On March 13, 1964,a hard working attractive 28 year old Italian American young lady Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was repeatedly stabbed and killed by Black Winston Moseley, in the 20' distance between parking her car and the doorway to her home, in predominately Jewish Kew Gardens, in Queens, NY before 38 indifferent witnesses.

The apathy of the witnesses grew into a national scandal that depicted Kew Gardens in particular and New York City in general as a cold and forbidding community.The violence in Kew Gardens was the Queens’ "Crime of the Century."

Yet it was due to those witnesses that nearly half a century later, Kitty Genovese stands out, not as a martyr to human depravity, but instead to the kind of apathy and cowardice that in a broader sense so easily led to Nazi Germany.

What has kept Catherine Genovese alive, indelibly etched in the minds of not only New Yorkers living at that time, but people around the world of every generation, is the almost , and, almost inescapably, cowardice, that led dozens of Ms. Genovese's awakened neighbors to do nothing to stop, or even summon help, in time to prevent her killer to return three times to the scene in order to finish what he had begun.
Above, the image that haunts all good people to this day. Catherine "Kitty" Genovese, Martin Gansberg of the New York Times  earned  an award for excellence from the Newspaper Reporters Association of New York for his story.

As most of the world will always know her to appear, in the lovely and powerful While Miss Genovese screamed: "Oh, my God, he stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!" The assailant stabbed her again."I'm dying!" she shrieked. "I'm dying!"

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. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault!

The responses included:"I didn't want to get involved", "Frankly, we were afraid",  "I didn't want my husband to get involved","I don't know", "I was tired"...

When Winston Mosely was arrested in March 1964, Moseley was 28 years old. He owned a house in Queens, was married and had two children. He had a steady job and no criminal record.

But Kitty Genovese was not his only victim. He committed dozens of burglaries and rapes, which he later admitted to the police and at his trial. “I chose women to kill because they were easier and didn’t fight back,” he once said.

After his conviction, Moseley was eventually shipped to Attica prison. In 1968, Moseley managed to overpower a guard and steal his gun. He later took five people hostage and raped a woman in front of her husband. Mosely's death sentence was reduced to life imprisonment, making him eligible for parole. As of 1995, although he has worked the system to the max, his attempts for a new trial and six requests for parole have been denied.

The murder was the subject of a book, "38 Witnesses," written in the 60’s by former New York Times editor, A.M. Rosenthal, now a columnist for The New York Post.

A painting, "The Screams of Kitty Genovese," by a Queens artist, Jerome Witkin, shows a naked woman smoking a cigarette nonchalantly while looking out of her window as the crime scene unfolds beneath her.

Now nearly four decades later, a musical, "The Screams of Kitty Genovese," has been produced by David Simpatico and composer Will Todd at the famed Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, and as a work in progress is hopefully headed for Broadway.

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Thanks to Steve Boatti, and H-ITAM
KITTY, 40 YEARS LATER
New York Times
By Jim Rasenberger
February 8, 2004

Kew Gardens does not look much like the setting of an urban horror story. Nestled along the tracks of the Long Island Rail Road, 16 minutes by train from Pennsylvania Station, the Queens neighborhood is quiet and well kept, its streets shaded by tall oaks and bordered by handsome red-brick and wood-frame houses. At first glance, the surroundings appear as remote from big-city clamor as a far-flung Westchester suburb.

Forty years ago, on March 13, 1964, the picturesque tranquillity of Kew Gardens was shattered by the murder of 28-year-old Catherine Genovese, known as Kitty. The murder was grisly, but it wasn't the particulars of the killing that became the focus of the case. It was the response of her neighbors. As Ms. Genovese screamed - "Please help me! Please help me!" - 38 witnesses did nothing to intervene, according to reports; nobody even bothered to call the police. One witness later explained himself with a phrase that has passed into infamy: "I didn't want to get involved."

Seldom has a crime in New York City galvanized public outrage so intensely. Newspapers spread the story across the nation and as far away as Istanbul and Moscow. Clergymen and politicians decried the events, while psychologists scrambled to comprehend them.

At a time when the world seemed to be unraveling - Kennedy had been assassinated four months earlier, Harlem was on the verge of race riots, crime rates were suddenly taking off - the case quickly expanded into an all-consuming metaphor for the ills of contemporary urban life. A psychiatrist speculated that television had rendered the witnesses inactive by making them almost delusional. Other observers cited a general moral collapse of modern society.

"When you have this general sense that things are going wrong, you look for events that are going to confirm that," said Neal Gabler, author of "Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality." "A society in which people are indifferent to one another; a society in which no one cares; a society in which we are all atomized. Here you had a story that confirmed all of those anxieties and fears...."

Psychologists continue to grapple with the social implications of the neighbors' response...

A Peaceful Life

Kitty Genovese, the petite eldest child of an Italian-American family, grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn. When her family moved to New Canaan, Conn., she stayed in the city and, in the spring of 1963, settled in Kew Gardens. With a roommate, Mary Ann Zielonko, she took an apartment in a two-story Tudor-style building on Austin Street, near the village, as residents referred to the central cluster of shops. Across the street rose one of the few high-rises in the neighborhood, an elegant 10-story apartment house called the Mowbray.

Tony Corrado, an 84-year-old upholsterer who has owned a small shop on Austin Street since the 1950's, recalls the day a cheerful Ms. Genovese moved in. She knocked on his door and asked him to give her help carrying a sofa up the stairs. "That was my introduction to Kitty," Mr. Corrado said. "I remember saying, boy, gonna be a lot of wild parties up there. I thought they were airline stewardesses, which we had a lot coming in."

In fact, Ms. Genovese worked as manager at a tavern in Hollis, Queens, called Ev's 11th Hour, and she and Ms. Zielonko lived a quiet, peaceful life over Mr. Corrado's shop. Crime rates were still low in the spring of 1963, and many residents slept with their doors unlocked. A cat burglar had recently made the rounds, and occasionally a loud drunk stumbled out of the Old Bailey bar, but these were minor disturbances. "I used to say, gee, nothing ever happens in Kew Gardens," Mr. Corrado recalled. "And all of a sudden, this nightmare."

The nightmare struck a year after Ms. Genovese moved in. Shortly after 3 a.m. on that night in March, she was driving home from Ev's 11th Hour. As she stopped her Fiat at a red light, she caught the eye of Winston Moseley, a business machine operator from Ozone Park. He had been cruising the streets in his white Corvair, searching for a woman to mutilate.

Mr. Moseley tailed Ms. Genovese to Kew Gardens, to the paved lot of the railroad station. When she got out of her car, he followed on foot. Ms. Genovese began to run up Austin Street, but he quickly caught up and stabbed her in the back. As she screamed, he stabbed her again, then twice more. A window opened in the Mowbray and a man's voice called out: "Leave that girl alone!"

Mr. Moseley later told the police he was not that concerned about the voice - "I had a feeling this man would close his window and go back to sleep," he said - but he ran off upon hearing it. He moved his car to a more discreet location, changed his hat, then returned. He found Ms. Genovese collapsed in a foyer in the back of her building and finished what he'd begun on Austin Street, stabbing and slashing her repeatedly, then leaving her to die.

The Community as Villain

Kitty Genovese's murder did not initially attract much attention from the press - The New York Times gave it four paragraphs - but 10 days later, A. M. Rosenthal, then metropolitan editor of The Times, happened to meet Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy for lunch. Mr. Moseley had just been arrested and had confessed to the murders of both Ms. Genovese and another young woman. When the subject turned to Mr. Moseley's double confession, Mr. Murphy, who is dead, mentioned the 38 witnesses. "Brother," he said, "that Queens story is one for the books."

As Mr. Rosenthal later recounted in his own book about the Genovese case, "Thirty-Eight Witnesses," he knew he'd just been handed a startling scoop, and he assigned it to a reporter, Martin Gansberg, that afternoon. A few days later, Mr. Gansberg, who died in 1995, filed his story, and it soon appeared on the front page.

"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 article began. "Twice the sound of their voices and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out and stabbed her again."

Beginning with its plain but indelible first sentence, the article suggested that 38 eyewitnesses had seen all, or at least a substantial part, of the killing; that they had "watched" it for half an hour, almost as if gaping at a performance. The Times was first to describe this horrifying spectacle, but it would soon have plenty of company. Writing in Life magazine, Loudon Wainwright put it like this: "For the most part, the witnesses, crouching in darkened windows like watchers of a Late Show, looked on until the play had passed from their view."

A pall fell over Kew Gardens in the months after the murder. "People had an impression of Kew Gardens that was unbelievable," said Charles Skoller, a Queens assistant district attorney at the time who would help prosecute the killer at his insanity trial. "The entire community was villainous..."

In the years since Ms. Genovese's death, this charge has been repeated a handful of times in newspaper articles, including a Daily News column by John Melia in 1984 and, more briefly, a 1995 account in The Times...

..recently in "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell and "New York: An Illustrated History" by Ric Burns and James Sanders,... it added to an impression of callous disregard by neighbors.

Charles Skoller, the former assistant district attorney,... is far less willing than Mr. De May to forgive the neighbors. Even if not all saw the crime, Mr. Skoller is convinced they heard it. "I believe that many people heard the screams," he said. "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...."

A. M. Rosenthal, who went on to become executive editor of The Times, stands by the article he assigned to Mr. Gansberg 40 years ago, right down to the word "watched" in its opening sentence. This questioning of details, he said, is to be expected.

"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,' '' said Mr. Rosenthal, who is retired from The Times and now writes a column for The Daily News. There may have been minor inaccuracies, he allows, but none that alter the story's essential meaning. "There may have been 38, there may have been 39,'' he said, "but the whole picture, as I saw it, was very affecting."

Theory, Guilt and Loss

Nowhere was the case more affecting than among America's psychologists. "It was monumental," said Harold Takooshian, a professor of urban psychology at Fordham University. Before the murder, he added, "nobody really had any idea why people did not help, and conversely why people did help. The psychologists were really stunned by their lack of information on this."

The first major studies prompted by the murder, conducted in the 1960's by the psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley, arrived at a counterintuitive conclusion: the greater the number of bystanders who view an emergency, the smaller the chance that any will intervene. People tend to feel a "diffusion of responsibility" in groups, the two concluded. Kitty Genovese would have been better off, in other words, had one witness seen or heard her attack, rather than the reputed 38.

In the years since these experiments, the study of human altruism has developed into a whole new branch of psychology, now known as prosocial behavior. "That area did not exist before," Professor Takooshian said. And, still, Ms. Genovese's death continues to haunt the field. On March 9, Professor Takooshian will host a symposium at Fordham to revisit many of the conundrums posed by that night 40 years ago.

It is psychology that probably offers the best explanation of the issues the case raised. A raft of behavioral studies performed over the last 40 years suggests that Ms. Genovese's neighbors reacted as they reportedly did not because they were apathetic or cold-hearted, but because they were confused, uncertain and afraid. "Where others might have seen them as villains," Professor Takooshian said, "psychologists see these people as normal."

Normal or not, many of the 38 were consumed by guilt after the crime. Others simply got fed up with the negative attention, and many of them moved away from Kew Gardens. "It was just too much for them, I guess," said Mr. Corrado, sitting in his shop, looking out over the spot where Ms. Genovese was first attacked...

William Genovese, one of Kitty's four younger siblings, offers other memories of his sister. He remembers how she would sweep into New Canaan to visit the family in her Nash Rambler, or later in her red Fiat, fresh from the city and bubbling with new ambitions and ideas. He remembers how the two of them would stay up late into the night talking about subjects as esoteric as solipsism and Einstein's theory of relativity. "She and I had a special affinity," Mr. Genovese said.

Two years after his sister's murder, Mr. Genovese volunteered for the Marines, a decision he attributes to his disgust with public apathy. "I became obsessed with saving people," he said. "When I got to Vietnam, I would have flashbacks of my sister all the time. I'd find myself in situations where I'd think, 'This is a test.' That's the way I viewed it."

Jim Rasenberger's book, "High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline,'' will be published in April by HarperCollins.

Kitty, 40 Years Later
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/08/nyregion/thecity/
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