Fifty eight years ago today, the grisly
murder barely attracted much notice in the press. Then, as now, street crime in New York and other big cities
was too common to make front page headlines, even when the victim
was a pretty young white woman.
If it hadn’t been for an offhand comment by Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy to a New York Times editor “That Queens story is one for the books”
the paper would not have launched an investigation that two weeks later
splashed across the front page and seared the conscience of a nation.
The sensational account of
the crime by Martin Gansberg claimed,
“For more than half an hour thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in
Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew
Gardens.” That account was repeated
and accepted as gospel for decades until a careful investigation,
interviews with witnesses, sifting through old police files,
and trying to make sense of chaotic police telephone records
showed that much of that account was dead wrong and a lot else misleading.
But that may be beside the point. The murder of Kitty Genovese entered the American consciousness entirely separate
from the reality of her life and death and became a touchstone
for anxiety about a society that just did not give a damn
or bother to bestir itself for fear of “getting involved.”
Genovese herself was much like many
young women of that day—or this. Born in
Brooklyn the eldest of five children
in a typical working class Italian-American
family in 1939, she had elected to stay in New York after her parents fled
to the Connecticut suburbs shortly
after she graduated from high school. Her mother had witnessed a street
killing prompting the move.
But Kitty wanted the life and excitement
of the city. She found it. Starting as a waitress and then a cocktail
waitress she had worked her way up in the bar business. She now had a good job as manager
of Ev’s Eleventh Hour Sports Bar.
She also found romance and a relationship,
albeit one that she kept from her parents.
She lived in an apartment in the middle class neighborhood
of Kew Gardens in central Queens
with her lover and life partner Mary Ann Zielonko. The
nature of their relationship was not revealed for years until
Zielonko was interviewed for an NPR radio
documentary in 2004.
Early Friday morning Genovese finished her shift at the bar. After locking up she drove the
several blocks to her apartment arriving after 3 am. She parked in a Long Island Railroad station parking
lot near her building and was walking to the entrance in the alley
for her rear-facing unit. Before
she got there she was frightened by a menacing man. She began running seeking shelter
in the front entrance of the building.
The man easily caught up to her and overpowered the barely 5 foot
tall woman. He stabbed her twice
in the back. Genovese screamed
“Oh my God, he stabbed me! Help me!”
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Several residents of the
apartment building heard something outside. But windows were shut in the cold
spring night and almost everyone was asleep. Most rolled over without investigating
assuming it was a domestic argument or just rowdies returning
from a bar. A couple went to
their windows but could not get a clear look at what was
happening. Robert Mozer, however, threw open his window and shouted
“Hey! Let that girl alone.”
Frightened, the attacker dropped Genovese and fled.
One or two others apparently
called police. In those days calls to
police were often made directly to local precinct houses or to other
numbers. In a precinct a desk sergeant or a civilian operator
without specialized training would take the calls. Whoever received calls about the attack
evidently dismissed them as a minor street row and didn’t dispatch
a car. The surviving son of one
caller reported that his dad told the cops that a woman had been beaten
but was now “up and staggering.”
Kitty was indeed staggering. She was wounded but alive. She tried to reach her own doorway in
the ally, but collapsed outside, away from the view of any witness from
the front of the building. Those on the
back side had never been aroused by street clamor.
The man Genovese encountered that
night was Winston Moseley from South Ozone Park in Queens. Like her he was 29 years old. About 2 am he had risen from his bed and snuck
out of his apartment leaving his wife and two children asleep. He was on a mission. He intended to kill a woman because, he later
told police, “they were easier and didn’t fight back.” He also told them that it was not his first
such attack. He had already killed two
other women. He also had committed a string
of at least 30 burglaries, all undetected.
Mosely wandered around until he
spotted Genovese, the perfect target.
After being frightened away Moseley
returned to his car and drove around for a few minutes, driving by the scene
until he was sure the police were not responding. He parked, put on a hat, and got out
of the car beginning a meticulous search of the area for Genovese. Almost 30 minutes after the original attack
he found her, weak but still conscious.
He stabbed her seven more times, raped her, and took $45 in cash
from her purse before fleeing on foot.
The second commotion awoke neighbors
in the back of the building. Sophia Farrar threw on a robe
and emerged from the building to find Genovese lying, moaning in pool of
blood. She cradled the
injured woman in her arms trying to comfort her. Meanwhile another neighbor, Joe Ross, investigated and then
returned to make a phone call to police that they finally responded to. In the upstairs apartment she shared with
Kitty, Mary Ann Zielonko, had slept through the entire attack and was only
roused by sirens when the cops finally arrived shortly after 4 am.
Kitty Genovese died of her wounds in
the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
Moseley got away from the
murder scene cleanly. No witness had
gotten a clear look at him. None
even noted that he was Black.
Six days later, his luck ran out
when he was nabbed in the commission of a burglary. Once in custody he began blabbing. He confessed to the Genovese murder,
providing details only the killer would know and evidence was
retrieved from his car. He also fessed
up to the other killings and burglaries.
Given a psychiatric exam, he was described as a necrophile.
All of this transpired before the Times article transformed the story into
a nation-wide sensation. Clearly that
story was wrong from the beginning.
There were not 37 or 38 do-nothing witnesses. At most twelve saw or heard a portion of the
attack. None saw or heard both
attacks. Most could not identify the
commotion, and of those who did only one realized that Kitty had been
stabbed. Phone calls were made to
police. One man had intervened in the
first attack, and at least two had come to her aid afterwards.
But at least one witness did tell
Timesman Gansberg that she didn’t report the “scuffle” she heard outside because,
“she didn’t want to be involved.” That
phrase would stick in the public mind and eventually be applied to all
of the 38 supposed witnesses.
Justice was swifter in those days.
During the trial Moseley took the stand and calmly related all of the
details of the murder and his other crimes.
He was easily convicted of murder on June 11 despite an insanity
plea. Four days later he was given
the death penalty. Judge J. Irwin Shapiro remarked, “I don’t
believe in capital punishment, but when I see this monster, I wouldn’t
hesitate to pull the switch myself.”
That was not to be. Two years later the New York Court of Appeals overturned the sentence on the
grounds the Moseley should have been allowed to present testimony that
he was medically insane in the sentencing hearing. The sentence was changed to “indeterminate
sentence/lifetime imprisonment.”
On March 18, 1968 Moseley escaped
while being transported back to prison from a hospital in Buffalo, New York where he had minor
surgery for a self-inflicted wound.
He attacked the transporting officer and stole his service revolver. After fleeing the scene, he hid in a vacant
house in near-by Grand Island for
three days until the couple who owned it came to check on their property. He bound Matthew
Kulaga and raped his wife then took off in their car. He went to another local house where he took
a woman and her daughter hostage before releasing them. He surrendered to police on March 22.
Convicted of a slew of new crimes,
Moseley was returned under heavy guard to prison. Moseley participated in the Attica Prison riots in the 1971 and
later in the decade, obtained a B.A.
in Sociology from Niagara University while studying
behind bars. Moseley was denied parole an eighteenth time in November
2015, and died in prison on March 28, 2016, at the age of 81. He had served 52
years, making him one of the longest-serving inmates in the New York
State prison system.
In the weeks, months, and years
after the Times article appeared, the
story of the uninvolved witnessed gripped the American imagination and stirred endless
outrage. Back in those innocent
times, conservatives and liberals were united in that
outrage. Preachers and pundits
roared. Liberal artists made the event a
symbol for an uncaring society.
Science
fiction writer Harlan Ellison became obsessed with the case and attacked the
“thirty-six motherfuckers…[who] and stood by and watched Genovese get knifed to
death right in front of them, and wouldn’t make a move” in articles in the Los
Angeles Free Press and Rolling Stone. In 1984 he revisited the story with the same
outrage in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In between he penned a novella based on the
incident.
Protest
singer/songwriter Phil Ochs made
the killing the lead in his searing indictment of society.
Outside of a Small Circle of Friends
Oh,
look outside the window
There’s
a woman being grabbed
They’ve
dragged her to the bushes
And
now she's being stabbed
Maybe
we should call the cops
And
try to stop the pain
But
Monopoly is so much fun
I’d
hate to blow the game
And
I’m sure
It
wouldn’t interest anybody
Outside
of a small circle of friends.
Unfortunately, that unanimity of
left and right, even if based on a skewed narrative of the event, could
never happen today. It would quickly break
down with claims that Genovese or those bystanders should have pulled
a gun—an idea that did not surface at all in 1964. Back then, surprisingly, race was not an issue
in the case. Today, it would be front
and center. And finally,
Genovese’s lesbianism would have erased
her victim status for many on the right and the left might have lifted
her up as a victim of a hate crime.
There were long-lasting effects
of the Genovese case. It became
endlessly analyzed and led to the development of a popular psychological theory on the diffusion of responsibility and
the bystander effect.
In New York City the case provoked reforms
in the police telephone reporting and dispatch system, eventually
being instrumental in the development of the 911 universal emergency number
and highly trained dispatchers. It is also credited with being the
inspiration for the development of neighborhood
watch programs which have spread across the country.
Almost six decades after the fact,
we can sort the facts from the legend.
But let the lurid crime story nor sociological fable that grew out of it obscure the memory of
the young woman who actually died.
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