The Victims

By Ken Gross and Bernard Lefkowitz

An account of one of the most sensational murder cases in the annals of American crime -- the brutal slayings of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert -- and of the strange events during the investigation that followed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: West 26th Street Press
• Release date: Oct 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386322368

Book preview

I

August 28, 1963

I say to you today, my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

—MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

1

On August 28, 1963, some 60,000 New Yorkers traveled to Washington to demonstrate their support of the civil rights movement. That same cloudless Wednesday two young women were murdered. At first there seemed to be no connection between the bright promise of Washington and the horror that visited an apartment in Manhattan.

The exodus began early. All over the city, during the predawn hours there was a midday bustle. On the Lower East Side, fifty men and women, all members of the reform wing of the Democratic Party, quietly boarded their bus. In this group was Susan Brownmiller, a lithe, dark-eyed girl who worked as a research assistant at Newsweek magazine. In some ways she was quite different from the usual pale crop of Smith and Wellesley girls who gravitate to the newsmagazines and advertising agencies every year. Her job was more than a holding action until she got married. She wanted very much to write. She was also seriously involved in the civil rights struggle. She was outspoken, tough-minded, briskly professional and not at all invisible.

As Susan climbed aboard the bus, she noticed several vacant seats in the back. With a measure of self-irritation, she remembered a phone call she had received on Monday from a co-worker at the magazine, Janice Wylie. A pleasant, cheerful girl of varying and sudden enthusiasms, Janice had wanted to know if Susan could get her a seat on the bus. Susan’s first reaction: If Janice is going to the march, I guess everybody is.

Susan told her she would try to find a seat, but she had never called Janice back. Janice wouldn’t fit in, Susan had decided. Not with this group of solemn, dedicated activists. The March on Washington was not a fashionable excursion to a swinging lawn party. That was a little unfair, Susan conceded to herself, as she leaned back and stared through the grimy window. She hardly knew Janice. She could have got her a seat on the bus. Outside, the sun was beginning to rise, warming the city with a faint flush. The bus was on its way, through the Lincoln Tunnel, to the New Jersey Turnpike, south across Delaware and Maryland. Then Washington.

Clark Montgomery arrived for work early. Fresh out of Princeton, twenty-two years old, an English major, he was employed by a medium-sized advertising agency on Madison Avenue. As a trainee he worked long hours for modest pay. His lunches consisted of hamburgers quickly gobbled between mundane assignments. Still, he took his job seriously, in part because he took most things seriously and also because he was about to assume new responsibilities. Today was Wednesday; Saturday he was getting married.

He was experiencing the normal emotions for a man only seventy-two hours away from such a momentous event: excitement, anxiety, happiness. Curiously, he felt something else, too: a mellowness, a sentimental affection for someone who soon would no longer be part of his life in the way she once was.

She had touched him in a personal, even intimate, yet not romantic, way. They had met six years before as high school students in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis. After high school they had both gone East to college, she to Smith in Northampton, Massachusetts, he to Princeton. Separated, they remained good friends, writing frequently, seeing each other occasionally. Her name was Emily Hoffert.

They had followed different roads, but in the summer of 1963 they came together again in New York. Behind her were four years of college, a year of graduate study in education at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and a couple of months of student teaching at a progressive high school in Newton, near Boston. She arrived in New York on July 20, and soon afterward she called Clark. It was good to talk to her again. When your life was hopelessly confused and everything was churning inside, Emily had this wonderful knack of puncturing your self-importance. With one quizzical look or a single phrase—Whoa, now, slow down—she could restore perspective. Her call settled him down.

Her plans, she told him, were still uncertain, but she had organized a fairly clear list of priorities: get a job teaching, preferably in a suburban school system where she would be more comfortable than in a hectic, nerve-jangling New York classroom; move at the end of August into an apartment on Park Avenue and 37th Street with two Smith classmates, Linda Rose and Susan Rothenberg; save enough money for a trip to Europe next summer.

Apologizing for not calling him sooner, she explained that she felt like a traveling salesman, moving from one apartment to another, staying just long enough to learn the floor plan. When another Smith classmate, Patricia Tolles, asked her if she wanted temporarily to share a five-room flat on East 88th Street for the month of August, Emily, who didn’t like the idea of living alone, agreed. The rent, $208 a month, was high, but it would be divided three ways because a third girl would be living with them. A girl named Janice Wylie.

Clark visited her in that apartment Monday night. When he arrived at Apartment 3C, 57 East 88th Street, she took him on a guided tour. To him it looked like every respectably old-fashioned New York apartment: thick walls, crossbeams on the ceilings, ornate moldings, parquet floors, a long hallway, a couple of bedrooms, a fairly spacious living room and a dinette separated from the kitchen by a glass door. The apartment had been rented since 1961 by a succession of single young men, including Miss Tolles’ brother, Terry, and the furniture was more functional than fashionable. The flowered draperies looked a little faded. The blotter on the telephone table was covered with illegible phone numbers. The marble coffee table might have been the result of an unfortunate impulse at a Salvation Army warehouse. Culture was represented by a Utrillo print hanging over the couch.

They had a few drinks, and Emily cooked him dinner. Her parents had sent her a frozen duck and a package of wild rice. They lingered at the dining table, talking easily, casually. She had recently rediscovered Dostoevski. "Reread Crime and Punishment. It means so much more the second time." She was excited about his approaching wedding.

You’ll come, of course, he said.

Of course, she said.

The prospect of teaching in the fall excited her. Her sister and brother-in-law were teaching in a community near San Francisco. They’ve done unbelievable things with the Negro kids there, she said, her face animated by a warm smile. "You make high school English a combination of Dickens and Defoe and no wonder the kids are bored. But they have them reading Salinger and Baldwin, and their classes are alive. It’s a new world for these kids. That’s the kind of thing I want to do. I don’t know if I can, but I want to try."

Clark realized they had talked about almost everything but her social life, and it made him a little sad. Emily was not a particularly pretty girl. She was short, about five feet three, with dark brunet hair and a pale complexion. Her jaw was prominent. Her thick glasses dominated her face. But none of this made any difference when you saw her smile. It was so sweet and natural and terribly infectious.

Yet those feminine artifices which some women cultivate so easily seemed to elude her. Nor did she exist to bolster a male ego; she rarely surrendered her point of view or blurred her personality to flatter a man. She was herself—with him, with others—always open, direct, unaffected, sincere. He was conscious as he talked to her that to some men she would present a challenge, perhaps even an intellectual threat.

The room was quiet. Their conversation had not run dry. It was the quiet of old friends, happy to see each other again, warmed by each other’s company. Their communication was unspoken. The silence was broken by the sound of voices, the click of a key being inserted in the front door. I guess that’s Janice, Emily said. You have to meet her. She’s something else.…

The apartment vibrated with noise. A distinguished-looking man in a sport jacket and slacks was lugging a television set into the living room, assisted by two younger men and three chattering girls. Janice, I’d like you to meet— Emily began. Before she could finish the introduction, Janice walked over to Clark, extending her hand, brightly greeting him. You’re Clark. Emily’s told me all about you. With an airy wave of her hand, Janice introduced her father, Max, her sister, Pamela, her cousin, Jonathan, his friend, Richard, her friend from Newsweek, Gail. Richard’s in television, she announced. Almost in the same breath Janice directed her father: I think the TV ought to go between the windows. Max Wylie pushed the coffee table out of the way, and Jonathan and Richard wheeled the TV across the beige carpet.

Clark chuckled. Six people to deliver a television set. Some operation. Janice seemed to be everywhere at once, plugging in the TV, talking over her shoulder at Emily, motioning her father to switch on a lamp. It was the kind of whirlwind performance that Emily would never be able to manage. She could never get so many people together, all exerting themselves on her behalf. Emily was twenty-three, Janice twenty-one, but Janice carried herself with the blithe assurance of an experienced woman. Clark found himself comparing the two girls. Janice, with her blond hair and feline green eyes; Janice, who surrounded, overwhelmed you, at first meeting—Janice had a sensuality, an animalism about her. But Emily was different. There was still a lot of the small town, the little girl, left in Emily.

As suddenly as they appeared, Janice and her party left. In the small patch of restored quiet, Clark asked, You’re not going to be staying here long, are you?

She shook her head emphatically. No, it’s a little too exciting here for me. I used to think an evening was fine if there was a lot of noise and small talk and some laughs. But I find it hard to make polite conversation now. The girls I’m going to be living with, they’ve shown me a whole other life, the theater, the opera, the ballet.

When are you moving?

This week, said Emily Hoffert. Wednesday, I think.

History distorts reality. Later it would seem as if every farmer and housewife and executive forgot everyday concerns on August 28 to watch the making of history in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. Surely aware of the drama in Washington, the occupants of Apartment 3C awoke Wednesday morning to confront the more mundane business of three single girls on their own in a large and infinitely complicated city. What to wear? Whom to go out with? Where to have lunch? How to move lots of books and heavy suitcases to an apartment downtown?

Since Emily was planning to move out, her bedroom reflected little of her personality. The room was sparsely furnished—twin beds, a night table, and a dresser, best described at Motel Modern. Cartons, which once contained Tender Leaf Tea and Kent cigarettes, were filled with her personal belongings. They had been jammed into the two closets, along with a plaid carrying case. No pictures on the walls; no ornaments on the dresser.

She slept in the bed farthest from the door, near the two windows. On the little night table, standing between her bed and the windows, were three objects: a clock radio, a martini-on-the-rocks glass, and a tennis ball. The last had been left there by the previous tenant, and she had not bothered to remove it. Emily rose at about eight thirty and dressed quickly in a loose-fitting green skirt, a print blouse with a white background, and sandals. Before leaving she paused to inspect herself in the full-length mirror set into one of the closet doors.

In the bedroom adjoining Emily Hoffert’s, there was considerable activity. The room was shared by Janice and the third roommate, Patricia Tolles. A slender, brown-eyed brunette of twenty-three, Miss Tolles worked as a researcher in the book division of the Time-Life publications complex. It took twenty minutes by subway to reach her midtown office. She had to be at work by ten. Slow starting in the morning, she had got up early to give herself plenty of time.

Patricia and Janice had moved in at the beginning of the month, but their room was more settled than Emily’s. Their clothes had been unpacked. A small print of a Paris street scene hung on the wall, a gooseneck reading lamp was on the night table between their beds, and an extension telephone had been installed. On Janice Wylie’s dresser was a jewelry box and a hair brush. The transition was not yet complete, but the room had begun to take on a feminine, personal look.

If Emily and Janice were not particularly compatible roommates, it was Patricia who made the temporary arrangement liveable. She was good friends with both. She had roomed with Emily in her sophomore year at Smith, finding her a witty, intelligent, and considerate friend. She knew Janice through her father, Winton Tolles, dean of Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Dr. Tolles and Max Wylie had been classmates at Hamilton. In the spring of 1961, Mr. Wylie, a successful writer and advertising executive, visited Hamilton to address the alumni, and the two men renewed their friendship. Since then the families had met frequently for excursions to the theater and ball games. Patricia’s brother Terry dated Janice occasionally. When Terry left New York to join an upstate law firm, he passed his 88th Street apartment on to his sister.

Generational strategy dictated that Patricia and Janice would live together. It was reassuring to their families. For both girls this was their first experience in New York away from their parents. Their parents felt their companionship assured their safety. Actually, they weren’t completely on their own. They both had jobs, but if the going got rough they both could count on their parents for ample financial support. They were outgoing and popular and had plenty of friends. Besides, Mr. and Mrs. Wylie lived only two blocks away. The image of career girls in a tooth-and-claw struggle for existence didn’t fit.

One rule Patricia learned at college was that you don’t maintain good relations with your roommate by waking her when she’s trying to get an extra hour’s sleep. So, this morning, she glided about the bedroom, quietly assembling a summery outfit: a rose-colored cotton dress with gold buttons and a plaid cummerbund.

At about quarter to nine the doorbell rang. Her bedroom was at the end of a long hall, and by the time Patricia padded to the front door in her robe and stockinged feet, she was almost out of breath. The porter was delivering a package of towels. She took the bundle and thanked him. Then she closed the door and double-locked it. Later she would say, I remember thinking at that moment, ‘We ought to get a chain lock for the door.’

She was in the bathroom when she heard the phone ring in her bedroom across the hall. Sleepily Janice picked it up. It was someone at Newsweek. Would Janice mind coming in at eleven o’clock instead of ten? She would work from eleven to seven, instead of from ten to six. She didn’t mind at all. She had been up late the night before, at a going-away party for a Newsweek executive. I’ll be in at eleven, she promised. Patricia came back into the bedroom. Janice, a sheet loosely wrapped around her body, curlers in her hair, was sitting up. Every time she moved she winced. The Sunday before, she had gone to Gilgo Beach on Long Island with a couple of girls who worked in the same department at Newsweek. It was fun watching the surfers; Gilgo was one of the best beaches on the East Coast for surfing. But she made the mistake of staying out in the sun too long in her two-piece bathing suit, and now she was paying the price. My back hurts so much I can hardly put on a dress, Janice had told Patricia. Painfully she squirmed on the bed, burrowing deep into her pillow.

It was getting late, and Patricia hurried into the kitchen. Emily had already sliced two oranges, and Patricia boiled some water for instant coffee. As they ate breakfast, she asked Emily if she had lunch plans. Emily was unsure. She expected to meet friends at one, but maybe they could all get together at some convenient restaurant. I’ll call you, said Emily.

Gulping the last of her coffee, Patricia tossed the little pile of orange skins into an overflowing garbage pail. Next to the pail was a carton of six empty soda bottles. She made a mental note to return the bottles when she got home from work.

Emily rinsed her coffee cup, and Patricia opened the service door in the kitchen and deposited the garbage on the third-floor landing. Holding the door open with her hip, she backed into the kitchen. The door slammed loudly. That automatically secured the lock. Then she turned the bolt, double-locking the door. (There were two entrances to Apartment 3C. The front door opened into the foyer, and the service entrance opened into the kitchen. The building was well serviced. Twice a day—between ten and noon and between three and four in the afternoon—the garbage on each back service landing of the ten-story apartment house was picked up by the porter.)

In the months that followed, when every routine detail of that morning assumed crucial importance, Miss Tolles would insist, I’m absolutely positive. I double-bolted the door after I put out the garbage. It was a rule of the house. We always made sure that both doors, front and back, were closed and locked. The only way the service door could be opened was from the inside.

From these precautions, it would appear that the girls were frightened of intruders. All outward appearances argued to the contrary. As neighborhoods go in New York, this one was safer than most. Restaurants and cocktail lounges on the Upper East Side of Manhattan stayed open late, and the garage across the street from the building was busy until well after midnight most evenings. Almost all the apartment houses, butting against pretty town houses, had doormen; the doorman at Number 57 was on duty until 10 P.M. A stream of delivery boys passed through the house every day. And, as with most apartment houses in this high-rent area—rents were more reasonable at 57 East 88th Street because of a system of rent control which affects many New York City buildings, built before World War II—many of the apartments on the first three floors were occupied by doctors and dentists who kept office hours throughout the day.

The street did not lack activity on summer mornings: a constant parade of young mothers pushed their prams to Central Park on Fifth Avenue; a doorman with puffy cheeks whistled for cabs; a moustached young man in a light blue blazer welcomed visitors to his art gallery on Madison Avenue. No disconcerting incidents but a reassuring consistency.

Someone like Janice Wylie who had grown up two blocks away would appreciate the relative security of 88th Street. She would be aware of the buffer zones separating her neighborhood from other, less serene enclaves. Yorkville, whose predominantly German-Irish population was now reluctantly accepting growing numbers of Puerto Rican residents, began a few blocks to the east, spreading uptown to East Harlem and east to the tenements and forty-cents-a-shot saloons of First Avenue. Janice would be familiar, too, with one of the most striking social checkpoints in New York. At 96th Street the grassy center island of Park Avenue, carefully planted with flowers, stops abruptly. There the New York Central railroad tracks surface from beneath ground and trail through the slums of East Harlem like some cold, unlovely steel ivy.

Yet Janice would also have learned that security in New York is an illusion. There are no longer any untroubled islands. You learned that by sullenly suffering a sweltering subway ride during the rush hour or by trying to order an orange drink from a leering counter boy. Wasn’t it, after all, Janice’s father who wrote in 1954: The popular equipment of the modern teen-age hoodlum is a switchblade knife. They’ve been carrying these knives for many years. I’ve seen them. They are all over my neighborhood. In New York, there is no such thing any more as a ‘good’ neighborhood.

Even this brick fortress on 88th Street was vulnerable. Despite its double locks and porters and doormen it wasn’t impregnable. Patricia’s brother Terry once told Janice that a cookie jar filled with coins had mysteriously vanished one night from his bedroom. One of Terry’s roommates, a young real estate broker named George Waterman, had entered the apartment one Saturday night two years earlier to find a doorman sprawled on the foyer floor, deep in an alcoholic slumber. Laughable incidents, perhaps. But they underlined the inescapable fact of city life: security cannot be purchased, not at $208 a month, not at any price, in New York.

Still, you couldn’t live your life forever teetering on paranoia. On a morning so flawless, so diamond-bright, who would want to think grim, depressing thoughts? This was the kind of summer morning, so rare in New York, that made you want to smile. The way Emily Hoffert smiled as she bustled out of the apartment trailing a good-bye behind her. Nine twenty.

This was the kind of morning that made you want to skip—if you weren’t a grown-up girl—on the freshly hosed sidewalk. Pat Tolles couldn’t repress the joy of being alive and young on this lovely morning as she walked to the subway. Nine thirty.

And it was the kind of morning made for lounging lazily in a sundrenched bedroom for a few guilty minutes more. As Janice Wylie did.

Every morning thousands of drivers endure the same dyspeptic crawl on clogged highways leading into the city. One can only imagine with what envy these impatient sufferers watched as Emily Hoffert’s car whizzed past them out of the city, along a clear highway to Riverdale.

Her first task of the morning would be easily accomplished. She had to return the white Dodge she was driving to its owner, Susan Rothenberg’s sister, Mrs. Ann Rosenberg, who lived in Riverdale. There she would pick up her own car, a small green Fiat. The day before, they had traded automobiles. Emily needed a larger car to complete a modest moving job. Returning to her old apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she had moved the last of her belongings to the new apartment she would share with Susan. There was more than she thought: a phonograph, seventy-five records, ninety books, sheets and towels, two oil paintings, her skis and ski poles, her heavy purple sweater, a Leica camera, a red cloth coat, and her warm fur-collared winter coat. She never would have been able to get it all into the Fiat.

She reached her destination at ten minutes before ten. It had taken her no more than a half hour to drive the ten miles from East 88th Street in Manhattan to 238th Street in Riverdale. Mrs. Rosenberg lived in a three-block-long, 17-story apartment complex overlooking the Henry Hudson Parkway.

Emily pressed the buzzer at Apartment 1006. Mrs. Rosenberg, a pretty woman in her twenties, answered the door. Hi, Emily, she said. Sit down for a second in the kitchen. Pour yourself some coffee. Susan’s on the phone. In a high chair, Mrs. Rosenberg’s young daughter, Ronnie, dipped her fingers delicately into a saucer of baby food. Emily put a small gift-wrapped package for the baby on the kitchen table.

Mrs. Rosenberg resumed her phone conversation. Susan, do you want to talk to Emily? She just walked in.

No, Susan said. I have to get back to work. Ask her if she’s going to have lunch.

When the message was relayed to Emily, she shrugged. I don’t know. I have to get the stuff moved out, and I have to take the car to a repair shop in Brooklyn. Tell her I’ll call her later.

Mrs. Rosenberg said good-bye to her sister and joined Emily at the kitchen table. Oh, you’re silly, she said, pointing to the present. It’s so pretty out—why don’t you spend the day with me? We can get the shopping done and take the baby out to the park.

I’d love to, but I’d better not. I have so much to do. The car and all. I want to move into Susan’s place today.

Well, okay, but since you’re here, why don’t you keep me company while I do some shopping? It’ll only take a few minutes.

Emily was willing. I’m not in that much of a rush.

Carrying her baby, Mrs. Rosenberg left the apartment with Emily. She suggested they take Emily’s car. It’s so much trouble getting a parking space—why don’t we leave the Dodge where it is?

Emily drove the Fiat four blocks. Johnson Avenue was the main shopping street. Once one of New York’s more exclusive neighborhoods, Riverdale had become much more accessible since the end of the Second World War. It had adjusted admirably to its city-bred newcomers. In the heart of Riverdale were four kosher butcher shops, two Chinese restaurants, and six beauty parlors.

She double-parked and waited in the car with the baby while Mrs. Rosenberg stopped at a bank. Returning to the car, Mrs. Rosenberg asked Emily again, Are you absolutely sure you can’t spend the day?

No, I’m going right back to Eighty-eighth Street and pick up my clothes and bring them over to the new apartment.

Mrs. Rosenberg had only one more stop—at the shoemaker. That took only a few minutes. She dropped off a pair of shoes that needed new heels, and they drove back to 238th Street.

Silently the two women, one now experiencing the newness of marriage and motherhood, the other beginning to investigate the mysteries of independence, stood in the horseshoe-shaped driveway in front of the apartment house. Across the Hudson River, the bluffs of the New Jersey Palisades challenged the soap factories and the gas tanks. Mrs. Rosenberg patted her young daughter.

Emily said, I guess I’d better get started.

Well, good-bye, and let’s hear from you.

Through the back window, Mrs. Rosenberg could see the girl lean over to shift into first gear. The car rumbled to the end of the drive and turned left toward the highway. The time, she would remember later, was between ten forty-five and eleven. Emily’s visit had taken less than an hour. By now the heavy traffic into the city had probably eased. Barring accidents and unexpected tie-ups, she could reach 88th Street by eleven thirty.

The car disappeared from view. Mrs. Rosenberg turned and went back into the house.

Emily was gone.

Impatiently George Trow, Jr., waited for Janice Wylie to show up. He worked on the clip desk of Newsweek. This was a busy day. The March on Washington meant a lot of added work for the clerks and editorial assistants. More glue pots to be filled, more wire copy to be ripped off the machines, more newspaper stories to be clipped, more memos to be circulated, more grease pencils to be sharpened. The twelfth floor of the Newsweek building on Madison Avenue was a frantic place at any time. Today, controlled pandemonium.

For personal reasons George was anxious for Janice to arrive. This was his last day at the magazine. After working there through the summer, he was leaving New York at the end of the week for a three-week vacation in Mexico, a pleasant interlude before returning to Harvard for his junior year. The sooner Janice arrived, the sooner he could leave the office and go home to finish his packing. He had been careful to tell Brierly Reybine, the girl in charge of arranging the work schedule, that he wanted to come in early and leave before one o’clock. When Brierly called Janice and she agreed to take George’s later shift, he thought his problems were over. But where was Janice?

As George thought back over the summer, he chided himself for being harsh with Janice. After all, he ought to be grateful to her. In a little more than five months of working for Newsweek, Janice had become the office live wire. She relieved the tedium of routine with her raucous humor, with her unabashed theatricality, with her blunderbuss candor. While the other girls solemnly discussed Sartre and Camus, Janice gossiped about the latest Hollywood divorce. While the other girls meticulously pasted clippings into bulging loose-leaf folders, Janice would splatter glue all over her eggshell-colored smock and hold up everything by reading aloud the juiciest scandal in the Daily News.

She was fearless. A few weeks after being hired, she organized a softball league. She had no compelling interest in athletics. It was just a convenient way for the girls at Newsweek to meet the young men at other magazines and advertising agencies. Once, when she wanted to meet a Newsweek editor whom she considered attractive, she intercepted a memo he had written and later returned it with an analysis of his handwriting. That Janice, the other girls tittered when they heard about it.

For all of her bravado, George detected a touch of innocence about her. They had gone out a couple of times, and he remembered that a few weeks before, he had wanted to go to a concert but she had talked him out of it. There’s a wonderful movie on Eighty-sixth Street, Janice had gushed. "It’s so terrible, it has to be wonderful. Tammy Meets the Doctor."

For an hour they sat in the theater, giggling at Hollywood’s stupidity. Finally the movie’s inanity strained even his fey sense of humor. Let’s go, he whispered. I think we’ve had enough.

But Janice insisted on staying. Look, look, she said, jostling him with her elbow. It’s going to get worse.

George looked at the blond girl. You know, he thought, she’s really enjoying the movie. This sophisticate really thinks it’s funny.

Yes, George liked Janice. His irreverence and her antic qualities meshed nicely. At this moment, though, he wished she were a little less unpredictable and a little more responsible. It was twelve thirty, and no Janice. He studied his watch. Miss Reybine smiled. You know Janice, she said. We’re all ten minutes late, and Janice is always later than all of us. Why don’t you go on—she’ll be in soon. Or if she isn’t, she’ll have a terrific excuse.

George stood up, stretching. Give her my love, he said, and tell her I’ll be back in the city for Thanksgiving and we’ll all have a drink.

To people who work for newspapers and magazines, distant events sometimes seem more real than concerns closer to home. The employees of Newsweek were involved this Wednesday in August with two men who were rescued after being trapped in a Pennsylvania mine for fourteen days; with a boycott by New York parents protesting school segregation; with emergency legislation just signed by President Kennedy to avert a threatened railroad strike; with The Group, a new book by Mary McCarthy about some 1933 Vassar graduates who left college with the notion that the wide, wide world was our oyster. No one was worried about Janice Wylie. Not yet.

Max Wylie was relieved that his daughter had decided against taking part in the March on Washington. Crowds, he knew, are combustible. In his lifetime he had seen too many peaceful meetings transformed into wild mobs by angry rhetoric. In the early 1930’s, he had taught English at Fohrman Christian College, a missionary school in Lahore, India. Some afternoons he would look out of his classroom window and see packs of rioters surging through the streets in an aimless wave of violence. Returning to the United States during the Depression, he discovered that hungry men are driven to acts of cruel desperation. Later, as he traveled through pre-war Europe, he was dismayed by the ease with which demagogues manipulated street crowds.

The roots of his distrust went deep. During his youth he lived in the small university town of Delaware, Ohio. His father, Edmund Melville Wylie, who later became pastor of the Park Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, was a rousing, fiery preacher. His fire was frequently directed at the evils of drink. The crowds drawn by his thundering sermons were so large that he had to hold his meeting at open-air church shows. Later he traveled the Chautauqua circuit. The Reverend Edmund Wylie was not all bluster: he succeeded in closing down the five saloons in Delaware. One night a drunken, gun-waving saloon owner threatened to kill him. The clergyman’s silken eloquence calmed the enraged tavern keeper, but the narrow escape left a lasting impression on Max Wylie: the passions of the people are dangerous playthings.

These experiences, reinforced by certain conservative political and social views, persuaded him that the March on Washington was a potentially explosive venture. So he had warned Janice. She had insisted on going. He had been equally adamant. They had argued for a long time over dinner the night before. He was so determined to keep her in New York that he threatened to withhold the money for the fare to Washington. Perhaps rendered more tractable by her favorite meal of sausage and fresh corn, she gave in. Now, the morning after, he was sure he had been right: Janice was in New York, safe at work, away from the crowd.

Most successful advertising men are not known for their firm convictions. But Max Wylie was an uncommon man, and his principles were never wrapped in gray flannel. His very presence suggested strength. At fifty-eight he was solidly built, with broad shoulders, powerful hands, and an erect, perhaps stiff, bearing. His face was arresting. His head was disproportionately large, giving it a leonine appearance. He had dark hair, flecked with gray, which he combed straight back. It was an almost rectangular face: square jaw, softened by jowls, long aristocratic nose, high forehead. In a moment of repose it suggested a basset hound.

His speech was cultivated American. Sometimes his rococo constructions made him sound a little effete—His brain seems to have become the parasite on the host of his humane feelings, was a characteristic Wylie sentence—but he was a master of the short, hard jab—The trouble with Robert Maynard Hutchins is that he is a million miles from the nearest human being.

He once described himself as just an average man in a medium-priced suit who believes in other people. He was in the minority; most people considered him anything but an average man. Average ad executives rise through the ranks, learn their trade by writing paeans to bath soap, and gain stature by suppressing their creative drives. Wylie, a television account executive for the high-powered Lennen and Newell advertising agency, came to his position through a career of writing and editing. The author of four novels, six books on broadcasting, and three plays, his accomplishments ranged from the script for the radio program Strike It Rich to an ambitious fictionalized biography of Eugene O’Neill.

Mr. Wylie reached his middle years a realist, aware of the ironies of fate, and an optimist, committed to the limitless possibilities of the human spirit. In a speech in 1961 to the graduates of Hamilton College he searched for the meaning of his optimism. He began by enumerating some of his professional reversals. He had been a graduate student and assistant instructor at the University of Pennsylvania: three days before he was to receive his Master’s degree, the university went broke and fired one hundred members of its junior staff, Wylie included. He got his first job with a New York publishing firm: four days later it went into receivership. His first novel was published in 1933 on the day President Roosevelt declared a bank holiday: less than 1,000 copies were sold. For two years he had worked on a play depicting India’s struggle for independence: on the first day of rehearsal Britain granted India her freedom, somewhat diminishing the impact of his drama.

I’ve had some disasters, but I’m not defeated, Mr. Wylie told his student audience.

He paused, then, to explain the source of his resilience. "We need the pragmatic day-to-day Christianity we had one hundred years ago. What does this mean in a sentence? It means people who don’t lie and don’t steal; people who care actively and with knowledge—not sentiment—about others; and who practice these principles in all their affairs—at the interracial level, at the personal level, and in business, at every level."

Today his pragmatic Christian faith would be tested as never before.

But this morning it was the optimist Wylie, confident executive, husband of Isobel, father of Janice and Pamela, brother of Philip, the well-known social critic and novelist, who entered the elevator in the lobby of 380 Madison Avenue, five blocks downtown from Newsweek magazine.

He greeted the woman who kept the attendance records at the agency, nodded to his secretary, and immediately set to reviewing his day’s calendar. A luncheon meeting had been confirmed, Louis and Armand’s restaurant. In the afternoon he had an appointment at the American Broadcasting Company. His agenda set, he stopped at the office of Frank Barton, his supervisor. Barton would join him for lunch.

These routine details out of the way, he settled down to watch the television coverage of the march. Already many thousands had gathered on Constitution Avenue. Above the sea of faces, signs bobbed: METHODIST STUDENT MOVEMENT: WE DEMAND AN END TO POLICE BRUTALITY NOW; FREE IN ’63. The camera panned familiar faces: Jackie Robinson, Burt Lancaster, Roy Wilkins, and standing before the Washington Monument, Martin Luther King. The majority of the marchers were Negro, but there were many whites, too. A white-haired man from Virginia wore a light blue business suit. A Negro couple from Albany, Georgia, came in faded overalls. On one street corner, a policeman clapped in time to Mahalia Jackson’s spirituals. Slowly the demonstrators, some with umbrellas open to shield themselves against the morning sun, others carrying picnic baskets, started the majestic march to the Lincoln Memorial. It looked peaceful; subsequently Life magazine would describe it as beatific. But Max Wylie, recalling his own experiences, had misgivings.

He was unable to watch without interruption. Five times, between eleven and noon, he consulted with Mr. Barton. Shortly after noon he left with Mr. Barton and a third colleague for lunch. At the restaurant they were joined by a pretty, talkative West Coast actress named Mary Treen. They discussed plans for a new television series. After lunch they hailed a cab for Miss Treen; she wanted to see a matinee performance of Oliver!

Returning to his office, he dictated a letter and watched a little more of the march. It was three o’clock, and Max Wylie prepared to leave for his midafternoon conference. He swept his papers into a folder. The day was almost over. He was looking forward to going out to dinner with his wife. It was only a few minutes later that his wife learned for the first time that something was wrong.

Where’s Janice? The question nagged at Brierly Reybine. Short-handed and overworked, she was annoyed by Janice’s absence. Lateness might be excused, but to skip a day’s work without explanation—well, that just exhausted her patience. Starting at two thirty, she called ENright 9-3222 four times. Janice did not answer. No one answered. Finally she called Mrs. Wylie. Janice’s mother had no explanation for her daughter’s absence. But Janice’s sister, Pamela, aware that Janice could act unpredictably, reassured her mother: She probably made up her mind at the last minute to go to the march.

Mrs. Wylie gave the girl at Newsweek Patricia Tolles’ phone number at work. Then she decided to call Patricia herself. Their conversation was unproductive. Look, Trixie—Mrs. Wylie, like most friends of Patricia Tolles’, called her by her nickname—we can’t find Janice. Pam thinks she may have flown to Washington. If she did, she will surely have left a note. As soon as you get home from your job, look for a note and call me.

Mystified, Patricia promised to call Mrs. Wylie. It didn’t make sense. Janice was supposed to be at work by eleven. She called her own home phone number. No answer.

She made another call. She dialed Newsweek and asked for Janice’s extension, half-expecting to hear her roommate’s squeaky voice on the other end. Brierly answered. Patricia felt a little foolish. She was repeating almost word for word the same conversation she had just concluded with Mrs. Wylie. Was this typical feminine hysteria?

Another call: Susan Rothenberg. Susan, Patricia asked, did Emily say anything at lunch about Janice going to the march? We can’t seem to find her.

But I didn’t see Emily at lunch. She had a lot to do. I guess she couldn’t make it.

Well, if she’s already moved into your apartment by the time you get home, ask her if she knows where Janice is. She didn’t go to work, and everybody’s looking for her.

No concern about Emily. Emily was safe. Emily had to be out shopping, or getting her things moved, or having her car repaired. I had no thought about Emily at all, Pat Tolles would say later, thinking back. As far as I knew, she was out of the apartment. My concern was for Janice because I’d been told she hadn’t come to work and was not wherever she should be. As far as I knew, Emily would be back later or would call or was down in her new apartment working. Safe, steady Emily.

One last call: Patricia phoned a young man with whom she was to have a date that evening. There’s a lot of confusion today, she told him. Everybody’s looking for my roommate, Janice. She didn’t go to work and nobody’s heard from her. When I get to the apartment—as soon as I find out what it’s all about, I’ll call you.

It was five thirty. She would leave work in a half hour, at her regular time. She did not feel compelled to leave early. It was all probably a comedy of missed connections and undelivered messages blown out of proportion. No sense worrying.

Unless you knew her very well, you could never be sure if Janice Wylie were crying out of some real need or crying wolf. She could rise to ecstatic enthusiasm or sink into deep depression. She was capable of striking a pose. For example, she had earnestly confided to a friend that on August 28 she would be sent by Newsweek to cover the March on Washington, an unlikely assignment for someone who was basically a clerk. To a girlfriend she proclaimed that very soon she would be appointed drama critic of the magazine. Her dreams, so seriously projected, did not irritate her friends: she wanted to be an actress, and she was always acting. This was the way Karen Jacobs explained Janice; this is why Karen Jacobs was not worried about her.

Karen Jacobs, who like Emily was about to embark on a teaching career, was casually acquainted with Janice. Although she didn’t know her well—a bridge game, an afternoon at the beach—Janice’s sudden contrasts and determined exuberance amused her. She first met her at a garden party in July on the Upper East Side. The host was a young professional man; the hostess, his current girlfriend.

South American music was playing. Drinking tequila and pomegranate liqueur, the guests examined the shrunken heads mounted on the walls of the basement apartment. The party flowed easily from the garden to the apartment. A young lady was sick in the bathroom. A middle-aged man with a white linen jacket and a purple ascot sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, dreamily snapping his fingers to the music. The music was very loud.

Janice was a late arrival. She was wearing a low-cut bright red dress, and she immediately became the center of attention. A knot of young men encircled her. Her body swung to the music as she carried on two or three conversations at once. She laughed easily and frequently.

Trying to add zip to the party, the hostess wandered from couple to couple, offering to read their palms. I can tell fortunes. I can tell your fortunes.

Janice, not easily outdone, announced, I can do that. I can read palms too. She turned to Karen and said, Let me try you.

Uncomfortable because Janice had turned the party spotlight on her, Karen laughed. I don’t really believe in that.

But Janice was insistent. Don’t be a poop. She seized Karen’s hands, turning the palms up. She peered at them, heightening the suspense. Oh, Janice exclaimed. You have a long line. See. She ran one fingernail along the girl’s palm. That means a long life.

But look at mine, Janice insisted, whirling so the guests could get a good look at her palms. I have a very short life line. A gypsy woman read my line last week, and she got very frightened. Janice giggled. I have to cram it all in at once. I’m supposed to die a very violent death. Very soon.

The room was quiet except for the maracas. Janice turned to her neglected date, weaving her shoulders. Let’s dance, she said.

But today, as Karen Jacobs left her class at New York University and hurried uptown to Bloomingdale’s for some last-minute shopping before the store closed, she was not at all concerned about Janice’s somber prediction. It was simply Janice’s means of creating an effect, making an impression. Everyone, Karen concluded, has his own style.

As far as Janice and Emily’s neighbors knew, it had been an uneventful day. There were one or two things out of the ordinary, but certainly nothing so remarkable as to create alarm. Mrs. Robert McEvoy lived in Apartment 3C at 54 East 89th Street. Her windows were eighteen feet away from the rear of the girls’ apartment. The buildings were separated by a courtyard. That afternoon she remarked to her husband, You know, that’s funny. The shades have been down all day in the apartment across the way. I’ve never seen that before.

The apartment house at 50 East 89th overlooked the same courtyard. One tenant in the building, Miss Helen Goldzimer, a teacher who taught third grade at nearby P.S. 6, was still on vacation this last week of August. Sometime between nine and eleven thirty during the morning, she glanced out of her bedroom window and noticed a man standing in the rear yard. He looked to be about five feet eight or nine, stocky, with black wavy hair. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and brown slacks. His skin was nut-brown and she thought he might be Puerto Rican. He looked harmless, standing there, and in fact he seemed rather well groomed. She did not report him to the building superintendent.

Marina Kytroka lived next door to the girls’ apartment. An exchange student from Greece, she had sublet Apartment 3D since August 10 from the regular tenant, a physician who was vacationing in Europe. Marina, a tall girl with olive skin and dark eyes, knew Janice and Emily by sight and had often nodded to them in the lobby. A graduate student in sociology at Columbia University, she worked during the summer at the Seamen’s Institute, which served as both a residence for merchant seamen and a museum and research center for maritime studies. One of the nice things about her job was that she didn’t have to be at work until noon. On the morning of August 28 she puttered about the apartment, dressing, leisurely reading a magazine, eating a drawn-out breakfast.

The doctor’s maid arrived at ten, took a batch of soiled clothes to the laundry on 86th Street at eleven, returned to the apartment at eleven thirty, and went about her work until one thirty, when she left for a job elsewhere. Not once that morning were the two women disturbed by any unusual sounds coming from Apartment 3C.

Miss Kytroka left her apartment between eleven and eleven thirty. It took an unusually long time, perhaps ten minutes, for the elevator to reach the third floor. There was a man in the elevator when it arrived. She judged him to be about twenty three to twenty five years old, approximately five feet seven, with reddish-blond hair. She would later describe his face as effeminate, an angel face. He wore a light beige shirt with a plaid design. It was not tucked into his pants. He did not speak to her, but there was something about the way he looked at her that she found disconcerting. She walked out of the building and took a subway to work. She promptly forgot about the stranger on the elevator.

And so the day passed on 88th Street.

As far as Susan Brownmiller could see, the streets of Washington were covered with the discards of 200,000 demonstrators—posters, signs, bags, napkins, newspapers. Dead-tired, she would arrive home and turn on the television to watch the news coverage of the demonstration. But the news that night was of the girl who had asked her to save a seat on the bus to Washington. In Bedford Hills, New York, George Trow jammed the last of his things into a suitcase. Tomorrow he would go to the racetrack, and Friday he would leave for his Mexican vacation. The last person to see him off at the airport would be a detective. In a second-floor apartment on 76th Street, Clark Montgomery plumped down in an easy chair and turned on the radio to find out what he had missed in Washington. It was then that he learned that Emily Hoffert would not attend his wedding. In the spacious, comfortable apartment he had rented for twenty-four years, the apartment where Janice had grown up, the apartment which was still visited by the Indian students he had taught thirty years before, Max Wylie waited for his wife to finish dressing for dinner. He was waiting for a phone call, a call that would tell him where his daughter had been all day. Soon the phone would ring, but it would not be Janice. Karen Jacobs went to sleep early. Only tomorrow when her eyes caught a front-page headline would she remember Janice Wylie’s prophecy.

Patricia Tolles did not rush home. She took a subway, not a cab. She walked at a steady but not hurried pace. She reached the building at six twenty-five.

The elevator opened on the third floor. She fished in her pocketbook for her keys, unlocked the front door, and stepped into the foyer. To her right, the foyer closet door was open. A tan raincoat was lying half in the foyer, half in the closet. A wooden hanger was still in the shoulder of the coat. She did not recognize the garment.

The mail, usually left under the front door by the doorman or the elevator operator, was stacked on the foyer table. She started toward the back of the apartment, glancing through the glass door of the dinette into the kitchen. She stopped for a second, frozen. The back service door of the kitchen was open about two feet. The door she had bolted shut in the morning was open.

In the half light of the evening the apartment looked gray. The sunlight of the morning had deserted it. At the far end of the long hallway leading to the two bedrooms, a shaft of light penetrated the gloom. The lights were on in her bedroom. The lights were on in the bedroom she shared with Janice.

Toward that light she began to walk.

2

A tornado had devastated her bedroom. It was a shambles. Blouses, jackets, dresses, books, skirts, underwear, papers, stockings, and letters were strewn everywhere. The two suitcases stored on the top shelf of her closet were open on the bed. Her suitcases. Her dresses. Janice’s dresses. Janice’s bed had been stripped of its sheets. Janice’s bed. Her dresser drawers were pulled open, and the top was a mess: packs of Marlboro cigarettes, half a dozen pennies, a plastic bag containing hair curlers. Her things. Janice’s things. The room they had made their own had been violated. She felt violated.

Some burglary victims have reacted, at first, with anger. They are infuriated by the gall of the intruder who callously walked into their lives, who handled their most private possessions, who appropriated their memories. Patricia Tolles was angry, but most of all, she was afraid.

She retreated into the hallway, turned, and entered the larger of the two bathrooms, the one directly opposite her bedroom. The light was on. She, at this moment, did not pay attention to the crumpled bedsheet on the floor or the bloodstained strip of white sheeting near the right leg of the sink. Like a woman hypnotized, she riveted on the kitchen knife on the right rim of the sink. It was a big carving knife, about a foot long, with a wooden handle. The week before, a girlfriend who was planning to move in with Patricia and Janice in the fall had sent it along with other kitchen articles from her home in California. Patricia had unpacked it. She recognized it now, yet it was different. Near the hasp of the knife, where the blade is attached to the handle, was a streak of blood.

As she would later tell her brother Terry, The first thing I thought of when I saw that knife was, ‘Oh, no! Janice has slashed her wrists!’

Logic fled. The knife, the bedsheets, the open service door, the ransacked bedroom, the phone calls in the afternoon, the burning lights, the disappearance of Janice—it was too much. Her composure was cracking. She had to call to get help. Should she use the phone in her bedroom? No, the clothing and bedsheets blocked the entrance, and besides, something kept her from entering. She could use the living room phone. As she stumbled out of the bathroom, she passed Emily’s bedroom and saw that the door was open a few inches. She did not go in. She still believed Emily was safe. She was worried about Janice, not Emily. The bedroom she shared with Janice was wrecked. The knife was in the bathroom opposite Janice’s bedroom, not Emily’s. There was no reason to look for Emily.

Impulsively she rushed into the kitchen and out onto the service landing. Leaning over the banister she peered down the dark, dusty stairwell. No one there.

She returned to the kitchen, as yet unaware of another detail of the larger disturbance. In the morning she had left six empty soda bottles in the carton. Two were missing.

She called her date and told him what she had discovered. Stay where you are, he said. I’ll be right over. Today Miss Tolles is not absolutely certain of the order in which she made her next two calls. She believes she first dialed the local police station, and a man’s voice answered, Twenty-third Precinct. Yes—

My apartment, she said, is terribly upset. My name is Patricia Tolles. I live at Fifty-seven East Eighty-eighth Street, Three C. I don’t know if anything has been stolen, but—

Wait a minute, the policeman said. He switched the call to the detective clerical office, where Martin J. Zinkand picked it up. Listen, she repeated, I think something happened in my apartment. I don’t know if anything has been stolen, but the whole place is a mess—and we can’t find my roommate.

Okay, we’ll be right over. Zinkand’s voice did not betray alarm. It sounded to him like another missing persons case. After more than twenty years on the force, he considered himself immune to the panic of others. He and a fellow detective, John J. Lynch, told the third man on duty that night that they were going out to answer a call on 88th Street. Lynch and Zinkand had just returned from investigating a burglary. It was the end of another long day. Now, another job. Casually, they riffled through their phone messages. Nothing urgent. The two detectives took their time. They wanted to catch their breath. No reason to rush. Just another squeal.

Next, Patricia called Janice’s parents. Mrs. Wylie answered, but Patricia asked to speak to her