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

by Pelonero, Catherine

  Despite his formal bearing, Sidney Sparrow was nonetheless a jovial and approachable man, solicitous to young lawyers who came to him for guidance. He advised Ed Webber to tell the higher court that he had been appointed to represent Moseley by the lower court, that he had already done work on the case, and that he wished to remain as counsel for Winston Moseley.

  Ed Webber did so at the arraignment. Sidney Sparrow was also in the courtroom that day, as he was on most days. From his seat in the attorney’s row, Sparrow saw Judge Shapiro shake his head in the negative at Ed Webber. A case of this magnitude called for a highly experienced defense attorney.

  Shortly afterward, Judge Shapiro asked Sparrow if he would be available for an assignment by the court. Sparrow replied that he would. Arriving at his office the next day, Sidney Sparrow was not the least bit surprised to learn that Judge Shapiro had appointed him to represent Winston Moseley. Shapiro also designated two other attorneys, Julius Lipitz and Martha Zelman, to act as co-counsel.

  As one of the most active defense attorneys in the area, Sidney Sparrow was privy to information on major arrests in the borough. He had already heard talk around the courthouse about Winston Moseley and some of the details of his alleged exploits. He knew Moseley had made some incriminating and apparently grisly admissions. Sparrow heard one police officer remark that Moseley was a vampire, because he sucked the blood of his victims.

  Sidney Sparrow would later recall his sense of astonishment on first meeting his new client face to face at the jail. Like Detective John Tartaglia a week before, Sparrow found himself sitting across from a small, delicate-looking man who seemed anything but a maniacal predator. Moseley spoke softly, articulately, and appeared extremely calm, just as he had with the detectives. Sparrow later said, “I would’ve thought he was the most innocent person in the room. But he wasn’t.”

  Without hesitation or emotion, Winston Moseley confirmed for his new attorney all the details in the statement he had given to the district attorney. Sparrow went over the specifics with him again, asking Moseley if, as Sparrow had been told by the police, he had gone out with the intention of finding a woman to kill; if he had stabbed Kitty Genovese to death; and if he had attempted to have sex with her dead or dying body. Moseley replied that all those things were true. As he had for the police and the D.A., Moseley gave Sparrow the whole unvarnished story.

  In his notes, Sidney Sparrow wrote, “He may be crazy, but he sure is truthful.”

  On Wednesday, March 25, Winston Moseley appeared with his new attorneys for a second arraignment before Judge Shapiro. Moseley entered a plea of not guilty. Sparrow moved to have his client committed to the Kings County Medical Center for psychiatric evaluation.

  Sparrow received no resistance to this request, neither from the judge, his client, nor his client’s wife.

  Following the stunning court appearance on the day of his arrest, a shocked and disbelieving Bettye Moseley had gone to see her husband at the jail. She asked him if he had done the things the police claimed that he did. He told her that he had. He did not say much else to her, although he asked if his dogs were okay.

  Fannie Moseley, Winston’s mother, visited him too. Unlike Bettye, she did not ask him about the crimes. Though Fannie of course knew why he was locked up—and told others that she did not believe the accusations against her son—she never discussed the subject with him. Fannie kept things light when talking with Winston, as she always had in the past (except for the times when she had complained bitterly about Alphonso). Fannie had never liked talking of unpleasant things. When she went to see her son in jail, they discussed ordinary topics, common things, as if she had dropped in to see him on his lunch hour at the office rather than in a correctional facility where he was being held without bail on a charge of first-degree murder.

  And so her visits to her son at the jail were much like the ones she had made during his childhood; stopping by every so often to see how he was doing, chatting for a bit, carefully avoiding discussion of any gloomy situations or feelings that might spoil their short time together.

  FOR MARY ANN Zielonko, the dramatic new press coverage of her lover’s murder, at least at the outset, was a blur; a wrenching but anticlimactic footnote in an anthology of tragedy and grief. Someday she would care about the news stories, but not now. The worst, after all, had already happened two weeks prior to the appearance of the New York Times article, and there was little right at the moment that could distract her from, or even intensify, the permanent state of despondency in which Mary Ann now existed. She stayed in her apartment. She drank heavily.

  For Kitty’s family, there was no such isolation. They had no forewarning of the New York Times story. Now they had no escape from the news coverage or from the phone calls that suddenly besieged their home.

  Seeing the horrible accounts of their sister’s death—and there was no avoiding them, as they were all over the place now—Kitty’s brothers and sister vowed that, as best they could, they would keep these press accounts from their mother. At the time, they could not have imagined what an endless job this would be.

  TRUE TO THEIR promise, the New York Journal-American followed up on their front-page story of March 27, 1964, with additional articles on the Kitty Genovese murder case for the next several days. On March 28, they printed an editorial titled, “THE AGONY IGNORED.” It briefly recapped the crime and reprinted some of the statements gathered from Kew Gardens residents the day before. The final paragraph praised the New York Times once again. “As newspaper people, we admire a job well done. As humanitarians, we turn our spotlight, too, on this appalling public indifference. All newspapers might well do the same.”

  The New York Times ran their own brief follow-up editorial this day titled, “WHAT KIND OF PEOPLE ARE WE?” Posing questions about how such “shocking indifference” could be shown by a cross section of New Yorkers, it ended by saying, “We regretfully admit that we do not know the answers.” Which made a perfect lead for the lengthier piece they ran the same day headlined, “APATHY IS PUZZLE IN QUEENS KILLING.” Written by Charles Mohr,the article was a collection of reactions from law enforcement, mental health professionals, and theologians. Walter Arm, the deputy police commissioner for community relations, was first quoted, calling the case “dramatic and shocking,” but adding that the problem of citizens not reporting crimes was a common one. He announced that the NYPD would be redistributing a leaflet called, “Law and Order Is a Two-Way Street,” which encouraged people to promptly report crimes and suspicious activity. The police department had distributed several hundred thousand of these leaflets in the past, he said, because of their concern about public apathy in reporting crime.

  A representative of the Queens Bar Association announced an event to be held May 1 at the upcoming World’s Fair called “Law Day U.S.” Its purpose was to “indoctrinate the public with their responsibility” and to “fight this tendency to look the other way.” It was organized in response to a proclamation by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had asked that such events be held throughout the nation.

  According to the article, the mental health professionals they had consulted were unable to give any definitive answers on why people had not called the police during Kitty’s ordeal. They were split on whether the reaction was common or atypical. Some gave answers that were arguably as meaningless as the ones given by witnesses in Kew Gardens, though far less comprehensible. One psychiatrist said, “I would assign this to the effect of the megalopolis in which we live which makes closeness very difficult and leads to the alienation of the individual to the group.” He said he was certain such a thing could never happen in a small community, surmising that the response in that environment “would have been immediate and very human.”

  A sociology professor called it a case of “disaster syndrome” that had produced “affect denial,” causing witnesses to ignore the event in order to psychologically withdraw from it.

  Another sociologist commented that the Kew Garde
ns incident “goes to the heart of whether this is a community or a jungle,” referring to persons who fail to defend their fellow members of society as “partners in crime.” He felt the incident was atypical, however, and that New York should not be condemned as a whole.

  Another psychiatrist felt the behavior of the witnesses was typical of the middle class in cities like New York, saying, “They have a nice life and what happens in the street, the life of the city itself, is a different matter.” He believed it reflected a common feeling New Yorkers shared that society is unjust. “It’s in the air of all New York, the air of injustice. The feeling that you might get hurt if you act and that, whatever you do, you will be the one to suffer.”

  Theologians offered more emotional reactions. A minister in Brooklyn had given a sermon in which he referred to the apathy in Kitty’s murder, saying “our society is as sick as the one that crucified Jesus.” Another brought up the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, noting that in that age-old tale, “it was supposedly good people who passed by on the other side.” He observed that people are “reluctant, perhaps, to admit that we haven’t made much progress since then.”

  On March 29, Easter Sunday, the New York Journal-American presented readers with another major story that included more witness reactions to the plight of Kitty Genovese as well as an account of another attack in Kew Gardens that had happened a few weeks prior to Kitty’s murder. The incident had previously been mentioned by the seventeen-year-old girl in the March 27 article. “DID HUSHED-UP ATTACK ON GIRL COST A LIFE?” the headline beckoned. Reporters Marjorie Farnsworth and Charles Roland opened this article with the bold statement, “If an attack on another girl in Kew Gardens, Queens, five weeks ago, had not been ‘hushed up,’ Kitty Genovese, victim of a vicious knife-wielder, might be alive today.

  “That was the judgment of neighbors who disclosed for the first time yesterday that a young girl had been attacked and stabbed in the lobby of the large apartment house at 82-67 Austin St. about Feb. 25. In that instance the girl was rescued before murder was done. No one moved a hand to help Kitty.”

  The story then shifted to an account of the weeks-earlier attack on an unnamed victim. Citing a woman who lived in the Mowbray, it told of an incident in which a man had followed a girl into the building. Reporters let the woman they interviewed (who, they wrote, had refused to give her name) tell of this earlier incident in her own words: “When she [the victim] pressed the elevator button, the operator did not respond.” The attacker had then “seized her and for half an hour terrorized her. He had his right hand around her neck, and a knife at her throat. He was molesting her, he would cut her whenever she protested. Fearing for her life, she could not shout for help. When the fiend took the knife away from her throat she let out one scream, and don’t you know, very few people tried to help. That’s fantastic.

  “The elevator operator finally came up from the basement. The man with the knife tried to pretend he was the girl’s boyfriend and kept kissing her. But the [elevator] operator saw the knife.” She then said the elevator operator had run to the door of a first floor apartment, rang the bell and shouted for the man who lived there, a lawyer, to help him. “The elevator operator began battling with the assailant out on the street in the snow,” the woman said. “The lawyer came out with his shotgun but the assailant fled.

  “I witnessed this part. I was shocked to think that in the entire [apartment] house, only two men tried to help that girl. I saw her afterwards. She had knife wounds near her throat. I was even more surprised when the incident was hushed up. The girl moved out of the house—and nothing happened. No police came to question anyone. It is possible her assailant was the man who killed Kitty. They never should have hushed it up. If he had known the police were looking for him, he’d (sic) would have never come back.”

  The woman concluded: “The men in this neighborhood should be ashamed of themselves. They could have saved Kitty’s life. If someone had thrown a milk bottle out the window it would have chased her killer. In fact, a milkman was delivering milk some time during the attack. He says he didn’t see the girl. I[’m] amazed he didn’t. Anyhow, he did nothing. There should be a law compelling a citizen to call police when they hear and see a violent disturbance.”

  During the investigation of Kitty’s murder, the police had, in fact, questioned persons at the Mowbray about this earlier attack on a girl in the lobby (although it is unclear whether the incident had been reported to them back in February when it was said to have occurred). The elevator operator in question—who had not been the same man on duty the night of Kitty’s murder—had given them his account of what happened in this prior attack. The reports indicate that a detective was assigned to pursue the matter further, although it cannot be determined from the Kitty Genovese case file what the outcome might have been, aside from the ultimate determination that Winston Moseley was not the perpetrator in that February attack at the Mowbray. The woman who gave the account to the Journal-American seems to have confused certain aspects of the February lobby attack and Kitty’s murder; there is no indication that the girl was terrorized in the lobby for half an hour, as the woman claimed.

  The remainder of this Journal-American story focused on Kitty’s murder and included quotes from others who had witnessed some portion of her ordeal. Mowbray superintendent Edward Bieniewicz told what he and his wife, Anna, had seen and heard from the window of their third-floor apartment overlooking Austin Street: “My wife and I heard her screams the night Kitty was killed. They woke us up. I raced to the window, pulled up the venetian blinds so quick they fell down.

  “The stabbing must have taken place at that moment. I saw a man run—I saw Kitty get off the ground. She staggered, but didn’t say anything then. I figured it was a lovers’ quarrel, that her man had knocked her down. So my wife and I went back to bed.

  “It must have been an hour later when we heard all the commotion of the police and the ambulance. I’ve seen many cases of drunks and brawling in the neighborhood, especially when the taverns close. I thought it [was] just one more of those. Looking back, I can’t imagine why I felt that way. But I never thought a murder could happen so close to home. If I thought she was being killed, I’d have dived out the window to help her.

  “Fear is the greatest thing in the world. If someone is waving a knife or a gun at you, and you aren’t permitted to have one because the law says it’s illegal, you could be a dead hero.”

  Next quoted was a female tenant in the Mowbray who said: “Poor little Kitty! I’d see her almost every day. She was friendly, pretty, extremely intelligent. She told me she was a college graduate.

  “Now I’ll have to live the rest of my life, thinking I might have saved her had I made a phone call to the police. It is not a nice thought.

  “I heard the screams, and looked out, and saw a figure crouched on the street. But I thought someone coming from a tavern on Lefferts Blvd. was drunk, so I did nothing about it. Now I realize Kitty’s screams were different from the screams of rowdies we hear at night.

  “The man who killed Kitty has been around here the past two years, off and on. A friend of mine, a woman about 50, was assaulted by him two years ago. She recognized his picture in the papers after his arrest.” The next line of the article stated that the police denied this.

  Paula Rubenstein, who lived in a corner apartment on the first floor of the Mowbray, said: “We should blame ourselves for the tragedy. When the screams woke me, I opened the window, though it was very cold after the rain and snow. I heard running footsteps. I saw this girl with high heels and a black coat, walking across the street. I had no idea it was Kitty. She seemed to walk normally, except once when she seemed to stagger.

  “I went back to bed with an easy mind, because I thought the girl was probably drunk. There’s an all-night luncheonette nearby. I thought she was going there and they would take care of her.”

  The reporters then wrote, “It was the same story throughout the neighborhood
.” They reprinted the quotes from other neighbors that they had collected last Friday.

  The following day, Monday, the Journal-American printed a lengthy article by their own expert on human behavior, noted psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers. Written in a straightforward and conversational style, Dr. Brothers’ article, “WHY CITY PEOPLE GO BLIND TO EVIL,” eschewed academic theories and instead gave some plain explanations for some of the fears city dwellers harbored when it came to reporting or otherwise involving themselves in the prevention of crime. Most notable of these was her recounting of the fate of Arnold Schuster, a young man gunned down on the street near his home in Brooklyn in March of 1952, presumably in retaliation for Schuster telling police the whereabouts of a notorious fugitive bank robber and escaped convict named Willie Sutton, whom Schuster had spotted on a subway. Joyce Brothers wrote of the fear that lingered in Albert Schuster’s neighborhood, despite the passage of twelve years. “Schuster’s killer has never been caught,” she wrote. “Possibly the neighbors could have helped identify the gunman. But the neighbors had learned too much from Arnold’s death . . . Willie Sutton’s avenger, whoever he was, left a similar legacy to all New York. We are afraid of retribution, if we get involved. Afraid that the thief or rapist, hoodlum or murderer, may someday track us down and get even. We fear for our lives.”

  The Arnold Schuster case would be invoked again in the flurry of stories on apathy that appeared in newspapers in the weeks ahead. Reporter Edward Weiland, writing an article on the Schuster case for the Long Island Star-Journal (one of a six-part series on “Public Apathy”), described District Attorney Frank O’Connor and Deputy Police Commissioner Walter Arm as becoming “visibly angry” at the mention of the Schuster case. Frank O’Connor said: “It’s unfair to hold up the Schuster killing as an example of what can happen if people get involved as a witness. I can’t recall one case of criminal retaliation in my nine years in office.” Deputy Commissioner Walter Arm agreed, relating a forgotten and ironic detail of the Schuster case: the police had kept Arnold Schuster’s identity a secret. Schuster had become angry, thinking the police were taking all the credit for the notorious bandit’s capture, and had revealed himself to the newspapers as the hero of the case. Thus it was only after Schuster had identified himself that he was murdered. Arm pointed this out as an important aspect that some people overlooked: a witness can remain anonymous until a case comes to trial.