My wife, my sister and I have a tradition for St. Patrick’s Day: she comes over to our place, we eat corned beef and cabbage, and we watch The Boondock Saints.
For those unfamiliar, The Boondock Saints is a 1999 action thriller about two Irish-American brothers in South Boston who come to believe that they’re on a mission from God to slay the wicked.
The movie begins with the brothers, both devoutly (if very heretically) Catholic, attending Mass. One of the attending priests stands up at the lectern and gives a sermon that tacitly approves of the brothers’ vigilante activities. To illustrate his point, he tells the story of Kitty Genovese.
You’ve probably heard the story of Kitty Genovese. The short version is the version the Monsignor tells, which is that a young woman was murdered in broad daylight with dozens of people watching, none of whom intervened because they “didn’t want to get involved”.
It’s one of the most commonly-cited examples of Bystander Syndrome – which is to say, the human tendency to not get involved when they’re in a large crowd, because responsibility is dispersed among that crowd, and everyone thinks someone else will handle it. Less charitably, it’s used as an example of the cowardice and cold-heartedness of human beings in general, or city folk in particular.
Allow me to give you some good news: it’s bullshit. More than bullshit, it’s an outright lie. In the movie’s defense, while there were definitely people who knew that it was a lie in 1999, it wasn’t widely debunked until 2016. Unfortunately, the lie has had decades to sink into the public consciousness as fact (along with all the wrong conclusions drawn from it), but few people have heard the debunking.
So let me tell you the true story of Kitty Genovese.
Kitty
I often wonder what people picture when they imagine Kitty Genovese. Most likely their own personal archetype of the innocent victim. The name “Kitty” certainly lends itself to imagining a tiny, innocent waif. Probably blonde.
She wasn’t.
See that picture? That’s a mugshot. There were other pictures available, but that one was my favorite. It makes her look badass.
Catherine Susan “Kitty” Genovese was born in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1935 to Italian-American parents. She went to the all-girl Prospect Heights High School, where she was noted for being “self-assured beyond her years” and having a “sunny disposition”. Her family moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, after her mother witnessed a murder in 1954, but Kitty stayed in the city with her grandparents to prepare for her upcoming wedding. The wedding was annulled later that same year…because Kitty was a lesbian. At the time of her death, she’d been living with her girlfriend Mary Ann Zielonko for about a year.
She worked a series of clerical jobs, but found them unappealing, and became a bartender. She lost one bartending job when she was arrested for bookmaking – i.e., taking bets on horse races from bar patrons. That’s where the mug shot comes from.
She got another bartending job and was soon promoted to manager, and at the time of her death was working double shifts to save money to open an Italian restaurant.
I think I would have liked this woman. I really do.
The Killer
There’s less to say about Kitty’s killer. He deserves less.
I’ve wondered how people have pictured this man as well. A generic New York street thug? A jealous boyfriend?
He was neither of those things.
His name was Winston Moseley, and he had a wife and three kids. Don’t they always? While she was working night shifts as a nurse, he would go out and live a double life, like a low-rent version of the BTK Killer.
Which is, in fact, what he was. Moseley was only convicted of Kitty’s murder, but he claimed to have robbed, raped, and murdered two other women as well, making him an official serial killer.
He also claimed to have committed something like forty burglaries, but that seems unimportant in comparison, except as your standard serial killer background of pettier crimes.
The Murder
So that brings us to the murder itself.
March 13, 1964. 2:30 a.m. The bars close and Kitty goes home from work.
(Yes, 2:30 A.M. Ante-frigging-meridian. 2:30 IN THE MORNING. You thought this took place in broad daylight? YOU WERE LIED TO.)
Moseley is on the hunt. He’s an addict, looking for his fix of womandeath. He spots Kitty driving home and follows her.
3:15 a.m. Kitty arrives at her home in Kew Gardens, Queens, and parks in the Long Island Rail Road station parking lot a mere 100 feet from her apartment building. Moseley parks too. He approaches her out of the dark and she runs. He chases, catches, and stabs her twice in the back.
Understand that at that moment, she’s already dead. Maybe she could have been saved if she’d been treated right away, but it’s those wounds that kill her. He has punctured both her lungs, and she eventually dies of asphyxiation. It also means that she can’t scream with the kind of volume she otherwise would have been able to.
Nevertheless, she was able to scream “Oh my God, he stabbed me! Help me!” loud enough for several neighbors to hear, but only a few of them recognized it as a cry for help. One of them, Robert Mozer, shouted “You let that girl alone!” and scared Moseley away.
At this point we meet the one unequivocal villain in Kitty’s story other than Moseley himself: the aptly-named Joseph Fink. I must confess that I was surprised to meet him. When I started writing this piece, I didn’t believe he existed: he is someone who actually fits the description of the uncaring witnesses who didn’t want to get involved.
Most of the people who called the police after the first attack (and more than one did) were confused about what they’d seen. They thought it was a drunken brawl, or an incident of domestic violence. One caller said that he saw a woman get beat up “but she’s up and staggering around”.
The NYPD had bigger fish to fry than that on a Saturday night in the Sixties.
Only Fink, who worked in an apartment building across the street, had seen that Genovese had actually been stabbed. If he’d called the police with that information, they might have arrived in some kind of timely manner. But he didn’t. Nor did he go out and help Genovese himself once Moseley was scared away. What did he do? He took a nap in the basement.
Meanwhile, Kitty staggered to the back entrance of the building, out of sight and hearing of those who’d witnessed the first attack. There, a locked door prevented her from getting into the apartment building.
Ten minutes later, Moseley came back. Shading his face with a wide-brimmed hat, he searched the parking lot, the train station, and another apartment complex before he finally found Kitty. Forget BTK, the man was a Terminator. An addict looking for his fix of womandeath. I wonder – if he hadn’t been able to find her, would he have sought out another victim like Jack The Ripper on the night of the Double Event? And it would have been a Double Event, because as mentioned before, the wounds she’d already received were fatal. That wasn’t enough for Moseley, though. He stabbed her a few more times – knife wounds in her hands indicate that she tried to defend herself – raped her, stole $49 she had on her, and left.
One of Kitty’s neighbors, one Karl Ross, heard the noise of that second attack. He looked out into the hall and actually saw Moseley stabbing Kitty, making him only the second person that night to actually know that she was being stabbed. Terrified, he closed his door again. Then he called some friends for advice before he finally called the police.
Not exactly covering himself with glory. Still, he was no Fink. He was drunk, terrified, and – as someone who was thought to be gay – really didn’t want the attention of the NYPD, so it took longer than it should have to get his head together, but when he finally did, he did the right thing.
But by then it was too late. Another neighbor, a 70-year-old named Sophia Farrar came out and cradled Kitty in her arms until the ambulances arrived, but she died on the way to the hospital.
Kitty’s girlfriend was initially the prime suspect, and the NYPD’s questioning of their neighbors was focused on that. Fortunately, Moseley was caught six days later in the midst of committing one of his many burglaries and confessed to all three of his murders. He died in prison in 2016.
The Lie
The killing didn’t make big news at first. Then police commissioner Michael J. Murphy had lunch with New York Times Metropolitan Editor A.M. Rosenthal and commented that “That Queens story is one for the books.” Rosenthal agreed, and on March 27, 1964, Martin Gansberg, one of Rosenthal’s staff writers, published a story with the title “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police” (the story itself actually said 38, so the title must have been a mistake). That story is when “roughly a dozen people saw something happen at 3:15 in the morning but no one of them saw the whole sequence of events and only one asshole realized that the first attack was actually a murder attempt and only one additional person realized the second attack was (at first) and several people took some form of action but ultimately failed to save Kitty” became “38 people watched Kitty being murdered in broad daylight and did nothing”.
This wasn’t just a question of getting the story wrong or new facts coming out later, either. WNBC police reporter Danny Meehan noticed inconsistencies at the time and asked Gansberg why his story didn’t mention that most witnesses didn’t know they were witnessing a murder, and Gansberg answered that “it would have ruined the story”. Gansberg and Rosenthal had deliberately crafted a narrative that played into what the demographic we would now call “Middle America” wanted to believe about the cities and New York City in particular: that they were full of cowardly, uncaring people who wouldn’t act to save someone being murdered right in front of them.
Meehan didn’t wish to jeopardize his career by challenging someone as powerful as Rosenthal, so he kept his findings secret. Rosenthal’s reaction to people who did challenge him in the decades since indicates that however you may judge Meehan’s choice, he did assess the risks correctly. It wasn’t until the 2000’s that the truth started to come out.
And it wasn’t until October 12, 2016 that the Times added the following Editor’s Note to the online version of its 1964 article: “Later reporting by The Times and others has called into question significant elements of this account.”