Kitty Genovese

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Kitty Genovese, picture from The Times article "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police".
Kitty Genovese, picture from The Times article "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police".

Catherine Genovese (1935 – March 13th, 1964), commonly known as Kitty Genovese, was a New York City woman who was stabbed to death near her home in the Kew Gardens section of Queens, New York. The circumstances of her murder and the apparent reaction (or lack thereof) of her neighbors were sensationalized by a newspaper article published two weeks later and prompted investigation into the psychological phenomenon that became known as the bystander effect, the "Bad Samaritan Complex" or "Genovese syndrome".

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[edit] Life

Born in New York City, Genovese was the oldest of five children in a middle class Italian American family and was raised in Brooklyn. After her mother witnessed a murder in the city, the family chose to move to Connecticut in 1954. Genovese, however, 19 at the time, chose to remain in the city, where she lived for nine years. Kitty eventually took a job as a bar manager at Ev's 11th Hour Sports bar on Jamaica Avenue in Hollis, Queens. At the time of her murder, she lived in a Queens apartment she shared with her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko.[1]

[edit] Attack

Genovese had driven home in the early morning of March 13th, 1964. Arriving home at about 3:15 a.m. and parking about 100 feet (30 m) from her apartment's door, as Mary Ann lay sleeping in their apartment above the street, she was approached by a man named Winston Moseley. Moseley ran after her and quickly overtook her, stabbing her twice in the back. When Genovese screamed out, her cries were heard by several neighbors; but on a cold night with the windows closed, only a few of them recognized the sound as a cry for help. When one of the neighbors shouted at the attacker, "Let that girl alone!", Moseley ran away and Genovese slowly made her way towards her own apartment around the end of the building. She was seriously injured, but now out of view of those few who may have had reason to believe she was in need of help.

Records of the earliest calls to police are unclear and were certainly not given a high priority by the police. One witness said his father called police after the initial attack and reported that a woman was "beat up, but got up and was staggering around."

Other witnesses observed Moseley enter his car and drive away, only to return ten minutes later. He systematically searched the parking lot, train station, and small apartment complex, ultimately finding Genovese, who was lying, barely conscious, in a hallway at the back of the building. Out of view of the street and of those who may have heard or seen any sign of the original attack, he proceeded to further attack her, stabbing her several more times. Knife wounds in her hands suggested that she attempted to defend herself from him. While she lay dying, he sexually assaulted her. He stole about $49.00 from her and left her dying in the hallway. The attacks spanned approximately half an hour.

A few minutes after the final attack, a witness, Karl Ross, called the police. Police and medical personnel arrived within minutes of Ross' call; Genovese was taken away by ambulance and died en route to the hospital. Later investigation by police and prosecutors revealed that approximately a dozen (but almost certainly not the 38 cited in the Times article) individuals nearby had heard or observed portions of the attack, though none could have seen or been aware of the entire incident. Only one witness (Joseph Fink) was aware she was stabbed in the first attack, and only Karl Ross was aware of it in the second attack. Many were entirely unaware that an assault or homicide was in progress; some thought that what they saw or heard was a lover's quarrel or a drunken brawl or a group of friends leaving the bar outside when Moseley first approached Genovese. Why would the witnesses pay no attention to Kitty's cries for help? Was it because they were scared that it may happen to them or think does the victim deserve my help?

[edit] Perpetrator

Winston Moseley, a business machine operator, was later apprehended in connection with another crime; he confessed not only to the murder of Kitty Genovese, but to two other murders as well, both involving sexual assaults. Subsequent psychiatric examinations suggested that Moseley was a necrophiliac. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

Moseley gave a confession to the police where he detailed the attack, corroborating the physical evidence at the scene. His motive for the attack was simply "to kill a woman." Moseley stated that he got up that night around 2:00 a.m., leaving his wife asleep at home, and drove around to find a victim. He spied Genovese and followed her to the parking lot.

Moseley also testified at his own trial where he further described the attack, leaving no question that he was the killer.

The initial death sentence was reduced to an indeterminate sentence of 20 years to life imprisonment on June 1st, 1967. The New York Court of Appeals found that Moseley should have been able to argue that he was "medically insane" at the sentencing hearing when the trial court found that he had been legally sane.

In 1968, during a trip to a Buffalo, New York hospital for surgery (precipitated by a soup can he placed in his own rectum as a pretext to leave prison), Moseley overpowered a guard and beat him up to the point that his eyes were bloody. He then took a bat and swung it at the closest person to him and took five hostages, sexually assaulting one of them, before he was recaptured alive. He also participated in the later Attica prison uprising.

Moseley remained in prison after being denied parole a twelfth time on February 3rd, 2006. A previous parole hearing included his defense that "For a victim outside, it's a one-time or one-hour or one-minute affair, but for the person who's caught, it's forever."[2] He will be eligible for parole again in 2008.

[edit] Public reaction

The story of Genovese's murder became an almost-instant parable about the supposed callousness, or at least apathy to others' plight, of either New York City, urban America, or humanity in general. Much of this framing of the event came in reaction to an investigative article [3] in the New York Times written by Martin Gansberg and published on March 27, two weeks after the murder. The article bore the provocative headline "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police"; the public view of the story crystallized around a quote from the article, from an unidentified neighbor who saw part of the attack but deliberated, before finally getting another neighbor to call the police: "I didn't want to get involved."

Other reports, cited by Harlan Ellison in his book Harlan Ellison's Watching, stated that one man turned up his radio so that he wouldn't hear Genovese's screams. Ellison says that the report he read attributed the "get involved" quote to nearly all of the thirty-eight who supposedly witnessed the attack.

While Genovese's neighbors were vilified by the article, in truth "38 onlookers who did nothing" is a misleading conception. The article begins:

"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."

This lead is dramatic but factually inaccurate. None of the witnesses observed the attacks in their entirety. Because of the layout of the complex and the fact that each attack took place in a different location as Genovese attempted to flee her attacker, it would have been physically impossible for a witness to have seen the entire attack. Most only heard portions of the incident without realizing its seriousness, a few saw only small portions of the initial assault, and no witnesses directly saw the final rape and attack in an exterior hallway which resulted in Genovese's death.

Nevertheless, media attention to the Genovese murder led to reform of the NYPD's telephone reporting system; the system in place at the murder was often inefficient and directed individuals to the incorrect department. The melodramatic press coverage also led to serious investigation of the bystander effect by academic psychologists. In addition, some communities organized Neighborhood Watch programs and the equivalent for apartment buildings to aid people in distress.

According to the New York Times, in an article dated December 28th, 1974, ten years after the murder, 25-year-old Sandra Zahler was beaten to death early Christmas morning in an apartment of the building which overlooked the site of the Genovese attack. Neighbors again said they heard screams and "fierce struggles" but did nothing.

[edit] In popular culture

Folk singer Phil Ochs alludes to the Genovese murder in the first lines of his song "Outside a Small Circle of Friends."

Joan Baez, a popular folk singer of the time, wrote a song entitled, "In The Quiet Morning," which was inspired by Genovese's death, but later dedicated to Janis Joplin.

In a Nip/Tuck episode, a bitter patient books an appointment under the alias Kitty Genovese.

In the comic book series Watchmen, Genovese orders a dress made from an unusual fabric, but changes her mind once the dress is made. One of the main protagonists cites the Genovese murder as his motivation to embark on a career as the masked vigilante Rorschach, fashioning his mask from the fabric of her abandoned dress. Writer Alan Moore slightly fictionalized the event, adding voyeuristic intent to Genovese's neighbors, saying, "Some of them even watched."

The movie The Boondock Saints opens with a preacher using the story of Kitty Genovese in a sermon to illustrate the point that passively watching a bad deed is as criminal as — or even worse than — committing the crime itself.

A 1975 made-for-TV movie, Death Scream, was loosely based on the Kitty Genovese murder.

The scene in John Carpenter's Halloween in which Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) cried for help while being chased by Michael Myers but was ignored by her neighbors, was meant to reflect Kitty Genovese's struggle. [citation needed]Harlan Ellison used the death of Genovese and the reports of her neighbors' willful inaction as the basis for "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs", an Edgar-winning story in his "Deathbird Stories" collection. In 1978, he worked with William Friedkin to create a screenplay for a film based on the story, which would have starred Jeanne Moreau. The project was halted due to problems in the film industry at that time.

Dorothy Uhnak's novel Victims is apparently inspired by the Genovese murder. [citation needed]

A 1996 episode of Law & Order entitled "Remand" was based on the Genovese case. In the episode, the victim, Cookie Costello, worked at a sports bar and had once been arrested for a minor gambling charge just as Kitty had. In the Law & Order story, Cookie survived the stabbing and assault only to witness her assailant seek to overturn his conviction when it was revealed his defense attorney had once represented Cookie. The conviction is overturned and the rapist goes free after his new attorney successfully suggests that a married male lover of Cookie's was the true attacker. In reality, Moseley did attempt to get a new trial based on the fact that his defense attorney had once represented Kitty in that minor gambling charge but he was not successful.

In 2006, a play written by J.R. Teeter, revolving around the life of Kitty Genovese, was released and viewed in Off-Broadway productions. [1]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ "It was not reported in 1964 that Kitty Genovese was a lesbian and that she shared her home in Kew Gardens with her girlfriend, Mary Ann Zielonko"
  2. ^ Joe Mahoney, "Kitty's Killer Denied Parole — Again," "New York Daily News", 4 February 2006.
  3. ^ Martin Gansberg, "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police," New York Times, 27 March 1964.

[edit] See also

[edit] Book

  • Rosenthal, A.M. (1964). Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21527-3.

[edit] External links

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