The Unkindness of Strangers - the Murder of Kitty Genovese
Ah, you say: another murder. Didn’t you just get through an extended account about two brothers murdering their parents, Trollheart? What was that you said in the introduction: not all these articles will feature murder or killing, as evil comes in many forms? And now, here you are, again with the murder. What gives? Well, apart from the fact that the last statement shows your age (or mine, really, as I wrote it) let me tell you that this is in fact not a story about murder. Well, it is, but not only murder. Let me explain.
The main thrust of this article is centred on the callousness and lack of interest of people, the idea that anyone could hear a cry for help, know - or have a good idea - that someone was being attacked, even murdered, just within earshot, and not go to their aid or at the very least phone the police, is what we’re dealing with here. The old and by now more entrenched than ever idea of not getting involved, not wanting to get involved, nothing to do with me. Is this evil per se? Have we not all done this ourselves, as the author of the book I chose to research this, A.M. Rosenthal says in
Thirty-Eight Witnesses? Well, no, I have to say I have not. That could be due to the fact that I never went out that much, and a lot less now since Covid and since Karen got sick, but even in my youth I never came across anyone in distress to whom I did not render aid. Maybe I was lucky and just never found myself in that position.
I like to think, as we all surely do, and maybe have, that I would go to someone’s assistance in a case like that. Oh, I don’t kid myself I would run out and confront someone - I’m a skinny Irish man with no skill in fighting and a devout follower of the Church of Cowardice, or at least its branch office, the Temple of Caution. It would, after all, be foolish and precipitous, and very dangerous to run into a hostile situation without knowing what you’re running into. But I think i would call for help at the least. Well, we all do, as I say. We all think that. But we have to. Who, after all, is going to say if I heard someone being beaten up or attacked I wouldn’t call the cops? I suppose, put it in a domestic situation - you hear your neighbour being beaten up, shouts, screams, curses - sure, you might turn back to the TV or your writing or whatever you’re doing and shrug. Just another argument that has nothing to do with you.
But outside, where someone is clearly being attacked? You wouldn’t even phone the cops? Look, I have my own tiny story to tell, and I’m a little ashamed but at the same time I’m glad it’s the only instance I can say this happened to me. Years ago, I was brushing my teeth I think - in the bathroom anyway - when I heard a girl seemingly in trouble, groaning “Leave me alone!” and a sarcastic male voice mimicking her. Now there are many reasons I didn’t run out. One, and the most important, is my membership of that church I told you about and my lack of any sort of fighting skill, muscle or being in any way able to intimidate anyone. But there were other reasons.
I didn’t know where the voices were coming from. My estate is built in such a way that you can hear voices that could be streets away, and we sort of really don’t have streets anyway. It’s a bit of a failed experiment, almost a totally enclosed housing estate with just one or two roads running through it for traffic. It’s not like your normal estate where you have houses on one side and houses on the other and a street in between. Hard to describe, but many of the houses back onto each other and cluster in clumps, so you could be talking about someone at someone’s back garden, or even at a corner you couldn’t get to. The voices could also have been engaged in some sort of disagreement rather than anything violent: I certainly heard no screams or sounds of violence. It could have been two lovers having an argument, with no real aggression involved. And though I only heard one male voice, who’s to say that there were not more?
Anyway, it bothered me but I turned away. There wasn’t really anything I could do. What was I going to do? Phone the cops and tell them I heard voices, seemingly in some sort of argument? Yes, a man and a woman. No I don’t know where. No I don’t know what they were arguing about. No I didn’t see any weapons, nor see them either. Thanks a lot sir. Next time, maybe don’t bother huh? Wasting police time is a serious crime.
All of that leads me back to this contention, though, of Rosenthal’s that we all at one time or another have closed our ears and our hearts to those whom we might have helped. Now, he goes into pretty esoteric detail, comparing a murder in progress to children dying on the streets of India, where he worked for a while, and blaming himself, and by extension, all of humanity for being callous and uncaring. But I think there he’s doing himself an injustice. Of course, if you’re to include every beggar you passed without helping, every woman you met who seemed to have a black eye and you didn’t enquire, every homeless person you ignored, we’re all guilty. But there are levels, and to me that kind of thing is on a much lower level to the idea of actually turning away from the desperate cries of a dying woman in the night as she’s murdered almost beneath your window.
So as we will see,* we have over thirty-eight people involved in what I would call an evil act, though not one of them was involved. And that’s the problem as I see it. There was a murder, and out of thirty-eight people who could have done something to stop it, or at least alert the authorities, not one did.* I suppose in some ways it’s unfair to call this an evil act. It’s more a case of a lack of caring, but in the end, isn’t that evil in its own way? If you saw or heard someone being attacked right outside your door, or as you walked home, or in a car park, would you intervene? Well, no, you probably wouldn’t, and to an extent that’s understandable. You’d be one person. But this was… well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let me first introduce you to the luckless future victim, both of a sadistic killer and of the cold-heartedness and callous disregard and disinterest of New Yorkers.
Catherine Susan “Kitty” Genovese (1935 - 1964)
Born only four days after Independence Day, Kitty Genovese was of Italian-American extraction, and lived in Brooklyn, New York. In perhaps a chilling foreshadowing of the end of her own life, her mother witnessed a murder ten years before her daughter would die under a madman’s knife, and it says the family moved after this, though whether that was as part of a witness protection deal or just because it was too stressful to remain there - or she feared for her life and those of her family - I don’t know. At any rate, that year was very significant, because it also became the year Kitty married and was subsequently separated from her husband of only a few months, when the marriage was annulled after she came out as a lesbian. So in one year, her family had moved from Brooklyn to Connecticut after her mother had suffered a horrible trauma in seeing someone killed (doesn’t say who, or under what circumstances), though she herself remained in Brooklyn,* fell in love, got married, realised she was not straight and got out of the marriage. A whole hell of a lot for a woman who had, unbeknownst to her, a mere decade of life left to live.
By the time the new decade had rolled around she had been working in bars in Queens, in fact though she was arrested for taking illegal bets at one, she later rose to manage another, and it was while in charge of this she would see out the final years of her life. She managed
Ev’s Eleventh Hour Bar on Jamaica Avenue and 193rd Street in 1961, saving money towards her dream of opening an Italian restaurant, and two years later met her soulmate, Mary Ann Zeilonko, with whom she shared her Kew Gardens apartment on Austin Street. The romance was not to have a happy ending, obviously, as Kitty had less than a year to live.
Winston Moseley (1935 - 2016)
As I like to do, I mark the, to me, somewhat staggering coincidence that both victim and attacker were born in the same year, though Moseley would certainly outlive his victim, by a massive fifty years. There’s also only four months between their births, he born in March and she in July, and both were born in the first week of the month, he on March 2, she on July 7. A machinist married with three children and no criminal record, Winston Moseley seems to have had no motive for the attack, other than that he liked to kill people, or at least dominate and have power over them. He wasn’t especially fussy: he would attack men if he thought the victim was weak enough or he could surprise him, though generally he tended to just rob men whereas with women there was always the possibility of rape too, which he indulged in when he could. He did appear to have a predilection for killing his female victims though.
He did not just shadow his victims on the street, walking behind them, but often drove behind one if he saw her alone in her car. He would then park where she parked and follow her, attacking her on foot. This was the 1960s, and things like stalkers were unknown, but even so, Moseley does not appear to have been of that breed. He didn’t read up on, pick out and then check the routine of his victims so that he could be sure he would be able to get away with his terrible crimes. He was what I suppose today we would call a killer of opportunity; he almost literally fell across his victims by chance. Yes, he was out looking for a victim, but not anyone specific. A woman on her own, a drunk, someone smaller than him or looking lost, anyone he could intimidate, overpower and attack and either rob or kill would do. Women or men, it didn’t seem to make too much difference to him.
And yet, there was the sexual motive. It doesn’t look as if Moseley went out with sex on his mind. If he had done, then surely - assuming he was not bisexual, which I don’t know, but he was married - he would have no interest in male victims? As far as I can make out, he chose his victim and then if it was a woman and he had the chance he would rape her. Not exactly a criminal mastermind, but certainly a brutal, unprincipled killer without morals or pity, without any real plan and certainly with no remorse for any of his victims, as became clear later at his trial.
The small hours before dawn were Moseley’s preferred time for hunting, when the sky was dark and morning was yet hours away. Night time crowds from bars or nightclubs would have cleared off the streets and the only ones remaining would be solitary people, workers returning home, women coming back from a boyfriend’s apartment maybe, insomniacs. The brutality of the man is underlined through a previous murder, that of Anna May Johnson.
Anna May was killed on February 28, almost exactly two weeks before Kitty Genovese would meet her death. She was one of the ones Moseley tracked in her car, and when she stopped he got out and followed her. The time was 2 AM. Having been approached by Moseley for money, and presumably scared, Anna May handed over some cash. Moseley then shot her in the stomach. He shot her a second time, and certain she was dead, decided to rape her. He removed all her clothes but the night was cold and he didn’t fancy doing it in the cold, so instead, having shot her just outside her apartment block, he took her into it where he laid her on the living room floor and had his way. He then dragged her up the stairs to her apartment, set it on fire and left.