The Kitty Genovese Murder Revisited
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At first, news of the grisly murder did not extend beyond The New York Times’ crime blotter. But A. M. Rosenthal, the ambitious Metropolitan section editor—later the paper’s executive editor—smelled a bigger story. On a tip from Police Commissioner Michael Murphy, Rosenthal and reporter Martin Gansberg discovered that multiple neighbors had heard or seen the attack. In a March 27 article titled “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call Police,” Gansberg claimed that 38 [sic]witnesses had seen Kitty die but did nothing.

The crowd’s indifference seemed emblematic of the city’s attitude in the mid-’60s—uncaring at best, treacherous at worst. Rapidly progressing social change left New Yorkers feeling alienated from their neighbors. Crime rates ticked up. Moseley and Kitty were total strangers, a fact implying that crime could happen to anyone, anywhere. Social psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley wrote that “present-day society is fragmented, compassion is disappearing, old moralities [are]crumbling.” They later characterized the neighbors’ inaction as the “Genovese syndrome”: “the hypothesis that the more bystanders to an emergency, the less likely, or the more slowly, any one bystander will intervene to provide aid.”

Kevin Cook argues that there was much more to the Kitty Genovese story than what’s presented in sociology textbooks. Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the crime, Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America aims to tell a richer story with first-hand accounts and unpublished court documents. Through interviews with her Kew Gardens neighbors and co-workers, Cook shows Kitty as a friendly, thoughtful, outgoing “career girl” who read nonfiction and dug folk music.

She was also a lesbian who lived with her girlfriend, Mary Ann Zielonko. “Sometimes you meet a person and you just know,” Zielonko tells Cook. “She was Italian–American, I’m Polish–American. She was Catholic, I was agnostic. She was so … charismatic, and I’m a quiet person. Opposites attract, you know!”

Though neither was involved in the pre-Stonewall gay rights movement, Zielonko relates the discrimination and secrecy that both women endured. Zielonko was more “out” than Kitty, blonde and femme to Kitty’s tomboyish mien. They frequented Greenwich Village folk clubs and lesbian bars like the Swing Rendezvous at 117 MacDougal Street, where they had met in 1963. Writes Cook: “The Swing had a long wooden bar scored with more initials than a grade-school desk, vinyl platters playing on the P.A., multicolored scrims shading the light bulbs overhead, and women of all shapes and sizes crowding the dance floor. The dancers wore Shalimar, Arpège and L’Aimant. They slow-danced to Piaf, Judy Garland and Streisand’s ‘Cry Me a River.’”

One conclusion that readers might anticipate—that Kitty’s sexual orientation made her a target for murder—never materializes. In fact, Moseley chose Kitty at random and didn’t know she was a lesbian at all. The scenes of Kitty’s life with Mary Ann Zielonko merely add color to the black-and-white outline of the victim before the crime.

Cook pokes additional holes in the familiar tale, claiming that the “38 witnesses” were a myth. Only a handful of neighbors heard Kitty’s screams or saw her and the attacker struggling on the dark sidewalk. One observed Moseley returning to stab Kitty to death after she’d crawled behind her apartment building—but the witness didn’t intervene. Another called the police but was rebuffed by an unconvinced dispatcher. Cook says Rosenthal embellished Commissioner Murphy’s tip in the interest of a good story, knowingly fudging the facts. “Thirty-eight. A number so definitive that it would help define the story for the next fifty years, and so arbitrary than Murphy may as well have pulled it out of a hat,” Cook adds.

Cook’s storytelling style often strays, however, and takes the reader down dozens of cultural culs-de-sac with little direct relevance to the main narrative. In trying to paint a full picture of early ’60s New York, Cook digresses into the Kennedy assassination, the Cold War, the Mets, the Yankees, Streisand, Bob Dylan, the geological history of Manhattan, and the 1964 World’s Fair. Cook fleshes out Moseley’s difficult childhood in Michigan with an analysis of the Detroit Tigers. He could have chosen historical details that enhance Kitty’s story rather than bits of well-worn ’60s pop culture.

The pace accelerates when Cook lets the tragic events unfold: the horrifying randomness of the attack, Moseley’s arrest and prosecution, Zielonko’s grief, and the media’s coverage of the murder. He dissects the half-truths in The New York Times’ accounts and demonstrates how reporting errors morphed into accepted facts over time. Remarks Cook: “Under the banner of the world’s leading news source, The New York Times at the height of its influence, the two-week-old story became a sensation. Newspapers in England, Russia, Japan, and the Middle East picked it up. As recast by Rosenthal and Gansberg, Kitty’s murder had elements of noir fiction: a gritty urban setting, craven bystanders, a defenseless young woman.” These lurid elements added up to a story with legs.

What does all of this mean, fifty years later? Politicians adopted the Genovese murder in campaigns against crime and civic apathy well into the 1980’s. The case prompted positive innovations, such as the 911 emergency system, Good Samaritan laws, and Neighborhood Watch organizations. Millions know of Kitty Genovese through social psychology books, newspapers, and pop culture references. “The hour of her death has been microscopically analyzed by criminal investigators, journalists, and psychologists,” explains Genovese scholar Harold Takooshian of Fordham University. “It was an hour not of her own choosing, when she suddenly found herself excruciatingly alone. Her screams may have been ignored by her neighbors at the time, but they have been heard around the world and touched millions of people since then.”

Kat Long is the author of The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City. She maintains a website at www.katlong.com.