Kitty Genovese: The Myth, the Truth ... And Me

Jim Rasenberger’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian, and American Heritage, among other publications. He is the author of The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed Invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs (Scribner, 2011).

It’s not often I get to claim my work changed history. So forgive me if I take the recent death of Winston Moseley, the killer of Kitty Genovese, as an opportunity to remind everyone that I once did, kind of, sort of, change the history of a notorious episode in New York’s past. Even if Wikipedia doesn’t much care that it was me who changed it; even if my role required less gumshoe sleuthing than fortuitous stumbling; even if my main source was a guy in Queens with a website. But enough with the disclaimers: it’s an interesting story, one that teaches-- taught me, anyway-- a great deal about how history, not to mention journalism, gets written, and how this has evolved over the last decade or two.It begins a dozen years ago, in the winter of 2004, with a phone call from an editor at the New York Times.  The 40th anniversary of Kitty Genovese’s murder was approaching, the editor reminded me. Would I be interested in writing a retrospective of the murder for the paper’s (now sadly defunct) Sunday City section? The moment I said yes, I began to regret my answer. Funny to recall this now, but my concern was that I’d have nothing new to add to the story.

Like many people of my generation, I’d grown up knowing the horrible tale of the 38 witnesses who watched Ms. Genovese get stabbed to death on the streets of Queens, lifting not a finger to intervene. I’d studied so called “bystander apathy”— aka “Genovese Syndrome” — in an introductory psychology class in college, and had come upon references to Ms. Genovese’s murder countless times since in television shows, magazine articles, and books. I’d read Thirty-Eight Witnesses, the book by A.M. Rosenthal, the titanic Times editor who had assigned and overseen the article that made Kitty Genovese a household name. I’d probably glanced a few dozen times at the famous lede, one of the most startling in the history of American newspapers, that appeared on front pages of the Times on the morning of March 27, 1964:

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. 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. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.

It was a lede that never failed to shock. But after 40 years of outrage and concern what more could there be to say?
I briefly considered the Winston Moseley angle. I knew he was still alive because every now and then his name would appear in newspapers as he came up for parole. Should I try to interview him, see what he had to say about the March night he slaughtered a woman in Queens? I nixed the idea almost immediately. Many people find psychopaths fascinating. I am not one of them.

As I thought more about it, I realized there was one aspect of the case, strangely, that I knew nothing about, and that was Kitty herself. Beyond a few sketchy details, I had never read anything about her. I’d seen one image of her, a pasty black and white photograph, probably reproduced in every psychology textbook in the world for a few decades. Kitty appeared drawn and lusterless, about as close to a portrait of a victim-in-waiting as you could imagine. It was as if her entire life had been reduced to its final half hour. As far I could tell, no one had bothered to find out what came earlier.

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