In Gansberg and myself, I think, a sense of excitement that is the reward of the business of newspapering kept growing. But still not large enough to keep me from pulling Gansberg off the story between phone calls to do other work. That night, Gansberg thought a lot about the Genovese story; even skipped Mitch Miller on TV to keep on thinking in the line of duty. The next morning he came in early and tried to set up an appointment in Queens with Assistant Chief Inspector Frederick M. Lussen.
It was not until Wednesday that Gansberg was able to reach Lussen. As he talked with Gansberg, Lussen received a call from headquarters informing him that he had just been promoted.
“This information induced him to smile,” Gansberg says. “It was the only smile I saw on his face that afternoon. The man was angry with what he had to tell me. He was angry with the people.”
Gansberg talked with every other detective on the case. They were angry too, as angry as detectives allow themselves to get. Everybody said the same thing—thirty-eight witnesses, all silent during a murder—and every detective asked the same question: Why?
In the car to Kew Gardens, the detectives, as if mesmerized by the shock of the familiar become unrecognizable, kept saying what a nice neighborhood it was, how quiet, how respectable.
Gansberg seemed impressed by the number of trees, which to him seemed to be a sign of solidity. “The trees were bare, but there were so many of them, sycamores, Norway maples, silver maples, that you knew a good class of people lived around them,” he says.
“There were some foreign accents to be heard in the streets and shops, because John F. Kennedy International Airport was nearby and many of the people in the neighborhood worked at the terminal.
“The more I walked around the neighborhood,” Gansberg says, “the more I felt I wouldn’t mind living there. Looks like a suburb, not a section of a busy borough in a busy city.”
There are private homes on the street, an apartment house with the fake-Tudor front that used to be the quintessence of swank in Queens, and neighborhood stores—a barbershop, a dry cleaner, coffee shop, a grocer—all quite cheerful except for the paint-covered window of the mail-order bookstore.
With detectives, the reporter retraced the investigation, knocked on doors, asked “Why?” He began to hate the people he talked to, he says now. That night he returned to the city room and we talked. The next day he went back with a photographer to get pictures of the neighborhood. Mostly, they met closed doors that would not open, frigid looks.
“What kind of story is this?” the photographer asked Gansberg. “It doesn’t fit together. Have you got me out here on some feature?”
Thursday night when the story was in hand and edited, I talked with Turner Catledge, now Managing Editor, and with Theodore Bernstein, Assistant Managing Editor, about it. I felt professional excitement quite keenly—excitement, not participation or guilt or responsibility, those came much later—and they did, too, immediately.
On March 27, the Times printed the following story by Gansberg, under a single-line four-column banner on the bottom of page one:
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.
Twice the sound of their voices and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out and stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.
That was two weeks ago today. But Assistant Chief Inspector Frederick M. Lussen, in charge of the borough’s detectives and a veteran of twenty-five years of homicide investigations, is still shocked.
He can give a matter-of-fact recitation of many murders. But the Kew Gardens slaying baffles him—not because it is a murder, but because the “good people” failed to call the police.
“As we have reconstructed the crime,” he said, “the assailant had three chances to kill this woman during a thirty-five-minute period. He returned twice to complete the job. If we had been called when he first attacked, the woman might not be dead now.”
This is what the police say happened beginning at 3:20 A.M. in the staid, middle-class, tree-lined Austin Street area:
Twenty-eight-year-old Catherine Genovese, who was called Kitty by almost everyone in the neighborhood, was returning home from her job as manager of a bar in Hollis. She parked her red Fiat in a lot adjacent to the Kew Gardens Long Island Rail Road Station, facing Mowbray Place. Like many residents of the neighborhood, she had parked there day after day since her arrival from Connecticut a year ago, although the railroad frowns on the practice.
Austin Street, Kew Gardens, where Catherine Genovese was first attacked in front of the bookstore.
She turned off the lights of her car, locked the door and started to walk the 100 feet to the entrance of her apartment at 82-70 Austin Street, which is in a Tudor building, with stores on the first floor and apartments on the second.
The entrance to the apartment is in the rear of the building because the front is rented to retail stores. At night the quiet neighborhood is shrouded in the slumbering darkness that marks most residential areas.
Miss Genovese noticed a man at the far end of the lot, near a seven-story apartment house at 82-40 Austin Street. She halted. Then, nervously, she headed up Austin Street toward Lefferts Boulevard, where there is a call box to the 102nd Police Precinct in nearby Richmond Hill.
She got as far as a street light in front of a bookstore before the man grabbed her. She screamed. Lights went on in the ten-story apartment house at 82-67 Austin Street, which faces the bookstore. Windows slid open and voices punctured the early-morning stillness.
Miss Genovese screamed: “Oh, my God, he stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!”
From one of the upper windows in the apartment house, a man called down: “Let that girl alone!”
The assailant looked up at him, shrugged and walked down Austin Street toward a white sedan parked a short distance away. Miss Genovese struggled to her feet.
Lights went out. The killer returned to Miss Genovese, now trying to make her way around the side of the building by the parking lot to get to her apartment. The assailant stabbed her again.
“I’m dying!” she shrieked. “I’m dying!”
Windows were opened again, and lights went on in many apartments. The assailant got into his car and drove away. Miss Genovese staggered to her feet. A city bus, Q-10, the Lefferts Boulevard line to Kennedy International Airport, passed. It was 3:35 A.M.
The assailant returned. By then, Miss Genovese had crawled to the back of the building, where the freshly painted brown doors to the apartment house held out hope of safety. The killer tried the first door; she wasn’t there. At the second door, 82-62 Austin Street, he saw her slumped on the floor at the foot of the stairs. He stabbed her a third time—fatally.
It was 3:50 by the time the police received their first call from a man who was a neighbor of Miss Genovese. In two minutes they were at the scene. The neighbor, a seventy-year-old woman and another woman were the only persons on the street. Nobody else came forward.
The man explained that he had called the police after much deliberation. He had phoned a friend in Nassau County for advice and then he had crossed the roof of the building to the apartment of the elderly woman to get her to make the call.
Miss Genovese was stabbed a second time before the drugstore at the corner of the railroad station and parking lot.
“I didn’t want to get involved,” he sheepishly told the police.
Six days later, the police arrested Winston Moseley, a twenty-nine-year-old business-machine operator, and charged him with the homicide. Moseley had no previous record. He is married, has two children and owns a home at 133-19 Sutter Avenue, South Ozone Park, Queens. On Wednesday, a court committed him to Kings County Hospital for psychiatric observation.
When questioned by the police, Mo
seley also said that he had slain Mrs. Annie May Johnson, twenty-four, of 146-12 133rd Avenue, Jamaica, on February 29 and Barbara Kralik, fifteen, of 174-17 140th Avenue, Springfield Gardens, last July. In the Kralik case, the police are holding Alvin L. Mitchell, who is said to have confessed that slaying.
The police stressed how simple it would have been to have gotten in touch with them. “A phone call,” said one of the detectives, “would have done it.” The police may be reached by dialing “O” for operator or SPring 7-3100.
The question of whether the witnesses can be held legally responsible in any way for failure to report the crime was put to the Police Department’s legal bureau. There, a spokesman said: said, “but where they are in their homes, near phones, why should they be afraid to call the police?”
Miss Catherine Genovese was attacked for the third time at doorway (1) by a man. She was trying to reach home (2) at Kew Gardens. He struck first on the opposite side of the block.
When first attacked, Miss Genovese was trying to get to the telephone box, at which a policeman stands, on Lefferts Boulevard at Austin Street.
He said his men were able to piece together what happened—and capture the suspect—because the residents furnished all the information when detectives rang doorbells during the days following the slaying.
“But why didn’t someone call us that night?” he asked unbelievingly.
Witnesses—some of them unable to believe what they had allowed to happen—told a reporter why.
A housewife, knowingly if quite casually, said, “We thought it was a lover’s quarrel.” A husband and wife both said, “Frankly, we were afraid.” They seemed aware of the fact that events might have been different. A distraught woman, wiping her hands in her apron, said, “I didn’t want my husband to get involved.”
One couple, now willing to talk about that night, said they heard the first screams. The husband looked thoughtfully at the bookstore where the killer first grabbed Miss Genovese.
“We went to the window to see what was happening,” he said, “but the light from our bedroom made it difficult to see the street.” The wife, still apprehensive, added: “I put out the light and we were able to see better.”
Asked why they hadn’t called the police, she shrugged and replied: “I don’t know.”
A man peeked out from a slight opening in the doorway to his apartment and rattled off an account of the killer’s second attack. Why hadn’t he called the police at the time? “I was tired,” he said without emotion. “I went back to bed.”
It was 4:25 A.M. when the ambulance arrived for the body of Miss Genovese. It drove off. “Then,” a solemn police detective said, “the people came out.”
PART TWO
It would be pleasant to be able to say now that once the story was in print my professional aloofness disappeared, and I felt a sense of personal involvement. It would be pleasant, but quite untrue.
The only reaction I had was one of professional satisfaction. We had printed a good story, we had printed it alone, TV and the other papers were chasing after us, the Journal-American had printed a most handsome acknowledgment of our energy and wisdom, in which we all took quite unabashed delight.
The story had no personal involvement for me at all. I realized, as we all did, that the point we were making was that the city had become a pretty grim place, a place where thirty-eight people would not lift a finger or a telephone to help a woman being attacked under their windows. How awful of them, we were saying. Of them.
Naturally, we had to have a follow-up. As the night the day, a follow-up comes after any good story. And the obvious thing to do is what we did—get on the telephone to a random selection of sociologists, psychologists and theologians asking them what they thought of it all, how they could explain this strange phenomenon of a story.
I am fascinated, now, by the threads that ran through the “reaction” from our professional sources, that day and in the days that followed. The reaction of almost every one of these social physicians was to admit total failure on their part to understand, or to look for a comforting bit of jargon, or to reach out for a target—metropolitan living, or fear of the police, or TV sadism.
Everybody used a word that had been in the headline in the story—apathy.
The first follow-up story summed up the professional reaction this way:
“Expressions of shock and perplexity followed the disclosure yesterday that thirty-seven witnesses to a murder in Queens had failed to report the crime to the police.” (We kept confusing readers by shifting between thirty-seven and thirty-eight; the reason was that thirty-eight had witnessed the crime or heard it, but that that one man finally did put through a call after it was too late.)
Experts in human behavior, such as psychiatrists and sociologists, our story found, seemed as hard put as anyone else to explain the inaction of the witnesses. One sociologist called it “non-rational behavior.”
Leo J. Zimmerman, vice-president of the Queens Bar Association, called the incident “outrageous,” and said he was “profoundly shocked.” Nobody, in a newspaper story is lightly, or non-profoundly, shocked. Mr. Zimmerman took pains to point out that he was not speaking on behalf of the Bar Association.
A professor at the Downstate Medical Center of New York State University said the incident “goes to the heart of whether this is a community or a jungle.” He suggested that when members of a society failed to defend each other they came close to being partners in crime. Then he added that he felt the incident was “atypical” and that New York as a community could not be condemned.
A psychiatrist called the incident typical—not atypical—of middle-class groups in a city like New York. “They have a nice life and what happens in the street, the life of the city itself, is a different matter.” The same psychiatrist, Dr. George Serban, said that there was a constant feeling in New York that society was unjust and that that might be the explanation.
“It’s the air of all New York, the air of injustice,” he said. “The feeling that you might get hurt if you act and that whatever you do, you will be the one to suffer.”
Dr. Renee Claire Fox, of Barnard College’s sociology department, talked of “disaster syndromes” something like that seen in victims of sudden disasters, such as tornadoes. She said that witnessing a prolonged murder under their own windows had destroyed the witnesses’ feeling that the world was a rational orderly place, and as a result “it deeply shook their sense of safety and sureness.” The result, she ventured, was an “affect denial” that caused them to withdraw psychologically from the event by ignoring it.
My own favorite comment came from the theologian who said that he could not understand it, that perhaps “depersonalizing” in New York had gone farther than he thought. Then he added, in monumental, total unconsciousness of irony: “Don’t quote me.”
Ever and ever, I shall treasure that theologian. A bit of handy jargon and then—don’t quote me, don’t involve me. Who are all these others? Somehow, when I read that last line in the story, I felt that every point we had to make had been made.
A variety of riders rode a variety of hobby horses. Walter Arm, the Deputy Police Commissioner for Community Relations, took the opportunity to point out that the police had long been concerned with apathy in reporting crimes, and that several hundred thousand leaflets would be distributed exhorting the public to report all crimes immediately.
Some time later, a psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph S. Banay, told a symposium on violence conducted by the Medical Correctional Association that a confusion of fantasy with reality, fed by an endless stream of TV violence, was in part responsible for the fact that the witnesses to Miss Genovese’s murder had turned away. “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 posthypnotic suggestion.”
Dr. Banay suggested that the murderer vicariously gratified the sadistic impulses of those who witnessed it. “They
were deaf, paralyzed, hypnotized with excitation,” he said. “Fascinated by the drama, by the action, and yet not entirely sure that what was taking place was actually happening.”
Dr. Banay, a professor of forensic psychiatry at Manhattan College, interpreted the readiness of the witnesses to admit to the police that they had failed to act as an attempt to purge their guilt through confession. “Persons with mature and well-integrated personalities would not have acted in this way,” he said.
At the same meeting, Dr. Karl Menninger, the director of the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, touched on the same theme when he said that “public apathy is itself a manifestation of aggressiveness.”
None of this sort of reaction was at all surprising. As a matter of fact, it was fairly pat and standard journalistically, and in my own mind I did not feel, nor do I now, that the sociologists and psychiatrists who commented contributed anything substantial to anybody’s understanding of what happened that night on Austin Street.
I am not really sure, to this moment, just when my own attitudes toward the story began to become a little more complicated, just when I came to think of it as something perhaps a little different from another strange story of the city, began to relate it to myself and to everybody around me. Even now, as I write this, I find it difficult to make a clean and totally honest distinction between my interest in the story as a newspaperman and a peculiar, paradoxical feeling that there is in the tale of Catherine Genovese a revelation about the human condition so appalling to contemplate that only good can come from forcing oneself to confront the truth.
This belief was slow in growing. I do know that I became intensely interested in the reaction of people who wrote letters to the paper about the story, and the fact that people talked so often about it, could not seem to let it go.
Thirty-Eight Witnesses Page 4