Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences

by Pelonero, Catherine

  “In the future, I’ll never think twice,” the man continued. “If I hear something suspicious, I’ll get down there and do something.”

  He explained that his colleagues at work “have ribbed me about this.” But, he insisted, he was not a coward. “I believe I would have helped if I’d realized what the real situation was.”

  As for his thoughts on what the “real situation” was at the time, he said: “At one point I thought maybe a girl was being raped—but if she was out alone at that hour, it served her right.”

  Saying that he remembered seeing Kitty Genovese around the neighborhood and describing her as “pretty, petite,” he added a final thought: “Of course, some girls can’t help being out late at night because of their jobs.”

  The next person quoted was a seventeen-year-old girl who lived in the Mowbray. “I heard unusual sounds early that morning and I sat up in bed. I couldn’t tell what the commotion was, but it sounded violent. I was afraid and decided to close my eyes and go back to sleep. Then it stopped.

  “I felt horrible [the] next day when I heard the girl had been stabbed. I didn’t think of calling police—I didn’t even think of what might be happening. It was like a nightmare, except I knew something really was happening. I don’t know what I could have done to help.”

  The girl explained that she attended night school and cared for her younger brother during the day while their mother worked. She told of her own fear coming home on the subway every night, saying she always ran the three blocks home. She then related a story of another violent incident that had happened in the neighborhood some weeks before, when a knife-wielding man followed a girl into the Mowbray. When this girl screamed, she said, the elevator operator had come out and fought with the attacker. Another man had come out with a shotgun, and the police were called. Of this incident she observed, “That girl was luckier, maybe because it was earlier in the evening.”

  Her final thought on what had happened to Kitty Genovese: “I think every woman who has to be out at night likes to feel that people would help her if someone attacked her. I suppose most of us have guilt feelings because we didn’t do anything that night. But I really didn’t know what was going on—and I think many others were in the same position.”

  Next came a woman who said her sixty-year-old son had told her the day after the murder that he had heard someone scream for help that night, but that the screams had died down quickly. “I wouldn’t have wanted him to do anything about it,” the woman said. “The man who stabbed that girl must have had a great deal of strength. I’m sure it would have taken many men to stop him.” She gave no comment on whether a call to the police might have been helpful. “I do think it’s a terrible, horrible crime, but I can’t see what we could have done to prevent it.”

  The story ended with comments from two other women, both residents of the Mowbray, who refused to give their names to the reporters but were willing to give their thoughts on the matter. The first said, “I’m not interested. That was none of my business. I attend to my own affairs.”

  The other said: “I was in bed. If that girl had been where she belongs, this would never have happened.”

  The article ended there. Readers were advised to check the upcoming Sunday edition of the Journal-American for “a penetrating analysis of why New Yorkers report no evil.”

  FROM A MODERN perspective, it might appear that many people who lived in Kew Gardens were possessed of a strangely virulent and shameless brand of sexism, with the various accusatory comments about Kitty being out alone so late at night (not to mention the one man’s opinion that a girl out by herself at night deserved to be raped). In 1964, however, such viewpoints were by no means endemic to Kew Gardens, or to Queens, or to New York alone. On the contrary, there are countless examples to be found throughout the news, entertainment, and culture of the time that illustrate a common if not prevailing attitude on the “proper place” of women (and disdain for those who step out of line) that is entirely consistent with what was expressed by some residents in Kew Gardens.

  Though some official progress had been made for the rights of women—The Equal Pay Act, the law that requires equal pay for equal or substantially equal work without regard to sex, had been passed by Congress and signed into law by President Kennedy in June of 1963—societal attitudes generally lagged far behind. As an example, in the same month that Kitty Genovese was murdered and news stories about her death were running locally and around the world, a major circulation newspaper called the New York World-Telegram and Sun printed a story picked up from United Press International headlined, “JUDGE OK’S BEATING OF STAY-OUT WIFE.” A judge in Cleveland, Ohio had dismissed assault and battery charges against a man who beat his wife, ruling that “it’s all right for a husband to give his wife a black eye and knock out one of her teeth if she stays out too late.” After briefly hearing the charges, the judge gave an explanation of his ruling: “I asked her what time she came home and she said 4:30 a.m. I told her her husband should have hit her, a woman with two children staying out until 4:30 a.m.” The judge was unmoved by the woman’s claim that she had actually come home at 1:30 a.m., arguing with her husband for three hours before he administered the beating; that the couple often argued about the husband staying out late at night by himself; nor by her plea that the only times she normally went out at night was to attend night school so she could finish her high school education.

  In the case of Kitty Genovese, however, insinuations that she had been partly responsible for her fate fell on unsympathetic ears. The incident was discussed far and wide, passionately and vocally, but the focus was not on what Kitty should have done differently.

  In writing his article, Martin Gansberg had not left things to chance; he had not automatically accepted the police version of what happened that night, nor any count of the witnesses the detectives had given him. Over two days, Gansberg had himself questioned residents about the events of that night. He had not restricted himself to questioning only the neighbors police had pointed him to. Gansberg did his own research, door to door, business to business, person to person.

  At the time Gansberg came to Kew Gardens, the people there had little or no idea what most of their neighbors had seen or done that night, nor what they said to police afterward. Each knew only his or her role, plus anything overheard or discussed here or there. In short, nobody knew the whole story. Only a handful knew that Karl Ross had called the police, or when he had called, or what transpired ahead of time on the roof of the Tudor building. For all any of them knew, thirty people might have called the police that night, as Mrs. Koshkin had assumed when she prevented her husband from doing so. There had been no community gathering to compare notes. No consensus on how things had played out, no certainty about who had done what.

  In other words, few people were on guard when polite, professional, mild-mannered Martin Gansberg showed up to ask questions.

  He asked, and they answered, with a candor many would soon regret, and some would eventually deny.

  Gansberg counted the witnesses for his article himself. On his first day there, in addition to speaking with people the detectives pointed him to, he found others who had witnessed the crime—people the detectives had not mentioned to him. As he later said, he was stunned by how easy it was to find people who had seen some part of the crime. Which is why he went back the next day.

  On his second day there, this time without the detectives, he found more. The standard he used when tallying witnesses: a person who had seen some of the victim’s ordeal, and who further admitted they had been aware that she wanted help (by hearing her explicitly call for it) or needed help (seeing her staggering along the street, seeing the attacker return and look around.) As for the seeming discrepancy between the article’s headline and the opening paragraph as to the number of witnesses who did not call the police—thirty-eight or thirty-seven—Gansberg gave Karl Ross “credit,” so to speak, for having called the police, though it had taken so lon
g for him to do so. In other words, only one of the thirty-eight, Karl Ross, had eventually called police. The other thirty-seven had not.

  Gansberg had not included persons in his witness count who had heard Kitty’s screams but had not seen anything. This would have made the count much higher; the police reports show sixty-two people who heard the screams.

  All of the eyewitnesses were ear witnesses, summoned to their windows by Kitty’s screams, but the reverse was not true; some people who went to their windows saw nothing when they looked out.

  Martin Gansberg never published a list of the persons he interviewed for his March 27, 1964, article, although in subsequent reports on the case that he wrote in later years, he did identify certain people by name (possibly because their names had by that time already appeared in print during news coverage of the trial or in the articles of other newspapers). However, it is possible to partially corroborate his original article—and ascertain the identities of some of those interviewed—by cross-referencing it with accounts in other newspapers written in the same time period that did print names. Gansberg’s story can also be compared against the existing DD5s from the police investigation.

  Police reports obtained via the Freedom of Information Act have redactions. A few pages are entirely or almost entirely blacked out. On others, most of the names of those interviewed are blacked out, but their statements of what they saw and heard remain. These reports show a total of thirty-three persons who saw part of the crime: either Kitty and her attacker on the street together, Kitty struggling away after the first attack, and, in some cases, the foregoing plus Moseley’s return to hunt for her.

  All of these thirty-three had of course heard her screams. Gansberg’s count of thirty-eight witnesses is remarkably close to what appears in the police reports. It is impossible to say with certainty whether the heavily redacted pages of the police reports would reveal five more witnesses, therefore matching Gansberg’s count of thirty-eight. It seems unlikely, given Gansberg’s professional standing and background and how close the numbers are, that he would have invented five phantom witnesses. Likewise, it seems highly doubtful, if not altogether impossible, that managing editors at the New York Times would have printed an article, much less a front-page pictorial, if Martin Gansberg had not supplied sources.

  The New York Times was hardly a fledgling newspaper in need of attention, nor was Martin Gansberg, a twenty-two-year veteran of the New York Times and former managing editor of its International Edition, an eager cub reporter looking to make a name for himself. The Times had not become widely esteemed as the Paper of Record by engaging in yellow journalism. Martin Gansberg had not been promoted through the ranks of the nation’s foremost newspaper by penning tabloid-style articles of dubious foundation.

  Martin Gansberg always stood by his account, maintaining that it had not been difficult for him to find witnesses to the crime, and that he had experienced a shocking attitude of indifference and a gross level of self-interest from most of them. Judging from contemporary accounts written by reporters from other newspapers and magazines, Gansberg’s experience was not unique. Reporters who went to follow up—including Gansberg himself in both the days following and on anniversaries of the murder—seldom heard denials of the witnesses’ inaction. What they heard instead were regrets, excuses, fingerpointing, or some combination thereof.

  Most of the outright denials would come much later.

  The day after the explosive New York Times account, an article by Edward Weiland, the reporter who had written the compassionate stories about Kitty in the immediate wake of her death, appeared in the Long Island Star-Journal. Headlined, “WHO KNEW IT WAS MURDER, SAY 38,” it gave an account of the sudden invasion of Kew Gardens by reporters and television cameras and the resultant bad publicity the community was enduring this Easter weekend. An expanded version of this article titled, “AUSTIN STREET CAN’T FORGET AN UNHEEDED CRY IN THE NIGHT” appeared the same day in the Long Island Press.

  “The people walk along Austin Street, just off Lefferts Boulevard,” Weiland wrote, “and they watch as a television crew photographs the path Kitty Genovese took to her death.”

  He described the residents standing around in small groups, discussing the notoriety and shame that had come to Kew Gardens. He wrote of how newspapers, radio stations, and television networks had pointed accusing fingers at the community, how the public viewed them as partners in crime because they had stood idly by and refused to help. “But they point an accusing finger of their own. ‘You,’ a woman says shrilly, ‘with your cameras and pencil and paper. You are guilty of shaming our community.’

  “A reporter points out that the attack on Kitty Genovese was a long and agonizing half hour of terror. That after she was stabbed for the first time she cried out for help and ran from her killer. That he chased her and she cried repeatedly for help, but that this help did not come. That people saw and people heard but no one came to her aid. That nobody even called the police until it was too late. ‘Are we different?’ the woman asks. ‘Would anybody else, in any other community, have done differently?’ ”

  Weiland’s articles continued with a quote from a man who reportedly shrugged and said, “You hear a scream in the darkness. You say, it’s too bad. But what can I do? If I go to help her, they’ll maybe both turn on me. That’s the way it is with lovers’ quarrels.” Another man explained that he had been punched himself once when he tried to break up a fight.

  A dissenting voice came from a man who had moved to Kew Gardens from Canada fourteen years earlier. Weiland quoted him: “Cowards! Yellow-bellied cowards! I’m getting out of here as fast as I can. I’m moving away. I could walk naked through the streets and nobody would even look at me.

  “They yell about the papers. The papers printed the truth about this street. They’re one zillion percent correct.”

  The man from Canada continued: “I live in the back, away from the street. I didn’t hear. But they did. Those cowards in front did. Why was it so long before somebody had the guts to call the cops?”

  An elevator operator in the Mowbray (Weiland did not give his name) agreed with the man from Canada. “I’ve worked in lots of buildings but I don’t know what’s with these people. They walk in and out and they got the cold fish stare. Like they’re too good for you or something.”

  A woman who lived in the Mowbray said she resented both the notoriety and something else written about the neighborhood, which she felt was a mischaracterization. “One newspaper described our community as middle-class. That’s unfair. We’re not middle-class. I’d say at least upper middle-class.”

  Weiland wrote that many residents in the area of the crime scene were elderly, stating that these residents applied a double standard when it came to their younger neighbors. He quoted a woman he described as an “elderly matron” saying: “The younger people should have helped.”

  She continued: “Of course I heard the screams. But there was nothing I could do. I was afraid. My hands were trembling. I couldn’t have dialed for an operator if I’d tried. I never even thought of it. I was too afraid.” A younger woman standing nearby agreed, saying, “The younger people should do something. Or the men. They should help.”

  Weiland interviewed another woman living on the fifth floor of a large building off Lefferts Boulevard who said: “People say they saw this or that.” Weiland wrote that she laughed before continuing: “I was awake. I heard something that sounded like two people talking loud. That’s all. I looked down and I saw two heads. How could I tell he had a knife? That it was anything but another drunken brawl?” The woman pointed to the fact that her building was near flush with the sidewalk,citing an absence of streetlights and trees standing near the curb. “A person looks out but can’t really see anything from our side of the street. So when the cops come around they like to talk.”

  A man said: “You get used to it after a while. You get conditioned. So when you hear a cry, you figure it’s just another drunk or a teen
-ager [sic] raising hell. How can you pick one noise out of a hundred and know this time it’s murder?”

  Weiland spoke with teenagers who he claimed resented these remarks, claiming that there are no teenagers on these streets at 3:00 a.m. “But if we were, we’d have helped,” one of them said. “We’d have ganged up and jumped him.” In Weiland’s opinion, the teenagers did not grasp the reality of what had happened. They viewed it more as if they had missed a good show on television. “The reality and the brutality of it seems to leave them unmoved.”

  IN THE DAYS that Martin Gansberg had spent investigating the murder in Kew Gardens, the wheels of justice had quietly moved forward. On Tuesday, March 24, the day following his indictment for the murder of Kitty Genovese, Winston Moseley was arraigned in the Supreme Court of Queens before Judge J. Irwin Shapiro. Judge Shapiro asked Winston Moseley if he had money for an attorney or if his family had an attorney for him. Moseley replied that he had neither a lawyer nor the funds to pay for one. Judge Shapiro noted on the record that he would thus appoint an attorney to represent him.

  Ed Webber, the young attorney appointed by the lower court to defend Moseley at the first arraignment, wanted to stay on the case. Prior to the appearance in Queens Supreme Court that Tuesday, Webber had sought advice on how to proceed from Sidney Sparrow.

  At fifty-one years of age, Sparrow was a preeminent criminal defense attorney in Queens. Polished, debonair, and with an extensive vocabulary he used freely, as he tended to speak and conduct himself very formally at all times, Sidney Sparrow had been practicing law for close to three decades. He had been a founding member of the Queens County Criminal Court’s Bar Association in the 1940s. He lived in Queens and had an office on Queens Boulevard, directly opposite the courthouse.