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Catherine “Kitty” Genovese
Born July 07, 1935, New York - Died March 13, 1964 (aged 28)
Catherine Susan Genovese (July 7, 1935[1] — March 13, 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.[2] The circumstances of her murder and the apparent reaction (or lack thereof) of her neighbors were reported by a newspaper article published two weeks later and prompted investigation into the psychological phenomenon that became known as the bystander effect or “Genovese syndrome.”[3]
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, nineteen 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.[4]
Attack
Genovese had driven home in the early morning of March 13, 1964. Arriving home at about 3:15 a.m. and parking about 100 feet (30 m) from her apartment’s door, she was approached by 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.”[5]
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 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.[6] 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.
Burial
Following her murder, Kitty Genovese was buried in a family grave at Lakeview Cemetery in New Canaan, Connecticut. The family requested to keep the burial location within the cemetery private, and visitors not be directed to the grave by cemetery personnel.
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, 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 1, 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.[7]
Moseley remained in prison after being denied parole a twelfth time on February 3, 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.”[8] He will be eligible for parole again in 2008.
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[9] in the New York Times written by Martin Gansberg and published on March 27, two weeks after the murder. The article bore the 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. He later repeated the figure of thirty-eight (this time using an expletive to collectively describe them) when mentioning the case in his book The Other Glass Teat.
While Genovese’s neighbors were vilified by the article, “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.”
The 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 attacks took place in a different locations, no witness saw the entire sequence. 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.[1]
The Genovese case 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 the comic book series Watchmen, the murder of Kitty Genovese is the event which compels Rorschach to become a vigilante.
* 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 (1978) in which Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) cried for help while being chased by Michael Myers but was ignored by her neighbors parallels Kitty Genovese’s cries fleeing Winston Moseley.
* Harlan Ellison used the death of Genovese and the reports of her neighbors’ alleged willful inaction as the basis for “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”, an Edgar-winning story in his “Deathbird Stories” collection.
* Dorothy Uhnak’s novel Victims (1985) drew from the Genovese murder.[10]
* A 1996 episode of Law & Order entitled “Remand” was loosely based on the Genovese case.
* In 2005, a play, The Witnesses of Kitty Genovese, written by J.R. Teeter, about the last night of Kitty Genovese’s life, was released and viewed in Off-Broadway productions. [11]
References
1. ^ a b c Kitty Genovese (English). A Picture History of Kew Gardens, NY. Retrieved on 2007-03-12.
2. ^ “Queens Woman Stabbed to Death in Front of Home”, New York Times, 1964-03-14, p. 26. Retrieved on 2007-04-11.
3. ^ Dowd, Maureen. “20 years after the murder of Kitty Genovese, The question remains: Why?”, New York Times, 1984-03-12, p. B1. Retrieved on 2007-04-11.
4. ^ Remembering Kitty Genovese, SoundPortraits, 13 March 2004
5. ^ Rosenthal, A.M. (1964). Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21527-3.
6. ^ Rasenberger, Jim (October 2006). “Nightmare On Austin Street“. American Heritage Magazine.
7. ^ Barry, Dan. “Once Again, A Killer Makes His Pitch”, New York Times, 2006-05-26, p. b1.
8. ^ Joe Mahoney, “Kitty’s Killer Denied Parole — Again,” “New York Daily News”, 4 February 2006.
9. ^ Martin Gansberg, “Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police,” New York Times, 27 March 1964.
10. ^ Lynskey, Ed. The Original Policewoman: Dorothy Uhnak. The Mystery File.
11. ^ Bread and Water Theatre
See also…
Book
* Rosenthal, A.M. (1964). Thirty-Eight Witnesses
: The Kitty Genovese Case. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21527-3.
External links
* Court TV’s Crime Library story on Kitty Genovese.
* Joseph De May Jr., “Kitty Genovese: What you think you know about the case might not be true.” A reinvestigation by a member of the Richmond Hill Historical Society, this comes in two versions:
* Single page that analyzes and argues with Gansberg’s article, with links to other material.
* This and thirteen subsequent pages constitute a version that is more visually attractive. (Although billed as shorter, it too is comprehensive.)
* “Sound Portrait” interview with Mary Ann Zielonko, Kitty Genovese’s girlfriend audio and transcript.
* Phil Ochs’ “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends” lyrics
* Kitty Genovese: Reclaiming Herstory
* A. M. Rosenthal, “Thirty-Eight Witnesses” (Online version)
* Jim Rasenberger, “Kitty 40 Years Later,” The New York Times (8 February 2004) (On the Middlesex County College Web Site)
* “Kitty Genovese, Revised” The Wilson Quarterly (Winter 2007)
* We Are All Bystanders - Greater Good Magazine article examines the bystander effect and Genovese’s death.
