Kitty Genovese

Case background and investigation

Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was born in Brooklyn on July 7, 1935, and in 1964 was managing a bar, Ev's Eleventh Hour, in Queens. She shared an apartment on Austin Street in Kew Gardens with her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko. In the early hours of March 13, 1964, she drove home from work and parked near the Long Island Rail Road station, a short walk from her door, arriving at about 3:15 a.m.

Winston Moseley, a 29-year-old married father of two from South Ozone Park with no criminal record, had been driving around looking for a victim, according to later accounts, and followed her. He stabbed her on the sidewalk. Author Kevin Cook told NPR that her screams woke people on both sides of the street and that a man shouted from a window, after which Moseley retreated. Genovese made her way around the corner, out of sight of most of those who had been woken, and into the vestibule of a building. Moseley returned, found her there, stabbed her again and raped her. The New York Times later reported that the episode lasted about half an hour and that a 70-year-old neighbor came out and held her until police arrived. She died on the way to a hospital.

Moseley was arrested six days later during a burglary and confessed while in custody. He was tried in June 1964, found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. In 1967 an appeals court reduced the sentence to life imprisonment. In 1968 he escaped while being taken to a hospital in Buffalo, raped a woman and held hostages before he was recaptured. He was denied parole 18 times, the last in 2015, and died at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, on March 28, 2016, aged 81.

The case became widely known because of a front-page New York Times article published on March 27, 1964, which said that 38 law-abiding citizens had watched the killing over more than half an hour without calling the police. The account prompted national debate and research into what psychologists called the bystander effect, and it is often cited among the factors behind simplified emergency calling; the Times notes that the unified 911 system was established in 1968.

Later reporting found the original account seriously flawed. In Moseley's 2016 obituary, the Times wrote that its article had grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they perceived: no one saw the whole attack, only a few glimpsed parts of it, many believed they were hearing a quarrel, there were two attacks rather than three, and two people did call the police. Genovese's brother Bill examined the case in the 2016 documentary The Witness.