I remember reading about this in college, and it stuck with me. This story has so many different levels, and I hope you find it as interesting as I do.
Catherine Susan Genovese was born on 7th July 1935 in New York, USA, to Vincent and Rachel; she was the oldest of 5 children. Kitty, as she was fondly nicknamed, lived at 29 St. John’s Place, Park Slope, Brooklyn and was raised a Catholic. She attended an all-girls high school, Prospect Heights, where she was described as having a ‘sunny disposition’ and being ‘self-assured beyond her years’. In 1953, Rachel witnessed a murder on the streets, which, understandably, disturbed her greatly. The family decided to move to New Canaan, Connecticut, but Kitty chose to stay where she was. She worked in various clerical jobs, including as a secretary for an insurance company, but she was unsatisfied with these jobs, so by the 1950s, she started working in a bar. In August 1961, Kitty was arrested for bookmaking; she had been taking bets on horse races from the customers in the bar. She was fined $50 and fired from the bar. Kitty then found another bar job at Ev’s Eleventh Bar on Jamaica Avenue and 193rd Street, and after being promoted to bar manager, she moved to Queens, where the bar was located.
Around ten years later, Kitty met Mary Ann Zielonko in a Greenwich Village nightclub. It didn’t take long for the two to fall in love, and they moved in together in a second-floor apartment in Kew Garden, Queens. It had a reputation as an idyllic, peaceful area.
At 2.30 am, on 13th March 1964, Kitty left work as usual and started driving home. She arrived back at 3.15 a.m. and parked at Kew Gardens Long Island Railroad Station, a mere 100 feet away from the back of the apartment building she lived in. While walking to the door, Kitty was attacked. A man with a hunting knife came towards her. Panicking, she tried to run round to the front of the building, but he chased her, stabbing her twice in the back. Kitty started screaming for her life, crying out, ‘Oh my God, he stabbed me! Help me!’. One neighbour who heard the commotion, Robert Mozer, shouted ‘Let that girl alone!’ at which point the attacker ran away. Severely injured, Kitty tried to make her way to the rear entrance of the apartment building. Later, witnesses would describe someone getting into a white car and driving away before returning 10 minutes afterwards; it was Kitty’s attacker. He searched the area around the apartment building until he found Kitty lying in the hallway at the back. A locked door had prevented her from entering, and sadly, that sealed her fate. Kitty was stabbed numerous times, raped, stolen from and left for dead. The ordeal lasted 30 minutes, and cut marks on her hands showed that she had tried to fight her attacker off. News of the attack finally reached Sophie Farrar, a friend of Kitty’s who lived in the apartment building. Rather than wait for someone else to do something, she raced to find her friend without regard for her safety. She found Kitty on the floor and, slipping in pools of blood, made her way over and comforted her dying friend as best she could. The ambulance finally arrived at 4.15 a.m. Kitty died En route to the hospital. She was 28 years old.
Detective Mitchell Sang questioned Kitty’s partner, Mary, just hours after the murder; initially, she was considered a suspect. Homicide detectives John Carroll and Jerry Burns asked her for six hours with a lot of focus on their relationship (homosexuality was still illegal at this time) and also questioned neighbours about the couple’s relationship. Nothing came of the questioning.
On 19th March 1964, Raoul Cleary became suspicious of a man removing a television from a neighbour’s house. Raoul went over to the man to question him, and he replied that he was working for a removal company. Raoul spoke to another neighbour, Jack Brown, who pointed out that the homeowners weren’t moving out. Realising that theft was happening, Jack disabled the thief’s car while Raoul alerted the police. They arrived at the scene and arrested the man for suspected burglary. Then, one of the detectives took note of the car; it was a white car. The same one that had been seen the night of Kitty’s murder.
The man who had been caught was Winston Moseley, a 29-year-old married man with three children and no criminal record. While being questioned, Moseley didn’t just admit to committing numerous robberies but also to the murder of Kitty, a woman called Annie Mae Johnson who had been shot and burned to death, and a 15-year-old girl, Barbara Kralik who had been killed at her parents’ home. His only motive was to ‘kill a woman’ because ‘they were easier and didn’t fight back’ (I hate this piece of shit). Later, psychiatric reports suggested that not only was Moseley a murderer but also a psychopathic necrophiliac (just when you thought you couldn’t be any more disgusted by him).
Whilst Moseley was charged with the murder of Kitty, someone else had confessed to the murder of Barbara Kralik. Alvin Mitchell told police he had killed her, which muddied the waters, and Moseley wasn’t charged with this murder. I found no information that he was prosecuted for Annie Mae’s murder either.
Judge J Irwin Shapiro presided over Moseley’s trial, which started on 8th June 1964; he pleaded not guilty before being persuaded by his attorney to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. It took just 7 hours for the jury to find him guilty, and on 11th June, he was sentenced to death; he showed no emotion. Judge Shapiro commented, ‘I don’t believe in capital punishment, but when I see a monster like this, I wouldn’t hesitate to pull the switch myself’.
On 23rd June 1964, Moseley attended the trial of Alvin Mitchell as a defence witness; Moseley was still adamant he had killed Barbara Kralik. The first trial produced a hung jury, but the second one found Mitchell, not Moseley, guilty of the murder.
On June 1st, 1967, Moseley’s sentence was reduced to life imprisonment. He died on 28th March 2016, at 81, in Clinton Correctional Facility, New York.
Now, that sounds like it’s the end of the story, but in many respects, it is just the beginning. We will return to the 13th of March 1964, the night Kitty was murdered. It was already confirmed that one witness had shouted at Moseley to ‘let that girl alone’, but what did the witness do after that? How did no one hear Kitty screaming at the top of her voice, begging for help?
Neighbour Hattie Grund had heard Kitty shouting for help and saw her standing alone outside. Hattie was unaware that Kitty had been injured but rang the police anyway, who told her they were already aware of the situation. Robert Mozer, who had shouted out the window, had assumed it was a drunken argument and went back to bed.
Teenager Michael Hoffman lived in a building across the street and said his father had rung the police, saying ‘there’s a woman being attacked. She’s staggering around outside’. The call wasn’t even logged. When detectives were asking around the following day, they were sharply told, ‘Maybe you should have come when I made the phone call’.
Joseph Fink, a night elevator operator at the apartment opposite, witnessed the first savage attack on Kitty and was aware she had been stabbed. Even after Moseley ran off, Fink didn’t check on Kitty or even bother to ring the police. He actually went to the basement for a nap (!!!).
During the second attack, neighbour and supposed friend Karl Ross heard the commotion. He eventually opened his door slightly to see Kitty being stabbed. Despite her making eye contact with him and trying to ask for help, he shut the door. He didn’t ring the police until later, only after ringing friends first. Ross later told police, ‘I didn’t want to get involved’.
The newspapers didn’t take long to get hold of the story.
On 27th March 1964, The New York Times published an article with the headline ’37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call Police’. The 37 was an error, as the article referred to 38 people who had witnessed what had happened to Kitty but chose to ignore it. The article began, ‘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 story originated from a conversation between the New York City police commissioner and the newspaper’s editor, Abe Rosenthal. I’m sure it won’t shock you that many of the ‘facts’ printed were seriously exaggerated or simply not true. There was outrage throughout New York that this young girl had been stabbed to death in front of an apathetic audience. How could 38 people ignore her cries for help? Rosenthal decided to capitalise on the anger and published a book, ‘Thirty-Eight Witnesses’, further cementing the blur between fact and fiction in people’s memories. Until recently, people believed there were 38 witnesses, and it was the catalyst for years of debate: why did people do nothing? It led to the development of the ‘Bystander Effect’, the idea that the greater the number of witnesses or bystanders, the less likely that any one of them will intervene. Studies into this phenomenon are still going on to this day. A Fordham University professor called the case ‘the most cited incident in social psychology literature until the September 11 attacks of 2001’.
It was only in later years that Kitty’s brother, Bill, started to investigate the circumstances surrounding his sister’s final hours. He discovered there was no evidence of 38 witnesses, but there were 38 entries into the police notebook from that night – could there have been some confusion? Unfortunately, the articles and subsequent books have been based on a story Rosenthal has carved to fit his narrative; everything was written for shock value. When police reporter Danny Meehan read the original article and questioned why there were so many inaccuracies, the answer he received was, ‘It would have ruined the story’ (ouch).
And that is the story of Kitty. Despite the fiction surrounding the 38 witnesses and a couple of the witnesses who were, let’s be honest, assholes, others did alert the police. Sophie, who died in 2020 at 92, risked her own life to try and help Kitty. One good thing that came from the case, and the police failings, was the implementation of the American national emergency number of 911 in 1968. I hope Kitty is at peace and am pleased that lessons have been learned. As always, let me know what you think in the comments, thanks for reading, take care of yourselves, and I will see you next time.
"I still have a lot of anger toward people because they could have saved her life, I mean, all the steps along the way when he attacked her. And then he sexually assaulted her, too, when she was dying. I mean, you look out the window, and you see this happening, and you don't help. That's — how do you live with yourself knowing you didn't do anything?"
Mary Ann Zielonko
Hi! I spend a lot of time writing for the website, and I basically exist on caffeine and anxiety - if anybody would like to encourage this habit, please feel free to buy me a coffee!
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