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

by Pelonero, Catherine

  “Well, some of them, I would say.”

  Judge Shapiro asked, “You mean that in front of your young son, you and your husband talked about your relations with another man?”

  “Well, he heard arguments,” Fannie answered.

  “I didn’t ask you that,” said the judge. “I asked you whether or not you discussed these things, your relations, or alleged relations with another man in front of this young son of yours?”

  “Well, I’ll have to say yes, at times.”

  Under questioning by Sidney Sparrow, Fannie said she saw her son about four weekends per year, or eight days total per year, from the time he was eleven until he was eighteen. Asked what Winston’s attitude with her had been during those years, Fannie answered, “Oh, we had a very happy relationship, Winston and I, during this time, but he was still very quiet.” Fannie told the jury that she had come to live with her son and his current wife about four years ago, living there sometimes and at other times with her boyfriend. She had remained at her son’s home after his arrest, moving out a month before the trial started. Asked what Winston’s demeanor had been like during these four years she had lived with him intermittently, she said, “Well, during that time Winston was moody. Occasionally he would be very happy and very jolly. Maybe he would play a record and he would seem happy, but it was only for a very, very short period of time. And then after that most of the time he sat alone and he brooded. And we would ask and ask, ‘Winston, what’s the matter? What can we do? What’s wrong?’ ” Fannie Moseley then broke down into sobs.

  Sparrow asked what Winston’s attitude had been with his children. Fannie answered that he had always been kind and gentle to them, and they loved him. “We all love Winston,” she said. “Winston was just our king.”

  “Did he show any signs of violence in the house at any time?” Sparrow asked.

  “Never. Never.”

  Fannie spoke of how much Winston loved his dogs, how well he cared for them. Sparrow brought her back to the conflicts between herself and Alphonso that had culminated with her estranged husband stalking her and threatening to shoot her. Fannie said she had discussed these threats with Winston and “this upset him very much and he spoke to his father about it.” She pinpointed the time of this incident as the middle of the summer of 1963. Fannie said that from that time on, Winston had been even more quiet and withdrawn. She said she knew nothing of him ever leaving the house during the middle of the night. In her visits to him since his arrest, she found his demeanor to be the same as always.

  On cross-examination, Frank Cacciatore asked Fannie about her son’s house and the room within it that he had converted into a bedroom for her. He had Fannie confirm that her son owned this nice house; that he went to work every day, and that his salary had been steadily increased over the years; that the defendant had been coherent during conversations. He asked Fannie about the many pets her son had kept and cared for. Fannie mentioned that ants had been his hobby ever since she could remember.

  “Ants?” Cacciatore asked. “Busy people, hah?”

  “Yes. He had a little enclosure for ants and he studied them.”

  “I see. Did you ever hear the term, ‘Go to the ant thou sluggard?’ Did you ever hear that?”

  “Yes, I have,” she answered. “I have no further questions.”

  The defense called Alphonso Moseley. Like his wife before him, Alphonso spoke of their troubled relationship; the broken home, the infidelity, the withdrawn child who related better to animals than to people. Neither of the Moseleys spared themselves in depictions of their ongoing tumultuous relationship and how the fallout from it had inevitably bled into their son’s life. Alphonso testified that he had known from the outset that Winston was not his biological child but always considered him his own son and had raised him as such. As close as they had been, Winston had never, as child or adult, ever spoken to Alphonso about his feelings, always changing the subject whenever Alphonso asked him what he was thinking or feeling. Of his relationship with Winston he said, “I never was able to crash his inner self. I was a brother like. We palled a lot, but I never could crash his surface. I never could invite anyone and introduce him and they’d become friendly. I never could tie him down to anything except what he wanted to be tied down with, such as friendships, social gatherings, and the like. He always had his own way about selecting these things.”

  Alphonso admitted that he had threatened and stalked his wife with a gun the prior year after their sixth and final reconciliation attempt, when Alphonso discovered that Fannie was still seeing the other man. Alphonso recounted the conversation he had with Winston outside his repair shop after his son discovered that Alphonso was on the verge of murdering Fannie. “He told me that I’d lose everything if I did this,” Alphonso said. “He said, ‘You know mother is not going to stay. She is not going to stay. With this man here, she is not going to stay with him [either]. She is not going to stay with you, so destroying her this way will do you no good. Let me do it.’ I got up and walked back inside.”

  Cacciatore leaped on this during cross-examination. “He tried to reason with you. Isn’t that so? To try to stop you from doing any harm to yourself or to anybody else; isn’t that so?”

  “That’s true.”

  Judge Shapiro said, “In other words, he was saying to you, it would be wrong for you to kill your wife.”

  “It would kill my wife and myself. That’s the way he put it.”

  “So that would be wrong,” the judge said.

  “Yes.”

  “Then he asked you for the gun?”

  “He told me to give him the gun and let him do what I said I’d do.”

  “Didn’t you think he was trying to get the gun away from you so you wouldn’t harm your wife?” Shapiro asked.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking at the time,” Alphonso answered.

  “Certainly you didn’t think he was going to shoot your wife, did you?” Cacciatore asked.

  “I most certainly didn’t give him the gun.”

  WINSTON’S FIRST WIFE, Leora, testified next. She told of the infidelity and tumult that had marked their ill-fated teen marriage. She said that their sex life had been normal. Asked if Winston ever spoke about his parents, she replied, “Always. He mostly talked about when he was a kid. He felt he was thrown from one person to the next and he didn’t have a home; self-pity, I guess.” She told of the incident where Winston had pointed a gun at her and she in turn had pointed it at him. She spoke of his fascination with ants, his pity for his father, and his frequent moody silence.

  Elizabeth Moseley took the stand. She described her husband as a man who was always quiet and always thinking. She spoke of his meticulous neatness and his extreme shyness. He never undressed in front of her. Asked about their sexual relations, she said, “Well, at first it was normal or what you consider normal. Then later it was more what they describe as cunnilingus.” She said he needed it as a stimulus before intercourse.

  Asked if he had ever been violent, she replied, “Never. As a matter of fact, the whole time I’ve known him, he’s never cursed, even said ‘hell’ or anything like that.” She said he had never yelled at her or at the children, nor at anybody else as far as she knew. Bettye spoke also of his devotion to animals, particularly his dogs and his ants. To her, he had never complained about his parents or said anything disparaging of them; never expressed any feelings or attitudes about them at all, not even when Bettye would ask.

  She did recall Winston becoming unusually upset at the end of her pregnancy, when he learned that she might have to undergo a Caesarean section. Bettye herself had taken it in stride, and she could not understand why the prospect of a C-section caused her husband such distress. He so feared his wife having this procedure that he did not want to have any more children. For Sidney Sparrow, this acute fear stemmed from Winston’s childhood trauma: his mother’s abdominal surgery had marked the time when, for all intents and purposes, he had lost her.


  Sparrow asked Bettye to describe the changes in her husband’s behavior that she had noted in the months prior to his arrest. She told of his constant beer drinking, his sitting and staring.

  “Did you ever speak to him about this?” Sparrow asked.

  “Yes. I felt that something was wrong. He would just say nothing. ‘Thinking, as usual,’ he would say.”

  Bettye Moseley recounted the morning of Winston’s arrest. She told of how she had found him in their bedroom, staring out the window, and the argument that had ensued before he left the house.

  “Have you spoken to him about these things that he told the police he did?” Sparrow asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Has he shown any compassion or any remorse to you at any time about any of these?”

  “None that I know of,” Bettye answered.

  Frank Cacciatore’s cross-examination of Bettye Moseley yielded little new information. Once again, the jury heard about the defendant’s interest in ants, his love for dogs, and his mundane home life. Asked what she recalled about March 12, the day preceding the murder, she said that nothing unusual had happened. It had been like any other day.

  The defense called Winston Moseley to the stand.

  Sidney Sparrow took his client through a step-by-step account of his lonely childhood. Responding to Sparrow’s questions, he told of his first sexual experience at the age of sixteen with an older, married black woman who lived in the same apartment building in Pittsburgh as his mother. Regarding his first marriage and Leora’s affair with a bartender, he said he didn’t fault the man for it. He said he had feared the bartender and his friends. His account of the gun incident with Leora matched what she had told the jury.

  In his calm, articulate manner, Winston Moseley verified the incidents told by his parents and his wives. He said he still believed that Alphonso Moseley was his father despite having been told otherwise by Alphonso himself.

  “Do you believe he is your father now?” Sparrow asked.

  “I still believe he is my father.”

  Asked about his dogs, he said that Wolfie was his favorite “Because she was not friendly with anybody else but me.”

  Sidney Sparrow asked if he had ever committed any crime prior to the summer of 1963. He responded that he had been arrested once as a juvenile for attempting to burglarize a hobby shop and had spent a week in jail for that offense.

  He said that Bettye had been working nights for about a year when, in the summer of 1963, he had begun his adult criminal activities. He told of his first burglary, climbing through the window of a random home in the middle of the night.

  “Was anybody at home with the children?” Sparrow asked.

  “No, there wasn’t. Nobody but the dogs.”

  “What did you do, just walk out and leave them there?”

  “I felt the children were safe home. I felt that as long as the dogs were at home, that they would be safe.”

  “And you committed this burglary?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did it bother you that you had done it?”

  “No.”

  “Did you do it for money?”

  “No,” Moseley answered. “I didn’t really need money. I always had a lot of times a hundred or two hundred dollars in my pocket at the time.”

  Judge Shapiro asked if he had taken any money. He said he usually never took money. He would instead take some sort of small electrical appliance which he would then either take to his father’s shop as a repair job or take home. His father accepted the explanation because Winston made most of the service calls for the shop. His wife thought items he brought home had come from his father’s shop. Moseley further said that he had committed forty to fifty burglaries over the past year, making somewhere between a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars total.

  Sparrow then asked, “And after the first burglary, how soon thereafter did you commit another or do anything else?”

  “Well, the next incident that I remember in particular after that was the Barbara Kralik case that you mentioned.”

  “I want you to tell us about that,” Sparrow said.

  Frank Cacciatore felt differently. “If Your Honor pleases, may I interrupt at this point? What is the purpose of this testimony, I’d like to ask, and what is the relevancy of it in any manner, shape, or form with respect to any mental condition as of March 13th, 1964?”

  Judge Shapiro turned to the witness. “This Barbara Kralik case, when did that occur?”

  “This occurred July the 20th, 1963,” Moseley replied.

  It was now close to 4:30 p.m. Judge Shapiro recessed court for the day, reminding the jury not to discuss the case or read anything about it in the newspapers. Afterward he spoke with both counsel on the issue of allowing the defendant to testify about the Barbara Kralik matter. Sidney Sparrow said to the judge, “In presenting the case to you on the defense of insanity, it is the intention of this defendant to show, through competent psychiatric testimony, that the entire pattern of this defendant’s life from his early adolescence and straight on up till the time of his arrest, and continuing right through this present date, is part of a disease pattern of the mind. There will be adequate medical testimony.”

  “In other words,” Judge Shapiro said, “you are claiming a progressive deterioration situation.”

  “Precisely.”

  “I overrule the objection. I’ll leave it to the jury to pass upon it with appropriate instructions.”

  Cacciatore protested but Judge Shapiro cut him off, saying, “The defense’s contention is, whether you agree with it or not, and whether the jury will buy it or not, is that by reason of the background, the environment, the habitat, the things that happened between the father and mother, he was so influenced that his mind lacked reality, and he wasn’t able to distinguish between right and wrong, and so I’m going to permit them the greatest latitude on that issue which they are tendering. I will submit it to the jury, with the proper instructions. The fact that he says he did or did not kill someone else, or the fact that he said he committed or did not commit certain other burglaries is tendered by the defense upon that issue of mental capacity. The defendant may or may not be telling the truth as to any one of the many burglaries which he claims he committed, or as to any of the homicides his counsel referred to in the opening, but I’m going to permit them to make their proof. Take a recess now until tomorrow morning at 10:00 o’clock.”

  WHILE THE PROSECUTION and the defense focused on the testimony of the defendant, newspaper accounts of the trial put the infamous witnesses up front. The New York Times account of the previous day’s proceedings bore the headline, “4 KEW GARDENS RESIDENTS TESTIFY TO SEEING WOMAN SLAIN ON STREET.” It began, “Four residents of Kew Gardens in Queens who failed to respond to a woman’s cry for help testified yesterday in the trial of the man charged with her murder.” Reporter David Anderson summarized each of the testimony from Mozer, Picq, Frost, and Koshkin, stating that they remained in the courtroom after testifying. Speaking with them afterward, Anderson quoted one as saying, “It’s an awful feeling.” Another told him, “I could cry; now it’s too late.” A third had said, “Oh, for another chance, though I guess we’d do the same thing again.”

  Anderson’s article noted the discrepancy between the number of attacks initially reported in the Times, stating that only two attacks, not three, had been depicted in court. “Miss Picq’s testimony that she ‘heard two last screams for help’ after Miss Genovese had rounded the corner of the parking lot suggested the possibility that a stabbing also took place there.”

  WHEN COURT RESUMED the following day, June 10, Winston Moseley took the stand to continue testifying in his own defense. Under questioning by his attorney, Moseley gave his version of how he had crept into the Kralik home and stabbed Barbara in her bedroom. Moseley then told of his home invasion burglaries. He also testified that beginning in January of 1964, “I did do maybe four or five rapes up until March.” All of his rape victims had been
black women.

  “Did you at any time from July of 1963 up to February of 1964 attempt to kill anybody?” Sparrow asked.

  “I had gone out with the idea before that, yes.”

  “When would that have been?”

  “That possibly may have been in December or January. On these occasions it would be that I just didn’t find anybody that I felt, you know, I could have caught up with those times.”

  “Why did you want to kill these people if you caught up with somebody?” Sparrow asked.

  “Well, what I had was just an idea that would come into my mind and it would override any other ideas I had and I just have to sort of complete that idea.”

  “What do you mean, you had to complete the idea?”

  “It was to me a compulsion.”

  In graphic detail, Moseley described his murder and postmortem rape of Annie Mae Johnson, including setting her body and house on fire even though he knew there were people asleep upstairs.

  “In each of the times that you committed these acts, whether burglaries or rape or killing, did you go to work the following day?” Sparrow asked.

  “I always went to work, yes.”

  “Did you think about it the next day, what happened the night before?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Weren’t you concerned about what you were doing?”

  “Not really.”

  “Did you read about the killing that you had done on this girl in July of 1963? Did you read that in the papers after it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you learn that this was a white girl?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Barbara Kralik,” Moseley answered.

  “Did you realize how old she was at the time?”

  “No, I didn’t think that she was as young as she was, nor did I know that she was white at the time.”

  “Didn’t you feel remorse and compassion about this girl?” Sparrow asked.

  “No.”

  “Or Mrs. Johnson?”