Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences

by Pelonero, Catherine

  Accounts of how she moved would vary. Some would describe her as staggering, others as walking “dreamlike.” One woman watching from a second-floor apartment above the bookstore described her as zigzagging down the street. However she moved, it was a labored journey. Her winter jacket had tempered some of the hunting knife’s thrust; her wounds were not very deep nor imminently fatal, but two had reached far enough to put small punctures in each of the lobes of her lungs. Air slowly leaked into her chest cavity. The incisions were sharp, and the shock and fear that surely coursed through her could have overshadowed the physical pain, might have pushed it into the background as a lesser and perhaps almost minor cog in this solitary nightmare. What she certainly felt other than a need to find help was a mounting pressure in her chest, a gradual tightening that slowly but steadily gained in intensity with every step and breath, as if a python had coiled around her, making each inhalation a little more difficult than the last. The constriction added to her fear and desperation but also drove her forward toward the promise of salvation; her attacker had fled and she had only to make it to the safety of home, not terribly far away. Less than a minute’s walk from here, normally. She kept moving down Austin Street, accompanied by the sound of her own crying and mumbled pleas and eyes that peered at her through windows up and down the block.

  Midway to the corner she retreated to the building for support, groping along the walls of the storefronts. She passed the darkened windows of the dry cleaner, the grocery, the drugstore—businesses she patronized during the day. The building she now clung to housed sixteen apartments, all on the second floor, one of which was her own. The entrances to most of the apartments, including hers, were in the rear along the wide walkway next to the train tracks.

  She rounded the corner and continued inching along the side of the building. The train station parking lot was now to her right. Directly beyond the lot stood a seven-story apartment building where a man and his wife on the sixth floor watched the young woman make her way toward the rear walkway. They would both later say that the woman definitely staggered at this point and that her movement had slowed from what it had been on the opposite side of Austin Street. Others who still had her in view would agree.

  Partway along the side of the building—and now several minutes into her ordeal—panic overcame her. She cried out, “I’m dying! I’m dying!”

  This outburst, coupled with the fresh horror about to come, caused at least two people listening to think the woman had been attacked again, here next to the parking lot. That was not the case, however. The woman’s cries were yet another reaction to her deepening mortal distress, and perhaps the certainty that she would not be able to go much farther.

  She made it to the next turn at the far edge of the building, where a darkened coffee shop with large glass windows overlooking the walkway occupied the ground floor corner lot. Laboring past the locked door of the coffee shop she came finally to an unlocked door—an apartment entrance. Clutching the door knob, she pushed inward with her remaining strength. The man and his wife up on the sixth floor across the parking lot watched her disappear inside, watched the door close behind her.

  It was right after this that the man with the hunting knife returned.

  He no longer wore a stocking cap. He now wore a dark fedora on his head, but it was him—the same slender young man who had pursued the woman down Austin Street some ten minutes before.

  He sauntered past the parking lot. His hands were in his pockets as he walked down Austin, the ten-story apartment building on his left, looking this way and that, searching. He came to the front of the bookstore where he had first stabbed the woman. He looked in the empty doorways and glanced up and down the street. Finding nothing, he turned and strolled back toward the parking lot, scanning the area with his eyes. People watching from the ten-story building strained to keep him in view as he moved in the direction of the train depot. Others in private homes on the block and the seven-story apartment building had a more clear view of his movements.

  About the time the man reached the locked train depot, looked around, and then headed for the rear walkway, the man on the sixth floor reached for his phone. “I’m calling the police,” he whispered to his wife. “Don’t!” she insisted. “Thirty people must have called by now.”

  The injured woman had entered a small foyer, a narrow and dingy entryway with peeling paint on the walls. There were no inner doors on the ground floor. Instead there was a set of stairs in front of her leading up to two apartment doors at the top. Neither of these was her own apartment; hers was farther down the walkway, only a few doors down, but she knew she could not make it that far. She needed help right away. Certainly it was fortunate that she had made it here, because one of the people who lived upstairs was a friend of hers.

  She may have tried to make it up the stairs or she may have fallen to the floor soon after the outer door closed behind her. Either way, she came to rest at the base of the narrow hallway and shouted up the stairs.

  “Karl! Karl, help me. I’m stabbed!”

  It is unknown whether Karl opened his door at this point. What is certain is that he reached for his phone—and called a friend of his in Nassau County.

  In a strange and brief conversation, Karl told his friend about the woman calling for help at the bottom of the stairs. He asked his friend what she thought he should do. She told him to call the police. He hung up the phone.

  “Karl! It’s Kitty. I’ve been stabbed. Help me!”

  Spurred to action, Karl climbed out his window and stepped out onto the flat inner roof of the building. Hurrying through the frosted darkness on the roof, he came to the window of an adjoining apartment and knocked heavily on the pane. The woman inside this apartment was startled by his banging, though she was already wide awake. Frightened—especially with all the screaming and strange activity that had been going on outside—the woman hesitated before going to the window. It was only after the man insistently knocked again and called, “It’s your neighbor! I’m on the roof!” that she finally drew the shade and opened her window. She and her neighbor faced each other through the open window. They heard moaning from the hallway below.

  “I heard screams . . .” the woman began. Her neighbor interrupted and quickly said he didn’t hear screams, since he was sleeping. Before he could say more, another call came from below.

  “Help me! It’s Kitty.”

  They looked at one another. “Call Sophie!” he said. “She lives next to Kitty. Tell her to come over and see if it’s really Kitty.”

  She replied that she did not have a phone and she didn’t know Sophie’s number anyway.

  The moaning continued.

  “I don’t want to get involved,” Karl said. “I want somebody else to come over and see if it really is Kitty.” He added, “I think she’s drunk.”

  The woman told him she had a phone number for Greta Schwartz, another neighbor who lived at that end of the building. He took the number and quickly left, leaving the woman staring after him as he scurried back across the roof to his own apartment.

  She walked into her bedroom. This was all so very odd. Her husband was in the bedroom and she said to him, “There’s a woman moaning in Karl’s hallway.” She thought of the police call box on the corner of Austin Street and Lefferts Boulevard. “Do you think I should go down and call the police from the call box?”

  “No.”

  THE MAN IN the fedora was about ready to give up. He had searched for several minutes, but his victim was nowhere to be seen. He stood at the top of the walkway next to the train tracks and looked down the long silent concrete path. He tried the door to the coffee shop on the corner. It was locked. He thought she must have made it home, for surely she must live around here. On impulse he tried one last door—the next one. A plain brown entry door. 82-62 Austin Street.

  She was lying on the floor. She looked up at him and let out a horrific scream—her last. People still at their windows around the other side o
f the block heard her last two cries of “HELP! HELP!”

  The door closed behind him. And then he was upon her.

  He straddled her where she lay and plunged the hunting knife into her throat to silence the screams. Unable to cry out, she moaned and struggled as he squatted down on her and cut open her jacket and blouse. She raised her gloved right hand in an effort to push him away but he slashed at her outstretched hand with the knife, cutting deep enough to tear her glove open and slice her palm. He cut through the center of her bra and discovered that her breasts were not as big as he had thought. She wore falsies. Infuriated by this, he slashed her right breast. Still she continued to twist and struggle beneath him, and now he was really fed up with her—fed up with her deception with the falsies and her defiance in still trying to get away. He took the hunting knife and stabbed her in the stomach, once, twice, and then again and again, not using all his strength, not deep enough to cause immediate death, but enough to make her still.

  Now, finally, he could do what he wanted.

  He pulled up her skirt. Underneath she wore layers of clothing—girdle, tennis shorts, nylons, and panties. He took the knife and cut through them all as the woman lay motionless and bleeding in the dank stairwell, moaning through the hole in her throat.

  A door at the top of the stairs opened.

  The man glanced up. Unfazed, he turned his attention back to his victim.

  The door at the top of the stairs closed.

  GRETA SCHWARTZ COULD not quite make sense of what her neighbor Karl Ross was telling her. What time was it, anyway? Close to 4:00 a.m. it looked like. She tried to listen carefully and understand him because there must be a good reason for him to call her at this hour.

  Greta and her husband lived in one of the rear apartments down near Lefferts Boulevard. Karl babbled something about screaming on the street. Screaming? Greta did not know what he meant. She had been sound asleep until the phone rang. Karl said something about Kitty being hurt in his hallway and then something about calling Sophie to come over and check on her. It was confusing.

  Greta knew who Kitty was—one of the two young girls, the dark-haired one, who lived across the hall from young Sophie Farrar and her family. Close to sixty years of age herself, Greta considered them all young. None of this was making much sense and she could not understand why Karl would be asking her to call Sophie in the dead of night. There must be something going on though. Greta told Karl she’d be right over and hung up the phone. She threw on a robe and slippers and went downstairs.

  Stepping outside into the walkway, Greta turned right and walked toward the entrance to Karl’s apartment down near the corner. There was no one else on the street. She had no idea that a man in a fedora, headed in the opposite direction toward Lefferts Boulevard, had passed by only a moment before.

  Greta reached the door of 82-62 Austin and pushed on it, but it would only open a few inches. It seemed there was something inside blocking the door. She put pressure on it and forced the door open enough to slip inside.

  Strange, raw smells filled the air, different from the usual stagnant musty odor of the narrow stairwells. It looked like somebody was lying on the floor. Greta looked down, straining to see in the darkness. As her eyes adjusted to the dim of the hallway she saw that it was Kitty lying there. She heard a moan. Kitty’s skirt looked like it was hiked up. She must have fallen, Greta thought.

  “Kitty?”

  Instinctively she bent down to fix Kitty’s skirt—and that’s when she saw.

  Greta Schwartz could not even find her own voice to scream. The sight of the carnage in front of her would haunt the rest of her days.

  Greta scrambled up and clawed her way outside. As she fled the blood-drenched stairwell she thought, My God, she’s still alive, but the thought was tinged with more pity than relief.

  RIGHT AROUND 4:00 A.M., at an intersection near Hillside Avenue and the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens, a man had dozed off behind the wheel of his parked car. A passing motorist waiting at the traffic signal noticed the man asleep in the car and also noted that the car was idling. He pulled his own vehicle over to the curb, approached the sleeping man’s car, and tapped gently on the glass to rouse him.

  Now awake, the man rolled down his window and looked into the pleasant face of a young man wearing a fedora.

  “You shouldn’t be sleeping here like that,” the man in the fedora said in a placid, kind voice. “The carbon monoxide builds up. Or somebody could come along and do something bad to you.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” the man replied, grateful for the stranger’s concern. “Just drifted off. You’re a good fella. Thanks.”

  The Good Samaritan in the fedora nodded and smiled, returned to his white Chevy Corvair, and drove off.

  chapter 2

  SOPHIE FARRAR LIVED in the Tudor building on Austin Street with her husband and their two young children. The building, which ran the length of the block from Lefferts Boulevard to the train station parking lot, was a modest structure by neighborhood standards, smaller and shabbier than the rest. Locals referred to it simply as “the Tudor.” It had only two stories, the ground floor occupied by a string of storefront businesses and the second floor housing sixteen walk-up apartments, with entrances to all but four of the apartments located in the rear, adjacent to the tracks of the Long Island Railroad.

  The night of March 12–13, 1964, had been even quieter than usual since the Austin Bar & Grill, on the first floor of the Tudor near the corner of Austin and Lefferts, had closed earlier than normal, as had the pizza parlor around the block on Lefferts. As the pizza parlor manager later told police, he had closed early due to it being such a slow night. Patrons and employees were long gone by the wee hours, leaving Austin Street silent and lifeless.

  Until about 3:20 a.m.

  “Did you hear that?” Sophie Farrar’s husband nudged her awake. He had awoken just a moment before, jolted from sleep by a piercing noise. In the darkness of their bedroom Sophie now heard it too: screams, loud and frightening, coming from somewhere outside.

  Screams in the night—ghastly, visceral cries like these—were not the norm in this neighborhood. Not in Kew Gardens, this solid middle-class community of working people and retirees. Nights were usually so peaceful and subdued, which is perhaps why the screams were heard by so many people.

  Sophie had no idea who else had heard them. In the isolation of her own apartment Sophie knew only that she and her husband heard something terrible—shrieks that chilled her to the bone and sent her stumbling out of bed to her window overlooking Austin Street.

  Peering out, Sophie saw nothing but the usual sights: the gray concrete façade of the Mowbray apartment building across the street, partially obscured by the branches of winter-stripped trees; parked cars sitting frosted and dormant by the curb; stretches of bare sidewalk lit dimly by the yellow glow of street lamps. Through her closed window she could not see the sidewalk directly beneath her. She had no view of anyone lying on the pavement down the block in front of the bookstore, or staggering alongside the storefronts of her own building.

  She stayed at her window for a minute or so, looking out and listening for anything unusual, but all remained quiet. For Sophie Farrar, tranquility had returned and the night looked as still and unperturbed as always. She returned to her bed, awake and uneasy in the darkness, unaware of what had happened, unsuspecting of what awaited her.

  Sophie was a petite woman in her thirties whose slender, delicate frame belied her strength. Her husband worked long hours, leaving her with the responsibility of running their small but active household. Her days were spent caring for her baby daughter, getting her son off to school, and managing an insulated but busy life with the self-sufficiency common to working-class homemakers. She rarely went out during the day. When she did, she stayed close to home.

  Directly beneath her apartment was a small upholstery shop called Fairchild Decorators. During the eight years Sophie had lived here she had become fri
ends with the owner, a man named Tony Corrado. Tony and his family lived a couple blocks away on Talbot Street, but he spent a good deal of time at his business, which had been there for the past fifteen years, since 1949. Nothing ever happens in Kew Gardens, Tony often said with a measure of satisfaction. Many people would likely have agreed. Sophie Farrar said later that what happened next was her first experience with violence, in Kew Gardens or anywhere else.

  Twenty minutes after Sophie heard the screams she was jolted once again by another shrill sound in the night: the ring of her telephone. She picked it up quickly, perhaps as eager to answer before it woke her children as she was to find out who could be calling.

  Greta Schwartz, possibly in a state of shock, probably overcome by panic, had rushed back to her own apartment after finding Kitty. She called Sophie.

  Answering her phone, Sophie listened to Greta’s voice, frantic, breathless. Greta explained—tried to explain—what she had seen. It came down to a single jarring sentence.

  “I saw Kitty lying in Karl’s hallway and she looked like she was dead . . .”

  Dead? Kitty, their neighbor? Dead?

  Sophie told Greta she’d come right down. She hung up the phone, bewildered. “I never thought of murder,” she said later. “I put on my slacks and ran down to see what was wrong with Kitty.”