The Terrible Death of Kitty Genovese

Where Kitty Genovese was attacked.

In the early hours of March 13, 1964, Catherine Genovese, known to her friends as Kitty—28 years old, slender and short-haired, with wide brown eyes and a welcoming smile that revealed a slight gap between her two front teeth—parked her red Fiat in a parking lot just across the street from her apartment. She was returning home from her job as manager of Ev’s 11th Hour, a bar in nearby Hollis, Queens, in New York City. Two weeks later, a front-page New York Times article told in the starkest terms what happened to her next.

Barely concealing his disgust, the journalist Martin Gansberg reported that “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 woman called after the woman was dead.”

Before long, the whole nation knew the facts of the story, and the facts were appalling. As Genovese began the short walk to her building, she noticed a man—later identified as Winston Moseley, a local laborer—lurking in the shadows. She ran to the front of 82-68 Austin Street, several houses down from her own, when Moseley overtook and began stabbing her.

Awakened by her screams—“Oh, my God! He stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!”—several building residents turned on their lights and stuck their heads out the window to assess the situation. One man yelled, “Let that girl alone!” Moseley retreated. But no one called the police. No one left his apartment to help the wounded victim.

Genovese struggled to her feet and began limping around the building to the back entrance of 82-70 Austin, where she lived. Emboldened by the silence, Moseley returned, pushed her to the ground, and resumed his attack. She called out, “I’m dying, I’m dying!” Again, lights went on. And again, no one called the police.

Something unnerved Moseley. He ran to his car, turned on the ignition, and drove off. Moments later, he returned. A quick search of the area led him to the door of 82-62 Austin Street, which Genovese had managed to open. She lay slumped on the floor. He raped and stabbed her. Again people heard her screams, but nobody called the police, and nobody came to her defense. Soon after, Moseley left the scene for good, and Kitty Genovese died.

Horrified by the complacency of her neighbors (none of whom, despite the implication of Gansberg’s piece, had seen or heard the entire attack), police detectives released the results of their investigation. “We thought it was just a lover’s quarrel,” said one housewife. “Frankly, we were afraid,” another neighbor confessed. “I didn’t want my husband involved,” admitted a third. A man who lived in the first building said that he “was tired” and had decided to “go back to bed.” As Genovese lay bleeding to death, Karl Ross, who lived just across from the stairwell in the building she ended up in, phoned a friend to ask for advice.

Running for mayor the following year, John Lindsay, a liberal Manhattan congressman, found that “what the Kitty Genovese story tells us is that something has gone out of the heart of New York City. That something is hope, morale, spirit, pride.” In shrugging to themselves, as if to ask, “What’s the use? Why get involved,” Lindsay said, her neighbors revealed the “disease” of apathy that was eating away at the fabric of the city and the country.

Phil Ochs, a popular folksinger of the time, eulogized Genovese in a scathing song titled, “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends.” The ballad began: “Look outside the window, there’s a woman being grabbed. They’ve dragged her to the bushes and now she’s being stabbed. Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain. But Monopoly is so much fun, I’d hate to blow the game. And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody, outside of a small circle of friends.”

Indeed, something did seem wrong with New York. The city’s crime rate had skyrocketed in the 1950s and ’60s, a trend that would continue unabated into the 1980s. In 1966 alone the number of reported burglaries citywide increased by 96.4 percent; the number of robberies by 89.9 percent; the number of rapes by 22.1 percent; and altogether the felony rate jumped 59.9 percent. It became axiomatic that entire parts of the city were off-limits to law-abiding citizens. Even public transportation seemed increasingly dangerous. In 1965 the rate of “serious” crimes reported on the subways—robberies, muggings, armed assaults—increased by 52 percent.

Such assaults had a cumulative effect. A survey conducted in 1966 revealed that almost half of all white Brooklynites felt unsafe when walking outside after dark; 40 percent reported sometimes staying home and foregoing social engagements because “it was too unsafe” to go outdoors; 74 percent were “somewhat concerned” or “very concerned” that their homes might be burglarized.

At the time, few people fully appreciated the deep roots of urban crime, a result in large part of America’s abandonment of the cities and the huge shift of public resources to the new suburbs. Even fewer people could have known another ramification of Kitty Genovese’s murder.

She left behind two grieving parents, but she was also survived by Mary Ann Zielonko, her partner. The two had lived together for almost a year. Their first date had been at Seven Steps, a gay bar on Houston Street in Manhattan. They were deeply in love, but like most same-sex couples of that era, they had been compelled to keep their relationship a secret. When Genovese died, it was Zielonko who went to the local hospital to identify the body, and Zielonko suffered in silence. To the rest of the world, she was just a roommate of a murder victim. Few people knew the depth of her grief.

Last month, for the twelfth time in 42 years, the New York parole board turned down Winston Moseley’s plea for release. Today it seems impossible to imagine that 38 people could stand by passively as one of their neighbors was raped and killed. That, perhaps, is the saving grace of the terrible end of Kitty Genovese’s short life.

—Joshua Zeitz is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine and the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern.