We could have learned a great deal more about Moseley at the trial, and about Catherine Genovese’s death. But the trial did not get much attention. The details were not the kind of material the Times or most other papers printed then or now.
I read the trial transcript through before writing this introduction to a new edition of the book. I knew it would be an unspeakable insult to Catherine Genovese for me to write about her again and walk away from the record of her death, which was her last scream.
Winston Moseley talked at great length and with entire calm about what he liked most to do. He liked to go out in the streets in the early mornings to rob men or kill women. If he spotted a man who was not too large, and was walking carelessly, or weaving, he enjoyed robbing him with a gun or at knifepoint and taking his money. He did not need money, but taking it away from a man he could catch off guard and overpower with a weapon gave him pleasure.
But it was not nearly as enjoyable as hunting women. He was black, a fact we did not print after he was arrested. Some white readers sent us nasty letters about that. Times policy is not to print that information in crime stories unless it is specifically pertinent to the crime or part of the description when police search for a wanted person.
Moseley did not care whether the women he hunted were black or white, except once, when he made the choice out of curiosity. Often he did not know. He never saw them clearly until they turned to face him, with his knife deep in them or his gun in their back. Sometimes he did not see them until they stared up at him from the ground, or he had to turn them over to see what they looked like.
What he looked for was a woman alone, walking or driving a car. If she was driving, he followed her in his car, and when she stopped, he stopped too and parked. Then he got out to track her on foot for the kill.
He says he did that at least five times and confessed to killing two other women before Catherine Genovese walked toward her home that night in March. Police say his confession about the first murder, of a woman called Barbara Kralik, was made because he knew he would be convicted in the Genovese case and was trying to help a friend who had confessed to the Kralik murder.
But about the murder of Anna May Johnson, everything he said checked out. She was not important in the Genovese case except as verification of his modus operandi. But I want to write a bit about her death. When someday I read this remembrance of the Genovese case in print, I do not want to have to ask myself why I turned away from another murdered woman because she was no great news story, not even worth the four paragraphs Catherine Genovese was awarded the day after her death.
Anna May Johnson was killed about 2 A.M. on February 28, 1964. Moseley testified in the Genovese case that he saw Anna May Johnson in her car. He followed it to near her small apartment house in South Ozone Park, Queens. When she got out, he followed on foot. She turned and saw him behind her. He asked for money and she gave it to him.
“Then I shot her.… I shot her in the stomach.”
He shot her again, then “I turned her over and then I could see for sure that she was dead. Then I decided, well, perhaps I’d rape her now that she was dead so I took off all her clothes that she had, right there in the snow.… Then I decided it was too cold out in the snow so I rolled her up the steps on into the house into the middle of the living room floor.… So first of all I committed that cunnilingus, was it? But I was impotent … I laid on top of her.… I did have an orgasm.”
After that, he dragged her upstairs to her apartment.
“I set a fire in two places in the living room and I took the scarf that she had on and put that on the lower part of her body … on her genital organs and set fire to her.” The next morning he went to work.
Winston Moseley went hunting again two weeks later and saw Catherine Genovese driving alone in a red car. He was picked up six days after her death. He was picked up because he was suspected of robberies, police say. Under some “persuasive” questioning, as he put it, he told them not only about the robberies but confirmed their suspicions that he was the killer of Catherine Genovese. He went to trial on June 8, 1964.
The defense did not challenge the confession but asked for acquittal on grounds of insanity. These are excerpts from testimony under questioning by his own lawyer.
Q: Now, on this night did you intend killing?
A: Yes.
Q: What if anything did you do to prepare for that?
A: Well, I had a hunting knife that I had taken from a previous burglary, and I took that with me.
Q: Had you any specific type of individual in mind?
A: Well, I knew it would be a woman.
Q: Is there any reason why now you intended to kill a white woman as distinguished from the two prior times that you thought you killed colored?
A: No, unless perhaps I might have been thinking there might have been some difference between them.
Q: Now tell us what you did, please.
A: Well, I left the house about one-thirty or two o’clock, and it took me until about three o’clock to find one that was driving where I could actually catch up with her.… I followed [her red car] for about ten blocks, and then it pulled into what I thought was a parking lot.
Q: Did you make your mind up to kill her?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you tell us any reasons why?
A: No, I can’t give you any reasons why.
The court: Was [money] one of the factors?
A: It possibly was, but it was not a primary factor.
Q: You tell us exactly what happened, Winston.
A: As soon as she got out of the car she saw me and ran. I ran after her and I had a knife in my hand, then I caught up with her and I stabbed her twice in the back.
He testified that he stabbed her in the chest and stomach as well as the back, that somebody called out the window, but that he “did not think that person would come down to help her.”
Moseley also testified that later he had heard somebody open an apartment door and shout down, but he “didn’t feel these people” were coming down the stairs. So he lifted her skirt, cut off her under-clothes, including her brassiere.
After he had stabbed her repeatedly he began to worry that somebody might have seen his car and noted the color, make, or license. So he walked back to the outdoor parking lot where he had left it to stalk her on foot. He moved the car around the corner. Then he took off his hat, a stocking cap, and put on a fedora he had in the car.
Q: [from the prosecutor] Why?
A: Well, I felt that perhaps if I had not killed the girl and had to leave what I started unfinished, she would have only seen the bottom half of my face.
Q: In other words, you thought you could disguise your face better by putting on a different hat.
A: That’s right.
Q: Now, when you came back, you were thinking, weren’t you, about what you were going to do?
A: That’s right.
Q: What?
A: That’s right.
Moseley said he heard some yelling from windows, but it had stopped by the time he got back to Catherine Genovese, whom he had left lying in the street. He did not think that anybody would come down “regardless to the fact that she had screamed.”
“So I came back but I didn’t see her.… I tried the first door in the row of those back houses, which was locked. The second door was open and she was in there. As soon as she saw me she started screaming so I stabbed her a few other times … once in the neck.… She only moaned after that.”
Q: You also knew that people at three o’clock in the morning on a cold morning would not take the trouble to even come down and investigate if someone had been killed?
A: I thought that way, yes.
Q: And as she started to scream, you stabbed her, didn’t you?
A: Yes, I did.
Q: You stabbed her in the throat?
A: Right.
Q: That is where the voice was coming from, isn’t that right?
A: That’
s right.
Moseley testified that he saw that she was exposed, decided to rape her, stabbed her again, that she kept moaning, that he took off one of his gloves to pull down his zipper, took out his penis, laid on top of her but could not attain—“What was the word?” he asked the judge. “Erection,” said the court.
Did he have an orgasm, the court asked. Moseley said yes. He also said she was menstruating at the time. He took the money from her wallet.
Q: Forty-nine dollars you put in your pocket, hah?
A: That’s being practical.
Q: Being practical?
A: Yes. Why would I throw money away?
He left. Somebody then did call the police. A half hour had gone by in the two attacks on Catherine Genovese, what with seventeen stabbings, Moseley’s back and forth from the parking lot, cutting her clothes off, raping her, and so on. She died soon after arrival in the hospital. If the call had come more quickly, the police said later, her life could have been saved.
Moseley said he did not know for sure that she was dead until he read it in the newspapers the next day. He committed at least three robberies between the time of the murder and the day the police arrested him.
The trial took three days. He was convicted and sentenced to death. Later an appeals court found that the trial judge had not allowed sufficient testimony about Moseley’s life in the sentencing hearings and therefore commuted the death sentence to life.
Four years later he cut himself with a bottle at the state prison in Attica, was sent to a prison hospital in Buffalo, and escaped by overpowering a guard. In the next four days, according to the police, he raped a woman, beat her husband, fled in their car, took two men and a woman hostage, and surrendered after a face-off with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In prison, Moseley began taking courses that earned him a college degree. That got him some print in newspapers. He wrote letters to newspapers saying he was a different man and deserved another chance to become part of society. In 1977, the Times printed an Op-Ed piece from him, explaining why he should be freed to become an “asset to society.”
In the 1980s Moseley began asking for parole, which he did not get.
In 1995, thirty-one years after her death, he appealed for a new trial on the grounds that he had not had an appropriate, objective defense, since he said he had recently discovered that his lawyer had once represented Catherine Genovese when she got a ticket for gambling. Catherine Genovese’s three brothers and sister had not attended the murder trial but appeared at the hearings. One brother, William, had lost both legs above the knee in Vietnam and hoisted himself onto a front bench from his wheelchair.
The original lawyer for Moseley testified that before the trial he had told Moseley about his earlier representation of Catherine Genovese. The judge called the representation “ephemeral” and said it created no bias in the lawyer against his client Moseley. The appeal was rejected. Winston Moseley is still in prison, planning another appeal to become a social asset.
For months after Catherine Genovese’s death, newspapers, magazines, and TV shows ran stories and analyses by psychologists and academics as to how it could have happened: a girl dying screaming while thirty-eight neighbors heard, never came down, did not pick up a phone to call the police. Some letters to the editor denounced the silent witnesses. Other letters and some of the specialists, then and since, have tried to explain them.
Screaming at night—how could they be sure it was not a fight between husband and wife, lover and lover. Any fool knows that is the kind of thing where the rage and violence turn on the interloper who gets between them; first thing you know, the jerk gets hurt.
Yes, they should have called the police. But as the Times and other papers explained, other cities had far more convenient systems of calling the police (New York did not yet have the 911 system) that guaranteed anonymity. Some specialists blamed TV violence for instilling terror, or urban detachment from neighbors and, more frequently, “fear of the street,” the fear of getting involved in something beyond their control.
Even if they just called the police, would they have to go to the police station, give evidence, and maybe testify in court? Maybe the thirty-eight witnesses worried about that, and can you really blame them entirely?
People in New York, around the country, and then in the seminars asked themselves whether they would ever refuse to give help to a person they could hear calling for help, just put themselves to a little trouble when there was no chance of real danger or cost? They thought they would not refuse under those conditions.
As I was writing Thirty-Eight Witnesses, I felt the question should be reworded so: would I ever refuse again?
I knew most of us had refused in the past, so often that we had become unaware of what we were doing.
I have walked past lepers and beggars scores of times in Asia. Any help from me, the merest, would have been of importance to them. They were terribly sick; I saw their sores. If they were professional beggars, as I told myself, did that salve their sores or straighten the limbs of the twisted children they held up, rented or not?
With a few pennies I could have helped them, but then others would have come up, crowded around, and touched me, and I could not stand the thought of that. So I walked away when the cost of helping them would have been less than the cost of a phone call for the thirty-eight, and no danger of being stabbed or involved.
Cripples crawling in New Delhi’s Connaught Place, the capital’s shopping center then, wretched misshapen babies held out by filthy mothers in Calcutta—I turned away not in fear but in disgust and annoyance.
Certainly those emotions are less worthy than fear as excuses for refusing succor, particularly as excuses to oneself if encountered in an honest moment.
But the mystery for all of us about the Genovese case was how could it have happened that thirty-eight people, thirty-eight, heard the screams and did nothing. Two or three, all right, maybe even a half dozen—it could happen. But everybody, all thirty-eight of them?
I was trying hard to be candid with myself, but not hard enough. Now and for some years I have realized that I failed to ask the question that might have answered the mystery of so many silent witnesses on Austin Street.
Who was walking with me on that street in Calcutta or New Delhi and not stopping to give help? Not thirty-eight people, but hundreds at any one moment, thousands in an hour.
In the middle of a cold night, thirty-eight people refused the risk of being stabbed or getting involved by answering a cry for help of a person they could not see. Is that a greater mystery, a greater offense, than that by light of day thousands on a single street withhold help to suffering people, when it would cost them virtually nothing and put them in no peril, even though they see their faces and sores?
Are the people who turned away that one night in Queens, each in a separate decision, any more immoral or indecent or cowardly because there happened to be thirty-eight, than if there were just one of them? Does God judge by the individual or by head count?
And what if we hear the scream but cannot see the screamer? Of all questions about silent witnesses, to me this is the most important.
Suppose the screamer is not downstairs but around the corner. Surely somebody else is closer, so we don’t have to run out, do we? What is the accepted distance for hearing but not moving—two flights down, five, one block, two blocks, three?
Suppose you know people screaming under persecution—not discrimination but persecution, as in imprisonment, torture, cells—for their politics or their religion. You have seen the smuggled pictures of bodies after the rack, you have heard from those who have escaped: your own government reports their existence in the Chinese gulag, the Laogai. You know they scream, but they are not within sight and you cannot reach out and touch them, nor are you allowed to visit them. But the screams are piercing.
How far away do you have to be to forgive yourself for not doing whatever is in your power to do: stop doing busin
ess with the torturer, or just speak up for them, write a letter, join a human rights group, go to church and pray for the rescue of the persecuted and the damnation of the persecutors, give money, do something.
Three stories up, a thousand miles, ten thousand miles, from here to Austin Street, or from here to the gulags or the dungeons for political and religious prisoners anywhere? How far is silence from a place of safety acceptable without detesting yourself as we detest the thirty-eight? Tell me, what question is more important than the one Catherine Genovese put to me for years when I sat down to write my columns for the Times—how far?
INTRODUCTION BY ARTHUR OCHS SULZBERGER
A newspaper is print and ink, and many things. There is no counting the hours that we who work on the New York Times have spent, and still spend, analyzing, assessing, diagnosing our own paper, our relationship to it and what it means to our readers.
Some things are known but unsaid. More than print and ink, a newspaper is a collection of fierce individualists who somehow manage to perform the astounding daily miracle of merging their own personalities under the discipline of the deadline, and retain the flavor of their own minds in print. In dread fear of sentimentality, another thing true is not said—that for its staff the paper is a source of pride and, I do believe, an object of affection and—yes, love.
Looking outward, we know and relish the knowledge that the Times has come to be regarded as a newspaper that pays minute attention to all matters of foreign and national significance. In a news sense we are an international and national newspaper.
But that is not all we are. It is often forgotten—I think sometimes by ourselves—that we are above all a community newspaper. We print for a specific community and although we search for readership beyond it, that community is our bread and butter, and its members the real basis of our existence.
We are the New York Times, not the Times of London or of Los Angeles or of Washington. Our readers are people who live in the city or its suburbs and although they are interested in foreign and national affairs they are quite as interested, perhaps more, in what takes place in the City Council as in the Security Council. Sometimes we suffer from Afghanistanitis—the theory that what happens in exotic places is somehow more important than what happens in Queens. But by and large, and more and more, we hold to the realization that metropolitan news is the essential third leg of our stool.
Thirty-Eight Witnesses Page 2