The Killing of Kitty Genovese

Her public slaying in Queens becomes a symbol of Americans' failure to get involved

By Michael Dorman

It was just after 3 a.m.

A red Fiat rolled slowly through the darkness into a parking space adjacent to the Long Island Rail Road station in Kew Gardens. The young woman behind the wheel emerged from the car and locked it. She began the 100-foot walk toward her apartment house at 82-70 Austin St.

But then she spotted a man standing along her route. Apparently afraid, she changed direction and headed toward the intersection of Austin and Lefferts Boulevard -- where there was a police call box.

Suddenly, the man overtook her and grabbed her. She screamed. Residents of nearby apartment houses turned on their lights and threw open their windows. The woman screamed again: ``Oh, my God, he stabbed me! Please help me!''

A man in a window shouted: ``Let that girl alone.'' The attacker walked away. Apartment lights went out and windows slammed shut. The victim staggered toward her apartment. But the attacker returned and stabbed her again.

``I'm dying!'' she cried.

Windows opened again. The attacker entered a car and drove away. Windows closed, but the attacker soon came back again. His victim had crawled inside the front door of an apartment house at 82-62 Austin St. He found her sprawled on the floor and stabbed her still again. This time he killed her.

It was not until 3:50 that morning -- March 13, 1964 -- that a neighbor of the victim called police. Officers arrived two minutes later and found the body. They identified the victim as Catherine Genovese, 28, who had been returning from her job as manager of a bar in Hollis. Neighbors knew her not as Catherine but as Kitty.

Kitty Genovese: It was a name that would become symbolic in the public mind for a dark side of the national character. It would stand for Americans who were too indifferent or too frightened or too alienated or too self-absorbed to ``get involved'' in helping a fellow human being in dire trouble. A term ``the Genovese syndrome'' would be coined to describe the attitude.

Detectives investigating Genovese's murder discovered that no fewer than 38 of her neighbors had witnessed at least one of her killer's three attacks but had neither come to her aid nor called the police. The one call made to the police came after Genovese was already dead.

Assistant Chief Insp. Frederick Lussen, commander of Queens detectives, said that nothing in his 25 years of police work had shocked him so much as the apathy encountered on the Genovese murder. ``As we have reconstructed the crime, the assailant had three chances to kill this woman during a 35-minute period,'' Lussen said. ``If we had been called when he first attacked, this woman might not be dead now.''

Expressions of outrage cascaded not only from public officials and private citizens in the New York area but from across the country. When detectives asked Genovese's neighbors why they had not taken action, many said they had been afraid or had not wanted to get involved. But Lt. Bernard Jacobs, in charge of the investigation, asked: ``Where they are in their homes, near phones, why should they be afraid to call the police?''

Madeline Hartmann, a native of France, was 68 at the time of the murder and lived in the building where Genovese died. On the 20th anniversary of the murder, she said in an interview she did not feel bad about failing to call the police. ``So many, many [other] times in the night, I heard screaming,'' she said. ``I'm not the police and my English speaking is not perfect.''

There was no law, police officials conceded, that required someone witnessing a crime to report it to police. But they contended that morality should oblige a witness to do so.

Six days after the Genovese murder, police arrested a suspect -- Winston Moseley, 29, a business-machine operator who lived with his wife and two children in Ozone Park. Moseley had no criminal record. But detectives said he swiftly confessed to killing not only Genovese but also two other women.

Moseley said he had ``an uncontrollable urge to kill.'' He told detectives he prowled the streets at night while his wife, Elizabeth, was at work. ``I chose women to kill because they were easier and didn't fight back,'' Moseley said.

Three months after Genovese's death, Moseley went on trial for her murder in State Supreme Court in Queens. He pleaded insanity and testified in painstaking detail about how he had stalked and stabbed Genovese to satisfy his supposedly uncontrollable urge. On June 11, 1964, a jury found him guilty. The following month, he was sentenced by Justice J. Irwin Shapiro to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison. ``When I see this monster, I wouldn't hesitate to pull the switch myself,'' the judge said.

But in 1967 the State Court of Appeals reduced the punishment to life imprisonment on the ground that Shapiro had erred in refusing to admit evidence on Moseley's mental condition at a pre-sentence hearing.

A year later, taken from prison to a Buffalo hospital for minor surgery, Moseley struck a prison guard and escaped. He obtained a gun, held five persons hostage, raped one of them and squared off for a showdown with FBI agents in an apartment building. Neil Welch, agent in charge of the Buffalo FBI office, entered the second-floor apartment where Moseley made his stand. Welch and Moseley pointed guns at each other for half an hour as they negotiated. Finally, Moseley surrendered.

Moseley's periodic requests for parole have repeatedly been denied. During one parole hearing in 1984, Moseley volunteered that he had written Genovese's relatives a letter ``to apologize for the inconvenience I caused.''

A parole commissioner responded acidly: ``That's a good way to say it. They were inconvenienced.''

Moseley also told the board the murder was as difficult for him as his victim. ``For a victim outside, it's a one-time or one-hour or one-minute affair,'' he said. ``But, for the person who's caught, it's forever.''

In 1995, seeking a new trial, Moseley obtained a hearing in Brooklyn federal court. Some of Genovese's relatives, unable to bring themselves to attend the original trial, appeared at the hearing. Genovese's sister, Susan Wakeman, said outside the courtroom: ``We don't blame the people who were there that night and might have heard her crying. Only one person killed my sister, and he should die the way she did.''

The court denied Moseley's petition. He is now convict No. 64A0102 at the Great Meadow state prison in Comstock, N.Y.

Over the years, there have been various scholarly studies of ``the Genovese syndrome.'' At a three-day Catherine Genovese Memorial Conference on Bad Samaritanism at Fordham University in 1984, City University of New York psychology professor Stanley Milgram capsulized the questions raised by the Genovese murder.

``The case touched on a fundamental issue of the human condition, our primordial nightmare,'' Milgram said. ``If we need help, will those around us stand around and let us be destroyed or will they come to our aid? Are those other creatures out there to help us sustain our life and values, or are we individual flecks of dust just floating around in a vacuum?''

Michael Dorman is a freelance writer