Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences (10 page)

Fannie finally left. To make sure her husband would not interfere, she had two police officers accompany her when she moved her belongings out of the apartment on 124th Street. Among the things she left behind was her nine-year-old son. She returned two weeks later, however, after a doctor informed her that she had a stomach tumor and needed an operation. Fannie moved back into the apartment with her husband and son and immediately summoned her mother in Michigan to come stay with them in New York to look after Winston while Fannie underwent surgery.

Fannie explained to her son that she needed to go to the hospital so the doctors could cut a tumor out of her stomach. How much of this explanation the young boy actually grasped is uncertain, but the memory of his mother leaving home to go have an operation seemed to stay with him as a particularly troubling event, likely because it marked the end of life as he had known it.

Fannie had the surgery and remained in the hospital for two weeks. Upon her release she returned to the apartment on 124th Street where her husband, mother, and son were waiting for her. Right after his mother came home, Winston was told he was going to Michigan to stay with his grandmother until his mother got better. The boy left with Fannie’s mother shortly after. He would never return to the apartment on 124th Street. Neither would Fannie, who moved out after her son left for Michigan.

Winston remained at his grandmother’s farm in Holly, Michigan, the rest of the spring and into the summer of 1944. It was a rustic home with no indoor plumbing, situated in a rural community with a one-room schoolhouse, at which he was enrolled. Quite an abrupt change of lifestyle for a boy who had just turned nine and had lived those nine years in New York City. He felt lonely. He missed his mother and father, his home, and his pets (two chickens he kept in a cage in the
apartment). No one told him who was taking care of his pets. No one told him much of anything. As the weeks passed he wondered where his mother was and when she was coming to get him, but he was too timid to ask. His grandmother treated him kindly, but she did not say much about his mother. There was little the boy could do but wait out the days in the solitude of this strange, isolated place.

There were animals on his grandmother’s farm, but he felt that none of them belonged to him. Walking along the desolate dirt roads of rural Michigan with no sound other than the crunching of his own feet on the thawing earth beneath him and nothing ahead except a ramshackle schoolhouse, he felt as if nothing belonged to him. When he finally left his grandmother’s home that summer, it was his father who came to retrieve him.

Alphonso had a sister who lived in Detroit, Michigan. With his wife living elsewhere in New York and his son living in Michigan, Al decided to move to Detroit and open a business. He could start fresh, reclaim his son and, he hoped, his wife. He collected Winston from his grandmother’s farm in Holly and took him to live in Detroit, where they moved in with Al’s sister, Winston’s aunt. Al leased a space across the street from his sister’s home and opened a repair shop. Winston had some cousins to play with here and his aunt and uncle were kind to him, although at times he did overhear his aunt criticizing his mother and this bothered him. His uncle tossed a baseball around with him once in a while, trying to encourage the shy boy to take an interest. Winston did develop a mild fondness for baseball, but his chief interest remained animals. His father let him have some pets of his own, and it was around this time he developed a fascination with ants. They made good pets for a thoughtful boy who did not like noise or commotion; they were silent, required little care, and were of course free for the taking.

His father built an aquarium so he could keep them. Winston found their little societies intriguing. Such a smooth and flawless operation. Self-contained. Organized.

As father and son settled into their new life in Detroit, Al assured Winston that his mother would be joining them before long. But the
boy knew. Somehow he just knew. Though he wasn’t one to argue, he spoke up one day after they’d been in Detroit a few weeks and told his father, who continued to make plans for his wife’s arrival, “No, daddy, she’s not coming back. She’s not ever coming back.”

But Fannie in fact did come to Detroit about six months after her surgery. She moved in with Al and Winston and the family was together again. The couple fought, but at least they were all together. For about a year, until Fannie left again. She stayed away for some time, during which Alphonso alternately expressed anguish and anger. Outwardly Winston expressed little, retreating to the haven of his pets, schoolwork, and his private thoughts. Fannie returned the following Christmas, when Winston was eleven years old. Al sent Winston to the movies so he and Fannie could have a talk. When Winston returned, Fannie had a swollen eye. She walked out of Al’s shop and out of their lives once again.

This time Al was more forthcoming with his son about why his mother had left. He told Winston that Fannie had taken up with another man. Al suspected the man had followed her to Detroit and was staying across the street from his shop while Fannie spent time with them. Al had not given up hope of another reconciliation and he was hurt and enraged that his wife had brought her boyfriend along, or allowed him to follow her, whatever the case. Winston now knew the reason for Fannie staying away, but why she was gone was almost immaterial. Except for making him feel a little closer to his father (as well as feeling sorry for him, as Al, unlike his son, did not keep his distress to himself), the reasons were secondary to the plain, painful fact that she was not there with them. He missed his mother, longed for her, but he quietly accepted, or at least realized, despite his father’s continued expectations to the contrary, that she would never come back to stay. He did not want to talk about it, either. Whenever his father broached the subject the boy told him, “Let’s talk about something else, daddy.”

Fannie came to visit Winston. Every few months she’d breeze in for a weekend visit, ever her carefree, ebullient self, greeting him as if she’d only been away a few days on a little vacation, then cheerily going
on her way with a promise that she’d see him again next time, though never promising exactly when the next time might be. He’d see her for these weekend visits at his grandmother’s farm. While there he’d collect small animals—mice, snakes, a chipmunk. He’d return to Detroit with a few new pets, but never with his mother.

Things went on this way until Winston was seventeen years old. Fannie Moseley would later tell a jury that her relationship with her son during these years had been a very happy one. Even in hindsight, with her adult son on trial for murder, she seemed oblivious to the fact that her brief appearances in his childhood may not have constituted a very happy relationship for him.

By Winston’s senior year of high school, even Alphonso had accepted that Fannie would not be coming to live with them in Detroit. He decided to return to New York and open a TV and radio repair shop there. He would teach Winston the business and they could run it together as father and son. Al went ahead to New York to make the arrangements while Winston went to spend his summer vacation with his mother, who was now living in Pittsburgh.

Winston was now eighteen. He had a small frame and was still very thin and not very tall, just as he had been as a growing boy. He remained shy, soft-spoken, and reserved. He was lighter skinned than either of his parents and had an angular though not unattractive face. His brown eyes were wide set, perched above high cheekbones. He had a slender nose that was perfectly straight, lips that were full though not abundant. On the rare occasions that he smiled, he could be considered good-looking.

When Al returned to Detroit, Winston came back as well, but he told his father that he had decided to move to Pittsburgh to live with his mother.

An anguished argument ensued between father and son. Al could not believe that Winston would choose to move to Pittsburgh with his mother, particularly since she was living there with another man. How could he do such a thing? Hadn’t it been the two of them for all these years? Winston did not want to hurt his father but he wanted this chance to finally be with Fannie again. He had also met a girl in
Pittsburgh, a girl he liked quite a lot. His first girlfriend; he was eager to get back there to see her. Winston hoped his father would understand. He assured Al that of course he loved him dearly, but he loved his mother too. He was moving to Pittsburgh; his decision was final. In a flash of anger and hurt, Alphonso told Winston that he was not his real father. And so the argument ended with tears running down the faces of both men.

Alphonso may have regretted making the revelation, especially in the way he did, but there it was. And of course it could not be undone.

Winston went to Pittsburgh, and Alphonso went to New York. Over the next two years they kept in touch by writing. Winston continued calling him daddy, refusing to believe that Al was not his father. Whatever he was feeling, he kept it buried, as usual. He would always consider Alphonso Moseley his father.

Winston finished high school in Pittsburgh. He had few friends there but he had his girlfriend Leora, who was fifteen when they met. The shy seventeen-year-old had struck up a friendship with her that led to a romance. In 1954, his first girlfriend became his first wife. He was nineteen by that time, she seventeen and pregnant with his child. Winston was happy at the thought of having a wife and child, a family of his own. Leora did not want to be a wife and mother at the age of seventeen, but under the circumstances her mother insisted she get married. Five months before their child was born, Winston and Leora wed. Leora cried throughout the ceremony.

Winston took some menial jobs in Pittsburgh, first as a stock clerk in a grocery store, then setting up displays in store windows. With a wife to support and a child on the way, he needed to find a career and a better income. When Al wrote and suggested he come to New York with his wife and join Al in his business like they had originally planned, Winston agreed. They moved in with Al, and Winston went to work in his father’s repair shop on Northern Boulevard in Corona, Queens.

Things did not go as Al had hoped. Winston did not seem to have the focus or maturity that partnering a business required. He could not seem to reconcile himself to staying in the store, preferring instead to
spend all his time with his new wife. Al finally had to have a talk with Winston, telling him that he was a man with a wife to support and a child on the way, and he had to find himself steady work of some sort. In June of 1954, through an employment agency, Winston found an entry-level job at the Raygram Corporation, a company that distributed photographic equipment to dealers. His starting salary was $40 per week.

After their son was born, Winston and Leora moved to their own apartment in Brooklyn. Their second child was born a year and a half later. Winston had a good job with potential for advancement, a home, and family of his own. Leora got a job at Gimbels department store and they found a woman to watch the babies during the day while she worked. Everything seemed to be on track, until 1957, when Leora became involved with another man.

Their apartment sat above a bar. Leora, barely twenty years old, restless at home with two babies in a situation she felt she had misstepped into in the first place, had started spending time at the bar downstairs, chatting with the rugged bartender. He was a bit of a tough guy, an exciting swashbuckler type, or so it seemed to a naive girl from Pittsburgh, left in a small apartment all evening with the children while her husband put in a full day at the office and then rushed over to Queens to help or spend time with her fussy father-in-law.

Almost any guy seemed tougher and more exciting than her quiet, moody husband. He did not like to socialize nor even make conversation. When he did talk it always seemed to be about the same old subjects over and over again. In his free time he liked to watch his ants in their aquarium, doing whatever it was that ants did. Aside from the two babies there was little liveliness in their home and even less adult companionship from Leora’s point of view. Winston had never been much of a social or dynamic type, but sweet Jesus, could they ever talk about something other than his rotten childhood, his parents’ problems, and the wonders of ants? Maybe go out once in a while, do something fun? Winston seemed content. Then again, it was hard to tell since he never shared his thoughts with her, at least not beyond what she considered his self-pity over being shuffled
around so much in his childhood. So, Leora sought companionship elsewhere. And like another woman central in Winston’s life, she became blatant about it.

Leora’s youth, coupled with the fact that her husband expressed so little emotion, probably contributed to her callous treatment of him. It was easy to lose sight of someone’s feelings when he didn’t appear to have any in the first place. In any event, Leora did not conceal her dalliance and Winston became well aware of the time his wife spent with the bartender. They argued. The bartender didn’t seem to care he was cavorting with another man’s wife, even though the cuckolded husband lived right above the bar and could hear his wife downstairs, laughing and enjoying herself with the bartender and his buddies. Winston felt he had little recourse against the bartender and his pals. Aside from his nonassertive nature, Winston was a slight man, only five-foot eight-inches tall, weighing only 120 pounds—physically no match for the bartender and his cohorts. He passed by the bar each day on the way up to his apartment, keeping his silence while the laughter and fun went on.

Winston felt intimidated by, and eventually downright fearful of, these men. He bought a gun to defend himself. He never brandished the gun on the bartender, but one day he pointed it at Leora. He was sitting by a window in their apartment, watching her talk to a group of men outside. When she came upstairs he was still staring out the window. Leora approached and asked, “What’s the matter?” In reply he raised the gun, a rifle, pointing it outside. “See how easy it is just to shoot him?”