Trollheart

Where Everyone Knows Your Name and Ignores Your Cries

At approximately 2:30 AM on March 13 1964 Kitty Genovese locked up the bar and climbed into her red FIAT, heading home to her apartment in Kew Gardens. She arrived about 3:15, having been spotted by Winson Moseley at a traffic light as he sat in his car awaiting a victim. He followed her, and sticking to his MO, when she parked he did too and approached her. She naturally got spooked and was heading for a telephone box to call the police when he grabbed her and stabbed her. With her first scream, a light went on in one of the apartments in the block opposite the bookstore where she had been attacked. A man shouted out at the assailant who walked off, but the caller shut his window and turned his lights back off. Moseley returned and stabbed Kitty again.

Screaming out that she had been mortally wounded, Kitty struggled along the street as lights went on in the apartments around her, but nobody else shouted or looked out. Moseley, seeing the unwelcome interest being taken in his activities, went to his car and drove off, but when the lights all went out and nobody offered any help to the dying woman, he returned, found Kitty slumped near her door, stabbed her again, finishing the job. He took her money and left. He was so unconcerned about what he had done that he committed another three burglaries before the police caught him.

This is his testimony, taken from the police interview after he was arrested, and reprinted in the book Thirty-Eight Witnesses:

Q: Now, on this night did you intend killing?
A: Yes.
Q: What if anything did you do to prepare for that?
A: Well, I had a hunting knife that I had taken from a previous burglary, and I took that with me.
Q: Had you any specific type of individual in mind?
A: Well, I knew it would be a woman.
Q: Is there any reason why now you intended to kill a white woman as distinguished from the two prior times that you thought you killed colored?
A: No, unless perhaps I might have been thinking there might have been some difference between them.
Q: Now tell us what you did, please.
A: Well, I left the house about one-thirty or two o'clock, and it took me until about three o'clock to find one that was driving where I could actually catch up with her. . . . I followed [her red car] for about ten blocks, and then it pulled into what I thought was a parking lot.
Q: Did you make your mind up to kill her?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you tell us any reasons why?
A: No, I can't give you any reasons why.
The court: Was [money] one of the factors?
A: It possibly was, but it was not a primary factor.
Q: You tell us exactly what happened, Winston.
A: As soon as she got out of the car she saw me and ran. I ran after her and I had a knife in my hand, then I caught up with her and I stabbed her twice in the back.

He testified that he stabbed her in the chest and stomach as well as the back, that somebody called out the window, but that he "did not think that person would come down to help her."
Moseley also testified that later he had heard somebody open an apartment door and shout down, but he "didn't feel these people" were coming down the stairs. So he lifted her skirt, cut off her under-clothes, including her brassiere. After he had stabbed her repeatedly he began to worry that somebody might have seen his car and noted the color, make, or license. So he walked back to the outdoor parking lot where he had left it to stalk her on foot. He moved the car around the corner. Then he took off his hat, a stocking cap, and put on a fedora he had in the car.

Q: [from the prosecutor] Why?
A: Well, I felt that perhaps if I had not killed the* girl and had to leave what I started unfinished, she would have only seen the bottom half of my face.
Q: In other words, you thought you could disguise your face better by putting on a different hat.
A: That's right.
Q: Now, when you came back, you were thinking, weren't you, about what you were going to do?
A: That's right.
Q: What?
A: That's right.

Moseley said he heard some yelling from windows, but it had stopped by the time he got back to Catherine Genovese, whom he had left lying in the street. He did not think that anybody would come down "regardless to the fact that she had screamed. So I came back but I didn't see her. . . . I tried the first door in the row of those back houses, which was locked. The second door was open and she was in there. As soon as she saw me she started screaming so I stabbed her a few other times . . . once in the neck. . . . She only moaned after that."

Q: You also knew that people at three o'clock in the morning on a cold morning would not take the trouble to even come down and investigate if someone had been killed?
A: I thought that way, yes. Q: And as she started to scream, you stabbed her, didn't you?
A: Yes, I did.
Q: You stabbed her in the throat?
A: Right.
Q: That is where the voice was coming from, isn't that right?
A: That's right.

Moseley testified that he saw that she was exposed, decided to rape her, stabbed her again, that she kept moaning, that he took off one of his gloves to pull down his zipper, took out his penis, laid on top of her but could not attain—"What was the word?" he asked the judge. "Erection," said the court. Did he have an orgasm, the court asked. Moseley said yes. He also said she was menstruating at the time. He took the money from her wallet.

Q: Forty-nine dollars you put in your pocket, hah?
A: That's being practical.
Q: Being practical?
A: Yes. Why would I throw money away?

The Aftermath

I think that last line speaks very well to Moseley’s state of mind. Is there any of us who - assuming we were able to murder and rape a woman - would even think of robbing her too? It shows, for me, the attempt, even if unconscious, to depersonalise his victim. She is nobody’s sister, nobody’s mother (well, she wasn’t either of these things, but he didn’t know that), nobody’s lover, nobody’s wife, nobody’s daughter. Just a corpse, a victim, a mound of flesh he could use to satisfy his evil urges having deprived the woman it was of life, and in that frame of mind, I suppose, why not take her money? It’s not as if she was going to be needing it.

But no matter how horrified we might feel at this killer’s cold attitude towards the woman who was only moments ago* a living and breathing human being with hopes and desires and fears,* and dreams, that can be put down to the fact that he was a sociopath and a killer, and did in fact plead insanity at his trial. The attitude of the onlookers, however, those people, those thirty-eight men and women, all of whom could have been in the same position as Kitty Genovese, who watched and listened to the attack and did nothing, that is harder to explain away.

But before I get to that, what of the killer?

Well, he was indeed apprehended. He doesn’t come across as a man who took any particular care to disguise his crimes; he killed Kitty Genovese out in the open, and it’s only due to the apathy of New Yorkers, or those ones anyway, that he wasn’t interrupted and caught. Did he know they wouldn’t interfere or investigate? Was he banking on that, or was it just, for him, a welcome happenstance? Whatever the case, he was caught but not before the New York Police went the usual route of checking Kitty’s lover out. Being 1964, though lesbianism was known of it would hardly have been that much in the mainstream, and as ever, those who are different are frowned upon by those who consider themselves “normal” or “straight”, with the result that Mary Ann Zielonko was questioned by the cops as a suspect, the idea being, I assume, that they believed some sort of lovers’ tiff was responsible. This, of course, despite Kitty screaming “He stabbed me!”

For over six hours Zielonko was interrogated, with I would imagine the minimum of finesse and sensitivity, and almost certainly by male cops, as I doubt too many female police were in the ranks at this time, certainly no detectives. A very large percentage of men seem to have an even bigger grudge against lesbians, as if they are somehow reducing the pool from which straight men have to pick women. Also, if a lesbian is good-looking or pretty, the oft-used and bitter comment of “what a waste!” tends to paint these women as going against nature, almost deliberately to deny men their god-given right over women. Yeah, I see now that it was all male cops.

Six days later, and having had no luck with the case (with presumably Mary Ann exonerated or at least unable to be tied to the crime) the cops had the blindest bit of luck when Moseley, in the commission of a robbery, was stopped by a neighbour who then called the police. His car was identified as the one seen at the murder scene, and he quickly confessed. This is insane. Sure it was night, but thirty-eight people witnessed the attack and yet the cops could not find, and seemingly did not even look for (no mention of an APB) a white Chevy Corvair, not exactly an inconspicuous car. Had it not been for the robbery attempt and a neighbour - ironically - actually taking an interest in the theft and calling the police - they might still have been looking. Or even not looking: I don’t know how much if any priority was given to this case, and I suspect little really.

Moseley’s trial took just over a week. His initial plea of not guilty was changed to not guilty by reason of insanity. He pled guilty to two other murders, that of already mentioned Anna May Johnson and another girl, Barbara Kralik, though another man, already charged with this murder, was later convicted of it, despite Moseley’s later testimony in his defence. After seven hours the jury brought in a verdict of guilty and Moseley was sentenced to death. This sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, due to the issue of his being insane not having been taken into account at the trial.

Wait, what? He pled not guilty by reason of insanity, didn’t he? So how could it be said he was not… oh. Apparently the idea was that he was convicted as a sane man and the insanity plea was not taken into account. ****ing appeal court. Well, he did die eventually, having been refused parole a staggering eighteen times, never showing any remorse for the murders and pretending now that he had never meant to kill Kitty, which clearly his interview shows he had. After serving a total of fifty-two years in prison, he died at the age of 81.

They Also (De)Serve Who Only Stand and Watch

So one stain was removed from the world, but another, deeper one remains. What of the people who stood idly by while a young woman was killed only yards from their doors? When questioned, most of these mumbled hard-to-accept excuses, such as “didn’t want to get involved”, “was afraid” or even, in one really incredibly selfish case, “too tired.” Some of them professed they could offer no explanation for why they did not intervene, or at least make a call, while others closed the door in the faces of enquiries. Poor explanations such as the belief that it could be a domestic incident (sure: where someone stabs someone) or that they didn’t really hear don’t wash with me. Even the idea that perhaps the fact that Kitty was a lesbian feeding into a general poor opinion of the woman makes little sense: nobody could see or hear enough to know who was being attacked, just that someone was.

The police groaned that had just one person called them sooner - someone did eventually call, but it was after the attack, and too later, as Kitty died on the way to hospital - her life could have been saved. There is evidence to suggest that much of the reluctance to call the police stemmed from either a distrust of the force or the feeling that the caller would be dealt with in a less than polite manner. Reactions all more or less along the lines of “don’t bother us” and “what do you expect us to do?” seem to have been common, and the idea that people would open themselves up to ridicule and even abuse seems to have some basis in truth. As well as this, the dearth of patrol cars cruising New York seems to have been an issue, as does the often inordinately long wait time to get through to the police (911 had not yet been instigated in New York, so callers had to go through the operator) - often up to forty-five minutes. Based on that, if someone had called the moment Kitty had first screamed, the killer would have had time to finish her off and rape her and vanish before the call had even been answered!

The incident attained a certain notoriety, turning from a “simple, commonplace” murder to a question of citywide and then national proportions, the troubling syndrome of the uncaring neighbours. In a world where people used to be able to call on those they lived nearby for help, the world had turned one-eighty and now people shut themselves in and metaphorically put their fingers in their ears, not wanting to hear anything that might require them to take action, even if that action did not involve any danger to themselves. In the six days between the murder and the apprehension of Moseley, I wonder did many of those people consider what might happen if the killer struck again? What would they feel like if their wife or girlfriend, or they themselves were the one bleeding out in the dark, crying in the night, hearing nothing but silence and seeing nothing but dark windows?

Mention must be made of four people: one, the man who at least opened his window and shouted at Moseley to leave “that girl alone”, even if all he did was that, and then went back to bed. It has to be allowed that at least he spooked the killer sufficiently to have him walk off, even if he swiftly returned when it was clear the man was not coming down nor had phoned the police. Second is Sophia Farrar, a neighbour and close friend of Kitty’s, who found her after the second attack and stayed with her until the ambulance arrived. The man who did - eventually, and too late - phone the cops, and finally, perhaps most damningly of all, Karl Ross, who was so unsure and scared of what to do - including whether or not he should call the police - that he delayed and wasted precious minutes while he debated his decision with friends on the phone he could have been using to alert the police. There’s no record as to whether he actually grew a pair and made the call, but he certainly made sure to protect himself first.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018