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

by Pelonero, Catherine

  BACK AT THE 114th precinct at 3:30 p.m., with the matter of the burglaries out of the way, Detective John Tartaglia resumed questioning Winston Moseley. Even after the arrest of his father, Moseley maintained his same cool composure. It was this utter calm, in fact, coupled with Moseley’s obviously shrewd mind that caused Tartaglia to have further suspicions about him. Moseley committed dozens of burglaries without clear motive or any discernible purpose. He offered no reasons, no excuses. Could it be that he simply enjoyed criminal acts? His conscience didn’t seem to be bothering him any more than the prospect of going to jail. Despite his gentle, unassuming surface, he obviously had the mettle for brazen home invasions. What else was he capable of?

  Tartaglia asked Moseley if he had committed any crimes other than burglaries. Assaults, for instance. Moseley remained silent. Tartaglia was content to let him think about it for a minute. As for the detective, his mind was on a series of recent unsolved attacks on women in the area. The attacks had all happened late at night in sections of Queens that encompassed Moseley’s burglary hunting grounds. On separate occasions between January and March, four different women had escaped the perpetrator with varying degrees of trauma. All four had been close enough to get a good look at the man who assaulted them. Each described a young, thin black man with a light complexion, about five-foot-eight, five-foot-nine inches tall, about 135 lbs. He wore a dark overcoat and threatened each with a weapon. In each case he had taken their money, although that was the least of what he had done.

  Moseley fit the physical description to a tee. He did not have the aura of a vicious predator. Then again, a placid surface on the sea often conceals a deadly riptide.

  Tartaglia had also noted that Moseley’s car was a white Chevy Corvair. Detectives in Homicide and the 102nd were looking for a night stalker who drove a car like that, wanted for questioning in the homicide of a young woman last Friday over in Kew Gardens.

  Tartaglia had nothing to lose by putting it out there. Looking directly at Moseley, he accused him of a heinous act; over in Jackson Heights on the night of March 1, a man jumped into an idling car and stuck a rifle into the belly of a woman sitting in the passenger seat, telling the startled woman, “Don’t say a word or I’ll blow you apart.” The woman had escaped from the car. As she ran screaming down the street, the man slipped out of the car and escaped into the night himself. “That was you, wasn’t it, Moseley?”

  A suspect’s reaction to an accusation can tell a great deal. Whether the suspect suddenly appears nervous, becomes sullen, or looks back in wide-eyed shock, staunchly proclaiming his innocence, a detective can gauge a suspect’s instant response and go from there. With suspect Winston Moseley, there was barely any “there” there.

  He did not flinch, did not protest. Neither his eyes nor body language registered anything more than the almost supernatural calm he had exhibited from the beginning. But he did answer. Meeting the look of Detective John Tartaglia with a gaze as gentle and unmoved as Tartaglia’s was stern and serious, Winston Moseley replied, “I guess I did do that.”

  I guess I did do that.

  Of the two men, the detective may have been the one feeling momentarily unnerved. John Tartaglia had suspected there might be something hidden beneath the calm—too calm—exterior of this non-threatening little man. But whether he was indeed the violent predator (or one of them anyway) that detectives had been searching for remained to be seen. As experienced police officers know, just because a person claims a crime as his or her own does not guarantee that it is, as there are certain individuals who, for reasons perhaps better understood by psychiatrists, will confess to crimes they did not commit. Detective Tartaglia had to find out if Winston Moseley was telling him the truth. He asked Moseley about another assault, one that had taken place the same night as the one in Jackson Heights and shortly afterward. A woman walking alone had been approached by a man fitting the same description as the Jackson Heights attacker. As in the other attack, the man had thrust the barrel of a rifle into her stomach. The woman screamed and fought back, grabbing the barrel of the gun and twisting it away from her stomach. The man struck her repeatedly in the face, then snatched the gun away and fled.

  “I guess I did that too.”

  Tartaglia pressed on. They would bring the victims in to see if they could identify Moseley. In the meantime, Tartaglia wanted to know more. Moseley fit the description in two other serious attacks. Before dawn on January 31, a woman waiting alone for her ride to work had been grabbed by a man who put a screwdriver to her neck. Forcing her into a vacant lot, he told her to lie down. She protested, saying that people would be coming by, pleading that she had a family. He unzipped his fly and made her give him oral sex, after which he took off. On February 15, a woman in Jamaica awoke to find a strange man in her bedroom. Her husband worked nights and she was alone with her three young children. Seeing the man in her room, she jumped up and screamed. The intruder brandished a knife, told her to stop screaming and she wouldn’t be hurt, be quiet and lie down on the bed. She begged him to please not do anything here, with her baby in the room. “The hell with the damn baby,” he told her.

  But then he relented, telling her to go into another bedroom. She stepped out, closing the bedroom door behind her. Instead of going into another bedroom, she made a mad dash down the stairs. He caught up with her at the bottom, told her to lie down and pull her nightgown up. She told him that her husband would be home any minute. Then she said that she had just cashed a large payroll check and offered to give him the money. He told her to go get it. Walking into her kitchen, she put the light on. The man had followed her. She could not find her wallet. The man held the knife against her and told her if she didn’t find it, she’d be sorry. While the woman searched in the kitchen, the man stepped into another room. When she heard him rummaging through something, she bolted out the back door and ran screaming to her neighbor’s house. As her neighbors came to the door, she saw the man run out the front door of her house, jump into a car, and speed away.

  He never got the money from her wallet. All he had stolen, before he woke her, was the television.

  Moseley denied these two attacks at first. But when Detective Tartaglia stood over him, saying that he was going to bring the women into the station house, Moseley relented. Yes, he had done those things, but that was all. The burglaries and those four assaults—that was it.

  Tartaglia shouted, eyes ablaze. “The hell it is!”

  It was time for Tartaglia to test him. Pointing to a wanted poster on the wall that the detective well knew was not Moseley but which the suspect could not see clearly, he said, “That’s you, isn’t it?”

  Moseley denied it, genuinely. “I don’t know what you’re talking about now.” Tartaglia persisted with the accusation but Moseley remained firm; that was not him. He did not know anything about any taxi cab holdups.

  So Moseley was not going to confess to just any crime the detective brought up. Good. He had confessed to multiple violent crimes against women, however.

  Tartaglia excused himself. He had more to ask Winston Moseley, but first he had to make some phone calls.

  SUMMONED TO THE 114th precinct by John Tartaglia, Detectives John Carroll and Jerry Byrnes of Homicide and Detectives Mitchell Sang and Bruno Pokstis of the 102nd were eager to speak with the suspect. Albert Seedman, commander of four squads in Queens, had also come to the 114th to check out this suspect.

  It was now 5:30 p.m. The assault victims had been brought to the station earlier. Each had positively identified Moseley as her attacker. Now the detectives had another recent crime against a woman to ask him about.

  A group of detectives—Carroll, Byrnes, Sang, Pokstis, Tartaglia, Seedman—gathered around Moseley. For the first time, his impregnable wall of calm wavered slightly. He looked up at the officers standing before him with a new alertness, like a rabbit suddenly attuned to the presence of a troop of foxes in his midst. Detective John Carroll clutched Moseley’s thin hands, holding t
hem up closer to the overhead light in order to take a closer look.

  Where did those cuts on his fingers come from?

  He said the cuts had come from working around his house. He had scratched himself doing work around the house.

  “That’s not how it happened,” a detective countered.

  Detective Carroll finished the thought. He accused Moseley of getting the cuts when he stabbed Kitty Genovese.

  Silence. Winston Moseley looked around for a beat. Then a small smile crept across his expressionless face.

  “Okay. I killed her.”

  For a moment no one spoke, no one moved. In an odd twist, the detectives were more anxious, more cautious than the suspect. They told him to start at the beginning, the day of Thursday, March 12, 1964.

  Winston Moseley told of how he had gone to work as usual that Thursday morning, putting in a full day at Raygram, then heading over to his father’s shop for a few hours. He had returned home around 9:00 p.m. He fixed food for his dogs, ate a sandwich himself, and kissed his wife when she left for work. With the two children in bed, he had watched TV for a while and drank some beer. It had been earlier in the evening, he thought, when he had gotten the idea of going out later that night to find a girl to kill.

  A detective, perhaps baffled by this blunt admission so casually made, asked if he planned to rob the girl. Maybe, Moseley said, but robbing her was not his priority. His main goal had been to find a girl he could rape and kill. Or preferably, as the detectives would discover, kill and rape. But he had to find the right one; meaning simply a girl all alone. Also, he thought he’d like to find a white woman this time. Usually he sought women of his own race to victimize, but tonight, though he was not sure why, he decided to look for a white woman. With this mission in mind, he had left his house at about 2:00 a.m. He recalled that he wore black pants, black shoes, a brown sweater and shirt, and a light gray coat. He placed a hunting knife in his right coat pocket. The knife had come from one of his burglaries.

  “I got in the car and drove to Queens Boulevard and Yellowstone Avenue and I started cruising around the neighborhood looking for a woman alone in a car. About three o’clock I did manage to find one on the street.”

  Where was this? Somewhere on Jamaica Avenue. A woman getting into her car by herself. He kept her in sight in his rearview mirror to make sure she was alone in her car. His quarry had to be alone; he did not assault women in groups, even if there were only two. Certainly never a woman accompanied by a man. This woman, then, fit the bill. When she pulled away from the curb, he had followed, leaving a little distance between them so she would not notice. But her car moved along at a good rate of speed so he had to hurry to keep up.

  “She drove to a parking lot and stopped her car. As soon as she stopped hers, I was following her and I stopped mine. While she was getting out of her car, I had already gotten out of mine and I ran into the parking lot before she really got out of the car. She got out of the car and she saw me and she was frightened right away and she started to run.”

  He described how he ran after her down the sidewalk, hunting knife in hand. She ran fast, he said, but he ran faster. He stabbed her in the back. She fell to her knees.

  Had he said anything to her? No, nothing. After he stabbed her and she was down, he looked around for a place he could drag her. But she kept screaming, and lights had come on in some of the apartments. Somebody yelled out. He didn’t know exactly what was said, but it had frightened him. He thought of his car parked just down the street. Abandoning the girl, he ran back to his car, jumped in and started it, putting it in reverse gear. As he backed his car away, he saw that the girl had gotten up. She was not dead.

  He backed up to the nearest cross street, driving in reverse down the cross street for about a half a block. He waited in his car for about ten minutes. Everything remained quiet. No voices, sirens, or doors slamming. He got out of his car and started walking back to where he’d left her.

  A detective interrupted; wasn’t he afraid somebody had come out to help the girl? Called the police? Didn’t he fear the police might be on the way?

  At this, Moseley’s little smile reappeared. There was a hint of the paternal in his voice, as if giving a gentle but assured answer to the guileless inquiry of a child. “Oh, I knew they wouldn’t do anything. People never do,” he said. “That late at night, they just go back to sleep.”

  Even when they don’t go back to sleep, they still don’t do anything, the detectives had learned. A bitter thought, but who could argue this point? None of the detectives even tried. They let him continue.

  “So I came back thinking that I would find her.”

  He started at the place where he’d first caught her. He looked around and tried a couple of the doors to see if she’d somehow gotten inside. Satisfied that everything was locked up on this part of the street, he proceeded to the parking lot to continue his search.

  “I came back into the parking lot and thought maybe she had gone to the train station. She wasn’t in the train station. It was locked.” Looking behind him, he noticed the walkway in back of the building. He walked over. There were doors down there, entrances to the building. “So I said, ‘Well,’ to myself, ‘Well, perhaps she is in one of these hallways.’ I tried the first door in this row of houses and the door was locked.” He thought she may have made it home safe. But just to be sure . . . “The second door I tried opened, I opened, and there she was laying on the floor.”

  “When she saw me, she started screaming again. So I stabbed her a few more times. She seemed to quiet down a little bit.” He stabbed her in the throat to quell the screaming. She only moaned after that. The stabbing reduced both her noise as well as her desperate efforts to get away. “So she wasn’t really struggling that hard with me now. So I lifted up her skirt and I cut off her girdle. I even cut or pulled her panties off and she had a sanitary pad and I picked that out and threw it away and I stabbed her again in the stomach. I cut off her brassiere and I don’t remember whether I cut her blouse or not.” Cutting off her bra, he saw she wore falsies. Her breasts were not as big as he had thought. “I guess it made me mad. I cut her across the right breast.

  “While this was going on, I could hear there were people awake upstairs. I heard somebody opening a door upstairs and, as a matter of fact, I could hear a mumbled voice upstairs. But when I looked up there I didn’t see anybody. I didn’t feel that these people were coming down anyway, so after she was not struggling with me anymore, I lifted up her skirt and cut off the rest of her undergarments.” He put his head between her legs and licked her. Then he pulled his penis out of his pants. He did not have an erection, so he laid on top of her. Even the knowledge that he was being watched did not dissuade him from the sexual assault. “I heard the door open up there at least twice, maybe three times.” But again, he did not think anyone would come downstairs. And he was right. Nobody did.

  This information hit Detective Mitchell Sang particularly hard. He knew Karl Ross had been lying to him. Ross knew full well what was happening to Kitty. Now there was no doubt. And of course this second round of stabbing and sexual assault had happened after Karl Ross, Mrs. Archer, and God knows who else had heard Kitty calling for help at the bottom of the stairs. Repeatedly calling for Karl by name. It’s Kitty. I’m stabbed. Help me . . .

  But Moseley said he heard a door open two or three times over the course of the hallway attack. Was that only Karl Ross’s door, or had the other apartment door up there opened as well?

  The police would never know for sure.

  Moseley went on. After his orgasm, he slipped the knife between her legs, sticking it inside her vagina. “I would have pulled the knife straight up, but the bone stopped me from being able to do that.”

  The sexual assault now completed to his satisfaction, he decided to take whatever she had in her pockets. “I looked through her pockets and I took everything she had, which were some keys, some makeup, a bottle of pills, and $49 she had in cash. I
took one of the false pads that she had in the brassiere because it had blood on it and I touched it with my finger and I didn’t want to leave it.”

  Leave no fingerprints. Smart. But by this point, the detectives already knew he was no idiot. They were not sure what else he was, however. His demeanor seemed all wrong. He had just described a horrific assault in the same calm, casual way he had spoken of the burglaries. He didn’t even show the excitement some killers will exhibit when describing the mechanics of a savage act that thrills them. Regardless of how he told the story, the detectives now knew he was the killer of Kitty Genovese. The information about the missing false pad from Kitty’s bra had never been disclosed to the press. The only ones who knew that detail were detectives and the medical examiner who performed Kitty’s autopsy. And the man who took it.

  Moseley said he looked up the stairs one last time before leaving the victim. He didn’t see anybody up there. Yes, the victim was definitely still alive when he left. He walked out the door. “Instead of going back through the parking lot, I walked around the block and came back on the opposite side of the street.” Had he seen anyone at all? “The only thing I saw was a milk truck with a deliveryman in it.” This had to be Edward Fiesler, making a delivery at the grocery store on Austin Street. “I walked around to the car and back to the street, parallel to the street that I first followed her on, and I started driving home. As I drove home, I threw out the keys, the bottle of makeup, and the case that the pills were in. I got to Hillside Avenue and Van Wyck Expressway and stopped and threw out this false pad from the brassiere that I picked up. From there I went straight home.”

  And the hunting knife? “It’s in a toolbox at my house. I washed it first.”

  They went over his story again. He remembered that he had changed hats between the first and second attacks. When he first chased her down he had been wearing a dark stocking cap on his head. After going back to his car, he took that off and put on a black fedora before returning to finish the job. He had kept the money he took from Kitty, but he threw her wallet into some bushes at the Raygram parking lot.