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

by Pelonero, Catherine

  The hasty collapse of her marriage was a turning point in Kitty’s life. At nineteen she found herself unwed and on her own for the first time, legally an adult, unencumbered by the demands of either parents or a spouse, and free to chart her own course.

  But what course? Her background had prepared her for marriage to a good man from a nice family much like her own; precisely the situation she had just walked away from. What now?

  Gradually, she found her footing. She worked at an insurance company. She moved into an apartment in Brooklyn with a female friend. The insurance business did not appeal to her, nor did the other clerical jobs she took after that one. She tried going back to her parents for a time in Connecticut, but that didn’t suit her either, despite her unquestionable devotion to her family. She did not want to live under her parents’ roof at this point in her young but decidedly adult life. Especially not in small-town Connecticut, a place she considered stifling and dull. She liked being on her own, making her own way. Moreover, she wanted to be in New York, even if she was not quite sure yet of what she would be doing there.

  By the late 1950s she had moved to Queens. Uninterested in office work and faced with the limitations of women’s employment opportunities, she took a job as a barmaid.

  Over the next couple of years she worked at a few places—the 600 Club, the Queens Café—small taverns in the same general area. By all accounts, she had a pleasant attitude and seemed to like the work. It could be that the social nature of a neighborhood bar appealed to her sensibilities—the friendly chat, the chance to be in motion rather than confined to a desk. It could also be that very early on, she decided on the goal of one day owning such a business, an idea that may have been sparked or solidified when, while employed as a barmaid at another small place on Jamaica Avenue called Club 190, she met a self-made businesswoman named Evelyn Randolph.

  Evelyn had also worked as a barmaid at Club 190, until she leased a space just down the street at 193-14 Jamaica Avenue, a former pizzeria, reopening it as a bar she called Ev’s Eleventh Hour Tavern. Her venture had been a success, and Evelyn had done very well for herself, going from barmaid to owner, driving around Queens in her white Cadillac. In 1961, Evelyn hired the bright young barmaid towork for her, not as a waitress, but as the manager, responsible for all day-to-day operations.

  Kitty had a head for business. Very intelligent, conscious of the balance sheet, trustworthy, and reliable, she knew how to manage and how to talk to patrons and employees in the right way, without having them turn sour on her even when she had to tell them something they didn’t necessarily want to hear such as, “You’ve had enough to drink.” She could put it down firmly but with charm, no hard feelings, come back and see us again. Moreover, she didn’t drink much herself and did not become too personally involved with the patrons.

  Perhaps most importantly, people liked her. There was perhaps no more important trait for a barkeep than to have a following, customers who would come in for the pleasure of the company. This was particularly true in an area like this, which had a bar on almost every corner. Kitty had it all for this cash-and-people business. Who wouldn’t want her as a manager?

  Male club owners, apparently. At least, none had ever handed her more than an apron and a tray, although to be fair Kitty was perhaps a bit young for management, only twenty-five when she became the top employee at Ev’s. In any event, Evelyn Randolph had become a proprietor and she didn’t have to worry, if she ever had, what job a man thought appropriate for her. Now Kitty didn’t have to worry about it either.

  Plus, everyone agreed, Kitty was not only a capable manager but also a good sport. One of the employees at Ev’s liked telling a story about an incident concerning some relatives of Evelyn’s who had come to town for a visit. Evelyn had a beautiful apartment in Queens complete with a full-time maid. At the time Kitty had a much smaller, more modest place in Jamaica. Not wanting her out-of-town relatives to know quite how much her fortunes had swelled, Evelyn asked Kitty to switch apartments with her during the relatives’ visit. Kitty gamely went along, moving into Evelyn’s luxury apartment for a few days and loaning her place to Evelyn, finding the whole ruse very funny.

  By early 1963 Kitty’s own fortunes had improved to the point that she was able to afford an apartment in upscale Kew Gardens. The apartment itself had no claims on luxury; just a small one bedroom in a building that had seen better days, but of course location was key. Kitty had commented on how pleasant she found the neighborhood, which had plenty of nice shops and restaurants as well as The Interlude, a coffeehouse featuring live folk music and poetry, right next to an art studio where her roommate Mary Ann took lessons. It was a nice place to live, she told friends. She was lucky to have found it.

  It was in this apartment at 82-70 Austin Street that Kitty Genovese lived the final year of her life. It was here that she dressed for work on the morning of Thursday, March 12, 1964, as a light snow fell on the streets of New York.

  The temperature that morning hovered around 33 degrees, turning the weak snowfall into a light slush that grayed upon contact with the pavement. The snow was supposed to stop by afternoon but the cold would remain, and since she planned to be out late, she dressed warmly. She wore a tailored turquoise blouse—a flattering, smart cut without frills; Kitty never cared for frills—and a straight gray flannel skirt, underneath which she wore a slip, nylons, girdle, and tennis shorts. Lots of layers, but with her lean figure, she still looked svelte.

  She slipped into a pair of black pumps and a brown suede jacket. After placing a few personal items in the pockets of her jacket, she left her apartment and drove to work.

  As far as anyone would ever know, she had a perfectly ordinary work day and a pleasant night out.

  She left Ev’s with Jack at about 6:20 p.m. They drove to Brooklyn, had dinner with Jack’s brother, had some drinks and some laughs and talked for hours, and nothing about the evening would stand out for the two men who later told about it. The night slipped by with talk of perfectly ordinary things: the horse races; the bar; St. Patrick’s Day coming up next Tuesday; the New York World’s Fair opening in Queens next month. But there would be no St. Patrick’s Day for Kitty. No World’s Fair. The hours passed and it was getting very late. It was almost midnight. It was almost March 13, 1964.

  As 3:00 a.m. neared, Victor tended to his usual duties behind the bar as Kitty stood on the other side chatting with a couple of the regulars. When Victor asked if she wanted something to drink, she declined, and Vic thought that was probably wise. It appeared to him that Kitty had already had a few. She was as composed and articulate as always, but he could tell she was a little bit drunk. That was unusual. Victor would remember this as the only time he ever saw Kitty that way. Normally she wasn’t much of a drinker, but tonight she had been out for hours with Jack, who definitely enjoyed a few drinks. No wonder she had indulged.

  Not that it mattered, because Vic knew that Kitty would not be driving home. She had planned ahead to stay the night with Bessie Thompson and her husband, two regular customers who lived in an apartment above Ev’s. A wise choice all around, since Kitty had to be here to open Ev’s at 8:00 a.m., now just a few hours away. As night bartender, Victor would be closing the place at 4:00 a.m.

  But around ten minutes after 3:00, Victor noticed Kitty saying goodnight, heading for the front door. “I thought you were staying upstairs with Bessie,” he said to her.

  “Ah, I was going to, but I think I’ll go home,” Kitty replied.

  This surprised him. Kitty didn’t live that far away, but still. Why drive home now? He said to her, “Why don’t you stay upstairs? You’ll be better off.”

  “No, I’m going home. I’ll be fine.” Kitty gave a reassuring smile and stepped toward the door.

  Well, if she insisted. And in truth, Victor felt no worry. There wasn’t much traffic this time of night.

  Kitty flashed her familiar smile, said she’d see them all later on, and walked out the door. Victor watch
ed through the front window as she went to her car, parked right at the corner. He saw Kitty get into her car alone. When he looked again, her car was gone. He saw nothing unusual. No disturbance, nothing out of the ordinary.

  It was only later that Victor or anyone else at Ev’s would learn of a white Chevy Corvair cruising down Jamaica Avenue as Kitty had left that night.

  Some people in Kew Gardens, however, had noticed Kitty’s assailant run to such a car. Not all were certain of the make, but enough that Detective Robert Plover filed the following report the day of the incident:

  Examined precinct records for any report of accident or summons relative to a white Chevrolet Corvair for the 24 hour period. There were no aided or accident cases and only one summons issued off signal light on Woodhaven Blvd. and Myrtle Avenue. CASE ACTIVE.

  chapter 5

  THE WHITE CHEVY Corvair sat in the driveway of a house in South Ozone Park, a neighborhood roughly four miles south of Kew Gardens. The car and the home, much like their owner, blended well in the prosaic landscape of the middle class, arousing neither suspicion nor complaint, appearing to all as nothing more or less than unremarkable gears in the cog work of ordinary life.

  The car and house were owned by a man who, at twenty-nine years of age, was married, a father of three sons, and steadily employed with a firm in Mount Vernon, New York, called the Raygram Corporation. His name, known to few outside his own family, small circle of coworkers, and even smaller circle of friends, was Winston Moseley.

  The dawn of Friday, March 13, 1964, began for him much like every other weekday morning. In many respects, his was a structured, predictable life. Weekdays routinely started with a 7:00 a.m. phone call from his wife, phoning from her job to wake him for his own workday. Not that he particularly needed a wake-up call. Known as a man of meticulous habit who fulfilled his responsibilities without fail, he often was already awake by the time his wife called, tending to his five dogs and the two children while getting ready for work. Of the children, both boys and both toddlers, one was the son of himself and his wife, Elizabeth, also known as Bettye (pronounced “Betty” despite the extra e). The other boy was the son of one of his wife’s cousins who had fallen on hard times. By agreement with the child’s mother, Winston and Bettye were raising the boy and planned to adopt him. Winston’s other sons, ages nine and seven, lived elsewhere in New York with their mother, Winston’s first wife, whom he had divorced in 1958.

  Bettye Moseley’s regular morning calls to her husband then were really more an affectionate ritual between the couple, allowing them to say good morning and wish one another a pleasant day, chatting for a moment or two, as they had little enough time to talk. Winston worked the day shift at Raygram, 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., after which he dutifully went to his father’s television repair shop in Corona and put in three or four hours every evening helping with work around the shop or more often with deliveries and house calls. Bettye Moseley, twenty-four years old, worked as a registered nurse at Elmhurst General Hospital in Queens. For the past two years, almost the entirety of their married life, Bettye had worked the night shift at Elmhurst General, leaving home at 11:30 p.m. and returning around 8:30 in the morning, just in time to kiss her husband goodbye before he drove off on his commute to Mount Vernon. While the arrangement left them little time together, it did afford them a comfortable living. Bettye earned $92 per week; Winston, who had just been given another raise in January, brought home $100 per week, of which he gave his former wife $32 per week in child support. With a mortgage of $120 per month and tastes strictly befitting those of a pragmatic middle-class couple, Winston and Bettye had no financial worries.

  In addition to Winston’s 1960 Corvair, a car they had bought used, they owned a 1962 Ford Fairlane for Bettye, purchased new. Winston wanted his wife to have the reliability of a new car. Their white and green frame house at 133-19 Sutter Avenue was a single family home with two stories, six rooms, and a partially finished basement. A spacious attic room made it in effect a three-story house with four bedrooms, including one adjacent to the living room that had been an enclosed porch but which Winston had converted into a bedroom for his mother, Fannie. His mother lived with them intermittently, coming and going as she pleased, as she had done throughout her son’s life.

  Winston and Bettye’s marriage, as they would both one day tell a jury, had been a happy one from the start, as harmonious—at least in regard to their relationship with one another—as Winston’s first marriage had been troubled. They were both quiet individuals of mild temperament, modest and reserved, he somewhat more modest and retiring than she. The only dark cloud hovering over their lives concerned not their own relationship but that of Winston’s parents, Alphonso and Fannie Moseley. To call his parents’ marriage stormy would be an understatement, unless said storm were a series of massive tornados touching down frequently and without warning, twisting violently along a frenzied though familiar course that uprooted all in their path, leaving a wake of bruised feelings, the occasional black eye, and old wounds so constantly reopened that they never had the opportunity to begin healing much less fade.

  For reasons only they themselves could perhaps fathom, Fannie and Alphonso had never divorced despite the fact they had effectively separated twenty years ago, living together only for short and sporadic periods of time since. A number of reconciliations had been attempted—six, according to Alphonso, the one who kept track, always hoping in spite of all past experience that “this time it will work.” It never did. Even during their reunions the tumult continued, culminating always in a fiery breakup in which no one in their orbit was spared a scorching.

  The elder Moseleys were not ones to battle in silence or in private, nor were they above attempts to solicit allies in their marital war. The chief ally whose allegiance both repeatedly and insistently sought was that of their son Winston, their only child and chief pawn in their ongoing twenty-nine year conflict. Each would run to him with fresh accusations against the other, tales of the latest indiscretion or outrage, imploring him to take their side and sometimes to intervene. Winston listened, having little choice. His plea to be left out of it had not worked when he was a child; it definitely wouldn’t work now that he was an adult, capable of being squeezed into service tendering messages or diffusing confrontations. He listened to whichever parent came to him and then insisted, no matter what new strife had arisen between his parents, that he loved them both and always would. The reply he most often received was a look of admonishment and hurt followed by a variation of “But how could you, after what he/she has done to me?”

  No matter how hard he tried to remain a neutral peacemaker in his parents’ quarrels, no matter how much he did to show his love for both of them, helping out every night at his father’s repair shop or building a room for his mother in his own home, peace never settled upon the complicated union of Alphonso and Fannie Moseley. There were lulls in the drama, but these were temporary—brief respites heavy with an undercurrent of dread anticipation of the next blowout. There seemed to be no shelter from these tempests spawned by Al and Fannie, least of all for their son. Even in periods of relative calm, he knew full well it was only a matter of time before he’d once again be thrown asunder by the next parental cyclone sure to come whipping through.

  Winston did not have the personality to lay down the law with his parents or extricate himself from their grasp, much as he may secretly have wished to. It was as if he, and now Bettye too, lived in a familial tornado alley with no means of escape.

  Bettye certainly would have preferred to stay out of her in-laws’ marital discord, but it really wasn’t possible at times when her father-in-law was driving slowly back and forth in front of the house, waiting for his wife to emerge so he could confront her. Or with her mother-in-law hounding her husband, complaining to him that his father had once again brandished a gun, threatening to kill Fannie and her boyfriend.

  The worst occasions, mercifully rare, were perhaps when Al and Fannie
were in the house at the same time, presumably to visit their grandson, actually to snipe and spy on each other. Similar nastiness ensued when Fannie dropped in at Al’s shop, though why she ever chose to do so was anybody’s guess. Like two Siamese fighting fish in too small a tank—though their tank was none other than New York City—Alphonso and Fannie could not, would not stay away from each other, forever sparring and retreating, carping and charging, and God help any guppies who happened to be in the way.

  Bettye may have wondered how two people of such quarrelsome and confrontational disposition had produced her gentle husband. It was near impossible to imagine a man more placid or less confrontational than Winston. The difference in the marriages of the elder and younger Moseleys was striking. Winston and Bettye had never had a single loud fight, much less a violent one. Winston even showed infinite patience with the children, never raising his voice with them either, not even with his two older, more active boys on the occasions when he saw them. By this point in his life, Winston seldom voiced complaints about anything, not even about his warring parents.

  But he brooded. Quite a lot.

  Many times Bettye would find him sitting alone, silent, staring. When she asked him what he was doing—or, as she had asked more recently, what was wrong—he would reply only that he was thinking, offering nothing more.

  Winston had always been a quiet, thoughtful type of person ever since Bettye had known him, and, according to his parents, ever since childhood. But lately Bettye had begun to worry. She detected changes in him, particularly over the last three months. Since around January, Bettye thought, Winston hadn’t quite been himself. The fact that he spent even more time deep in thought wouldn’t necessarily have aroused her concern—after all, he’d always been “moody,” according to both Fannie and Al—but there were other changes too.