March 13, 1964: The Murder of Kitty Genovese

March 13, 1964, 60 years ago: A murder is committed, symbolizing the rising crime wave in New York City, and American cities in general. What's worse wasn't the number of people who cared, but the number of people who seemed not to care.

Catherine Susan Genovese was born on July 7, 1935 in Brooklyn, and grew up in the neighborhood of Prospect Heights. As far as has been determined, she was not related to New York's Genovese organized crime family. In 1954, her mother witnessed a murder, and her parents left, moving to New Canaan, Connecticut. But Catherine, known as Kitty, decided to stay in Brooklyn, as she was about to get married. But the marriage was quickly annulled.

She took clerical jobs, but found bartending more to her liking. In 1961, she was arrested for bookmaking, for taking horse racing bets from bar patrons. She pleaded guilty, paid a $50 fine, and was fired from her job.

She soon got another bartending job, at Ev's Eleventh Hour Bar, on Jamaica Avenue and 193rd Street in Hollis, Queens. Soon, she began managing the bar on behalf of its absentee owner. This enabled her to make enough money to get an apartment in the Kew Gardens section of Queens, at 82-70 Austin Street. She shared it with Mary Ann Zielonko. As comedian Bill Maher once said of this period, "Lesbians were called 'roommates.'"

She went to work on March 12, 1964, and left at 2:30 AM on March 13 -- a Friday the 13th. At 3:15, she parked her red Fiat in the Kew Gardens station of the Long Island Rail Road, about 100 feet from her apartment's door, in an alleyway at the back of the building.

She and her Fiat had been seen by Winston Moseley, who was driving a Chevrolet Corvair. He followed, parked his car in a bus stop on Austin Street, and got out, taking a hunting knife with him. He ran after her, caught her, and stabbed her twice in the back.

She yelled out, "Oh my God, he stabbed me! Help me!" Some neighbors heard the sound, but only a few of them recognized it as a cry for help. One, Robert Mozer, shouted out, "Let that girl alone!" but did nothing else. Moseley ran away, and Kitty got to the entrance of her apartment.

But she only got as far as a hallway at the back of the building before falling, barely conscious. Moseley went back, found her, stabbed her again, raped her, and stole $49 from her (about $448 in 2022 money), before finally leaving.

Sophia Farrar, a neighbor and friend, found her, called an ambulance, and held her until the ambulance arrived. One witness said his father had called the police after the initial stabbing, saying, a woman was "beat up, but got up and was staggering around." Another witness called friends for advice on what to do, before finally calling the cops. At 4:15 AM, the ambulance got to the scene, but it was no use: Kitty died on route to the hospital, just 28 years old.

The first suspect the police questioned was Zielonko, thinking the gay relationship might have soured and turned violent. She denied knowing anything about it. The neighbors also denied that Zielonko had anything to do with it.

Six days later, on March 19, Moseley was arrested in Ozone Park, Queens, after a stolen television set was found in the trunk of his Corvair. During questioning, Moseley admitted that he killed Kitty. He also confessed to killing Annie Mae Johnson, shot in her apartment in South Ozone Park a few weeks earlier; and Barbara Kralik, only 15, and killed in her family's house in Springfield Gardens in July 1963. He said he preyed on women because "they were easier, and didn't fight back." On June 11, he was convicted, and remained in prison until his death in 2016, at age 82.

The murder of Kitty Genovese would have been a footnote in the history of crime in New York City, if not for Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy meeting A.M. "Abe" Rosenthal, then the metropolitan editor of The New York Times, for lunch and telling him, "That Queens story is one for the books." Rosenthal launched an investigation, and on March 27, 2 weeks after the murder, the Times published a story titled "37 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police."

The text of the article raised the number to 38, and subsequent editions printed the number 38 in the headline, but it entered the public consciousness as "37 people saw a murder and did nothing about it." The article quoted one witness as saying, "I didn't want to get involved."

Crime had been on the rise in New York since the end of World War II, and with the Baby Boomers, the largest generation America has ever produced, now beginning to reach adulthood, and illegal drugs becoming more available and more widespread than ever, it was starting to get out of control. The Genovese murder didn't start the crime wave that continued to plague New York until the mid-1990s, but it was a convenient symbol. And the reaction to it was a convenient symbol for the callousness of New Yorkers, making the City look very bad to the rest of the country.

In the years to come, the facts of the case began to emerge. In 2014, on the 50th Anniversary of the murder, a book was published suggesting that the number of 38 witnesses who "did nothing" was misinterpreted. Some witnesses thought they saw, or heard, a minor argument, and had no idea a that murder was taking place until the next morning. She was attacked 3 separate times, and in each of the 1st 2, only 1 witness saw her get stabbed. And the 1st stabbing punctured a lung, rendering her incapable of screaming.

What's more, there was no real way to get in touch with emergency services: The best that could be done at the time was to dial zero for a telephone operator, say, "Get me the police," and go through the NYPD's calling system of the time, and hope that it led to an ambulance getting there in time. This was considered unacceptable, and in 1968, 4 years later, the 911 emergency-call system was put into effect.

Episodes of the CBS legal drama Perry Mason, like the novels that inspired it, were usually titled "The Case of the... " followed by an alliteration. On November 21, 1965, the show aired "The Case of the Silent Six," with 6 residents of a small apartment building failing to help a murder victim. The 1975 ABC film Death Scream was also based on the murder. So were 2 episodes in the NBC Law & Order franchise, one of them titled "41 Witnesses."

In the 1986 comic book miniseries Watchmen, the character of Walter Kovacs recalled reading about the Genovese murder, saying that it inspired him to become the vigilante Rorschach. This was also mentioned in the 2009 film version. What the film version did not include, but the original graphic novel did, was that his mask was made from a dress that Kitty had worn.