Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences (2 page)

She closed the door of the little red car.

He slid his hand into the deep pocket of his coat.

She was standing by her car door with the key in the lock when she turned her head and saw him, a thin, small man in a stocking cap, over at the far end of the parking lot, looking at her. He had already taken a few steps in her direction and now, as she looked up and it was clear that she had seen him, he wondered if he had fouled this up; moved too soon and given himself away. He worried she would get back in her car. With some relief, he saw that she did not.

She was walking now. She turned and strode quickly toward the building in front of her, veering to her right in the direction of the building’s rear entrances down a wide alleyway adjacent to the train tracks. Her brisk walk betrayed an urgency, and it could be that an awareness had dawned on her of how alone she was at this moment, alone in the gloom and chill with the odd man in the parking lot, as if suddenly they were the only two souls left on earth. She hurried along, turning her back on the man; and that’s when he came at her faster. He was not quite running, not yet, but he quickened his pace and came rushing across the parking lot, his right arm held down at his side so she would not see the hunting knife gripped in his gloved hand.

She looked over her shoulder and saw him again, the stranger who had been staring at her, and the feeling of uneasiness she may have felt a second before turned into panic. Now she knew.
He was coming for her
. There could be no doubt. He was coming for her and she needed to do something.

Suddenly she changed direction, darting sharply to her left and running full speed up toward Austin Street. She must have seen him change his course to intercept her, or perhaps it was simply
instinct and fear and panic compelling her because by the time she set foot on the corner of Austin Street she screamed at the top of her lungs “Help!”

“HELP!” again as she dashed around the corner, the man now in full pursuit. She kept screaming it—“HELP! HELP!”—as she ran down Austin Street toward Lefferts Boulevard, past the corner drugstore, a tiny grocery, a dry cleaner, and now a bookstore, all shuttered for the night.

It was 3:20 a.m. There was only one business on this block that could have been open at this hour and that may have been where she was headed, to the safety of a neighborhood bar called Austin Bar & Grill, just four more doors away.

But he caught up to her now between the bookstore and the liquor store and she stopped running suddenly, clumsily, halted by a knife thrust in her upper back that turned her cry of “Help!” into a tremendous piercing shriek. Again he plunged the knife into her upper back and her long scream intensified. She fell to her knees on the sidewalk with the man standing above her, his knife poised, and for a second they remained this way, the man panting, flushed, exhilarated, the woman shocked, stricken, perhaps disbelieving. She raised her head and screamed,
“Oh my God, he stabbed me! Help me! Somebody please help me!”

As if her shattering cry were a cue, the man bent over and lunged the knife at her again. Instinctively the woman crouched lower as he continued to jab at her.

Another young woman, this one watching through a window in an apartment building across the street, thought the man was beating the screaming woman, who was now crouched almost flat on the pavement, her wounded back parallel to the sidewalk. But in fact he was stabbing at her again and the knife connected twice more in her back before two other screams, both male, sounded from across Austin Street. The first was the angry voice of a young man, reacting to the clamor outside with a shout of,
“Shut the fuck up!”
The second followed immediately after and this one came booming from a window high above, a more mature and commanding male voice demanding,
“What’s going on down there!?”

The man in the stocking cap jerked upright and looked up into the blackness, startled and suddenly fearful. Across the street stood an immense ten-story apartment building that ran the length of the entire block. Lights were coming on, first one and then another and another, as if a giant stone creature had suddenly awakened and begun to open its many rectangular eyes. He was standing straight across from a recessed entryway to the building where lights in the lobby shone through a large bay window. Worse, he and his shrieking victim on the sidewalk were directly beneath a street lamp.

The booming male voice from above—it sounded like the same one—shouted again,
“Leave that girl alone!”

The man in the stocking cap turned and darted down Austin Street back toward the train station. Some who watched him go saw him disappear into the darkness as he ran past the parking lot. Others were able to see him get into his car, throw it in reverse, quickly back it down Austin Street and then, still in reverse, up a one-way side street called 82nd Road.

The injured young woman lay alone on the sidewalk in front of the bookstore. She was no longer screaming, but crying—the pitiful, unguarded weeping of a child.

“Help!” she called out through sobs. “If somebody doesn’t help me I’m going to die!”

Any reply she may have hoped for did not come. The street was once again silent except for the sounds of her own plaintive weeping. No one stirred or peaked out from the Austin Bar & Grill; it had closed early tonight. All of the businesses were deserted. Some of the apartment lights that had snapped on a minute before went dark again. Some people went back to bed. Of the others who remained at their windows, a few felt they could see the street better with their inside lights off.

The woman tilted on her side and slumped over on her back, facing up toward the night sky and the yellow glow of the street lamp above, blood from the wounds in her back forming fresh stains on the pavement beneath her. Almost immediately she tried to get up and away; but, as one onlooker later described it, she was not having an easy
time of it. Her legs moved as if in slow motion as she tried to regain her bearings and stand. She rolled to her side, propping herself on an elbow, and gradually climbed to her feet. A few faltering steps got her to a nearby parked car, which she leaned on for support. From there she lurched to a tall tree by the curb, resting for a moment against its trunk. Pushing off from the tree, she bent unsteadily and grabbed something—her wallet?—from where it had fallen on the sidewalk. Slowly she started down Austin Street the way she had come, back toward the corner drugstore at the edge of the train station parking lot.

Accounts of how she moved would vary. Some would describe her as staggering, others as walking “dreamlike.” One woman watching from a second-floor apartment above the bookstore described her as zigzagging down the street. However she moved, it was a labored journey. Her winter jacket had tempered some of the hunting knife’s thrust; her wounds were not very deep nor imminently fatal, but two had reached far enough to put small punctures in each of the lobes of her lungs. Air slowly leaked into her chest cavity. The incisions were sharp, and the shock and fear that surely coursed through her could have overshadowed the physical pain, might have pushed it into the background as a lesser and perhaps almost minor cog in this solitary nightmare. What she certainly felt other than a need to find help was a mounting pressure in her chest, a gradual tightening that slowly but steadily gained in intensity with every step and breath, as if a python had coiled around her, making each inhalation a little more difficult than the last. The constriction added to her fear and desperation but also drove her forward toward the promise of salvation; her attacker had fled and she had only to make it to the safety of home, not terribly far away. Less than a minute’s walk from here, normally. She kept moving down Austin Street, accompanied by the sound of her own crying and mumbled pleas and eyes that peered at her through windows up and down the block.

Midway to the corner she retreated to the building for support, groping along the walls of the storefronts. She passed the darkened windows of the dry cleaner, the grocery, the drugstore—businesses she patronized during the day. The building she now clung to housed
sixteen apartments, all on the second floor, one of which was her own. The entrances to most of the apartments, including hers, were in the rear along the wide walkway next to the train tracks.

She rounded the corner and continued inching along the side of the building. The train station parking lot was now to her right. Directly beyond the lot stood a seven-story apartment building where a man and his wife on the sixth floor watched the young woman make her way toward the rear walkway. They would both later say that the woman definitely staggered at this point and that her movement had slowed from what it had been on the opposite side of Austin Street. Others who still had her in view would agree.

Partway along the side of the building—and now several minutes into her ordeal—panic overcame her. She cried out,
“I’m dying! I’m dying!”

This outburst, coupled with the fresh horror about to come, caused at least two people listening to think the woman had been attacked again, here next to the parking lot. That was not the case, however. The woman’s cries were yet another reaction to her deepening mortal distress, and perhaps the certainty that she would not be able to go much farther.

She made it to the next turn at the far edge of the building, where a darkened coffee shop with large glass windows overlooking the walkway occupied the ground floor corner lot. Laboring past the locked door of the coffee shop she came finally to an unlocked door—an apartment entrance. Clutching the door knob, she pushed inward with her remaining strength. The man and his wife up on the sixth floor across the parking lot watched her disappear inside, watched the door close behind her.

It was right after this that the man with the hunting knife returned.

He no longer wore a stocking cap. He now wore a dark fedora on his head, but it was him—the same slender young man who had pursued the woman down Austin Street some ten minutes before.

He sauntered past the parking lot. His hands were in his pockets as he walked down Austin, the ten-story apartment building on his left, looking this way and that, searching. He came to the front of the
bookstore where he had first stabbed the woman. He looked in the empty doorways and glanced up and down the street. Finding nothing, he turned and strolled back toward the parking lot, scanning the area with his eyes. People watching from the ten-story building strained to keep him in view as he moved in the direction of the train depot. Others in private homes on the block and the seven-story apartment building had a more clear view of his movements.

About the time the man reached the locked train depot, looked around, and then headed for the rear walkway, the man on the sixth floor reached for his phone. “I’m calling the police,” he whispered to his wife. “Don’t!” she insisted. “Thirty people must have called by now.”

The injured woman had entered a small foyer, a narrow and dingy entryway with peeling paint on the walls. There were no inner doors on the ground floor. Instead there was a set of stairs in front of her leading up to two apartment doors at the top. Neither of these was her own apartment; hers was farther down the walkway, only a few doors down, but she knew she could not make it that far. She needed help right away. Certainly it was fortunate that she had made it here, because one of the people who lived upstairs was a friend of hers.

She may have tried to make it up the stairs or she may have fallen to the floor soon after the outer door closed behind her. Either way, she came to rest at the base of the narrow hallway and shouted up the stairs.

“Karl! Karl, help me. I’m stabbed!”

It is unknown whether Karl opened his door at this point. What is certain is that he reached for his phone—and called a friend of his in Nassau County.

In a strange and brief conversation, Karl told his friend about the woman calling for help at the bottom of the stairs. He asked his friend what she thought he should do. She told him to call the police. He hung up the phone.

“Karl! It’s Kitty. I’ve been stabbed. Help me!”

Spurred to action, Karl climbed out his window and stepped out onto the flat inner roof of the building. Hurrying through the frosted darkness on the roof, he came to the window of an adjoining apartment
and knocked heavily on the pane. The woman inside this apartment was startled by his banging, though she was already wide awake. Frightened—especially with all the screaming and strange activity that had been going on outside—the woman hesitated before going to the window. It was only after the man insistently knocked again and called, “It’s your neighbor! I’m on the roof!” that she finally drew the shade and opened her window. She and her neighbor faced each other through the open window. They heard moaning from the hallway below.

“I heard screams . . .” the woman began. Her neighbor interrupted and quickly said he didn’t hear screams, since he was sleeping. Before he could say more, another call came from below.

“Help me! It’s Kitty.”

They looked at one another. “Call Sophie!” he said. “She lives next to Kitty. Tell her to come over and see if it’s really Kitty.”

She replied that she did not have a phone and she didn’t know Sophie’s number anyway.

The moaning continued.

“I don’t want to get involved,” Karl said. “I want somebody else to come over and see if it really
is
Kitty.” He added, “I think she’s drunk.”

The woman told him she had a phone number for Greta Schwartz, another neighbor who lived at that end of the building. He took the number and quickly left, leaving the woman staring after him as he scurried back across the roof to his own apartment.

She walked into her bedroom. This was all so very odd. Her husband was in the bedroom and she said to him, “There’s a woman moaning in Karl’s hallway.” She thought of the police call box on the corner of Austin Street and Lefferts Boulevard. “Do you think I should go down and call the police from the call box?”