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

by Pelonero, Catherine

  Moseley had chosen the wrong city for his escape. It seemed that the entire Buffalo Police Department was engaged in the search along with the Erie County Sheriff’s Office and agents from the FBI’s Buffalo field office. In addition to the hindrance created by the large, skilled police force in Buffalo, Winston Moseley did not know his way around this part of New York.

  THE KULAGAS WERE giving their statements at Buffalo Police headquarters later that day when they received word that Mrs. Kulaga’s elderly mother, who was babysitting her grandchildren in the Kulaga’s Grand Island home, had suffered a nervous seizure. Sympathetic police officers offered to rush the Kulagas back to Grand Island in a squad car.

  But suddenly a call came over the police radio ordering all cars to stay away from the Kulaga home in Grand Island. No explanation was given.

  WITH HIS TYPICAL calm, cool candor, Winston Moseley later said that he had planned to flee to Pittsburgh. He had become lost, however, after driving away from 278 Dewey Avenue in the stolen car. He listened to the car radio and knew a description had been put out on the vehicle (as the police would later learn, Moseley had kept abreast of the search for him during all three days he had been on the loose). When he realized that he had not made it to the New York State Thruway—and not knowing quite where he was, but definitely feeling the need to ditch the stolen car—Moseley abandoned the Kulaga’s white Comet and set off on foot. Purely by chance, he had driven to the suburb of Grand Island across the Niagara River. He left the Kulaga’s car parked by the side of a road that was located only a short distance from their home.

  A young housewife named Mary Patmos was having coffee in her Grand Island apartment that morning with her friend, Gladys Costanza. Mrs. Costanza had gotten up to leave when they heard a knock. Answering her door, Mrs. Patmos found herself staring at a young man pointing a gun at her who proceeded to walk inside.

  At first, Mrs. Patmos thought it was a prank. Mrs. Costanza said later that she knew immediately it was Moseley.

  He ushered the women back into the kitchen. “Sit down and do what you’re told and you’ll be all right,” Moseley told them. “I’ve already killed once and I have nothing to lose if I kill again.”

  Holding the two women and Mrs. Patmos’s infant daughter hostage, Moseley demanded food. Oddly, he also wanted conversation. The three of them sat at the kitchen table and talked, Mrs. Patmos holding her baby on her lap, Moseley eating the sandwich that Mrs. Patmos made for him. After his initial warning that he had nothing to lose by killing again, he was weirdly polite and intelligent. They discussed religion, God, racism, and education. Moseley said that if he had a college degree, he would not be in his present predicament. Mrs. Costanza remarked later on how refined he seemed and how struck she was by his thoughts and discourse.

  They had been talking for some time when the baby started to cry. Mrs. Patmos excused herself to go and feed her. She left her baby daughter in another room before returning to the kitchen, thinking that if Moseley decided to use his gun, at least he wouldn’t hit the baby.

  As the three adults continued their conversation, the phone began to ring. Moseley allowed Mary Patmos to answer but held the gun at her ribs, warning that she shouldn’t give him away.

  Moseley’s getaway car had been found at the side of a road in Grand Island. Neighbors were calling to warn Mrs. Patmos to stay inside, not to answer the door.

  At 11:30 a.m., Gladys Costanza told Moseley she had to go and pick up children from daycare. If she did not show up, people would come here looking for her. She persuaded him to let her go. He told her that if she did not return within twenty-five minutes, he would kill her friend. Mrs. Costanza agreed. Before she left, Moseley asked her how she could be so calm.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” she snapped. “If I bring the children back and you touch any one of them, I’ll kill you myself.”

  “I won’t harm the children,” Moseley said quietly.

  Gladys Costanza left. She went to a church across the street and immediately called her husband, who then called Special Agent Neil Welch at the FBI office in Buffalo. Agent Welch said later that he knew Moseley would kill his hostages instantly if he saw a police car. He also knew that he could not get to Grand Island within the twenty-five minutes that Moseley had given his hostage to return. Welch phoned another FBI agent who could get to the scene faster, then called the pastor at the church across from the Patmos residence to explain what was happening and asked him to follow the arriving FBI agent’s directives to the letter.

  The word quietly went out to law enforcement that the fugitive had been located. Orders were given to furtively surround the building and close off all bridges to the island, but under no circumstances should any law enforcement officer or vehicle be visible from the apartment where Moseley was holding the woman and baby who were his hostages. Neil Welch then jumped into a car with Buffalo Chief of Detectives Ralph Degenhart and sped to Grand Island.

  To buy time, the police had Mrs. Costanza call the Patmos apartment and make an excuse that she had been delayed at the daycare center. A nervous Mary Patmos, with Moseley holding the gun at her side, asked her friend to hurry back.

  A loud siren sounded. Moseley jumped up, visibly nervous. Mrs. Patmos assured him it was just the fire department, which was true; ironically, the town alarm had gone off to summon a rescue unit to the Kulaga home, where Mrs. Kulaga’s mother had suffered a nervous seizure after hearing what had happened to her daughter and son-in-law on Dewey Avenue. The home of Moseley’s earlier victims sat just a short distance from the apartment where he now held Mrs. Patmos hostage.

  Arriving in Grand Island, and still formulating his plans on how best to approach the fugitive, Neil Welch spotted a diaper truck down the road from the Patmoses’ home. The startled driver of the diaper truck suddenly found himself surrounded by armed law enforcement officers who commandeered both his truck and his uniform. A detective put on the uniform while a group of agents and police officers climbed into the back of the vehicle. The diaper truck then drove off toward the Patmoses’ apartment, leaving the bewildered driver standing by the side of the road in his underwear.

  At the direction of the FBI, Gladys Costanza drove a car to the front of the apartment. Stepping out, she waved the keys at Moseley, who watched her through a window, then placed the keys on the roof of the car. The FBI had instructed her to then walk slowly back to the church.

  “But before she could walk away,” Neil Welch later recalled, “Moseley put his gun to the baby’s head and motioned her to come inside. The woman started to break down and headed for the front door. Another agent and I eased around the corner, creeping through a muddy flower bed, and grabbed her off to the side before she could go back in.” Welch was not sure if Moseley had seen them or not, but obviously the first plan had failed and a new approach had to be devised in a hurry. To complicate matters, reporters and television crews had started showing up at the scene.

  Neil Welch had dealt with many men as desperate and ruthless as Moseley in his career with the FBI. The forty-one-year-old agent had helped capture George “Sharky” McIntyre, a man wanted for killing five victims with his bare hands. At the court arraignment, “Sharky” had leapt over the railing and attacked Welch, vowing to kill him. Welch had also been assigned to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi back in 1964. Klansmen had threatened him with shotguns and left live rattlesnakes in his car.

  Welch now made a bold choice.

  The phone rang again at the Patmos residence. When Mrs. Patmos answered, Neil Welch asked, “May I talk with your guest?”

  Mary Patmos held the phone out to Moseley. “It’s for you.”

  FBI Special Agent Neil Welch informed Winston Moseley that the building was surrounded. Escape was impossible. Moseley agreed to let Agent Welch inside to talk.

  The two men—FBI agent and convicted killer—sat across from one another in the Patmoses’ living room, the agent trying to persuade the killer to give up the gun, M
oseley seemingly just stalling for time. Moseley kept cocking and recocking his gun, pointing it at Welch’s chest. Welch had a snub-nosed revolver concealed in his overcoat pocket, which he kept pointed at Moseley. Welch had realized, too late, that he had slipped the gun into his left pocket rather than the right. If it became necessary for him to shoot, he would have to do it with his weaker left hand rather than his right.

  While the two men spoke, Mary Patmos quietly edged her way out of the room. She picked up her baby and fled through a bedroom window.

  As Agent Neil Welch later recalled for reporters, “At first, he was afraid of what would happen to him . . . He was concerned about these crimes he had committed since he got loose. Then we talked about his life, the crimes he has committed, life in prison, what he could expect at this point, the advisability of giving himself up.”

  He also told Welch that he was an avid fan of the FBI, saying he watches the FBI program on television.

  Welch and Moseley had been speaking for close to an hour when the phone rang. As Welch later wrote in his 1984 memoir, Inside Hoover’s FBI, “We were at a delicate point in the conversation when the phone rang. It kept ringing. I told Moseley it would be best if I answered it—we couldn’t get anything accomplished with that phone ringing. We maneuvered around each other, neither of us taking our eyes off the other or giving up our sight patterns. I picked it up.

  “It was a television news reporter, who wondered what was going on. I told him Moseley and I were discussing things calmly and thanked him for his interest—he told me he had deadline pressures, and his editor wondered how long the crew would have to stay out there. I apologized for the delay and told him I was certain Moseley would understand his problem.”

  As strange and unexpected as it was, the phone call had broken the tension. Welch hung up the phone. He walked over to Moseley and stuck out his hand. “Give me that gun, Winston. Now’s the time.”

  “Here it is,” Moseley said.

  Agent Welch took the gun and escorted Moseley outside. The agent later said he thought the fugitive seemed relieved that it was over. An account in the Buffalo Evening News noted the large number of police and curious bystanders that had assembled outside the Grand Island apartment during the standoff, describing it as “Winston Moseley’s biggest audience—bigger than the one in New York City in 1964 when 38 witnesses watched and did nothing when he stabbed Kitty Genovese 15 times.”

  In custody, Moseley spoke of his escape. Fleeing Meyer Memorial Hospital, he had stayed in the immediate area, hiding until nightfall. Walking the streets after dark, he noticed that there were no lights on in the Dewey Avenue house and he had broken in through a cellar window. He lived there from Monday night until Thursday morning, eating some fruit preserves he found stored in the basement. He claimed he had gone out on Tuesday and Wednesday nights to buy some oranges and the newspapers. He watched the television newscasts about the manhunt.

  He had found the .32 revolver in the attic, where he slept at night. He also found bills in the house addressed to Matthew Kulaga. He, of course, had been the one who called the employment agency to ask for a cleaning lady. He had kept her at the house all day Wednesday before releasing her that afternoon.

  The Erie County district attorney later filed charges against the young cleaning woman for failing to report Moseley’s whereabouts to police. She had not done so, she said, because Moseley had threatened to kill her children if she did. He had also sexually assaulted her.

  Though she had not contacted the police, she had made the anonymous call to Mrs. Kulaga, warning her to stay away from the Dewey Avenue house.

  A senior assistant district attorney named Barbara Sims refused to pursue the case against the cleaning woman. Sims publicly defied her boss, proclaiming in court and in the press that the cleaning woman was a victim and should not be charged. A city court judge agreed and dismissed the charges.

  New felony charges against Winston Moseley included rape, kidnapping, burglary, robbery, and grand larceny. A grand jury returned a thirteen-count indictment. Moseley eventually plead guilty to robbery and attempted kidnapping in a plea deal reached with the Erie County district attorney and received a fifteen-year sentence for each, to be served concurrently with his life sentence for the Genovese murder.

  In post-capture interviews, Moseley told reporters in Buffalo that he would try to escape again if he ever got the chance.

  chapter 18

  IN JULY OF 1968, a play called Witnesses by William Murray opened at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Actor Paul Winfield played Winston Moseley. A fictionalized version of Kitty’s murder was portrayed on TV in a “Movie of the Week” called Death Scream that aired on network television in 1975. Other fictional stories, documentaries, songs, and film references based on the case are far too numerous to list.

  On December 28, 1968, psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley received a $1,000 award for research they conducted on why bystanders to an emergency fail to help. Following their initial study in the wake of the Kitty Genovese murder, Dr. Latané and Dr. Darley embarked on an extensive three-year probe sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The results were published in the December issue of Psychology Today magazine, earning Latané and Darley the psychological prize essay award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

  Latané and Darley referred to their findings as “depressing.” Through different experiments that replicated emergency situations, they had concluded that people in crowds readily “pass the buck,” convincing themselves that someone else would take care of an emergency. Moreover, most tend to take their behavioral cues from others who are present. “In general, it is considered embarrassing to look overly concerned, to seem flustered, to ‘lose your cool’ in public. When we are not alone most of us try to seem less fearful and anxious than we really are. Looking at the apparent passivity and lack of reaction of the others, each person is led to believe that nothing is really wrong.”

  The psychologists had conducted numerous experiments on the topic, varying the nature of a simulated emergency and the number of witnesses. In one scenario, Latané and Darley had placed college students in separate rooms and asked them to converse over an intercom. They had one of the group simulate a seizure and call for help. Varying the number of “bystanders” in several repetitions of the experiment, they found that of the subjects who believed they were alone with the victim, 85 percent reported the emergency to the experimenter. When two were present, the figure dropped to 62 percent. In groups of five or more, a bystander would seek help for the victim only 31 percent of the time.

  The pioneering work of Bibb Latané and John Darley became a standard entry in psychology textbooks around the world. Other researchers would follow in their footsteps, launching a new field of psychological study dubbed “prosocial behavior.” The terms “Genovese syndrome,” “bystander effect,” and “diffusion of responsibility” became part of the lexicon.

  IN THE EARLY 1970s, Bettye Moseley divorced her husband. She took their son and left New York, moving across the country in search of anonymity and a fresh start for herself and the young boy. Before leaving, she went to see Winston at the prison and she brought their son with her. Winston later said that he didn’t blame Bettye for wanting to get on with her life.

  IN MARCH OF 1974, Martin Gansberg wrote an article for the New York Times headlined, “KEW GARDENS SLAYING: A LOOK BACK.” Briefly recounting the crime, he again wrote that there had been three separate assaults on Kitty Genovese. The article focused more on the positive changes that had come about in the neighborhood in the ten years since the infamous murder: the formation of police auxiliary and block watch groups. Gansberg quoted a police lieutenant at the 102nd precinct as saying that Kew Gardens residents were quick to call them now and that the work of the auxiliary patrol was very impressive. “They’re astute, good people there,” the lieutenant said.

  Gansberg wrote that most of the witnesses to Kitty’s mu
rder had since moved away or died. One of the few left was Andree Picq, who told Gansberg that soon after the murder she had bought a whistle, which she had since used to frighten off intruders. “I feel at least that I am doing something to help now. There are still too many old people here to expect anyone to give any real help.”

  As in prior interviews over the years, residents were split on whether their neighbors would call the police if a similar incident happened now. People who had moved to Austin Street in the years after Kitty’s murder generally seemed to take a more optimistic view than those who had lived there at the time. A woman in the latter group said, “It’s the same now; no one would lend a hand.”

  In reaction to Gansberg’s article, the New York Times received a letter to the editor from a man who owned a store on Lefferts Boulevard:

  I would like to submit that it was absolutely unnecessary for you to dig up this sad story of long ago . . . such unnecessary publicity so many years after the fact again draws bad attention to our neighborhood, and does no good whatsoever to our businesses. It was bad enough 10 years ago, and still seems incredible that such a thing could have happened in our neighborhood.

  However, I would also like to say that as long as you wrote such a long article, why couldn’t you, at the same time, give a plug and put in a good word for the shopping area on Lefferts Boulevard with its many nice stores . . .

  NINE MONTHS LATER, on Christmas Day, 1974, a twenty-five-year-old woman named Sandra Zahler was beaten to death in her fifth-floor apartment at the Mowbray. Madeline Hartmann, a neighbor in an adjoining apartment, overheard the struggle. In an eerie coincidence, Zahler had reportedly been attacked at 3:20 a.m., the same time as the attack on Kitty Genovese some ten years before. In an interview with the New York Times, Hartmann said she also recalled hearing the screams of Kitty Genovese. Of this latest murder she said she heard a man and a woman enter Zahler’s apartment. “About five minutes later I heard her shout loudly: ‘No! No! No!’ Then I heard the slapping sound as from a belt, three or four times.” Zahler had screamed after each of these slapping sounds, she said. “And finally, [Zahler] said loudly, ‘O.K.’ And then he apparently slapped her again.