Selects: The Kitty Genovese Story

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1:12Hey everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's Select, I've chosen our 2016 episode on the murder of Kitty Genovese. Her story is fairly famous. She was murdered while an entire apartment block of people watched and did nothing. But that's not exactly the real story. Like most things in life, there's more to it, and we explained what actually happened. We relied a lot on the excellent documentary The Witness for this episode, and I highly recommend watching it. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this one.

1:47Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

1:57Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry. So this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. True crime edition, actually. Yeah, but so much more than just a single crime. Agreed. A crime that echoed throughout a city, throughout the world, throughout decades. And it's true, man. Like, there are very few crimes you can point to that had more of an impact than the murder of Kitty Genovese. Agreed. And there are a lot of true crime podcasts out there. We are not trying to become one. No. This is just something we do from time to time. Sure.

2:39As I researched this, and as I watched, did you watch The Witness? Of course. The documentary recently. On Netflix right now. It is. HBO documentary. And I was disturbed, and I'm glad it finally covered it in the documentary, but I was disturbed that Kitty Genovese, and we'll get to her murder, but very quickly she was murdered and became the symbol for people not helping out. Right. What came to be known as bystander apathy or the bystander effect, that the more people who are around, the less likely anyone is to help. Yeah. So she became such a symbol that you never hear about Kitty Genovese and who she was as a person.

3:23That was one great thing about that documentary. There are multiple great things about it. But that it really talked about her and showed her and revived her spirit. Which I was really looking for because even in researching online, it's hard to get a lot of information. Some things, some even contemporary articles still aren't mentioning that she was gay. Well, yeah, her own brother who made the documentary didn't know that she was gay. No, it's true, but it's been out since, I'm not sure when actually that came out. It was just this year. Oh, okay, so it was fairly new. This year, last year, yeah.

3:59I thought it was like in the last five years maybe. So, in honoring that, why don't we talk a minute about Catherine Genovese. Kitty. Yep. Born in 1935 in Brooklyn to Vincent and René Le Genovese, Italian-American parents. And it's weird. I don't see. Oh, yeah. Rachel was her mother's name. She was Rachel Petrolli at first. So they lived in Brooklyn, and she was very well-loved in school. Yeah, she was like the leader of her clique. Yeah, and she was apparently a lot of fun and a good mimic of her teachers. and she was voted class cut up in her senior year graduating class. She went to an all-girls school in Prospect Heights.

4:46And it was just, by all accounts, this vivacious, fun-loving, really sweet, sweet lady. Yeah. Or girl at that point. Her little brother, Bill, who ended up being featured in the documentary The Witness, was just in love with her. She was just amazing to him. They had a very special relationship. Yeah, I think she was about 13 years older than him. Yeah, quite a bit. Maybe 12 years older. I had a sister like that. There's a very special relationship. I'm sure. There's none of that sibling rivalry. Yeah. They're not old enough to be your mother. It's just a unique situation to be a younger sibling and to be able to inherit all that worldly wisdom.

5:32Yeah. And they're going through all their own things and their own struggles and their own travails. But to that 13-year-old younger brother, they know everything. And they're the coolest person walking the planet. And they're the kindest person walking the planet. Because they've lived long enough to figure out some of the major stuff. Yeah, even my own sister is only six years older. And we very much had and still have that relationship. And she and my brother are great now too. But, you know, when you're two or three years apart, there can be a little bit of the knocking of heads. But by the time I came along, I was like, you know, my sister was six.

6:09It was perfect. I was a little baby doll for her. So anyway, that was very much the relationship that Kitty had with Bill. And it seemed like one of the older brothers always had a little bit of a like, yeah, she always liked him better kind of attitude. Seemed like everybody kind of knew like she liked Bill the most. Yeah, which I kind of felt bad for, but that's just those family dynamics, man. You know, the thing is, whenever you do start to kind of talk about somebody who's died, especially someone who's died violently and young, it's easy to canonize them. You know? Oh, yeah. You really put them up on a pedestal and forget their flaws.

6:47And, of course, I'm sure Kitty had tons of flaws, but she didn't seem to have any from what I'm gathering that were, you know, just terrible flaws or that made her like a bad person. She seemed like she was a – like an overall above average great person. Yeah, agreed. So New York was getting too dangerous for her family, they thought, to have all these kids. So they moved when she graduated high school to New Canaan, Connecticut. And she said, you know what? I'm staying here in New York. I'm 18 now. I love it here. She got married for a brief time to a guy. What was his name? Rocco? I don't remember his name.

7:30It's either Rocky or Rocco. And in the documentary, Bill tries to get in touch with him. He's like, I really, because he found out she was gay and was like, you know, we didn't even know this. I think Rocco can help shed some light. And he very respectfully asked for his own privacy. He said, my relationship with Kitty will remain forever a mystery. Yeah. It's like, that's an odd response. It was. I think he just didn't want to. I mean, if she was gay and they were married for a short time, he either didn't know and maybe felt the fool, or he did know and was maybe trying to do right by her in some way.

8:09Sure. Either way, he didn't want to talk about it. Right. But she worked as a secretary for a little while. She was a waitress for a little while. Eventually, she was a barmaid, bartender, and then became bar manager at a place in Hollis, Queens called Ev's 11th Hour. That is a great bar name. Well, and from all accounts, it was one of those wonderful neighborhood bars. Opened at 8 a.m.? Yeah, where the people were in there getting sauced pretty early in the day. Sure. And everyone knew everyone, and everyone loved Kitty, and she helped take care of everybody, but was very much an independent kind of firecracker of a woman.

8:47Sure. Drove a red Fiat. Convertible. Her dad used to tease her about, like, when are you going to find the right guy? She was like, I make more money than any guy I would go out with. I don't need that. Which is, I guess, 1960s for dad, I'm gay. I'm gay. Yeah. And I can't say it. But she did make pretty good dough as the bar manager. And then in March 1963, she met a woman named Marianne Zalonko at Swing Rendezvous. It was an underground lesbian bar in the village. And they moved in together shortly thereafter. Yeah. And Kitty actually used to bring Marianne home with her to visit. But her family was all like, well, they're just good friends and roommates.

9:32Right. It's the 60s. Right. The early 60s. Yeah, and there's an audio interview with her in that documentary that's really touching. She didn't want to be on camera, but Bill was able to speak to her. And I think what was so compelling about this documentary was that he was, it was a search of a man looking for closure. It's a harrowing, sometimes almost unbearable to watch search. It was tough. I mean, like he's at odds with his family here or there.

10:06he's just doing things where if you watch it in the context of the documentary and you just follow along the documentary it all makes utter and complete sense but then if you stop and remove yourself long enough to be like this is a documentary which means this guy really did this stuff and there was a camera following him along while he was doing it I couldn't have done half of it oh I know he really he just at one point he calls it an obsession but it's not he doesn't come off as obsessed right agreed alright so let's detail the crime and then we will take a break after that how does that sound?

10:46yeah alright so flash forward to March 13th 1964 it's 3.15 in the morning and Kitty Genovese is as she often did was making her way home from work late at night as a bar manager. Yeah. And was being trailed by a man, a man by the name of Winston Mosley. Yes, who is definitely the villain of this story, but is not the only one that will turn out. Right. So Kitty was 28, and at the time she was killed, and Winston, her killer, was 29, just turned 29, I think like a week or so before. And I think he said this is March 13th, 1964. Yeah, he was married with a couple of kids. Yeah, his wife, Elizabeth, worked the night shift.

11:37She was a hospital nurse. And Winston's mother stayed at home with the kids. So he basically said, you know, I own my own house. I've got a great job operating computers. No one even knows what I'm supposed to be doing with them yet, but I'm making money doing it. Yeah, he was a smart guy. So I'm going to indulge myself. I'm going to go out and stalk women and murder them in my spare time. That's what I'm going to do. So that's what he was doing on this night. He was cruising around looking for a woman to kill, basically. Yeah, that was his direct quote in questioning. Yeah. I was looking for a woman to kill.

12:14Yeah. So he saw at, I believe, a red light, this little red Fiat convertible caught his eye, and there was Kitty driving. So he started to follow her, and she parked. And she parked in the parking lot for the Long Island Railway, which the parking lot went backed up to the side of her apartment building, which is a two-story Tudor job that had shops in the bottom and apartments in the top, right? Yeah, this was in Kew Gardens in Queens. So he followed her on foot at this point. She sees him and knows that something is going on. he has a knife in his hand so she starts running he catches up to her outside of a bookstore and stabs her twice in the back right off the bat with this knife and she had been running toward a bar that she thought would be open but it turned out apparently there was a new manager and the new manager had closed down early so when she stabbed twice in the back it's on this darkened street but right across the street Austin Street is a 10-story apartment building with dozens of windows looking out onto Austin Street where she's being stabbed in the back.

13:32And she screams. She cries out. I think she said something like, oh, God, he stabbed me. Help me. Help me is what they said basically definitively is what she screamed. And people who were witnesses to this recounted that one guy said that he was, I think, a 10 or 11-year-old kid who was inside one of the apartments in the Mowbray apartment building and that he was awakened from a deep sleep. The scream was so loud. He said it was the loudest thing he's ever heard. So she screams and a man living in the Mowbray apartment buildings opens his window. What's his name? Yeah, Robert Moser opened his window and screamed out, hey, get out of there, what are you doing?

14:20And Mosley took off. Yeah. Took off running away. He's very frequently misquoted as having said, like, let that girl alone. But even by his own words, in his own testimony, he said, hey, get out of there. Yeah, at any rate, he scared him away. Right. So in between that time, about 30 minutes passes, Kitty makes her way around to the vestibule of her own building, right? Yeah. And goes inside the vestibule and like you think the horror is over for her. She could probably survive these wounds. Right. Is in shock, I would imagine. And then Mosley went to his car, kind of checked out the building, saw that some lights had gone on, and reasoned to himself, no one's going to do anything.

15:16Puts on a different hat and goes back, finds her in the vestibule, and finishes the job in the most horrific ways you can imagine. Yeah, he stabbed her at least 12 more times. They think she was stabbed at least 14 times. He said he doesn't remember how many times he stabbed her. but he basically kept stabbing her until she stopped screaming. She was still alive. I saw that he attempted to rape her. I've also seen that he raped her. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure which one's correct. But at one point, and this is really important here, as he's stabbing her and she's screaming, in the vestibule there's a staircase that leads directly up to a door and behind that door lived a man named Carl Ross.

15:59And Carl Ross opened his door and looked down one single flight of stairs at Winston Mosley stabbing Kitty Genovese, who was bloody. There was no confusing what was going on. And he closed the door, and he called his girlfriend, and his girlfriend said, don't get involved. I'm worried for you. Just leave it alone. It's none of your business. And he did. He didn't do anything, at least for a little while. All right, so that's a good place to break here, and we're going to come back and talk about who saw and heard what and what they did about it right after this.

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20:11All right. So at this point, Kitty Genovese is not dead yet, but dying in the vestibule. So a woman did come down and was with her. Her name is Sophia Farrar. She's still with us. And she was a neighbor and friend of Kitty's. And so she went down there and apparently was with her as she passed away, tried to calm her down, evidently did calm her down. and likes to think that she at least saw a friendly face and that she was being cared for as she passed. The weird thing is that is not mentioned. I guess we've got to get into the New York Times now. Yeah, so after the murder, like the next day, the Times ran four paragraphs on the Kitty Genovese murder.

21:05It was not incredibly newsworthy at first because that year there were 636 murders in New York City. Yeah, and that was just one of them. Just one. But a couple weeks later, the head, the city editor of the New York Times, a guy named Abe Rosenthal, who's a legendary journalist, was having lunch with, I believe, the police commissioner of the NYPD. And the commissioner said, did you hear about that Genovese murder? That's one for the books. 38 people standing around watched the whole thing. Nobody did a thing about it. Yeah, now you've got a story. Abe Rosenthal, legendary journalist, is like, thank you for that.

21:46Here's my diner's club card. I have to go now and get this story done. So he did. He assigned it out to a guy. What was the original reporter's name? His name was Martin Gansberg. And they wrote on the front page. I shouldn't say they wrote. It was definitely all Gansberg. But he was assigned and definitely under the direction of Abe Rosenthal. Like, this is the story. 38 people stood around and did nothing. Yeah. The title of the article was 37. It was 37 at the time. 37 who saw murder, didn't call the police. And basically the entire article and the entire narrative from that moment forward for decades was A, not about this woman at all, hardly.

22:32She became a symbol. be not necessarily even about the crime, but about the crime of, uh, these people who didn't, the crime of apathy for these 37 or 38 people. Uh, but it was very much misconstrued in the New York times to the point where in 2004 they all but wrote a retraction, uh, with new information. Um, cause the original article, they said like these people witnessed it. That is not true. maybe only a couple of people might have actually seen anything with their eyeballs. The other 35 or 36 may have heard someone screaming. They might have thought it was a drunken couple in their neighborhood coming home from a bar.

23:20There might have been some apathy involved for sure for some of them. But to characterize this as 37 or 38 people witnessed this horrific crime and literally shut their doors and windows to it was not accurate at all. Right. They said specifically, well, the way that they put it was that there were, the way the story read was that 38 people had watched this murder, which took place. They misreported that there were three attacks and that the man had been chased off twice and came back two more times. but that this whole thing had taken place over 30 minutes, this long, prolonged attack, and that 38 people had just been sitting there watching it, doing nothing.

24:06And that is definitely a mischaracterization of what had happened. Like you're saying, for the most part, people were earwitnesses, not eyewitnesses. There were certainly not 38 eyewitnesses. And most people weren't in a position to do much, if anything, about it, certainly physically. But I don't know if you could call it like a retraction because the point that Abe Rosenthal, he never apologized for it ever. Even in the documentary he's interviewed. And he's like, this is great. I'm glad that it did what it did. Yeah, sure. The point is still there that there was apathy in that there were two people who could have done something and they didn't.

24:49But then from what the other witnesses said, the scream was pretty clearly not a purse snatching and not a couple fighting drunkenly. Right. That it was a violent crime being committed on this woman and people still didn't do anything. Yeah, they misreported possibly that no one called police. Apparently, perhaps up to three people called the police, although police logs showed only one call came in. And it may be a case of these people now telling themselves, like, I called the cops. I did something. Sure. When they may not have. They did not report at all that Ms. Farrar had gone down to be with her.

25:32She was not mentioned ever. So I kind of went from feeling like, yeah, you know, this bystander effect, it had good. It led to the 911 being created, apparently, in some ways. And people study this in class, and it raised awareness. So, you know, if they stretched it a little bit, then it had a good effect. That's what Abe basically— That was his position. That still is his position, but— Well, he's dead now. Oh, did he finally pass away? Yeah. And then I finally came around to be like, no, you know, the truth is what you should print. And if you're a reporter and you run a story, you should print the truth and not some sensationalized version of it to sell newspapers.

26:13No, no, absolutely. I agree with you. And I think the one thing that you can hang on Abe Rosenthal is that that story was definitely fashioned in a manner to be as sensational as possible, to shock and outrage the public as much as possible. But I still think it's rooted in the basic fact that there was apathy involved and that it possibly allowed Winston Mosley to finish the job. That Kitty Genovese might have survived had somebody done more than just sit up, look out their window, and go back to bed. Or not even bother to look out the window. And like you said, Chuck, this had a lot of impact because this story comes out in 1964.

26:58And for 40 years, it wasn't until 2004 that the Times saw fit to go back and really reinvestigate. Yeah. And they did. There was a great article called Kitty 40 Years Later, I think. And the author goes through and reinvestigates the case and really sets a lot of facts straight. But within that 40-year period, the effects that this murder had were just sweeping. It led to the establishment of 911. Yeah. It's a big one. Sure. And it created this whole field of psychology that looks into the psychology of crowds, you know, and why we would just stand around it. What is this diffusion of responsibility?