Kitty Genovese

Please read the Kitty Genovese storty below, and complete the inquirysequence found on the To Do page.

The Kitty Genovese Story

A Modern Parable

Extract for Story by By Mark Gado for the True Crime Library http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/kitty_genovese/

Prologue

During the 1960s, when there was no shortage of drama in the nation’s courtrooms, one murder case stood alone in its ability to shock the country. The crime was not as gruesome as some others, since many more were just as violent, and still more that easily surpassed it. The victim was an ordinary working girl, not at all wealthy and not a member of any elite class. Her name was Catherine Genovese, the 28-year-old daughter of Italian-American parents. But to millions of people who read her story when it first appeared in New York City’s press, she would forever be remembered as “Kitty” Genovese. What happened to her, what happened to all of society on that dreadful night in the spring of 1964, would reverberate across the country and generate a national soul-searching that is reserved for only the most catastrophic of events. And nearly 40 years later, her name has become synonymous with a dark side of an urban character that, for many people, represents a harsh and disturbing reality of big city life.

During the 1940s and into the 1950s, the Genovese family lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York. In the 1940s Catherine’s father, Vincent A. Genovese started his own business of supplying coats and aprons to local businesses. It was called the Bay Ridge Coat and Apron Supply Company. He became moderately successful, and in 1954 he and his wife Rachel decided to move to New Canaan, Connecticut. The decision came shortly after Rachel had witnessed a shooting near their home. By that time, they had five children, the oldest being Catherine, who was 19. But she chose to remain behind in New York and stick it out while the rest of the family moved to the suburbs.

Catherine was an attractive, outgoing woman who liked Latin American music and loved to dance. A graduate of Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights High School in 1954, she was also interested in history and politics and could debate on many issues. “I remember that she loved to talk politics and knew a great deal about what was going on,” said her younger brother, Bill Genovese, recently. “She was a Renaissance woman, interested in a lot of different subjects,” he said.

By 1963, she had moved to Queens. She rented an apartment located on the second floor of a commercial building on Austin Street in the Kew Gardens section of Queens, a quiet, mostly residential area. She shared her space with a girlfriend, Mary Ann Zielonko. Catherine later got a job as a bar manager in Ev’s Eleventh Hour Club, a small neighborhood tavern on Jamaica Avenue and 193rd Street in the Hollis section of the borough. The bar was about five miles from her apartment, and she drove her red Fiat to the restaurant nearly every night. She worked late, sometimes into the early morning hours. It made her nervous to return to her apartment in the dark, but it was something that could not be avoided and being a city girl her whole life, Catherine had the typical resiliency and determination of a native New Yorker.

A Cry in the Night

Along a serene, tree-lined street in the Kew Gardens section of Queens, New York City, Catherine Genovese began the last walk of her life in the early morning hours of March 13, 1964. She had just left work, and it was 3:15 a.m. when she parked her red Fiat in the Long Island Railroad parking lot 20 feet from her apartment door at 82-70 Austin Street. As she locked her car door, she took notice of a figure in the darkness walking quickly toward her. She became immediately concerned as soon as the stranger began to follow her. “As she got out of the car she saw me and ran,” the man told the court later, “I ran after her and I had a knife in my hand.” She must have thought that since the entrance to her building was so close, she would reach safety within seconds. But the man was faster than she thought. At the corner of Austin Street and Lefferts Boulevard, there was a police call box, which linked directly to the 112th Precinct. She may have changed direction to call for assistance, but it was too late. The man caught up with Catherine, who was all of 5’1” and weighed just 105 pounds, near a street light at the end of the parking lot.

“I could run much faster than she could, and I jumped on her back and stabbed her several times,” the man later told cops.

“Oh my God! He stabbed me!” she screamed. “Please help me! Please help me!” Some apartment lights went on in nearby buildings. Irene Frost at 82-68 Austin Street heard Catherine’s screams plainly. “There was another shriek,” she later testified in court, “and she was lying down crying out.” Up on the seventh floor of the same building, Robert Mozer slid open his window and observed the struggle below.

“Hey, let that girl alone!” he yelled down into the street. The attacker heard Mozer and immediately walked away. There was quiet once again in the dark. The only sound was the sobbing of the victim, struggling to her feet. The lights in the apartment went out again. Catherine, bleeding badly from several stab wounds, managed to reach the side of her building and held onto the concrete wall. She staggered over to a locked door and tried to stay conscious. Within five minutes, the assailant returned. He stabbed her again. “I’m dying! I’m dying!” she cried to no one. But several people in her building heard her screams. Lights went on once again and some windows opened. Tenants tried to see what was happening from the safety of their apartments.

The attacker then ran to a white Chevy Corvair at the edge of the railroad parking lot and seemed to drive away. On the sixth floor of 82-40 Austin Street, Marjorie and Samuel Koshkin witnessed the attack from their window. “I saw a man hurry to a car under my window,” he said later. “He left and came back five minutes later and was looking around the area.” Mr. Koshkin wanted to call the police, but Mrs. Koshkin thought otherwise. “I didn’t let him,” she later said to the press. “I told him there must have been 30 calls already.” Miss Andre Picq, a French girl, who lived on the second floor, heard the commotion from her window. “I heard a scream for help, three times,“ she later told the court, “I saw a girl lying down on the pavement with a man bending down over her, beating her.”

At about 3:25 a.m., Catherine, bleeding badly, stumbled to the rear of her apartment building and attempted to enter through a back entrance. The door was locked. She slid along the wall until she reached a hallway leading to the 2nd floor of 82-62 Austin Street but she fell to the vestibule floor. In the meantime, the man had returned again. “I came back because I knew I’d not finished what I set out to do,” he told cops later. He walked along the row of doors and calmly searched for the woman. He checked the first door and didn’t find her. He followed the trail of blood to the doorway where Catherine lay bleeding on the tiled floor. And there, while the defenseless victim lay semiconscious, incoherent from pain and loss of blood, he cut off her bra and underwear and sexually assaulted her. He then took $49 in cash from her wallet. “Why would I throw money away?” he asked the court at his trial. As Catherine moaned at his feet, probably unable to comprehend what had happened to her, the man viciously stabbed her again and killed her.

The man, who had selected his victim purely at random, ran to his car still parked where he left it. The entire event lasted at least 32 minutes. He said later that murder “was an idea that came into my mind, just as an idea might come into your mind, but I couldn’t put mine aside.” He jumped into his white sedan and fled the scene. A few blocks away, he came to a red light. He glanced over at the car idling next to him and saw that a man was asleep behind the wheel. The killer got out of his car and awakened the sleeping driver. He told the man he should go home. Then the killer, full of himself, $49 richer and not at all ashamed of what he had done, got back into his own car and drove off into the night.

Catherine was his third murder.

Thirty-Eight

At about 3:50 a.m., a neighbor, Karl Ross, who lived on the second floor of Catherine’s building on Austin Street, finally called the police. But before he did, he called a friend in nearby Nassau County and asked his opinion about what he should do. After the police were notified, a squad car arrived within three minutes and quickly found Catherine’s body in the hallway on the first floor. She had been stabbed 17 times. Her torn and cut clothes were scattered about and her open wallet lay on the floor next to her. Her driver’s license identified her as Catherine Genovese. Detectives from the 112 responded and began an exhaustive investigation. It was a frigid, winter morning, and a brisk, unrelenting wind made it seem even colder. A canvass of the neighborhood turned up several witnesses, including the one who had notified the police. When cops finished polling the immediate neighborhood, they discovered at least 38 people who had heard or observed some part of the fatal assault on Kitty Genovese.

Kew Gardens is a residential area located at the center of the borough of Queens,

one of the most populated communities in America. If Queens were a city, it would be America’s fifth largest. The area of Kew Gardens is generally middle class where houses in 1964 typically sold for $30,000 to $50,000. It resembled a small village in the suburbs rather than a city neighborhood. Mostly white, working class and typically one of the hundreds of small communities that make up metropolitan New York City, Austin Street is the focal point of the neighborhood. On this neat, picturesque avenue, there are shops, a small park and a busy train station where commuters catch the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central, 15 minutes away. Not the kind of place where one would think a person could be murdered without anyone offering even a smidgen of assistance.

“We thought it was a lover’s quarrel!” said one tenant. “Frankly, we were afraid,” said another witness. One woman who didn’t want her name used said, “I didn’t want my husband to get involved.” Others had different explanations for their conduct. “We went to the window to see what was happening, but the light from our bedroom made it difficult to see the street.”

There were lots of excuses. Maybe the most apathetic was the one who told reporters, “I was tired.” But the fact remained that dozens of people stood by and watched a woman being brutally assaulted for an extended period of time, and did nothing.

“If we had been called when he first attacked, the woman might not be dead now,” an assistant chief inspector told the press at the time. New York City Deputy Police Commissioner Walter Arm said, “This tendency to shy away from reporting crimes is a common one.” That was a revelation to the public. Some detectives were stunned. Others simply saw the unwillingness to get involved as representative of the times. Apathy, especially in urban settings, was everywhere, not only in Kew Gardens. In her own defense, one neighbor said she was too afraid to call. “I tried …I really tried,“ she said, “but I was gasping for air and was unable to talk into the telephone.”

As killings go, the murder of Catherine Genovese was not a spectacular one, nor did it generate much publicity when it happened. The original NYCPD complaint report reduced the episode to just five typewritten lines:

“Karl Ross…heard calls of help at his residence. He saw a woman later identified as Kitty Genovese F-W-28 lying face down in ground floor hallway, she was taken to QGH (Queens General Hospital) by… with multiple stab wounds and pronounced DOA…then taken to morgue.”

There were hundreds of killings in New York City in 1964 and 9,360 murders in America that year. A random killing in the street was not big news. The New York Times delegated a few short paragraphs to the incident on page 12. For two weeks, it lay dormant and gathered virtually no public attention. It wasn’t until March 27, when The Times published its famous “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call” article by Martin Gansberg, that the killing became big news. The New York City media picked up on the wider themes of the event. Camera crews and newscasters descended on Kew Gardens. The press searched the neighborhood for any scrap of uncovered information, no matter how small or insignificant. Kitty Genovese’s story began to take shape.

Investigation

During the week after the murder, the 30 detectives who were assigned to the case sifted through the neighborhood of Kew Gardens and Forest Hills. They located a milkman who was able to furnish a description of a suspect. Others also had observed Catherine’s killer in the area prior to the murder and were able to add to the description. But it wasn’t until six days later, when a suspect was arrested stealing a television during a house burglary that cops had their man: Winston Moseley, 29.

Moseley had no criminal record. He was married, owned a home in Queens and had two kids. Slight of build, barely 5-foot-8, with thin features and a brooding appearance, Moseley was a machine operator who worked in Mt. Vernon in nearby Westchester County. His arrest report, dated March 19, 1964, lists his occupation as “Remington Rand tab operator.” He did not seem to be the type of person who committed street muggings or murder. But Moseley quickly confessed to the Genovese killing and two others. He told cops he had killed Barbara Kralik, 15, on July 20 in Springfield Gardens, Queens, and shot Annie Mae Johnson, 24, of South Ozone Park, Queens, on February 29. Both were savage killings and may have involved sexual assault. Trouble was, another man named Alvin “The Monster” Mitchell, 18, a local gang member, was already in custody for the Kralik killing. He had allegedly also confessed to the teenager’s murder. But Moseley was insistent. He had killed them all, he said.

In the murder of Annie Mae Johnson, Moseley insisted that he shot the victim several times. “I shot her in the stomach. I reloaded and shot

her again in the stomach,” he told cops. But the autopsy on Johnson had listed the cause of death as puncture wounds from a sharp object such as a screwdriver or a file. Based on Moseley’s confession, the body was exhumed from a cemetery in Monck’s Corner, South Carolina, and a second autopsy was performed. Using X-ray equipment borrowed from a South Carolina Medical College in Charleston, the coroner found six bullets inside Johnson’s body. Four of these bullets were recovered. “The finding of these bullets adds a lot of credence to Winston Moseley’s other statements,” Queens District Attorney Frank O’Connor told the press.

In the murder of 15-year-old Barbara Kralik, there was blood evidence available, no test yet existed that could compare bodily fluids for conclusive DNA identification. Moseley, however, was able to supply details that conformed to the existing evidence. Cops were satisfied they had the right man. Even his own court-appointed attorney, Sydney G. Sparrow, believed Moseley. “I’m convinced Moseley did all three of these killings,” he told reporters after he met with his client for three hours in the Kings County Psych Ward. “There are too many things he knew that only the killer could know,” he added.

But there was more. Moseley confessed to other attacks during nighttime expeditions in which he would roam the streets searching for victims at random. He said he raped many women, frequently robbing them in the process. Moseley admitted to dozens of burglaries, including the one for which he was arrested when he was caught stealing a television. But it was the sexual assaults that had detectives interested. Particularly the failed attempts of rape which several women reported. Moseley, it seemed, preferred sex with the dead. Dr. Oscar Diamond, a psychiatrist from Manhattan State Hospital, performed a pretrial psychiatric examination of Moseley. “He told me he got no thrill with live women he raped,” he told the court later.

The Kitty Genovese Syndrome

By mid-April, the Kitty Genovese story had taken hold and the nation began a lengthy period of analysis and self-deprecation. Why would civilized people turn away from another human being in dire need of assistance? As the details of the killing emerged, it became plain that if any one of the 38 witnesses had simply called the police at the first sign of trouble, the victim could have survived. The initial stab wounds inflicted may not have been fatal. Timely medical treatment could have saved the life of Catherine Genovese.

Were the witnesses really that cold-hearted? People wondered. Some psychologists blamed television for the sad state of affairs in Kew Gardens. In a symposium held in Manhattan’s Barbizon Plaza Hotel in early April 1964, psychiatrist Ralph S. Banay said television was at least partly to blame. “We underestimate the damage that these accumulated images do to the brain,” he said, “The immediate effect can be delusional, equivalent to a sort of post-hypnotic suggestion.” The witnesses became confused, and paralyzed by the violence they witnessed outside their window, he explained. “They were fascinated by the drama, by the action, and yet not entirely sure that what was taking place was actually happening,” he said. That explanation fit in neatly with what some of the witnesses had told police. They claimed that when they saw the disturbance on Austin Street, they imagined it was an argument between man and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend. None really thought that they were witnessing a real killing. “We thought it was a lover’s quarrel,” one witness said later. Another neighbor repeated that assertion when he said, “I thought they were some kids having some fun!” Others complained of the media attention and said the press made the neighborhood look bad. “These things happen every day all over the world,” one neighbor told a reporter, “The stories were only giving us a black eye!”

Dr. Karl Menninger, a world-renowned psychiatrist and founder of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, also spoke at the symposium. “Public apathy to crime is itself a manifestation of aggressiveness,” he told the audience. People turn away for a variety of reasons, including their desire “not to get involved.”

But were people in big cities more apathetic, colder and indifferent than others in more rural environments? Or was the “Kitty Genovese Syndrome,” as some psychologists characterized it, indicative of society as a whole?

One dynamic brought forth was the Bystander Effect. This theory speculates that as the “number of bystanders increases, the likelihood of any one bystander helping another decreases.” As a result, additional time will pass before anyone seeks outside help for a person in distress. Another hypothesis is something called the Diffusion of Responsibility. This is simply a decrease in the feeling of personal responsibility one feels when in the presence of many other people. The greater the number of bystanders, the less responsibility the individual feels. In cases where there are many people present during an emergency, it becomes much more likely that any one individual will simply do nothing.

In essence, the 38 witnesses felt no responsibility to act because there were so many witnesses. Each one felt that the other witness would do something. Social psychology research supports the notion that Catherine Genovese had a better chance of survival if she had been attacked in the presence of just one witness.


Websites providing more information on the By-Stander Effect:

http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/bystander_effect.htm

Includes other experiments such a this one by: Latané and Darley, who sat a series of college students in a cubicle amongst a number of other cubicles in which there were tapes of other students playing (the student thought they were real people). One of the voices cries for help and makes sounds of severe choking. When the student thought they were the only person there, 85% rushed to help. When they thought there was one other person, this dropped to 65%. And when they thought there were four other people, this dropped again to 31%.

http://www.safety-council.org/info/community/bystander.html

(Canada Safety Council also provides a good explanation of the theory, and tips about how to stay safe)