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

by Pelonero, Catherine

  Gansberg wrote that he had returned from living in Paris shortly before covering the crime and he had forgotten how callous New Yorkers could be. He had returned to Kew Gardens many times over the years and had received a mixed reception. Some people treated him with disdain while others were kind, even expressing gratitude on occasion. “The owner of a local luncheonette wouldn’t let me pay for a malted and a piece of pound cake. ‘You’re the man who opened our eyes,’ he said.”

  Gansberg’s story was supplemented by several quotes from Kew Gardens residents gathered by another reporter. The owner of the Kew Gardens Market, who had lived in the neighborhood most of his life, said: “I had customers who said they heard her screaming, but none of them called the cops. They didn’t want to get involved. It’s a real tragedy . . . such a young girl. And it could happen again. It will happen again.”

  Another man who was a resident at the time said he thought the press had exaggerated the story. “There’s no way that 38 people could have heard and not one of them picked up the phone.”

  Greta Schwartz, now in her eighties, also spoke with the reporter. “I never heard any screaming. My bedroom is in the middle of the building, not in the front, and you can’t hear anything. But the police were called. An ambulance was called. One girl from across the street, a French girl, said she called the police. But they made fun of her accent and so she hung up on them. She was the only one who called right away—she was coming home from her job at the airport. I helped—I tried to help—but it was too late. A neighbor called me, saying that I should go and see Kitty, and so I went over right away, not suspecting anything. There she was, lying on the floor. But it was too late. It was awful.”

  The French girl Greta referred to was obviously Andree Picq, although Greta’s claim that Andree hung up the phone because the police made fun of her accent did not jibe with any previous accounts, not even with the many statements Andree Picq herself had made to reporters over the years.

  Robert McDermott, a police officer at the 102nd precinct for thirty years, said: “I don’t think it is at all possible that we could have ignored earlier calls. It was an aloof community, and the police were considered a necessary evil. They only tolerated us if and when they needed us. I shouldn’t rap the community, but they took better care of their lawns than they did their neighbors.”

  Officer McDermott also said that the neighborhood had changed since then, with residents much more involved in the community now than they had been at the time of Kitty’s murder.

  AROUND THE TIME of Moseley’s bid for a new trial in 1995, Newsday, along with other newspapers, covered the story again. In an article that appeared on July 23, 1995, a reporter who visited Kew Gardens wrote of how weary the residents were of the story. One shop owner on Austin Street—after saying that everybody had cared about what had happened to Kitty and two people had called the police that night—said the blame, if any, should be put on the police, for being slow to respond. The reporter then wrote, “In reports immediately following the crime, police admitted receiving several calls, but said the caller hung up before they got any information.” This was not true. There are no records or accounts of any police officer having said any such thing.

  Like the killer who had stalked their streets in the darkest hours of March 13, 1964, and who desperately wanted his freedom back, it seemed that some residents of Kew Gardens, wishing to remove the stain of infamy from their community, were willing to throw as much at the wall as possible in the hope that something might stick. A decade later, something did.

  MARCH OF 2004 marked the fortieth anniversary. On February 8, the New York Times printed an article called, “KITTY, 40 YEARS LATER.” Written by a freelancer named Jim Rasenberger, it began, “Kew Gardens does not look much like the setting of an urban horror story.”

  A brief account of the crime and its far-reaching impact was given. “But for all that has been said and written about Ms. Genovese’s murder, important questions persist. Some Kew Gardens residents maintain, even now, that there were fewer than 38 witnesses and that many of them could not have seen much of the killing—in other words, that there was less cold-heartedness in Kew Gardens than has been commonly portrayed.” Describing the fallout on the community, the article says that some of the residents afterward began complaining about the unfair portrayal of their community, claiming the famous story had been exaggerated by police and journalists.

  Martin Gansberg had passed away in 1995. Rasenberger spoke with Abe Rosenthal, who stood by the forty-year-old story, right down to the word “watched” in its opening sentence. As for the residents questioning its veracity, Rosenthal said: “In a story that gets a lot of attention, there’s always somebody who’s saying, ‘Well, that’s not really what it’s supposed to be.’ ” Rosenthal, who by this time was retired from the New York Times, said there may have been minor inaccuracies in the story, but none that altered its essential meaning. “There may have been 38, there may have been 39,” Rosenthal said, “but the whole picture, as I saw it, was very affecting.”

  Charles Skoller, the former assistant DA who had assisted Frank Cacciatore with the prosecution of Winston Moseley, was quoted: “I don’t think 38 people witnessed it. I don’t know where that came from, the 38. I didn’t count 38. We only found half a dozen that saw what was going on, that we could use.” Though it was not explained in this article, Charles Skoller, in other interviews and in his own later book, explained that witnesses “we could use” meant eyewitnesses that the prosecution felt comfortable calling to testify in court. They did not want to call Joseph Fink or Karl Ross, nor others who either changed their accounts or were unwilling to testify. Rasenberger further quotes Skoller: “I believe that many people heard the screams. It could have been more than 38. And anyone that heard the screams had to know there was a vicious crime taking place. There’s no doubt in my mind about that.”

  Jim Rasenberger neither quoted nor even mentioned any of the police officers or detectives who had investigated the crime.

  He spoke with some Kew Gardens residents. Forty years after the crime, none of the actual witnesses were still living in the neighborhood. Most had since died. He was left speaking with some who raised legitimate questions, such as the discrepancy between the report of three attacks instead of two, and others who simply insisted, based on their own gut feelings (and likely on lies told to them by some of their neighbors after the story had exploded) that the story must have been exaggerated.

  One of the Kew Gardens residents Rasenberger spoke with for his 40th anniversary article was Joseph De May. De May had moved to Kew Gardens in 1974, ten years after Kitty’s murder. In 2002, De May had created a website devoted to the community’s history. Included on the site was a lengthy section on the murder and an analysis by De May of the original New York Times article. Based on what he currently knew of the neighborhood, conversations with some of the long-time residents, and excerpts he had read from the 1964 trial, Joseph De May argued that the Times article had exaggerated the number of witnesses. He expressed doubts about what the witnesses saw or heard, questioning if it had been enough for them to realize that a violent crime was taking place. He contended that the New York Times had gotten the story wrong, but readily acknowledged that his research was incomplete.

  Considering the decades-long pummeling Kew Gardens had taken, it was natural that the people who lived there wanted the bad press to stop, and further wanted their neighborhood cast in a better, fuller light for once, rather than being singularly and perpetually defined by a murder. Nor does it seem unusual that people who had moved to the neighborhood long after that night in 1964 had questions and doubts about what had happened. Martin Gansberg’s original story for the New York Times seemed to be the only point of reference. Many of the other newspapers that had covered the story at the time, such as the New York Journal-American, the New York World-Telegram and Sun, and the Long Island Star-Journal, had ceased publication decades earlier. The only easil
y accessible news accounts from that time period were from the New York Times. It’s unlikely that the people living in Kew Gardens by 2004 were aware of these other news accounts that supported—and supplemented—what the Times had printed in 1964. And thus there were, as there had been for at least the past twenty years, people in Kew Gardens protesting that the New York Times story had been an exaggeration. The Internet now made it possible to air these grievances to a wide audience.

  With the stigma and the lack of other available references, it is perhaps not surprising that some people in Kew Gardens felt—or hoped—that the original news accounts may have been exaggerated. It’s not even surprising, all things considered, that some residents suggested, based on the little bits and pieces of information that they had, a revised version of events.

  What does seem surprising is how readily and unquestioningly some journalists accepted the revisions.

  Jim Rasenberger spoke at the Catherine Genovese Memorial Conference at Fordham University in March of 2004, where he said to the audience, “The death of Kitty Genovese is arguably one of the preeminent urban myths of the latter half of the 20th century. But like most urban myths, it’s not exactly true . . . As a simple matter of geography, it cannot be the case that thirty-eight witnesses saw all or even much of the attack on Kitty Genovese. She was stabbed in two completely different locations and one of them was completely out of sight of thirty-seven of the thirty-eight witnesses.” He failed to note that the New York Times story had included photographs, including the aerial shot that clearly showed the path Kitty had taken from the front of Austin Street around to the back of the building.

  Rasenberger’s point seemed to be that not all thirty-eight witnesses had watched for all thirty-five minutes. He claimed that the great majority had been ear witnesses rather than eyewitnesses, “and what they saw, or more likely heard, was not clear and conclusive, but fragmentary and vague and puzzling.” He conceded that “plenty of people heard Kitty Genovese scream that night. And as Mr. Skoller has pointed out to me, there may well have been more than thirty-eight people who heard the events of that night. And certainly many of them heard enough to prompt at least a phone call to the police. So I’m not acquitting anyone of moral responsibility here. Even if you accept, as I do, that the original Times story and many subsequent media accounts exaggerated what happened that night, it’s still plenty horrifying. And it’s still difficult to understand or forgive. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that what happened is less shocking and less extreme and is far more complex than what is commonly supposed.” Rasenberger concluded, “The irony of course is that if the story had not been exaggerated, it would have been a three-day story, maybe a five-day story, rather than a forty-year story, and we would not be sitting here today talking about this.”

  An audience member asked Jim Rasenberger the obvious: If the original accounts had been so exaggerated, why had no one set the record straight in the forty years since? Rasenberger answered that he didn’t know.

  The last speaker at the 2004 conference was Abe Rosenthal. Now eighty-one years old, Rosenthal had not been scheduled to speak, but accepted the chance to do so when Professor Harold Takooshian asked if he had anything he wanted to say. Rosenthal rose and slowly made his way to the podium. In addition to his 1964 book, Thirty-Eight Witnesses, Rosenthal had written of and referenced the murder of Kitty Genovese in many articles throughout the years. In a voice that was still strong despite his advanced age, Rosenthal told the 2004 conference attendees, “I am still discovering why that story meant so much to me.”

  Discussing the night of March 13, 1964, and the New York Times account, he turned and looked directly at Rasenberger, who sat with other speakers at a long table behind the podium. “Thirty-eight,” Rosenthal said firmly. “Yes, thirty-eight. I never said, nor did anybody at the New York Times or any reporter with a brain say there were thirty-eight peering out of a window. It was a total of thirty-eight, and we [relied on] the intelligence of the reader to understand that.”

  Abe Rosenthal died in May of 2006 at the age of eighty-four. The same year, Jim Rasenberger wrote an article for American Heritage Magazine titled, “NIGHTMARE ON AUSTIN STREET.” A subheading read, “It was a story so disturbing that we all still remember it. But what if it wasn’t true?”

  The article contained some very heady—and completely unsubstantiated—claims about what had happened on Austin Street on March 13, 1964.

  After a description of the famous New York Times story and its tremendous impact, Rasenberger wrote, “All of which brings us, 42 years later, to what may be the most peculiar aspect of the case. The Times article that incited all this industry about an urban horror was almost certainly a misleading account of what happened.

  “Almost from the start there were murmurs that the Times had exaggerated details of the case.” In support of this, Rasenberger mentions the New York Daily News article of 1984. Skipping the question of how a twenty-year gap constitutes murmurs of exaggeration “almost from the start,” the Daily News article had based the implication that the story might have been exaggerated solely on the opinion of a Kew Gardens resident who insisted that she just didn’t believe it.

  Rasenberger conceded that some Kew Gardens residents could and should have done more to help Kitty. “But that description of 38 people watching the murder for more than half an hour struck many as implausible. Indeed, as a matter of geography, it seems impossible.”

  As the police records and trial testimony show, several people watched the ordeal of Kitty Genovese for an extended period of time. As those records and newspaper interviews also show, plenty of people saw, heard, and knew that a young woman was repeatedly screaming and crying for help, even if they did not watch the entire 35-minute episode from grisly start to gruesome finish. As one of the original investigating detectives had put it, “How much do you need to see?”

  Rasenberger writes in his American Heritage article, “The true number of eyewitnesses was not 38, but 6 or 7. To be sure, far more residents heard something, but the perceptions of eyewitnesses and earwitnesses alike were mostly fleeting and inchoate.”

  The police reports, of course, paint a starkly different portrait, as does every single one of the contemporary news accounts.

  With the exception of repeating Abe Rosenthal’s quote from Rasenberger’s 2004 “KITTY, 40 YEARS LATER” piece, the American Heritage article cites not a single person who was actually involved with the case in 1964 (and Rosenthal, of course, had not participated in the reportage, and certainly not in the police investigation). The final line reads, “One final irony, though: None of us would still be writing, or reading, about Kitty Genovese 42 years later if the Times had gotten the story right in the first place.”

  Historical revisionism of the Kitty Genovese story was underway, and the beautiful twilight of falsehood did indeed enhance it into something far less blinding than the burning glare of the truth. Other publications began parroting the claim that the original New York Times story had been exaggerated, citing these new “sources” of information, apparently not realizing that said sources had based the revised version on essentially nothing more than the opinions of a small handful of people in Kew Gardens who had the great game advantage of having outlived Martin Gansberg and nearly all of the original detectives.

  It was proof by assertion, flourishing freely now without fear of meddlesome rebuttals from people who could have proved otherwise. Enough time had passed, and enough people had died. The deniers had finally found a receptive audience.

  Some forty-five years after the murder of Kitty Genovese, the story transformed from an account of a horrendous crime to a tale of wicked yellow journalism, “a stubborn and intractable urban myth,” as it was called in a 2007 article published in, of all places, American Psychologist.

  Thirty-eight witnesses had somehow reduced to six or seven. The original accounts had presumably been malicious exaggerations calculated to harm an anonymous little c
ommunity in Queens; a massive conspiracy carried out by the cooperative efforts of the New York Times, the NYPD, the District Attorney’s Office, the New York Journal-American, the Long Island Star-Journal, the Long Island Press, LIFE magazine, et al., feeding the public lies and distortions about Kew Gardens.

  chapter 22

  TELLING OF HOW much he had suffered since he had committed his crimes, Winston Moseley once explained to a parole board, “For a victim outside, it’s a one-time or one-hour or one-minute affair, but for the person who’s caught, it’s forever.”

  Apparently Moseley defined his victims strictly in terms of the individuals he had physically traumatized or killed. For the people who had loved Kitty Genovese, the suffering had certainly not been a one-time, one-hour, or one-minute affair.

  In 2004, Mary Ann Zielonko spoke publicly for the first time about her love affair with Kitty Genovese, “the most wonderful person I’ve ever known.” In the years following Kitty’s death, Mary Ann had rebuilt her life. She had earned a master’s degree in statistical analysis and had retired in 1997 after a long career. At the time of her 2004 interviews, she was living in comfortable retirement with her partner. She discussed the lingering pain of her loss, still with her after forty years. She spoke adoringly of Kitty, the great love of her youth.

  AT THE CATHERINE Genovese Memorial Conference held at Fordham University in 2009, a member of Kitty’s family attended for the first time. Bill Genovese sat unobtrusively in the audience, listening to the speakers talk about his sister and the legacy of her murder case. At the program’s conclusion, he was given a warm introduction by the conference organizer, Professor Harold Takooshian, who had devoted himself these many years to honoring the memory of a young woman he had never met but who had forever touched his own life.