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

by Pelonero, Catherine

  ON THURSDAY NIGHT, March 26, Martin Gansberg’s story was edited and slated for publication.

  The editors knew immediately what they had.

  The story, with photos, would run the next day—Good Friday, incidentally—on page one of the New York Times, right below the fold.

  There was one thorny issue the senior editors had to discuss: whether to print the names of the individuals to whom Gansberg had spoken.

  The New York Times was not a publication that cited “unnamed sources” in their reportage, particularly not back in 1964. Gansberg had the names, but there were legal and moral questions involved. The editors—Turner Catledge, Theodore Bernstein, Abe Rosenthal—anticipated the story would be big, not to mention inflammatory. They were also well aware that the accused, Winston Moseley, had not yet had a trial, nor would he for another couple of months. Printing the names of witnesses could not only be horribly embarrassing for those people, it could also potentially be dangerous. Little was known of Moseley; for all they knew he could have criminal associates who might try to harm the witnesses. In any event, exposing witnesses, some of whom might be called to testify in court, could also jeopardize the prosecution of a serious criminal case that was still in the early stages of preparation for trial.

  It was thus decided that an exception would be made. The only persons identified in the article by name would be the victim, the accused, and police officials.

  This suited reporter Martin Gansberg. The story was not about judging or embarrassing individuals. The story was not even about Kew Gardens, or New York City. It far transcended neighborhood, city, or even country.

  On a purely basic level, Gansberg felt anger and disdain for the people he had spoken to, as had the detectives. But he also pondered the situation in a greater context.

  As a student of philosophy, Martin Gansberg had contemplated fear of the stranger. On the eve of the publication of what would prove to be his most celebrated article—indeed one of the most pivotal news stories of the twentieth century, as it turned out—with the words and images of the people he had interviewed over the last two days fresh in his mind, he may have recalled the words of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, a man who had experienced neither Kew Gardens nor the twentieth century:

  “At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.”

  PART TWO

  TRIALS AND JUDGMENTS

  The sound of screaming was repeated several times . . . then it abruptly ceased. The silence that followed, as the night suddenly stood still, seemed interminable. I wanted to run and yet didn’t move an inch. I was trembling, I believe from cold and shock. I told myself that I had to be quick and felt an irresistible weakness steal over me. I have forgotten what I thought then. “Too late, too far . . .” or something of the sort. I was still listening as I stood motionless. Then, slowly, in the rain, I went away. I told no one.

  The Fall by Albert Camus,1956

  Are we different? Would anybody else, in any other community, have done differently?

  Unidentified woman in Kew Gardens, quoted in the Long Island Star-Journal, March 28, 1964

  chapter 13

  IT HIT THE newsstands two weeks to the day after Kitty’s murder. The morning of Friday, March 27, 1964. Good Friday.

  On the front page of the New York Times, right below the fold, the headline blared: “37 WHO SAW MURDER DIDN’T CALL THE POLICE.” A smaller heading underneath read, “Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector.”

  Written by Martin Gansberg, the opening paragraph read, “For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.” The story went on to describe how the assailant had been frightened off twice by the sound of neighbors’ voices and the glow of apartment lights snapping on. Gansberg had spoken to at least one neighbor who told him of an assault on the side of the Tudor building. Stating that no one had called police during the assault and only one witness had called after the woman was dead, the article described how shocked Inspector Frederick Lussen was over the “good people” failing to call. Lussen was quoted as saying that as the police had reconstructed the crime, “the assailant had three chances to kill this woman during a 35-minute period. He returned twice to complete the job. If we had been called when he first attacked, the woman might not be dead now.”

  Ultimately the question of how many times Winston Moseley attacked Kitty would not be sorted out until the District Attorney’s Office could interview witnesses and compare their statements against the claims of the killer, a process the D.A.’s office had not yet begun, overwhelmed as they were by the complications in the Barbara Kralik homicide. Reporter Martin Gansberg wrote what he was told by police and witnesses.

  The article continued with an account of the crime attributed to the police, describing how Kitty Genovese had returned home to “the staid, middle-class, tree-lined Austin Street area” at 3:20 a.m., had been grabbed by the man underneath the streetlight in front of the bookstore, how she had screamed and lights had gone on in the tenstory building across the street. “Windows slid open and voices punctured the early-morning stillness.” The story mentioned that there was a police call box on the corner of Austin and Lefferts.

  “Miss Genovese screamed: ‘Oh, my God, he stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!’ ” It gave an account of a neighbor shouting from an upper window, the assailant retreating, and Kitty struggling to her feet. “Lights went out.” It stated that the killer returned and stabbed Kitty while she was trying to make her way around the side of the building, Kitty shrieking, “I’m dying! I’m dying!” The article described lights again going on and windows again opening, the attacker retreating and driving away in his car, and Kitty staggering to her feet again.

  As it would later be determined, this attack did not happen. The description of it had come about as a result of confusion among witnesses. An account of a second attack—coming after the stabbing in front of the bookstore and before the gruesome finale in the hallway—no doubt raised the horror level of the story for readers.

  The article attempted to guide the reader almost step-by-step through the victim’s harrowing journey to her death while highlighting the fact that much of it happened on the street, in public view. Mention was made that a city bus passed at 3:35 a.m. (“Q-10, the Lefferts Boulevard line to Kennedy International Airport”), although at that time, Kitty would have reached the back of the building and would no longer have been in view of anyone on the bus or the street.

  In recounting the final assault, the article described the killer’s return, stating that by this time Kitty had “crawled to the back of the building” and that the killer found her at the bottom of the stairs in the hallway at 82-62 Austin Street, where he stabbed her fatally. The story included sizeable photographs marked with numbers showing the victim’s path and the locations of the attacks (including the alleged second attack on the side of the Tudor building), as well as the location of the final murderous assault in the hallway and the entrance to Kitty’s own apartment, illustrating just how close to home—and safety—she had been when overtaken for the last time. The effect was chilling.

  “It was 3:50 by the time the police received their first call, from a man who was a neighbor of Miss Genovese,” Gansberg wrote. “In two minutes they were at the scene.” It said that the neighbor and two women were the only persons on the scene when police arrived. Though they were not named, the two women were obviously Greta Schwartz and Sophie Farrar. No mention was made of Sophie’s efforts to comfort Kitty as she lay dying. It’s very possible that Gansberg did not know about this; Sophie Farrar was certainly not roaming the neighborhood declaring her heroism, nor did many neighbors or even all of the detectives know what she had done for Kitty. Though its inclusion may have added a sliver of humanity to the story, all things considered, it’s arguable whether it would have changed the overall perception of what happened that night
in Kew Gardens.

  Without mentioning Karl Ross by name—or giving an account of his conversation with Mrs. Archer—the article stated that he had called a friend in Nassau County for advice, then crossed the roof to a neighbor’s apartment to get her to make the call to police. Then came a quote from Ross that would come to define both the horrid death of Kitty Genovese and the public persona of the neighborhood of Kew Gardens: “I didn’t want to get involved.”

  The next two paragraphs told of the arrest of Winston Moseley six days after Kitty’s murder, mentioning also his admissions to the murders of Annie Mae Johnson and Barbara Kralik (including the fact that in the Kralik case, police were holding Alvin L. Mitchell “who is said to have confessed that slaying”). The next part discussed how easy it would have been for the witnesses to Kitty’s murder to contact police. Quoting an unnamed detective: “A phone call would have done it.”

  The next line stated that police could be reached by dialing ‘0’ for the operator or by direct dial to “SPring 7-3100.”

  The following paragraph raised the question of whether there were legal repercussions for witnesses to a crime who failed to act. Quoting a representative from the police department’s legal bureau: “There is no legal responsibility, with few exceptions, for any citizen to report a crime.” The statutes of the city required a witness to a violent or suspicious death to report it to the medical examiner. State law deemed that a witness to a kidnapping could not withhold information about it.

  After this came a brief description of the neighborhood, “which is made up of one-family homes in the $35,000 to $60,000 range” (well above the median home price of $18,900 in the United States at the time, thus emphasizing the upscale status of the neighborhood), “with the exception of the two apartment houses by the railroad station.” Lieutenant Bernard Jacobs was quoted as saying Kew Gardens was “one of the better neighborhoods,” with scarce reports of crime, and even those typically were crimes of a minor nature. The remainder of the article discussed the neighbors and the reasons they gave for why they had not called the police that night. According to the police Gansberg interviewed, the answer most witnesses had given them was that they had been too afraid to call, an excuse that did not pass muster with Lieutenant Bernard Jacobs. While conceding that the police understood why citizens would be hesitant to physically intervene in a violent crime, he added, “but where they are in their homes, near phones, why should they be afraid to call the police?” Jacobs said that the information provided by witnesses in the days following the murder had allowed police to reconstruct the sequence of events and capture the suspect. He was then quoted as asking unbelievingly, “But why didn’t someone call us that night?”

  The story continued, “Witnesses—some of them unable to believe what they had allowed to happen—told a reporter why.” Gansberg then recounted some of what neighbors had told him. In painful detail, he included quotes from witnesses who said they were afraid, or thought it was a lovers’ quarrel, or did not want to become involved. He quoted one couple, a husband and wife, who heard the first screams. “We went to the window to see what was happening,” said the husband, “but the light from our bedroom made it difficult to see the street.” The wife then said, “I put out the light and we were able to see better.” Gansberg asked them why they didn’t call the police. The wife “shrugged and replied: ‘I don’t know.’ ”

  Gansberg described another man who peeked out from his apartment door and rattled off an account of the “second attack.” “Why hadn’t he called the police at the time? ‘I was tired,’ he said without emotion. ‘I went back to bed.’ ”

  Presumably, with Gansberg’s understanding of the crime, this account of the “second attack” would have been Kitty’s cries of, “I’m dying!” while struggling along the side of the Tudor building.

  The article concluded with the ambulance arriving at 4:25 a.m. to carry away the body of Kitty Genovese (Gansberg apparently was not aware that she had in fact still been alive at this time). The final sentences referred to the departure of the ambulance. “It drove off. ‘Then,’ a solemn police detective said, ‘the people came out.’ ”

  From the moment of its publication on that morning in the spring of 1964, the article caused a major sensation.

  Throughout New York City and its suburbs, millions of people read the horrifying story of the apathetic witnesses to a young woman’s gruesome, drawn-out murder. It would not remain a local story for long, however; it was immediately picked up by newswires, radio, and television, reported and reprinted across the country and around the world.

  The story was huge, beyond even what the editors at the New York Times had anticipated. As Abe Rosenthal would later say, “Very few stories transfer immediately their essential meaning from the victim or the participant to the reader. This did.

  “There were two questions: How did it happen? And the second question was, what would I have done?”

  The latter question did not seem to be on the minds of most readers. Stunned and horrified, they wanted to know more about Kitty’s aberrant, coldhearted neighbors. The rest of the media wanted a piece of the uproar.

  On the same day, March 27, reporters from other New York newspapers, photographers, television crews, and curious citizens descended on the quiet community of Kew Gardens, rushing through with notepads and cameras in hand, eager to speak with any of the witnesses. Among the throngs who beat a path over to Kew Gardens were reporters from the newspaper New York Journal-American.

  The Journal-American had in fact come to Kew Gardens on March 13, the day of the murder, to write a story which they printed the same day: a brief but dramatically written article that ran on page six, titled, “A KNIFE FLASHES . . . A LIFE EBBS.” A vivid introduction described the stabbing of Kitty Genovese and her plea for help, followed by an interview with Sophie Farrar: “I was awakened by Kitty’s scream. I ran down and found her with her shoes off her feet. Her clothes were partly ripped off. She was bleeding and kept moaning something I couldn’t understand.

  “I cradled her in my arms. I could see the stab wounds, I could feel her slipping away. I kept asking her, ‘Kitty, who did it . . . who did it?’ But she never answered.”

  Giving a couple details about Kitty and where police said she had been just prior to the attack, the article concluded with further quotes from Sophie: “Kitty was a wonderful girl. She was a real spitfire and the life of the party. She couldn’t have had any enemies.” The last line was the reporter’s own grim rejoinder, “Obviously, Kitty Genovese had one.”

  Now, galvanized by the New York Times article, the Journal-American and fellow members of the press rushed over to Kew Gardens to find some who might perhaps be described as passive “enemies” of Kitty Genovese.

  The New York Journal-American produced its own front-page story in the March 27, 1964, late edition. Including the overhead photograph of Austin Street borrowed from the New York Times and headlined, “THIS IS THE SHOCKING STORY OF 37 WITNESSES WHO SAW EVIL, BUT CHOSE TO DO NOTHING,” it began with an unusual and remarkable introduction, set in italics, from the Journal-American’s editors:

  “As any newspaper reader knows, it is a tradition—a bad one, we think—that a good job for the community’s welfare by one newspaper is ignored by other newspapers.

  Too many editors, it seems to us, pay little or no attention to the harddigging efforts by what newspapermen call the ‘opposition.’

  Sometimes, a valuable service rendered to the entire community—even the nation—goes unnoticed and unsupported by all except the readers of one newspaper.

  All of which leads up to the fact that the New York Times did an important job for New Yorkers today. It was the shocking story—in dramatic detail—of a murder that might not have happened if any one of 37 of our fellow New Yorkers had acted as a good citizen should.

  So, on this page, we are giving credit to the New York Times that it deserves. We are using the facts The Times so alertly and aggressive
ly uncovered—and adding any facts that we dug up on our own.

  Moreover, we are going to keep at this story—and have already arranged for an analysis of our strange attitude toward crime being committed in the city. See it on Sunday. But read the shocking story that follows.

  THE EDITORS”

  The article began with a rehash of the New York Times story—although the Journal-American, unlike the Times, did name Karl Ross, mentioning both his “I didn’t want to get involved” quote as well as his arrest for interfering with police—immediately followed by a supplement of the Journal-American’s own interviews in Kew Gardens. Written by Helen Sutton and Charles Roland, a bold headline declared: “ASTONISHING THINGS SOME OF THE WITNESSES TOLD US TODAY.”

  The piece differed from that of the New York Times in two respects: it contained lengthier quotes from witnesses in the Mowbray, and it also gave their names.

  The first person interviewed was a thirty-five-year-old man who worked for an advertising firm on Madison Avenue. He said he had been asleep when, around 3:30 that morning, he heard a noise and thought at first his TV was still on. “But then I heard a woman’s voice: ‘Please, somebody; please help me, oh God!’

  “I walked to the window, opened it. The voice was a little lower now. She said ‘help.’

  “I looked out but didn’t see anything. I felt that if I heard anything else I could tell where the voice came from. But I never heard another thing. I thought it was a dream.

  “If only she’d screamed once more, or if I’d seen anyone, I’d have jumped into my pants and run downstairs. Her first shout was so strong, it woke me—and I sleep tight. If she’d screamed just once more, I’d have called the police.”

  He then explained that he wouldn’t have known where to send the police if he had called them, since he had not seen anyone being hurt, and was not sure if the screams had come from the outside or from inside a home. He added that if he had called the police, he didn’t know whether they would have arrived in time to save the girl.