“Later,” Hartmann continued, “there was a sharp crash as if a television set or something heavy fell to the floor, and then I heard the dog yelp as if being kicked.”
Police found Sandra Zahler’s small dog in the apartment with his deceased owner. The dog had a broken leg.
Madeline Hartmann also said she had heard water running from the kitchen tap and figured someone was cleaning up. She then heard someone with a “very heavy” step leave Zahler’s apartment. “I didn’t hear the door lock and this was strange because she was careful and usually locked it.” Mrs. Hartmann added that all had been quiet afterward.
Mrs. Hartmann admitted she had been “worried,” but said she had not called the police because she thought the building superintendent, who lived in a nearby apartment, must have overheard the commotion too, and she assumed that he would call. The superintendent had not called the police, nor had any of the neighbors. Sandra Zahler’s dead body had been found in her apartment later that day by her boyfriend.
ON JANUARY 8, 1977, while still an inmate at Attica Prison, Winston Moseley received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Niagara University. Moseley was among the first prisoners in New York to earn a degree through a new program in which the state provided a tuition grant for college teachers to provide instruction at the prison. In an article that appeared in the Niagara Falls Gazette, Moseley’s intellect was praised by the chairman of Niagara University’s sociology department. “He’s an extremely brilliant man,” the chairman was quoted. “I’d venture to say his IQ is in the 150 range.” The chairman further said that Moseley was “very conscientious in his studies,” describing him as “the ideal student.” He also criticized the news media, saying it was unfair to keep bringing up the fact that Moseley was a convicted killer whose education had been financed with taxpayer funds. “The press has been very negative, as if all this has been a waste of taxpayers' money.”
In April of 1977, Moseley sent a long letter to the New York Times, which they printed on April 16. “I’ve been imprisoned many years now, and I’ve wished so many times that I could bring Kitty Genovese back to life, back to her family and friends.” Writing that his “perpetual torment and agony will not resurrect her,” he agreed that he should have been punished for the crime. “The crime was tragic, but it did serve society, urging it as it did to come to the aid of its members in distress or danger.”
He praised the media for heightening public awareness about apathy and the need to help others in the wake of Kitty’s murder. He then wrote, “Those sent to prison are ultimately society’s responsibility, too.”
The violent Attica prison rebellion of 1971 had “sickened” him, and he had vowed afterward to get back on track and make amends for his past. He wrote of the college degree he had earned and his positive role as an inmate liaison at Attica. Moseley claimed he had changed greatly. “The man who killed Kitty Genovese in Queens in 1964 is no more . . . . Another vastly different individual has emerged, a Winston Moseley intent and determined to do constructive, not destructive things.”
In closing he wrote, “Today I’m a man who wants to be an asset to society, not a liability to it.”
Two years later, in a televised interview on ABC-TV’s 20/20 news program, Moseley claimed he had killed Kitty Genovese because she had used a racial slur. Attorney Sidney Sparrow dismissed this new claim, saying that the allegation of a racial slur “had never reared its ugly head before.” Moseley also told 20/20 that sex had not been a motive in his attack on Kitty.
In his quest for freedom, Moseley was apparently willing to throw as much at the wall as possible in the hope that something might stick. Two decades later, something did.
chapter 19
THE LAST LEGAL phase of the Kitty Genovese saga occurred in 1995. On June 16 of that year, Judge Frederic Block of the US District Court in Brooklyn heard arguments from Barry Rhodes, Moseley’s courtappointed attorney, and John Castellano, a Queens assistant district attorney. Rhodes argued that Winston Moseley’s 1964 conviction should be set aside on the grounds that Sidney Sparrow had a conflict of interest at the time he represented Moseley since Sparrow had also once represented the victim, Kitty Genovese.
Moseley had made this same appeal to a New York State court in 1989, to no avail. In the same year, he also sent a letter to the Buffalo News in which he asked for forgiveness for the crimes he had committed in Buffalo in 1968. He wrote that he could not fault people who were still inclined to characterize him as villainous, admitting that at the time he had been a “desperate man who was indeed criminal in thought and action.” The letter then read:
This is however 1989, not 1968. Criminals and prison inmates like people in every other walk of life, can gradually change. Some imprisoned men reform. I did . . . I am not going to try to convince anyone I changed overnight. I did not, but I did slowly change for the better. After 1968 and while I was paying my debt to society behind bars, I made myself do what many men in prison find difficult if not impossible, and that is to seriously contemplate the societal fear they generated, the havoc they created in one or more communities, and the harm they did to their victims. I was appalled in coming to realize I had done to others what I would not want anyone to do to my own family and friends . . . Along with that sobering realization came gut-wrenching remorse, genuine sorrow for the crimes I committed, sorrow for the fright and consternation I caused in Buffalo, sorrow for the harm I did to every person I victimized. It is never too late to try to make amends, so should the day come when I am released from prison, and I pray to God that day will come, I will do all in my power to atone for the sins of my past.
HE CLOSED BY asking forgiveness from the people he hurt or traumatized as well as from the people of Buffalo as a whole for his transgressions against the city. The apology, however, had not won him release at subsequent parole hearings, nor had his complaints about his legal representation in 1964 earned him a hearing in state court.
Sidney Sparrow had said himself at the 1964 trial that he knew the victim. His controversial words appeared in the trial transcript: “I didn’t try this case involving Kitty Genovese objectively, calmly, just as a lawyer defends a client, because I knew Kitty Genovese and represented her for years.” According to Moseley’s new attorney, Sparrow in years past had also represented members of the Genovese crime family; mafia members whom—Rhodes/Moseley claimed—were related to victim Kitty Genovese.
Assistant DA Castellano argued that Judge Block should give no credence to these claims and throw the matter out of court, noting that Moseley had made this same appeal in 1989, which a state court had rejected at that time.
This current action had come about as a result of years of letterwriting from Winston Moseley in which he continued to assert on several different grounds that he had not received adequate representation from Sidney Sparrow. Moseley, sixty years old, had been incarcerated now for thirty-one years and was serving his time in Green Haven prison. He had been turned down for parole six times since 1984.
Moseley wanted his conviction set aside and he wanted a new trial. After the rejection in state court, he had filed suit in federal court in 1990. The case had sluggishly wound its way through the system until ending up on the docket of Judge Frederic Block in 1995.
Naturally enough, the District Attorney’s Office was not eager to re-try a case that was now thirty-one years old. Judge J. Irwin Shapiro was dead, as was prosecutor Frank Cacciatore and District Attorney Frank O’Connor. Surely some of the witnesses must be as well.
Sidney Sparrow, however, was alive and well. The eighty-two-year-old Sparrow still practiced law in Queens. He sat as a spectator in the Brooklyn courtroom as Rhodes and Castellano argued before Judge Block.
After hearing both sides, Judge Block decided that there might be constitutional issues involved in Moseley’s claims. “I have a responsibility as a Federal judge not to sweep it under the rug,” he said. Judge Block set a hearing for July 24 in which he would hear test
imony from Sidney Sparrow and Winston Moseley.
“NOBODY HELPED HER THEN, AND HER KILLER WANTS OUT NOW,” read the headline in the New York Times that told of Judge Block’s decision to grant a hearing.
Kitty’s parents had both passed away by 1995. Her three brothers and her sister, all middle-aged now, decided to attend the hearing. For the first time, they would see their sister’s murderer in the flesh as he sought to have his conviction thrown out. They would also speak with the press. As Kitty’s brother, Frank, said to a New York Times reporter on July 24, the day of the hearing, “We have lived with this for 31 years, through movies and books and newspapers. We had chosen to live it alone, removed. But now, we are here, with the gloves off, because we will not let her be the victim again.”
Frank Genovese had been only twelve years old at the time of his sister’s murder. He had to read about her death in textbooks in high school and college.
As much as they had tried to avoid exposure, none of Kitty’s family had been able to escape the widespread, persistent publicity that continued unabated after her murder. Catherine Genovese had been yanked from anonymity as an ordinary human being and thrust into the posthumous role of iconic—and dehumanized—public figure: “Kitty Genovese.” Cultural catchphrase, comic book heroine, cautionary tale. A perennial victim whose death was cited by scholars, thoughtlessly mocked on occasion by people who stopped on Austin Street to wail, “Help me! I’m stabbed!” and laugh at the wit of it all.
People generally failed to recognize that she had once been a living, feeling human being, loved and forever mourned by other living, feeling human beings.
Kitty’s brother, Vincent, told of how he and the family had read the gruesome descriptions in newspapers of what had happened to her that night. They had all tried to shelter their mother from the gory details. When Rachel Genovese passed away, they found articles about the murder tucked away in a drawer of her desk.
The constant contact and questions from newspapers, magazines, and complete strangers had caused them to retreat. Even now there was tremendous public interest. Reporters and camera crews had gathered outside the Brooklyn courthouse, much as their counterparts of a generation ago had done at the Queens courthouse in 1964.
Sidney Sparrow also spoke with the press. He dismissed Moseley as a liar who was trying to get out of prison any way he could. Sparrow said that his representation of Kitty on a minor gambling charge in 1961 had no bearing on his later representation of Moseley. Kitty Genovese was one client among thousands. He barely knew her, and he certainly had no personal feeling toward her beyond the basic sympathy for anyone with such a fate as hers. Moreover, Sparrow had informed both Winston Moseley and Judge J. Irwin Shapiro of his prior representation of the victim well before the trial commenced in 1964. “I’ve been practicing 59 years,” Sparrow told a reporter for the New York Daily News. “I’ve had about 10 or 12 cases where the defendant was accused of homicide, and I had represented the victim.”
Sparrow said this to Judge Frederic Block as well when he took the witness stand on the morning of July 24.
The front row of the courtroom was occupied by Kitty’s family—her sister Susan; her brothers, Vincent, Frank, and Bill, who entered the courtroom in his wheelchair; and two of her surviving aunts. Vincent Genovese had told reporters that morning that they intended to stare directly at Winston Moseley. “We hope the stare goes right through him.”
They had their first look at their sister’s killer when he entered through a side door. Susan believed that he had briefly made eye contact with her as he had walked in. She later told reporters that she had felt an angry urge to approach him and ask, “Do I resemble anybody?”
SIDNEY SPARROW WAS the first to give testimony. Under direct questioning by Moseley’s attorney, Barry Rhodes, Sparrow explained how and when he had been assigned by Judge Shapiro to represent Winston Moseley. Despite the passage of three decades and his advanced age, Sparrow was remarkably sharp of mind and quite thorough in his recollections. Sidney Sparrow had also kept very meticulous records throughout his years of practice. He had his day books and legal calendars for every case he had handled dating back to the 1930s: a record of his daily activity for each day of the preceding fifty-nine years. As a result, he was able to give the court the exact date and circumstances under which he had represented Catherine Genovese: September 5, 1961. She and a co-defendant had been convicted on a minor gambling charge. Sparrow had also represented them on appeal, getting their sentences reduced to a fine rather than both a fine and five days in jail. Sparrow, of course, also had a record of the dates of sentence, appeal, and adjournments.
Sidney Sparrow explained that in those days he had as many as thirty cases a day on his calendar; not that he tried that many in a day, but small-time gambling charges were very prevalent at that time. A trial on such a charge typically lasted about five minutes.
He had met Kitty and her co-defendant (along with a small crowd of others he was defending) in the hallway of the courthouse on the day of their own five-minute trial. After that date, he had seen her again on November 15 when they had another equally brief court appearance. Subsequent to that, Sparrow had filed an appeal brief for Kitty and her co-defendant but he had no personal contact with her at that time. In all, he had spoken with her two times at the most. His contact with Kitty Genovese had been fleeting. He had spent very little time with her, and did not know her at all on an even remotely personal level.
As for his other cases, felony or otherwise, Sparrow had never represented crime boss Vito Genovese.
They rehashed his representation of Moseley. Sparrow explained very plainly why he had felt that insanity was Moseley’s only defense. Moreover, Sparrow had believed that Moseley was insane.
Sparrow explained the comments in question that he had made in the courtroom back in 1964. When he had said that he didn’t try the case “calmly, objectively,” he had meant that he shared the feeling of horror that the jurors and observers obviously felt over the defendant’s monstrous acts. He further explained that Judge Shapiro cut him off before he could complete his sentence that he had represented Kitty Genovese four years ago, not “for years.”
Sparrow maintained that his representation of Kitty Genovese had had no bearing at all on his representation of her killer. “I’m a lawyer. As a lawyer I do a job. I think I do the best damn job that a lawyer can do. I always did and I always will as long as I continue to be able to.” He had given Winston Moseley the best defense that he possibly could.
Rhodes asked why Sparrow had not asked for either a change of venue or a delay and Sparrow said there would have been no advantage to either. He felt that Moseley, as a black man accused of murdering a white woman, had a better chance of getting a fair trial in New York City than perhaps anywhere else at the time. Delaying the trial until the publicity died down was not an option, as evidenced by the crowd of reporters at the courthouse now, thirty years later.
Assistant District Attorney Gene Reibstein pointed this out on cross-examination, asking Sparrow to confirm that he had been stopped by a horde of reporters on his way into the courtroom this morning. Even the current President of the United States, Bill Clinton, had within the past year remarked on the Kitty Genovese case during a speech.
Going over the details of Moseley’s open admissions at the time, Reibstein had little problem showing that Sidney Sparrow had used sound judgment in pursuing an insanity defense. Sidney Sparrow also had proof that Moseley had agreed with this defense: Sparrow brought with him the tape recording made of his pre-trial interview with Moseley from 1964, on which Moseley had said he understood and agreed. The DA also produced a letter that Moseley had written to the court dated June 4, 1964:
Your Honor, after giving my case much thought, I have decided that I would like to have Mr. Sidney Sparrow handle the selection of jurors, the examination and cross-examination, and have the final decision as to any thoughts Mrs. Zelman or Mr. Lipitz may have on my case. This
letter should not imply any disrespect to Mr. Lipitz or Mrs. Zelman. I just feel that Mr. Sparrow is better equipped to handle this type of case. I would still like all three of them at the trial, with the understanding that Mr. Sidney Sparrow is in complete charge of my case.
SIDNEY SPARROW’S GOAL in 1964 had been to save Winston Moseley’s life. As evidenced by Moseley’s presence in a courtroom in 1995, and as the assistant district attorneys now pointed out, he had been successful.
On redirect, Barry Rhodes said, “If I heard you correctly, Mr. Sparrow, you’re taking credit for saving Winston Moseley’s life?”
“I’m not taking credit for that,” Sparrow answered. “I’m taking credit for having done as good a job of an attorney as I could.”
Sidney Sparrow thought that Judge Shapiro had saved Moseley’s life. The death sentence had been reversed because of Shapiro’s error at the sentencing hearing, when the judge had not allowed the defense attorney to present evidence of medical insanity as a mitigating factor. Sparrow suspected that Shapiro had made the error deliberately.
Winston Moseley took the stand. Speaking so softly that Judge Block had to ask him twice to keep his voice up, Moseley told the court, in response to his attorney’s questions, that his 1964 confession had not been “voluntary in the sense that you would define it in the dictionary.” He had confessed, he said, because the police had held him at the station for fifteen or sixteen hours, during which he was given no food, no beverages of any kind, and had not been allowed to use the restroom. He now claimed he had been “Struck in the face but not hard enough to leave a mark; struck in the stomach and chest but nowhere where a mark would show and my father was arrested.” He further said that he had told all of these things to Mr. Sparrow at the time.
Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences Page 33