A Re-Examination of the Failure of Media Coverage of Kitty Genovese’s Murder
The media coverage of this case, with all its twists and turns, claimed to expose the underlying barbarity of modern life.
But then there was Sophia who rarely, if ever, got mentioned.
The brutal murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, a story that spread like wildfire, shook our nation and led to significant changes in American society. Overall, it led to results that improved us as a country and how we respond in emergencies. But there was a tragic death that precipitated all of this. The changes will be outlined later.
As a child I read the story and it was one of those “loss of innocence” moments for me. I learned of the discrepancies over the years, and always wanted to set it all down. Kitty, at least, deserves to have the truth told on her behalf. The story of Kitty Genovese is well known but usually contains distorted or incorrect facts.
Please keep in mind this short piece is just to whet one’s appetite. It’s a complicated story. I’ve listed my main references at the end.
Let’s dig in.
MARCH 13, 1964
A vibrant, independent and spirited 28-year-old Catherine “Kitty” Genovese left her bar manager job at Ev’s Eleventh Hour Tavern in Hollis, Queens, at 3:00 AM. As she drove her hot little red Fiat to her home in the Kew Gardens neighborhood in Queens, NY, she failed to notice the white Corvair trailing her.
She often parked in the Long Island Railroad parking lot as it was only 100 feet to her door. Once parked, she must have seen the man standing in the shadows because she started running up to Austin Street instead of to her door. (see illustration) It is thought that she was seeking safety at the Old Bailey bar, which normally stayed open until 4:00 AM or to use the Police Call Box at the end of Austin Street. But none of the die fell in her favor that morning. The bar had closed early because of a brawl. The Police Call Box wasn’t working. And she never made it that far.
The man in the shadows was Winston Moseley, a 29-year-old black man aiming to kill a woman that night. He was cruising in his white Corvair looking for a victim when he saw Kitty coming out of work, and once he satisfied himself that she was alone, he followed her.
Moseley came out of the shadows, stocking pulled over his head, and chased Kitty down Austin Street stabbing her four times in the back. The street was poorly lit, which was another issue for eyewitnesses.
Kitty’s blood-curdling screams rang out during the attack, “Oh, my God, he stabbed me! Please help me!”
Lights went on in the Mobray apartments across the street, and in the Tudor Apartments where Kitty lived. Windows opened, a few heads popped out.
A young male voice screamed, “Shut the fuck up!” A moment later a man yelled out, “Leave that woman alone.” People thought this was a domestic fight, a lover’s quarrel, or probably drunks from the Old Bailey spilling out onto Austin Street, as often happened.
Moseley ran away.
Kitty then got herself up, holding onto a car wailing, “God please help me, I’m stabbed!” She turned around and stumbled to the rear of the Tudor Building, holding onto the building. Both of her lungs were punctured at this point. Then the heartbreaking, “I’m dying. Oh God, please, somebody help me.“
She made her way to the entrance of 82–62 Austin Street, located in the rear of the Tudor building, where her friend Karl Ross lived. People left their front doors open back then, so she managed to get inside. She repeatedly called out to Karl, “It’s Kitty. I’m stabbed. Help me.”
Karl opened his apartment door a crack, saw Kitty, and closed the door.
Meanwhile, Moseley had returned, oddly having changed the stocking cap to a feathered Fedora, and was feverishly looking for her. He followed the blood and tried every door until he came upon Kitty at the foot of Karl Ross’ stairs. Kitty started screaming again as Moseley entered, prompting Karl Ross to open his door a second time, seeing the attack as it was happening and quickly shutting the door again.
Karl called a friend and told her someone was attacking Kitty. “Call the police,” the friend said. But Karl did not want to call the police. Instead, he climbed through the skylight and made his way to another friend’s apartment where Greta Schwartz let him in.
When Greta heard what was happening she quickly ran down the hall to Sophia Farrar, Kitty’s friend and neighbor, and woke Sophia up out of a sound sleep. Sophia threw on a coat, knowing only one thing: her friend Kitty was in trouble. Not knowing who or what was going on, she ran outside to Karl’s doorway. Neither woman had seen the attacks, but they ran to Kitty’s aid.
Moseley had cut off Kitty’s clothing, raped and stabbed her again and then fled.
Sophia struggled to get the door open since Kitty was lying against it. Once inside she fell onto the blood-soaked floor. Sophia grabbed Kitty in her arms and began talking softly to her. Kitty was flailing her arms, still struggling with her attacker. Slowly Kitty calmed down, perhaps recognizing Sophia’s voice.
Sophia and Greta were the heroes in the chain of events. At least Kitty saw the eyes of love before she left this life.
Kitty died on the way to the hospital. The attack lasted approximately 35 minutes.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
In the next couple of days Kitty’s attack and murder appeared in news stories as little more than a name and police portrait taken when she was arrested in 1961 on a misdemeanor charge of gambling. Kitty was portrayed as a lawbreaker, stemming from an incident when Kitty had relayed a bet to a bookie at the bar where she worked.
THE ARREST OF WINSTON MOSELEY
Six days later police arrested Moseley for a separate crime. Moseley was breaking into homes and stealing TVs, radios and appliances, which he then delivered to his father’s TV repair shop. But during one of his break-ins, a neighbor saw the suspicious activity and called police, who then arrested the serial rapist-murderer, unaware of his killings.
During interrogation, Moseley finally admitted to killing Kitty. He then told police of two other women he’d murdered.
On March 23, 1964 Moseley was indicted by a grand jury.
THE NEW YORK TIMES GETS THE STORY WRONG
A.M. “Abe” Rosenthal, the New York Times metropolitan editor, had lunch the same day Moseley was indicted with the NYC police commissioner Michael J. Murphy who told him about the shocking murder and the passive observers. He claimed all these witnesses had done nothing, none called the police and they let this poor woman be killed in plain sight.
Commissioner Murphy cited a collection of “about 38 witnesses” who had watched the murder take place and did nothing. (Author’s Note: This notion of witnesses seeing the final killing would’ve been impossible. Kitty’s first attack was on Austin Street, but the second, final attack was at the foot of Karl Ross’ stairway inside the Tudor building.) Most people thought the man was hitting Kitty, not stabbing her.
Rosenthal assigned Martin Gansberg to the story and Gansberg did his own on-the-ground questioning of witnesses. Gansberg got a list from the police that summarized the “38 witnesses.” He ran with the headline “37 Witnesses Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police.” (March 27, 1964) The story starts with “For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks.”
Aside from the headline that didn’t agree with the text in the first sentence, this initial coverage was flawed, inaccurate, but sold a lot of papers! A lot. The harmful legend was launched. The damaging stereotype of the uncaring, passive, selfish city dwellers who cared not one whit about their neighbor being murdered spread everywhere. And by the way, there were two attacks, not three.
Sophia told her story of sitting with Kitty in her last moments to a reporter who then asked her “Would you do that again?” To which Sophia replied “Certainly, of course!” The next day’s column stated that Sophia said she would never get involved again. Sophia told her son, “It don’t pay to talk, cause they twist what you say.”
The sad truth is that without this headstrong but wrong reporting, Kitty Genovese’s murder would’ve dissolved in a few days into the mist of NYC crime and murders.
Gansberg wrote in his NYT piece: “Assistant Chief Inspector Frederick M. Lussen … is still shocked. ‘If we had been called when he first attacked, the woman might not be dead now.’ ”
But people had called the police! Michael Hoffman, who was 15 at the time and lived on the 2nd floor of the Mobray gave a detailed account in 2003 of that morning. He saw some kind of attack, saw the man take off. His father had to dial the Operator and wait for eventual connection to a police operator. Michael continued to watch for any activity while his father was on hold. His father finally got connected, gave details and location and all of his contact info. Then they sat and waited for the police or ambulance. Neither came. His father went to bed.
When police were interviewing the Mobray residents, Michael said, “My father told the police if they’d come when he called them, Kitty would probably still be alive. For that he got a dirty look (from the detective).”
Upon hearing Kitty’s calls for help, Mobray resident Hattie Grund called the police who said, “We already got the calls” and hung up on her. “We were not apathetic at all,” said Hattie.
Gabe Pressman, a reporter for NBC, recounted in an interview how he reached out to Gansberg about the “38 Witnesses” bit, and asked him why he wrote that when it was an insecure fact of the story. Pressman said, “Some people did call police, why didn’t you report that?” Gansberg shot back, “It would’ve ruined the story.”
A month after Moseley’s conviction, Abe Rosenthal released his book, “38 Witnesses” that made the myth rock solid. Only 87 pages long, it was about 38 of Kitty’s neighbors, none of whom he knew or ever met. Rosenthal conferred with “experts” but did no further research or questioning of witnesses. He said he didn’t need to, clearly this sort of thing was “emblematic of our times.”
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED
Kew Gardens was a quiet place where life went trustingly along. People left their front doors unlocked. Kitty often left her apartment door unlocked so her friend, Sophia, could answer her phone and take messages while she was at work.
The Mowbray residents were working class families, elderly persons and not a few were Holocaust survivors. Sophia Farrar’s son said, “A lot of people had numbers tattooed on their arms, so they wouldn’t get involved.” He was perhaps inferring that Holocaust survivors would not want to help armed police, having gone through what they did.
This wasn’t a case of 38 people sitting in lawn chairs at their windows watching the murder unfold as many stories led the public to believe.
It has been estimated that 50 or more people heard screams and commotion. But they didn’t see the whole crime, nor understand what was happening.
In a most awful misunderstanding of what they were seeing, a few people who saw Kitty stumbling alone down Austin Street after the first attack also saw Moseley flee. They made the assumption that the woman was drunk and that they’d just seen a domestic dispute. Once Kitty had turned the corner off Austin Street and was no longer visible, witnesses reported seeing the same man come from the LIRR parking lot heading in the same direction as Kitty. They thought he knew her and was coming to help. But no, it was Moseley coming back to finish the murder he’d started.
CONDITIONS OF THE ERA TO BE CONSIDERED
People tended not to call the police during the 1960s in New York City. There was widespread mistrust of police after reported incidents of brutality and corruption against minorities. People were generally afraid to call the police because they feared harassment and violence. Add to that fact that police stations were not always responsive. (Author’s Note: A number of witnesses did call the police that morning, but there was no record kept in the police call logs of their calls.)
The press did not report on Genovese’s being lesbian, which spared her partner and lover, Mary Ann Zielonko, and family untold misery. The public’s reaction may’ve been very different, though Kitty’s personal life had nothing to do with her murder. Gay life was very dangerous during this era. Kitty and Mary Ann kept their private lives very private. The one friend who knew their true relationship was Karl Ross, the one person who saw the murder and shut his door twice. He “didn’t want to get involved.”
Decades later Mary Ann revealed that Karl was gay. He may have been so frightened at the prospect of talking to police — he said he was drinking that night — because he was gay. And back then, it could’ve gotten him into a world of trouble. Hard to say. Also worth considering is how terrifying it must’ve been for Karl to witness the murder in progress. But why did he turn away the first time he opened his door, before Moseley found Kitty?
ABOUT CATHERINE “KITTY” GENOVESE
Kitty’s family was not related to the Genovese crime family, as was suggested at times. She was born in 1943 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which was largely populated by Irish and Italian families. The family was Catholic, during an era when everyone got dressed for church and went together on Sundays.
The oldest of five kids, Kitty was caring and one might say maternal to her younger siblings. Her youngest brother, Bill, discussed how she could talk on any topic from Greek mythology to politics. Kitty was known as a leader, humorous and caring. “You wanted to be in Kitty’s crowd,” a high school friend said.
In 1953 the family moved to New Canaan, Connecticut as many families did as post-war mobility increased. After a short time there, Kitty moved back to the city.
Kitty was discovering bohemian Greenwich Village. “I feel free in New York, I’m alive here.” Kitty worked as a bartender and eventually bar manager, keeping the books and closing the place at night.
She enjoyed the city nightlife, where she met Mary Ann Zielonko and fell in love. The two moved into an apartment in Kew Gardens, “statistically the safest of the city’s five boroughs.” They were there short of a year when this all happened.
WHO WAS WINSTON MOSELEY?
By his wife and family’s account Moseley was a very quiet man. He held a steady job as a tab operator at Raygram, a business machine company in Mt. Vernon, punching data cards to be fed into first generation computers. He had two sons and five dogs he doted on. His wife worked graveyard shift as a nurse, and the two rarely saw each other. But they owned their home and went along as they were.
But once investigators dug into Moseley’s past, the source of his pathology was evident. He grew up as an only child in a deeply dysfunctional, violent home. His mother and father fought viciously on a regular basis, mostly about his mother’s many affairs. His father couldn’t stand her infidelity. Winston became obsessed with ants, kept an ant farm and various pets. These non-humans seemed to be his only escape. At least he could love and care for them without the possibility of being hurt.
The parents eventually divorced and his father moved to Queens and opened a TV repair shop. Winston then started his crime spree, breaking into homes and stealing items for his father’s store.
Winston’s wife, Bettye, stated that in the months preceding Kitty’s murder, Winston grew remote and withdrawn, staring out the window drinking beer for hours. He stopped bathing and eating and would disappear at night until early morning. Yet, he went to work every day during this period.
Under police custody, Moseley eventually confessed to raping and murdering two other young women, both black: Annie Mae Johnson and Barbara Kralik. In court testimony, Moseley said, “I intended to kill a white woman, yes. To see if there might be a difference.”
He was sentenced to death on June 15, 1964, but his sentence was later reduced to life. On June 1, 1967, there was an appeals case heard on Moseley’s behalf claiming that the sentencing hearing had not allowed psychiatrists to testify as to Moseley’s possible schizophrenia. New York State abolished the death penalty in 1965 and then the following year Governor Rockefeller commuted all death sentences to life. All factors combined, Moseley would not be put to death.
Moseley escaped Attica, a maximum security New York state prison in 1968, during which time he raped two women and took three hostages in Buffalo before being recaptured. He was given an additional 30 years and was denied parole 18 times.
He died at the Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Clinton, NY, on March 28, 2016 at age 81 after serving 50 years. At the time, Moseley was one of New York’s longest serving inmates.
THE CHANGES RESULTING FROM THE CASE
1. Creation of 911 Emergency Response System
As of today 96% of the U.S. has a 911 system.
Up until this time people used various methods of contacting police. They could dial “0” for Operator to reach a police department and wait to be transferred to a police station. In urban areas, they could go outside and flag a policeman down as policemen walked neighborhoods and were accessible while on patrol. In rural areas, people simply called the police station directly.
The process of dialing “0” caused confusion, leading to callers being transferred to the wrong precinct and not receiving the necessary priority. Many lives were lost. Prioritizing calls was a big issue since a large number of people in a metropolitan area might dial “0” at the same time.
AT&T proposed the 9–1–1 number as it was unique, easily remembered and implemented quickly. It took four years for the launch of 911 after Kitty’s murder. In 1968 Congress approved AT&T’s proposal and the system was launched.
But even today, 911 call response can vary from region to region. The system technology is paid for by the state and then local communities carry the cost of staffing and maintaining a call center. Widespread use of cell phones these days cause havoc with 911 systems that have not been yet upgraded, because operators cannot track the caller’s location.
2. The Bystander Effect
Social psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley studied the case, and developed a theory called the “Bystander Effect”, or the “Genovese Syndrome.”
Latané and Darley attributed the bystander effect to two factors: diffusion of responsibility and social influence. The perceived diffusion of responsibility means that the more onlookers there are, the less personal responsibility individuals will feel to take action. Social influence means that individuals monitor the behavior of those around them to determine how to act. (Psychology Today)
After three years of study, the psychologists said their findings were “depressing.” They found that people want to keep their cool, not letting on how fearful they really are. And so they tended not to act, assuming (hoping?) that someone else would take care of the situation. And they got their cues of inaction from the people around them.
Despite inaccuracies about 38 witnesses not taking action, the Bystander Effect has been studied, acknowledged and written about extensively and is still taught in psychology departments.
3. The transfer of prisoners from prison to court or a hospital would never be the same.
In 1968, Moseley showed up to the prison infirmary “experiencing discomfort of a private sort.”
The senior physician on duty “found a meat tin of the sort that held Spam one to two inches in the rectum.” Moseley was transferred to a hospital where surgeons removed numerous objects from his rectum.
After recovery, an officer was taking Moseley back to prison when Moseley attacked the officer and ran. The officer couldn’t keep up. Moseley found an abandoned house 900 yards away and hid in the basement. He called a cleaning service to request a maid. He raped the poor woman at gunpoint, a gun he’d found in the house.
Moseley raped another woman, then broke into a second home and held three people hostage. By then, police were on the case and two hundred police surrounded the hostage situation. Three days of terror, but Moseley finally surrendered.
Police departments now have protocols in place for prisoner transfer that require at least four officers accompany the prisoner, who must be handcuffed. The transport vehicle has to be properly equipped with restraints and law enforcement officers are trained in de-escalation and restraint techniques.
CONCLUSIONS
As the flawed media stories came to symbolize indifference, they, too, were flawed and contributed to the public’s perception of Kitty’s murder. And the story was revived over and over again. TV shows from New York Confidential (1964), American Justice, Crime Stories; The Case That Shocked the Nation, Forensic Files, Law & Order, on and on, further sensationalized the 38 witnesses account.
This whole dismal episode propelled a spirit of activism in response to the phrase so often attributed to witnesses, “I didn’t want to get involved.” For a long time afterwards, stories of apathy crowded newspapers. It seemed to be everywhere. But there was a response this time.
Another effect of Kitty’s case was that feminists came out in years following focused on cause of violence against women, including rape and murder. Up until this period there was little discussion of these topics under tacit acceptance of the violence. There seemed to be an attitude that this is how things were.
Feminism, political activism, gay rights, community involvement, all grew in the 70’s onward with an increased emphasis on communities coming together to prevent and deal with crime.
Howard Tarkooshian, Ph.D., professor at Fordham University, held two-day forums to re-examine where we are since that morning in 1964. He summarized as follows after the Fifty Year Anniversary (2014):
“Yes, Kitty saw her screams ignored that night but these screams have reverberated around the world for five decades, and our society is now the better because of it. Yes Kitty, we hear you now, and we are not the same because of it.” (Harold Tarkooshian, Ph.D. Psychology Today)
For someone who died an unimaginably cruel death Kitty was spared being alone at the end. She died with soft words of comfort being spoken to her while waiting for an ambulance.
Thank you, Sophia Farrar and Greta Schwartz. Many of us continue to thank you for your immense courage, fortitude and love.
References:
An Urban Physiognomy of the 1964 Kitty Genovese Murder, Carrie A. Rentschler Space and Culture published online 21 July 2011
Kitty Genovese: The Murder, The Bystanders, The Crime That Changed America, Kevin Cook (2014)
Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences, Catherine Pelonero (2014)
The Witness, Kitty Genovese Murder Documentary (2016)
Tarkooshian article: https://www.apadivisions.org/division-1/publications/newsletters/general/2014/09/genovese
