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Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case (Melville House Classic Journalism)

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On March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was a single woman of 28 years who worked as a bartender and lived by herself in the Kew Gardens section of the Queens borough of New York City. She was killed, in three separate attacks in three separate places, over a period of one half hour by a man she had never met, one Winston Moseley, who was married, employed, and who upon being captured had no official criminal record but confessed to two other murders. Between her death and his capture, he committed three other robberies.

The author, a well known columnist, editor, and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, does not ask or answer typical journalistic questions. We learn nothing about Kitty Genovese's educational record, employment history, love life, family life, religious or community activities, etc. He notes her lack of prominence, and that her death initially received a mere four paragraphs in the New York Times.

What we learn instead is that her cries for help in the middle of the night led thirty-eight people to watch her being fatally stabbed, and the reaction of 37 of them was to treat her ongoing murder as a bad television show that could safely be turned off. None of the 37 called the police. The 38th witness first went to someone else's apartment so his calls could not be traced to him, called a friend for advice, and then, after she was dead, called the police, who came within two minutes.

Some of the people in the neighborhood casually knew Ms. Genovese, but not well enough to spring into action. The author sees them mainly as apathetic, but also as alienated from the community of which they were a part and somewhat indifferent to the fate of their fellow citizens.

The focus of the New York Times on the 38 witnesses who did not act in a timely fashion made this a national news story. Other similar stories of apathy, alienation, and indifference around the world came to light.

Some New Yorkers blamed the police for slow response time, probing personal questions of complainants, and disrespectful treatment of callers, saying that the poor record of the New York Police Department was the reason that people did not call. The New York Times diligently investigated the various methods used by other urban police departments to receive citizen calls, and successfully joined the Police Department's ultimately successful attempt to have a citywide emergency number.

But none of the 38 used that excuse. Those willing to talk to the press expressed apathy, fear of consequences, fear of involvement, reluctant spouses,and other similar reasons that look petty and inconsequential when one considers that a life was lost. Before they began to consider the press interest in their decisions to be harassing and advisable to avoid, they told the New York Times that they had learned from their experience and would not do it again.

To his credit, the author does not get on a high horse. He notes that he had turned away beggars repeatedly, beggars in obviously poor health and desperate financial circumstances. He makes it clear that the key question of the Genovese case--what degree of sacrifice do we owe others?--is a question that applies him and to all Americans as well as the 38 witnesses.

Sparing us extraneous details of Kitty Genovese's life, this book is an ethical and moral classic. It belongs in ethics courses at all levels.

It is also a classic book on the decay of urban communities. It does not ask or answer questions about the role the Genovese case played in middle class flight out of New York and other cities, but it clearly played a supporting role in the fear-based migration. This book belongs in urban studies courses and courses in criminology where the social effects of crime are considered.

Abe Rosenthal is the greatest editor opf his generation, a man who transformed The New York Times and modern-day journalism. Earlier, he was a wonderful foreign correspondent, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from Poland. This book, written when he was metropolitan editor of The Times, is about one of the most gruesome urban tragedies to occur in New York. This book needs no review. It simply needs to be read, and its lessons remembered by all of us.

A.M. Rosenthal's take on the Kitty Genovese murder remains wildly exaggerated, even after numerous other sources have shown that some witnesses DID 'get involved', and that the few witnesses didn't know exactly what they had seen.

Editor A.M. Rosenthal likely wrote the lead for his reporter's original article, which said 38 people "watched" the attack go on as Kitty screamed. It just ain't true. All reliable accounts (including the prosecutor) put the number at fewer than a dozen, with perhaps half that number actually seeing or hearing anything significant.

Kitty was NOT murdered in "full view" of ANY witness, and she didn't scream for 'over an hour'. No witness saw the entire attack. There were actually two separate attacks (the killer fled for a period of time, and Kitty walked away), and they did not span more than 35 minutes. It is unlikely Kitty would have screamed after the initial attack, in which she was stabbed in the lungs (causing her death by asphyxiation.)

There might have been a brief few minutes when one of her neighbors might have done something that might have saved her life - if they had known she had been stabbed, if they had known that it was something other than 'a lover's quarrel', and if the cops had shown up and been able to find her in time. But Rosenthal's urban morality tale is wildly inaccurate and unfair to an entire neighborhood. And he's more concerned with those neighbors than with Kitty herself. He never tells HER story. Kitty deserves better.

Not that far back, I was with a group of friends and one of them recounted how he had seen a woman fall in front of a restaurant. We inquired if she had gotten up, and he said no. But, he insisted, other people were there to help. We asked why he did not volunteer to help the injured woman. He said that he would have been more of a burden than a help. And it was through this simple discussion that the case of murdered New Yorker Catherine "Kitty" Genovese popped up.

A.M. Rosenthal's little book, consisting of only 69 pages, is really an essay on the dangers of apathy and inaction. It details only the facts and is not laced with personal opinions. It does not offer any psychological insights nor expert viewpoints in relation to the criminality of the human mind. All that is given is just the cold hard facts. And sometimes that alone is sufficient, especially in this case.

At three in the morning on March 13, 1964, Kitty, as she was commonly referred to, was returning home to Kew Gardens in the borough of Queens after her bar shift was completed. Upon exiting her vehicle, she saw a man in the darkened shawdows, stealthily moving towards her. The man in question was Winston Mosley, a married man with two kids, a house and a good paying job. But on that particular night, while his wife worked the evening shift as a nurse, he deliberately scoped and prowled the area with the sole intention of committing murder on a helpless woman, all because he simply felt like it. Sensing the danger that she was in, Kitty Genovese ran towards a police call box, but it was too late, for he stabbed her repeatedly as she screamed at full volume, "He's trying to kill me."

Witnessing this were thirty-eight neighbors, who watched from their windows and yet, did nothing. Even before the attack and rape happened, people saw and knew that something vile was going to take place. And when it did and the screams became audibly clear in the crystal cold night, apathy soaked the consciences of those who were privy to the dark happenings while they sat on their perch and watched. Nobody picked up a phone to call the police while tortured screams saturated the night. People were at a standstill and others simply went back to bed, even though they knew full well what was happening. One witness said that he just didn't want to be bothered.

Rosenthal's pamplet is an excellent piece of journalism, because it is not embossed with any calibur of bias. It is not embellished in order to evoke feelings that are favored to sway in any particular direction. It is an apolitical work. Yet, Rosenthal has enough confidence in his readers and in their intelligence to just leave it alone at the facts and nothing else. He also does not pass judgement on the witnesses, not profiling them in any way or putting them in compartmentalized boxes with labels that only a neophyte psychoanalyst could come up with. He does his job and reports the facts alone. By so doing, he shines a light to the reader and makes them reflect, What if I was one of those thirty-eight witnesses? What would I have done?

Journalism of this nature is unfortunately a dying craft; the media on both sides of the spectrum do seem to have their favorates. And they make it blatantly known. But what this work is really great at showing-by the facts alone-is that Catherine Genovese was a human being who had something absolutely horrible befall her. He death was not in vain, as is showcased in numerous laws and conferences bearing her name, each avenue exploring apathy and indifference and what can happen if they are married into violent crimes. Thirty-Eight Witnesses was an eye-opening work that had a powerful message to convey.

The March 13 1964 murder of Catherine (Kitty) Genevese has become sort an everyman's tale for modern time.

Just leaving a bar where she worked Genovese, 28, parked her red Fiat and prepared to walk the short distance to her home. All of the sudden she became aware of the presence of Winston Moseley, 30, a habitual armed robber and killer of women.

As Moseley made for her with his knife, Genovese attempted to make it to a police phone to call for help.

She didn't make it.

Instead Moseley caught up with her, inflicting two stab wounds in her back.

She cried out. A couple people yelled from a nearby apartment house but, sensing they wouldn't actually do anything, Moseley returned to his victim, continuing to stab her.

For the next 35 minutes, tenants heard the death screams of the tormented Genovese...doing nothing.

Moseley had enough time to move his car and change his attire in an effort to avoid detection.

Six days later he would be captured. By the end of that summer, he would stand convicted of murder (a crime for which he would ultimately be sentenced to life imprisonment).

However, as so poinantly laid out by Abe Rosenthal in this tight little book, the question remained: why did the 38 Genovese murder witnesses do nothing?

Though Rosenthal spends a good bit of time pontificating this question, his book never alludes to research that had almost contemporaneously been done by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram.

Between 1961 and 1963, Milgram (an intense Jew who'd lost family in the Holocaust) tested the question of why "good people" could stand aside and essentially do nothing. He published his thoughts findings in an excellent 1974 book called Obediance to Authority.

Tragically, the fact that 38 witnesses were present for this crime may have been the very reason it went unreported (until it was too late). According to Milgram, if a witness sees wrongdoing as part of a crowd they can settle themselves in the assumption that others will lead the charge and either report it or seek to rectify it.

So, interestingly enough, had there been just one witness then almost certainly Genovese would have lived. This is because the first call to police came AFTER the attacks but had a lone caller made the call earlier in the attack, Genovese wouldn't have sustained as serious of injuries. This finding was confirmed at Moseley's trial (starting June 8 1964) where he testified he didn't inflict what was the fatal knife blow until the end of the attack.

Though Rosenthal chose to include other speculations and information by way of more contemporary updates on the case, for some reason he didn't include any of the Milgram material or its obvious relevance to the case. Though I suspect this omission was due to simple laziness on his part (the book comes in at a slender 112 pages including forward material), what he said is still relevant and important enough to merit a reading of this work, albeit of course in conjunction with the Milgram book.

In the ways of described therefore, this murder can seen for what it properly is: another example of how human perception can go awry. A trick of light makes us think we see a rainbow when of course it's not "really" there. A trick of sound makes a think that thunder and lightning don't happen at the same time when of course they do. And if we're in a group and witness wrongdoing, we don't feel the need to be a good Samaritan when of course that's when we most need to be one.

This book is slight in content as well as size. Essentially an essay on the Kitty Genovese case, the author tells us (twice) that he knew nothing of the woman other than her name, her age and the manner of her death. Those facts, along with a tiny bit of information about the killer and some anecdotes concerning the author's job at the New York Times and his contact with this story, are about all you get when you read this book. It's a pity that 35+ years after her death, the author knows no more about her or the case than he knew in 1964. His commentary is the easy commentary of a journalist who writes for quick deadlines, the cumulative effect of which is that, by book's end, we find that Miss Genovese' life and far-too-early violent death - witnessed by thirty-eight bystanders who failed to act - has been marginalized once more by an reporter who, himself, fails to investigate.