PRECEDENT: Kitty Genovese

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Speaker 1 Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.
And as promised, I'm here to bring you the 10th and final episode of our Precedent series. And this is one of two episodes that I dropped today.

Speaker 1 So if you haven't already, you got to go back and listen to the story of Henry Alford and a little something we know now as the Alford plea.

Speaker 1 But for this last episode, I want to tell you a story that may sound familiar to some of you. Now, this case is actually the one that sparked the idea for this entire series.

Speaker 1 And it has to do with the three-digit, now infamous number you can call when you're in need of help, 911.

Speaker 1 As a self-proclaimed crime junkie, the concept of an emergency helpline seemed synonymous with all true crime stories.

Speaker 1 So much so that I can vividly remember the first time I read an article that talked about a time before 911. And it stopped me in my tracks.
What do you mean before? I mean, I couldn't fathom it.

Speaker 1 I always assumed that for as long as there were phones in people's homes, there was a way to call for help. But I was so wrong.

Speaker 1 There was a time before, and before there was a 911 number, there was Kitty Genovese. This is her story.

Speaker 1 It was a cold night in March 1964 when 29-year-old Catherine Genovese, who everyone called Kitty, left the bar that she managed in Hollis, Queens, and headed for home.

Speaker 1 It was around 3 in the morning, but she's in New York, the city that never sleeps, so hers was not the only car on the road.

Speaker 1 Kitty was eager to get home, not just because it was 3 a.m., but also because it was her one-year anniversary with her partner, Marianne.

Speaker 1 Kitty and Mary Ann lived together in a second-floor apartment in a neighborhood in Queens called Hugh Gardens.

Speaker 1 It was a pretty small building, just two stories with retail on the ground level and 14 apartments upstairs. The early morning hours were just like any other for Kitty.

Speaker 1 It wasn't until she parked her car just a block from her apartment that she noticed she was being followed.

Speaker 1 Kitty heard footsteps behind her as she walked to her apartment. She started to run, but the person chasing her was faster.

Speaker 1 Kitty was just 100 yards from her apartment building when the man caught up to her.

Speaker 1 And right there on the sidewalk in front of her building, he attacked, stabbing her twice in the back with a hunting knife.

Speaker 1 Kitty cried out, oh God, I've been stabbed, hoping someone would hear her and help her. And someone did hear her.

Speaker 1 According to an article from npr.org, that scream was loud enough to wake neighbors on both sides of the street.

Speaker 1 One of them, a guy named Robert Moser, saw a man and a woman struggling, and he opened his window to yell, hey, leave that girl alone. It was enough to spook Kitty's attacker, and so he took off.

Speaker 1 But But Kitty was seriously injured and rapidly losing blood. Somehow she managed to stagger to her building but she never made it to her apartment.

Speaker 1 She was just inside the vestibule at the bottom of the stairs when she collapsed.

Speaker 1 But this story didn't end here because just 10 minutes later while Kitty was still lying injured and bleeding at the bottom of the stairs, Her attacker returned to finish what he had started.

Speaker 1 He stabbed Kitty again and then sexually assaulted her there at the bottom of the stairs. According to biography.com, when he was done, he dusted himself off before stealing $49 from her wallet.

Speaker 1 Then he left, climbed into his car, and drove away.

Speaker 1 One of the other tenants in the building, a woman named Sophia, heard strange noises coming from the vestibule. By the time she got there to see what was going on, the attacker was long gone.

Speaker 1 What she found there was Kitty, alive and breathing, yes, but barely. Sophia screamed for someone to call the police, and finally, at 4 a.m., someone did.

Speaker 1 Several minutes later, police and paramedics arrived at the scene. Kitty was en route to Queens General Hospital in the back of an ambulance when she died.
She had been stabbed 13 times.

Speaker 1 The question was, by whom?

Speaker 1 The police investigation focused first on Kitty's neighbors and the other tenants of Kew Gardens.

Speaker 1 Police had had a few conversations already by the time they arrived at Kitty's own apartment, the one she shared with her partner, Marianne, and they arrived just a few hours after Kitty's death.

Speaker 1 Kevin Cook wrote in his book, Kitty Genovese, The Murder, The Bystanders, The Crime That Changed America, that two investigators questioned Marianne for six hours on that first day, asking, you know, where she'd been that night, how long she and Kitty knew one another, the last time they argued, the kind of stuff you'd expect in the early stages of a murder investigation.

Speaker 1 But what police wanted to talk about the most was Mary Ann and Kitty's sex life. What was it like? Were there problems? Even which positions they used.

Speaker 1 Wildly inappropriate questions, even in the 1960s. In fact, many of the interviews police did with the building's tenants were like that.

Speaker 1 They had what history.com's article calls a quote, preoccupation with the gay lifestyle, end quote.

Speaker 1 As far as I can tell from the research material on this case, Marianne was the first and only suspect in Kitty's murder investigation, and police assumed the motive was jealousy.

Speaker 1 One of the investigators on the case was quoted in Kevin Cook's book saying, quote, one of the most common motives for murder is jealousy.

Speaker 1 It's also our experience that homosexual romances produce more jealousy by far than straight romances. More jealousy means more chance for violence.

Speaker 1 Women, in fact, can be more possessive toward their lovers than men, end quote. That is some pretty backwards misogynistic thinking, if you ask me, even for the time.

Speaker 1 It's this kind of thinking that helps literally no one and instead slows down an investigation, which is exactly what happened here.

Speaker 1 But it turned out Kitty's death was not the result of a lover's quarrel and had absolutely nothing to do with her sex life or her sexuality. Those were distractions.

Speaker 1 But the cops got lucky with this one because less than a week later, Kitty's killer legit fell into their laps when someone called police and said, hey, I'm pretty sure I'm watching a guy steal a TV from a house.

Speaker 1 And when cops responded, they found a man named Winston Mosley with a stolen television in the back of his car.

Speaker 1 And that car happened to be the same make, model, and color as the one witnesses said they saw at the scene of Kitty's murder.

Speaker 1 So these cops brought Winston down to the station to book him on burglary charges. And the detectives working the Kitty Genevieve's murder happened to see him and were like, hey, hold up.

Speaker 1 This might be our guy.

Speaker 1 Not only did he drive the right car, but he also had scabs all over his hands, as though he'd been in a fight. And there was something about him that just didn't sit right.
He was just creepy.

Speaker 1 So they straight up confronted him about Kitty's murder. And when they did, Winston folded like a house of cards.

Speaker 1 Not only did he take responsibility for Kitty's death, but he also confessed to two more murders, only one of which he actually committed, along with several rapes and a string of burglaries, all of which were unsolved up until this point.

Speaker 1 Winston Mosley was the kind of killer that'll haunt you. In a 2014 New Yorker article, Nicholas Lemon wrote that what made Winston so chilling was his double life.

Speaker 1 By day, he was a 28-year-old man with a steady job and a house in the suburbs that he shared with his wife, two kids, and five dogs.

Speaker 1 But he had a habit of stealing things, big things like TVs, which is how he ended up getting caught in the first place. But he didn't have a criminal record.

Speaker 1 He was on no one's radar, which is how he was able to continue with his other criminal habit, stalking, raping, and killing women. He picked his targets completely at random.

Speaker 1 which is exactly what happened the night kitty was murdered.

Speaker 1 Winston told police police he left his home at about 1 a.m., wife and kids sleeping soundly, fully intending to find and kill someone.

Speaker 1 He was actually out driving around with a serrated hunting knife in his pocket, literally prowling for his next victim. And that's when he spotted Kitty Genovese alone in her red fiat.

Speaker 1 So he followed her home. And when Kitty parked by the rail station near her apartment, he did too.

Speaker 1 When she started walking toward the door, he did too.

Speaker 1 When Kitty screamed and woke neighbors up after that first attack, he ran to his car where he stayed, quiet in the dark for 10 minutes.

Speaker 1 But when he realized the police weren't coming, that's when he went back to find Kitty, to rape her, to rob her, and to make sure she was dead.

Speaker 1 Kitty's murder, Winston's arrest, all of it happened with very little fanfare until 10 days after Kitty's death when the police commissioner made a seemingly offhanded comment to an editor for the New York Times.

Speaker 1 The commissioner said that the thing that struck him most about the crime wasn't the murder itself, horrific though it was.

Speaker 1 What struck him was the fact that there were 38 eyewitnesses and not a single one had called police.

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Speaker 1 On March 27th, 1964, the New York Times ran a story on its front page that started like this: quote, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Not one person telephoned the police. End quote.

Speaker 1 Now, I need to interject here and tell you that this story has several factual inaccuracies. Like, there were two attacks, not three.

Speaker 1 The number of witnesses and what they saw or heard, those facts have also been widely disputed over time.

Speaker 1 And if you read the archived version of this story on the Times website, you'll see an editor's note from 2016 saying as much and pointing you to more recent, more accurate coverage.

Speaker 1 But back in 1964, while this unfolded in real time, the story shocked people in a way crime stories really hadn't before.

Speaker 1 Because no one could make sense of why so many people could witness an attack and do absolutely nothing to stop it.

Speaker 1 I mean, the witnesses themselves couldn't even really explain why they didn't call for help. There was one woman who said she just thought it was a lover's quarrel.

Speaker 1 A couple said that they were afraid for their own safety. Two other neighbors said that they just didn't want to get involved.
And another couldn't even give a reason why they didn't call police.

Speaker 1 They just didn't.

Speaker 1 These excuses seem shocking in the context of such a brutal attack. But what if it was something else? What if it was a car off the road on a busy highway and yours is one of dozens whizzing past?

Speaker 1 Would you think, I need to pull over right now and help? Or would you look around at all of the other vehicles and think, someone will have already called this in.

Speaker 1 I don't want to clog up the phone lines.

Speaker 1 What happened that night on Kitty's street with all those witnesses and no action was studied extensively for decades by social scientists trying to better understand what they call bystander apathy.

Speaker 1 The idea is that the responsibility to act in a crisis is shared among all the people who witness it, which means the smaller the number of witnesses, the greater the personal responsibility on each person.

Speaker 1 But in crowds or in densely populated urban areas like where Kitty lived, that responsibility is spread out among more people, making each individual less likely to act.

Speaker 1 During a time when cities were growing rapidly, the New York Times narrative confirmed what people already suspected about urban life. There is no community in a city.

Speaker 1 Because is it really a community if 38 people, 38 neighbors can stand there and watch while you die alone in the dark?

Speaker 1 Of course, we know now that 38 people didn't stand in their windows and watch Kitty die.

Speaker 1 During trial, the prosecutor would say it was five or six tops who saw or heard enough to know someone might be in danger.

Speaker 1 And really, only two of them were actual apathetic onlookers as far as we know. One was an assistant superintendent for the building across the street from the first attack.

Speaker 1 He told police he was awake sitting in a chair in the lobby and from there he saw the whole thing, including the shine of the knife blade as it was plunged into Kitty's back.

Speaker 1 But instead of doing anything about it, the man went to sleep. He told police he just didn't want to be bothered.
The second witness was a man named Carl Ross, a drunk neighbor.

Speaker 1 Police learned from Kitty's killer that Carl had actually opened his door during the second attack and saw Winston stabbing Kitty.

Speaker 1 But instead of intervening or even calling for help, he called a friend and then a neighbor who ended up calling police. But these two men were the exception, not the rule.
People did act.

Speaker 1 There was Sophia who heard the commotion and ran to Kitty's side to hold her.

Speaker 1 There was the man who saw what he thought was a man striking a woman and yelled out the window to leave that girl alone, which sent Kitty's attacker in one direction and Kitty in another.

Speaker 1 And at least two people say they actually did call the police to tell them a woman was hurt, but that the police just didn't come.

Speaker 1 Calling for help wasn't as easy in 1964 as it is today.

Speaker 1 Back then, the way you reached the police or fire department was by calling the precinct or station in your area directly or by dialing zero and having the operator connect you.

Speaker 1 After you're connected, you might be passed from person to person, once, twice, maybe even more, as the people on the other end tried to figure out who to send, if they sent anyone at all.

Speaker 1 For police calls anyway, it was pretty much at the discretion of the officer on the other end of the phone, whether or not that call warranted a response or even a report.

Speaker 1 Author Kevin Cook told NPR that there were lots of examples at the time of people calling in and being, quote, invited to mind their own business or move to another neighborhood if you don't like it there, end quote.

Speaker 1 By the time Kitty was killed, by the time that sensationalistic headline ran in the New York Times, emergency responders in other parts of the country were already calling for a single easy-to-remember emergency number.

Speaker 1 Fire chiefs in particular had been pounding that drum since as far back as 1957.

Speaker 1 In the wake of Kitty Genovese's death, local officials in New York joined those national cries. The idea was we need to make calling for help in emergencies as easy as possible.

Speaker 1 Maybe if calling for help had been easier to do in the middle of the night when Kitty was attacked, maybe she would have escaped. Maybe she would have lived.

Speaker 1 In Canada, some police departments had already adopted a single number approach. There, you dialed 999 to reach help in an emergency.
Super easy to remember, yes.

Speaker 1 But in the days of rotary phones, it also took forever to dial.

Speaker 1 That's why in the US, they settled on 911, just as easy to remember, but much quicker to dial on a rotary phone.

Speaker 1 According to Kevin Cook's book, the 9 at the beginning wasn't so much a purposeful move as a way to work within the quirks of the phone company's switching system at the time.

Speaker 1 The first 911 call was made from Haleyville, Alabama in February 1968.

Speaker 1 By 2017, Carolyn Abate reported for PBS that the service now handles about 240 million calls a year.

Speaker 1 The service has evolved over time, of course. The original technology just got you a dispatcher and you had to work with them to make sure the first responders got to your location.

Speaker 1 Later, advancements in technology allowed 911 dispatchers to see the exact location you were calling from. This is still in place today, but it applies only to landlines.

Speaker 1 At this point, the only data dispatchers can get from your cell phone is the nearest tower or a general area, not your precise location, which to be honest, even I didn't realize.

Speaker 1 Most of us are calling from cell phones now, so it is incredibly important to be as precise about your location as possible. Remember that.

Speaker 1 In some locations, you can even connect with 911 operators via text, which not only provides a low barrier solution for bystanders who might not want to pick up the phone, but also makes connecting with 911 possible even when you can't speak.

Speaker 1 It's hard to say for sure whether a 911 system would have changed the outcome of that night. But that night and Kitty's death certainly went on to change the world.

Speaker 1 This marks the end of the 10th precedent setting story I've shared with you.

Speaker 1 But there are many others out there and many more still to come as our world evolves and we find better ways to keep each other safe and treat each other fairly.

Speaker 1 In true crime, there will always be stories to tell, and part of being a responsible true crime consumer, at least for me, is taking the time to understand that behind every one of these stories, behind every episode of every podcast, is a person, a family.

Speaker 1 and often a precedent that forever changed the world we live in. Thank Thank you for listening and learning along with me throughout this series.

Speaker 1 I'll see you on Monday for our regularly scheduled programming.

Speaker 1 To find all the source material for this episode, you can go to our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Crime Junkie Podcast.

Speaker 1 And we'll be back on Monday with a regularly scheduled episode.

Speaker 1 Crime Junkie is an audio chuck production. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

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Speaker 6 Have you ever experienced something truly unexplainable?

Speaker 6 A moment that felt almost like a vivid dream, leaving you with a lingering sense of wonder, leaving you questioning everything you thought you knew?

Speaker 1 Perhaps it was a fleeting glimpse of something extraordinary, a chilling whisper in the dead of night, or an undeniable premonition that comes to life.

Speaker 1 I'm Yvette Gentile, and I'm her sister, Rasha Pecaro.

Speaker 6 Each week on our podcast, So Supernatural, we partner with the one and only Ashley Flowers, host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie, to take you on a journey of the world's most mystical mysteries.

Speaker 1 Ready to explore the unknown? Join us every Friday for a new episode of So Supernatural, available wherever you listen to podcasts.