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

by Pelonero, Catherine

  “We learned her identity from the police, and that Kitty had gone around to the back of the building across the street, which is where she lived, and that the guy came back to finish her off. That part we didn’t see or hear since it happened in a hallway in the rear of that building. Even though my father gave his name, phone number, and address, the police did not seem to have any notes that we had called the police dispatcher, but they did listen to us. Several of my neighbors were being interviewed at that time and the detectives seemed to not have more time to listen to what we had to say. They did take our statements, but told us that since we didn’t see anything of substance (to them), it would be doubtful that we were needed in the future. I remember my dad telling the police that if they had come when we called them, she’d probably still be alive. For that he got a dirty look from the detective.

  “The newspapers said that a few minutes after the first attack on Austin Street, Kitty was attacked again on the parking lot side of the two-story Tudor building, and that she screamed for help. Although we could not see her on that side of the building, we probably would have heard her if she screamed again from that location. We did not hear anything once she turned the corner by the drugstore. At the time, neither my dad nor I ever thought for a second that this was an attempted murder, or that the man I saw run away would return, find Kitty, and kill her.

  “I have been told that the neighborhood residents at the time said that a lot of early morning noise came out of the Old Bailey bar1 which was a few doors down Austin Street from where Kitty was first attacked. Personally, nothing from the Old Bailey ever woke me. Once in a while, in the late evening before I went to sleep, there would be a drunk or two merrily singing in the street, but I never was awakened by any problem drunks. But I was only living there a short time. I don’t know what problems there were before or after.

  “I worked as a New York City policeman out of the 112th precinct, although that was years after Kitty was killed. While stationed at the 112, I met an old timer (it’s been way too many years to remember his name) who was almost ready to retire. He told me he was on duty in the 102nd precinct that night and heard the first call go out as a simple assault. It wasn’t even put out as ‘in progress.’ The dispatcher sent out a second call escalating the situation after Kitty was found lying in the hallway.

  “I am told that in his book, Chief!, former New York City Chief of Detectives, Albert A. Seedman, wrote that at the time Kitty Genovese was murdered, the West Virginia Apartments (located at 82-60 Austin Street alongside the Long Island Railroad parking lot) had an allnight elevator operator who would have seen the killer pull up almost directly in front of his door. However, the West Virginia never had a manned elevator that I knew of, and I had been in that building as early as the late 1950s with my cousins visiting friends. I’d been in all of the buildings on Austin Street, and the only building I knew with an operator in 1964 was mine, the Mowbray. The rest were automatic, that I remember. But in any event, the Mowbray was a manned elevator, and it was until at least 1967.2

  “I have been told that one of the people interviewed for a 1999 History Channel special on the Kitty Genovese case was a Queens County assistant district attorney who mentioned that there was a night elevator operator in the Mowbray who saw everything from a bay window, but instead of calling the police, he simply went downstairs and went to bed. In my opinion, the idea that the Mowbray night elevator man heard or saw anything is wrong. I knew the night man well, and while I don’t remember his name after almost forty years, I remember enough about him to know if he did indeed see or hear anything, he would have gone out there and got involved.

  “Furthermore, when idle, the elevator man was supposed to sit in a chair in the lobby next to the elevator, even in the wee hours of the morning. It had to be attended all night long since people did come and go periodically in the middle of the night. There was a chair as well in the basement next to the elevator, and I suppose they did use that as well if they wanted to ‘coop’ and not get caught. ‘Going downstairs and going to bed’ does not fit. Napping in a chair, maybe. Since [the Assistant D.A.] mentioned that he ‘went downstairs and went to bed,’ I put forth the theory that it’s where he was to begin with—napping in the chair in the basement—and did not see or hear a thing. If in the basement, even gunshots on Austin Street would not have been heard there!

  “Also, the front entrance to the Mowbray Apartments was not even [flush] with the public sidewalk. It was back at the end of an entrance courtyard. There was a real nice older door and bay windows looking out into the courtyard. But even if the night elevator operator was in the lobby, I doubt that he could have seen anything from there unless he went outside and walked several yards towards the street. The entry courtyard was not well lit, but the lobby was. Seeing out that window was very difficult due to the lighting contrast, and I can attest to this of my own experience. In addition, he would not have a clear view due to the cars parked on both sides of the street. In 1964, parking was allowed on both sides.3 During my observations of the attack, I did look out my open window facing the courtyard several times, and I did not see or hear anyone in the courtyard.

  “Each of the elevator operators brought a little radio with them to work to listen to when bored. In the quiet of the night (and it was always quiet), the sound of the radio had a gentle but strong sound, that echoed even stronger in the large, marble lobby. You could hear (but not offensively) the radio throughout all the hallways of the building. I never heard anyone complain because it was not seeping into apartments, even the ones on the first floor right off the lobby, and they played soft, classical, and symphony-type music. So if someone did scream across the street, I would find it difficult to believe that the elevator man heard anything unless he was standing outside to begin with, possibly getting some fresh air.”

  DESPITE MICHAEL HOFFMAN’S feelings to the contrary (and the possibility he did not know which operator had been on duty that night, as the Mowbray employed four different elevator operators as well as a building superintendent), night elevator man Joseph Fink did eventually admit, albeit reluctantly, to police and later to the Queens District Attorney’s Office that he had witnessed the first attack on Kitty Genovese. But first, determined to deny it, he told them something else.

  After stubbornly sitting in silence for several hours at the 102nd precinct—and perhaps realizing that the detectives were willing to wait out his stubbornness—Fink told Detective Charles Prestia that though he had been on duty in the lobby of the Mowbray, he did not hear any screams or noises on the street. How could that be, detectives wondered, considering his proximity to the attack and the fact that the victim’s screams had been loud enough to awaken scores of people out of their sleep, when Fink had been wide awake at the time? He then told detectives that he had taken the elevator down to the basement at around 3:00 a.m. to get some coffee or water, he didn’t remember which. He claimed he must have been in the basement when it all happened.

  Detectives weren’t buying it. Fink’s belligerence from the start coupled with his attitude during questioning indicated, as Detective Prestia wrote in his report, “that he did not want to become involved in this case.”

  Police were baffled by Joseph Fink’s unwillingness to cooperate. Clearly he was not a suspect. Clearly he was also lying about not having seen or heard a thing. But why? Detectives knew he was holding back. He knew detectives knew he was holding back. Still, he kept his silence for an incredibly long time, then plied them with the implausible very-long-coffee-break-in-the-basement story.

  Fink was in his late 30s, a fit-looking man who spoke with a German accent. Figuring there had to be some reason he was so loathe to talk to them, detectives asked Joseph Fink if he had any previous arrests. Detective Prestia recorded he “was evasive relative to an assault he had committed on a female.” However, when the police ran a check, they found no arrests of any kind for Joseph Fink.

  In the time before lightning-fast c
omputer networks linked law enforcement databases and made information available in seconds, it was possible that Fink had been arrested in a jurisdiction outside of New York, and this was the reason they could find no records on him. With Fink’s caginess, it was impossible to be sure.

  When finally he relented, telling them what he had seen and heard of the matter at hand, they had to be satisfied with that.

  Joseph Fink spent the better part of March 13 at the 102nd precinct before giving a more credible version of events. Alerted by Kitty’s screams, he had looked outside to see the man catch her on the sidewalk. He saw the knife, he saw the man stab Kitty in the back, and he saw her collapse to the pavement. He heard the yelling from the windows, saw the man flee, watched Kitty struggle to her feet and limp away. His description of the assailant, when he was finally willing to give it, was the most detailed and would prove to be the most accurate.

  Fink still claimed he had gone down to the basement, but admitted that he had done so after the attack, not before.

  The mystery of Joseph Fink—why he failed to either help or summon help for Kitty Genovese, why he adamantly refused to aid in the investigation—would never have a definitive answer. Fink never explained himself to the police, nor to anyone else as far as is known. His identity was not made public at the time, but decades later he was mentioned by name by former Queens County Assistant District Attorney Charles Skoller during a discussion of the case. The revelation stirred the curiosity of a woman who lived in another area of Queens, not far from Kew Gardens.

  “My former superintendent, now deceased, of the co-op building where I moved in 1993 was named Joseph Fink,” she said. “He was foreign-born, Germany, I think, possibly Austria, and was in his late sixties when he died in a fall from a ladder outside my building around the late 1990s, possibly the year 2000. He had come to the building as a young man, I was told by old-time neighbors.”

  The woman wondered whether he was the same Joseph Fink from the Mowbray, moving to her building to escape the notoriety of the Genovese case. She described how he was waked at the time of his death, the room where he was laid out “looking rather Germanic-Medieval.” She added, “In my opinion he was a strange man all the years I knew him as my super, his little comments to both my teen son and myself forming my opinion of him.” She stated he was single and described him as wearing glasses, an “odd”-looking man with unruly hair. As for his role as superintendent, she said, “He was the best handyman, and my elderly neighbors liked to give him breakfast or other meals in exchange for household fix-its. My neighbors never mentioned his involvement with the Genovese case, but perhaps he never told anyone.”

  A few years after making his 2003 affidavit, Michael Hoffman, who lived in the Mowbray as a teenager from 1962 to 1965, said he did not recall anyone named Joseph Fink. He remembered one elevator man at the Mowbray who seemed to fit the description, although he did not think he was the night duty operator. Of this man, Hoffman recalled, “He had a heavy German accent. He hated Jewish people and the kids (even non-Jewish) called him ‘Adolph.’ He did wear glasses, but I’d have to put him around fifty [in 1964.] Of all the employees, not one was younger, all were close to or over fifty, and all were German or of German heritage.”

  Whatever the truth may be—whether the Joseph Fink from the Mowbray and the superintendent with the “German-Medieval” funeral wake were one in the same; whether Michael Hoffman, four decades later, misremembered which elevator man worked the night shift (or, more precisely, which one happened to be working that night); whether there was something in his psyche or his past or both that made Joseph Fink immune to the suffering of another person and averse to contact with authorities—the fact remained that he, stationed in the lobby of the Mowbray and thus perhaps in the best position to immediately grasp the urgency of the situation, did not involve himself in the slightest way during the ordeal of Kitty Genovese. This becomes all the more disturbing in light of what followed, once the killer fled and his victim was left alone on the sidewalk, injured and weeping. As Michael Hoffman further recalled:

  “Kitty was trying to get up and move almost as soon as the attacker took off, but she was not having an easy time of it, obviously. I’d estimate that it was about a full minute before she was somewhat erect. Kitty first leaned on the parked car she was next to, then the tree near it, and then staggered to the building. She was using the building for support, and it was about another minute or ninety seconds before she rounded the corner by the pharmacy. I called out where she went to my dad, who was still waiting for the police to answer.”

  Michael Hoffman claimed the officers thanked them that morning for calling the police after the Hoffmans told them that they had.

  Perhaps so. But the overwhelming feeling among the detectives on that day and ever after was that neither they nor Kitty Genovese had many people to thank.

  DETECTIVES JOHN CARROLL and Mitchell Sang were present for the initial examination of Catherine Genovese in the basement morgue at Queens General Hospital. After listing the clothing she wore, Detective Carroll wrote in his report: “All of the undergarments, brassiere, panties, girdle, shorts, were torn apart in the front. There were four separate and distinct slashes in the back of her outer jacket and blouse. The front of her blouse also had numerous perforations. There were immediately visible approximately eight wounds in the chest, abdomen, and throat and four wounds in her back.”

  In his postmortem report, Detective Carroll also noted cuts on the fingers and palm of the right hand. These injuries indicated that the victim had fought back, or at least attempted to defend herself.

  Dr. William Benenson, Assistant Medical Examiner for the City of New York, conducted an autopsy on Catherine Genovese later that morning. As required by law, a blood relative, in this case Catherine’s uncle, Vito Genovese, made an official identification of the deceased prior to autopsy.

  The autopsy revealed a total of thirteen stab wounds: four in her back, nine on the front of her body spread out from her inner thigh to her throat. Then there were the cuts on her hands and fingers that the detectives had noticed, defense wounds inflicted when she held up her hands to ward off the knife thrusts. In addition to the superficial cuts on the fingers, her right hand had an incision in the palm and another that reached down to the tendons.

  None of the wounds were especially deep. Even the neck gash, though 4¾ inches in length, had not penetrated deeply enough to sever a major artery. Dr. Benenson determined the cause of death as bilateral pneumothorax due to multiple stab wounds. Two of the cuts in her back had penetrated the right and left chest, slowly releasing air into the chest cavity. As a result of that, the lungs were compressed and breathing gradually became impossible. The stab wounds she sustained in the later attack had contributed to the chest cavity filling with air, leading to her death.

  Though she still would have been able to speak and cry out after the first attack, as the witnesses claimed, the wounds would have been extremely painful and no doubt very frightening, giving the sensation, moment to moment, of being able to breathe a little less. Though the back wounds may have ultimately been fatal, they had not, however, been imminently fatal.

  It had taken well over an hour for Kitty to slowly suffocate to death.

  As noted, DD5 reports typically are not imbued with emotion, certainly not that of the investigating officers. But some DD5s in the case of the Kitty Genovese homicide seem to betray a hint of feeling from detectives who wrote them. One report taken that morning included a statement from a woman who told them that she heard the screaming “but she didn’t bother to go to the window until she heard an ambulance on the scene.” This statement followed one from a husband and wife who gave an account of hearing “several screams for help,” then watching the man in the dark hat walk around the railroad parking lot “looking for something” before he walked to the back of the Tudor building.

  A call from the Hoffmans and an attempted call from Andree Picq notwithstanding, t
here were plenty of others who, the police felt, should have called. Particularly those who, unlike the Hoffmans, did hear the words Kitty cried out—“stabbed,” “help,” “dying.” With the number of people who acknowledged remaining at their windows for a prolonged period of time, it wasn’t as if it had all been over in an instant.

  While no one person did or could have seen the entire ordeal from start to finish—which police could now reasonably estimate at lasting about thirty or thirty-five minutes—there seemed sufficient ground for a number of them, based on what they did see or hear, to have contacted authorities at the very least.

  From another canvass of the Mowbray that morning, conducted by Detective George Volz and Patrolman Patrick Breen:

  —Heard screams of “Help me, help me, he is stabbing me or he stabbed me.” She saw nor heard nothing further.

  —Heard screams and saw the deceased fall in front of the bookstore and then saw a male bend over her, could not identify the perpetrator.

  —Heard screams of “Help me, help me,” and saw nor heard anything further.

  —They heard screams and saw her laying on the ground.

  —Heard screams but did not know what was said.

  —Heard screams, could not say what was said.

  From a DD5 written by Detective Edgar Sand, interviewing two others:

  —Stated she woke up when she heard the girl screaming and all she heard was the girl saying “Help me.” She looked out the window and saw a woman stagger out of sight.