Kitty Genovese Became the Accidental Icon of the So-called Bystander Effect

 Kitty Genovese behind the bar at Erv's.

Sixty one 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!” 

 

Kitty Genovese's apartment in Kew Gardens.  #1 is where she was initially stabbed and where a neighbor yelling out a window scared off the attacker.  #2 is by the rear entrance to her apartment where she was stabbed again and raped when the attacker returned more than a half hour later.
 

Several residents of the apartment building heard something outside. But windows were shut on 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 of them 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. 

 

Kitty Genovese's apartment in Kew Gardens.  #1 is where she was initially stabbed and where a neighbor yelling out a window scared off the attacker.  #2 is by the rear entrance to her apartment where she was stabbed again and raped when the attacker returned more than a half hour later.

 

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 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. 

 

Genovese' murder inspired one of folk singer Phil Ochs to write one of his most compelling songs.

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. 

 

On the 50th anniversary of the murder, Kevin Cook's meticulously researched book uncovered the true, untold story.  The cover blurb by Harlan Ellison was also an admission that he had been swept up in the myth.

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 spread across the country. 

 

More than 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.

My Chicago Summer of ’68 Part IV—The Shit Hits the Fan

A Chicago Police line advances behind a haze of tear gas to push demonstrators out of Lincoln Park Sunday night.  A handful of  Marshals moved between the cops and the retreating protesters as they spilled out of the park into the streets of Old Town.

Yesterday I ambled to Lincoln Park to check out the territory and checked in to my Movement Center assignment.  Now on Sunday things first come to a head.

The high school kids at the Movement Center at the Methodist Church on Diversey staggered out of their bed rolls late on Sunday morning. The church service upstairs finally woke the last of them. We served them a breakfast of Cheerios in re-constituted non-fat dry milk, powdered eggs, toast, and coffee made by the gallon in an industrial urn. Breakfast conversation was confined mostly to grunts and groans. A few asked about the day’s activities as if they were back at summer camp.

We volunteers slapped together more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and wrapped them in waxed paper as rations for the day. As the kids straggled out the door, a few of us cleaned up the kitchen. I hauled a couple of galvanized garbage cans out to the dumpster in the alley. As I was heaving the second one, I was surprised by two burly guys.

When the burly cops rousted and questioned me, my mind flashed on all of the old movies I had seen.  I had to bite my tongue to keep from answering "What about it, flatfoot."

“We wanna talk wit you,” one of them said. My mind flashed on dialogue from an old gangster flick. Luckily I restrained myself from replying, “What about, flatfoot?”

It turns out they wanted to know just who was inside. “We know the SDS is here. You one of them?” “No” I replied quite truthfully. Having no SDS chapter at Shimer, I had never taken out a card.

“We know who’s in there, we just need you to confirm it,” the second cop said. “It’ll go easier on you if you do.” He rattled off a couple of names I didn’t recognize anyway. They could have been there, but I was blissfully ignorant.

We danced around for a bit, me not giving any info, them asking questions they knew I would not answer. After a few minutes another guy emerged from the Church with more garbage. He took one look at us and ducked back in.

“Well, I guess that’s all we need,” said cop #2. They let me go and climbed into a dark sedan. I realized that the whole point of the exercise was for me to be seen talking to them. They hoped that the others would assume I was a spy. Did it work? I have no idea.

***

Nobody remembers how cool Chicago was that week. Freakishly cool. August in Chicago was usually the month of sweltering temperatures and TV news stories about the eternal battle between the Fire Department and neighborhood kids about open hydrants. Many mini-riots erupted when the hydrants were shut down. And many Chicagoans escaped the heat by coming to the Lake Front parks to sleep. Whole families would do it.

Not that year. Starting Sunday daytime temperatures hovered in the low ‘70’s and even high 60’s. Nights were downright chilly. That may have been good for the folks who usually spent heat waves in the park because that year Mayor Daley had camping in the parks made illegal to head off the Yippies. Parks, he announced, would be closed by police at exactly 11 pm. No exceptions. Thus were the battle lines drawn.

The cool weather changed my outfit. Gone were the short-sleeve white shirts, replaced with cheap plaid flannels bought at Woolworths for $2 each. It was even cool enough for a jacket. I had a jean jacket borrowed from my pal Bill Delaney that had the Rocking Bar D brand of his family’s South Dakota ranch emblazoned on the back. I pinned on a peace button. The red kerchief stayed. To prepare for the expected clashes with police, I lined my battered white Stetson with rolled-up newspaper in the crown as a makeshift helmet. Around my waist I strapped my dad’s World War II utility belt—the same one I used as a kid to play endless hours of Army. Hung on the belt was a G.I. canteen and ammo pouches stuffed with first aid supplies. I had appointed myself a volunteer medic. In addition to the expected gauze, bandages, band-aids and iodine, there were a dozen or more white pocket handkerchiefs filched from Dad—in those distant days men had drawerfuls of them.

That’s how I set out from the church sometime after noon that Sunday. This time I cut down Clark Street then over into Lincoln Park north of the Zoo. The park, which would be teaming with families on most weekend days, was nearly deserted. On Stockton Drive I saw two more of Chicago’s finest. They were bending over at the rear of their unmarked car. As I grew closer I could see that they were using masking tape to cover the numbers on the license plate. 

Two plain clothes cops in Lincoln Park were taping over the municipal license plates on their unmarked car.  I decided to ask why.

I walked up to them. For some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to talk to them. This can only be ascribed to a case of serious mental illness. “What you doin’” I ask. In a split second I found my face being pushed into the trunk of the car, my glasses falling off to the side. My arms were twisted up my back and my feet were being kicked wide apart. If you are from Chicago, you know the position. One cop was screaming at me “What the fuck is it to you, asshole!” or words to that effect. I was sure I was going to be beaten senseless and thrown into the back of the car, perhaps never to be seen again.

But the second cop pulls the guy off. “Let him go…we don’t have time for this shit…we got bigger fish to fry.” Cop number one let me up and gave me a hard shove. “I’ll be looking for you, kid.” They drove off as I searched for my glasses and felt the first rush of adrenaline that I would experience several more times that week.

Phil Ochs and Country Joe McDonald played from park benches and makeshift stages in Lincoln Park on Sunday.  They seemed to be everywhere Convention week, especially Ochs.

As I approached the south end of the Park, I saw a growing crowd milling about.   The Yippies had promised a free concert as a lure to bring more kids to the park.  Of course they had no permit.  But all summer long regular happenings in Lincoln Park on Sunday afternoons included musical performances, including rock bands, and no permits were needed.  Abbie Hoffman, I would learn later, was frantically trying to get last minute permission.  Meanwhile acoustic performers like Phil Ochs and Country Joe McDonald stood on park benches and tried to keep the crowd entertained.  Only one rock band—the self-proclaimed Detroit revolutionaries MC5 had shown up.  Late in the afternoon police allowed the band to begin to play, but prevented a flatbed truck from coming in to act as a stage and denied them city power.  Hoffman tapped the electric service of nearby concession stands and the band began to play.

The concessionaires complained and police ordered the power disconnected.  The crowd was getting restless and angry. They started taunting police who were standing by in large numbers.  The Yippies again attempted to bring in the flatbed truck, nearly reaching the planned stage area.  MC5 tried to set up on it as Hoffman and others encouraged the crowd.  Police demanded that the truck be moved out of the Park.  Hoffman evidently agreed to move it to the street by the park.  When the truck started retreating fighting broke out between cops and kids.  Several were arrested and hauled away as police began to form cordons around the crowd. 

Listening to speakers Sunday afternoon.  The crowd was less stereotypical hippie than in the public imagination.  A lot of students, little really long hair.  A good many local kids from the neighborhood like the kid in the t-shirt to the left and more Black faces than usually credited from near-by Cabrini Green and the Wells Street scene.

That’s when Hoffman told the crowd that “the Pigs had shut the festival down.”  Speeches replaced music.  They tried to organize the crowd.  Don’t fight to stay in the park at closing, we were told, “Take it to the streets.”

All evening long tensions rose in the park.  Police formed skirmish lines and pushed into the crowd with batons swinging two or three times.  Kids responded with anything they could throw.  Some tear gas was used. 

After dark things grew even more chaotic in the park.  Word circulated for designated Marshalls to move into position.  That was me.  A dozen or so of us took up space on a low ridge not far inside the park, ready to move.  We lay among the trees and watched a movie unfold as police advanced across the park.  A large knot of protesters rallied around a kid with a Vietcong flag riding on the shoulders of others.  The crowd held at the edge of the park, surged back in, and retreated again a few times.  The long line of Police advanced throwing tear gas ahead.

All at once the knot around the flag poured into the street.  That was our signal.  With my stomach doing things I never imagined possible, the other marshals and I took our places in a line between the police and the crowd.  We were stretched thin.    Miraculously, the maneuver seemed to work.  The police line halted at the park’s edge.  The crowd moved out and began to disappear at Clark and North, scattering into side streets.  Tear gas hung in the air.  But the whole thing seemed to me to be suddenly over without the major battle I had envisioned.

There was no one around to tell us what to do.  I decided to head back to the Movement Center.  I headed up Wells to Lincoln.  There was almost no traffic.  The streets were dark.  Behind me I could hear occasional sirens.

By the time I made it to Dickens I was tired and thirsty.  There was a large bar in the corner with big plate glass windows.  The lights were dimmed inside but it was open.  I decided I needed a beer.  There were just two men at the long bar.  I settled down a few stools away from them and ordered a tap beer.  It was delivered in a schooner.  Maybe the best beer of my life.

I met SDS leader Carl Oglesby in a darkened Lincoln Avenue tavern, shared a beer with him, and sent him into trouble.

One of the men, a tall fellow with a dark beard, glasses and a Greek fisherman’s cap asked me if I had been in the park.  I told them I was.  They called me over and bought me another beer.  The bearded one introduced them.  “I’m Carl Oglesby, this is Carl Davidson.”

“I’ve heard of you,” I stammered foolishly.  Of course I had.  These guys were real movement heavyweights—the President and Vice President respectively of SDS.  I was flattered by their attention.  They asked me what had happened.  I gave them my account of the evening.

“How is it back there now?” they asked.  I told them that it looked to me like everything was over for the night.  “I guess we’ll go have a look.”  So we left.   They headed south on Lincoln on my intelligence.  I headed north.

When I got back to the Church, I found folks huddling around a radio.  It seems that after I left protesters reformed around the Clark/LaSalle/North Ave. intersection.  The police surged out of the park to meet them.  A running battle in the streets of Old Town with protestors and cops playing tag and the streets choking with gas went on until morning.  A few of our kids straggled in with horror stories.

I wondered what I had sent the two Carls into.

Next—Monday turned out to be my labor day of Convention week.  First an unexpected invitation that would change my life then joining the SDS on a CTA strike picket line.

 

Kitty Genovese—Accidental Icon of Urban Street Violence and Attacks on Women

                        Kitty Genovese behind the bar at Erv's.

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!”

Kitty Genovese's apartment in Kew Gardens.  #1 is where she was initially stabbed and where a neighbor yelling out a window scared off the attacker.  #2 is by the rear entrance to her apartment where she was stabbed again and raped when the attacker returned more than a half hour later.

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. 

A New York Times story popularized the narrative that the attack was ignored by numerous witnesses who did not "want to get involved."  Decades later investigations would prove much of the mythic story was wrong.

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.  

Genovese' murder inspired one of folk singer Phil Ochs to write one of his most compelling songs.

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. 

On the 50th anniversary of the murder, Kevin Cook's meticulously researched book uncovered the true, untold story.

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.