Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences (29 page)

A man said: “You get used to it after a while. You get conditioned. So when you hear a cry, you figure it’s just another drunk or a teen-ager [sic] raising hell. How can you pick one noise out of a hundred and know this time it’s murder?”

Weiland spoke with teenagers who he claimed resented these remarks, claiming that there are no teenagers on these streets at 3:00 a.m. “But if we were, we’d have helped,” one of them said. “We’d have ganged up and jumped him.” In Weiland’s opinion, the teenagers did not grasp the reality of what had happened. They viewed it more as if they had missed a good show on television. “The reality and the brutality of it seems to leave them unmoved.”

IN THE DAYS
that Martin Gansberg had spent investigating the murder in Kew Gardens, the wheels of justice had quietly moved forward. On Tuesday, March 24, the day following his indictment for the murder of Kitty Genovese, Winston Moseley was arraigned in the Supreme Court of Queens before Judge J. Irwin Shapiro. Judge Shapiro asked Winston Moseley if he had money for an attorney or if his family had an attorney for him. Moseley replied that he had neither a lawyer nor the funds to pay for one. Judge Shapiro noted on the record that he would thus appoint an attorney to represent him.

Ed Webber, the young attorney appointed by the lower court to defend Moseley at the first arraignment, wanted to stay on the case. Prior to the appearance in Queens Supreme Court that Tuesday, Webber had sought advice on how to proceed from Sidney Sparrow.

At fifty-one years of age, Sparrow was a preeminent criminal defense attorney in Queens. Polished, debonair, and with an extensive vocabulary he used freely, as he tended to speak and conduct himself very formally at all times, Sidney Sparrow had been practicing law for close to three decades. He had been a founding member of the Queens County Criminal Court’s Bar Association in the 1940s.
He lived in Queens and had an office on Queens Boulevard, directly opposite the courthouse.

Despite his formal bearing, Sidney Sparrow was nonetheless a jovial and approachable man, solicitous to young lawyers who came to him for guidance. He advised Ed Webber to tell the higher court that he had been appointed to represent Moseley by the lower court, that he had already done work on the case, and that he wished to remain as counsel for Winston Moseley.

Ed Webber did so at the arraignment. Sidney Sparrow was also in the courtroom that day, as he was on most days. From his seat in the attorney’s row, Sparrow saw Judge Shapiro shake his head in the negative at Ed Webber. A case of this magnitude called for a highly experienced defense attorney.

Shortly afterward, Judge Shapiro asked Sparrow if he would be available for an assignment by the court. Sparrow replied that he would. Arriving at his office the next day, Sidney Sparrow was not the least bit surprised to learn that Judge Shapiro had appointed him to represent Winston Moseley. Shapiro also designated two other attorneys, Julius Lipitz and Martha Zelman, to act as co-counsel.

As one of the most active defense attorneys in the area, Sidney Sparrow was privy to information on major arrests in the borough. He had already heard talk around the courthouse about Winston Moseley and some of the details of his alleged exploits. He knew Moseley had made some incriminating and apparently grisly admissions. Sparrow heard one police officer remark that Moseley was a vampire, because he sucked the blood of his victims.

Sidney Sparrow would later recall his sense of astonishment on first meeting his new client face to face at the jail. Like Detective John Tartaglia a week before, Sparrow found himself sitting across from a small, delicate-looking man who seemed anything but a maniacal predator. Moseley spoke softly, articulately, and appeared extremely calm, just as he had with the detectives. Sparrow later said, “I would’ve thought he was the most innocent person in the room. But he wasn’t.”

Without hesitation or emotion, Winston Moseley confirmed for his new attorney all the details in the statement he had given to
the district attorney. Sparrow went over the specifics with him again, asking Moseley if, as Sparrow had been told by the police, he had gone out with the intention of finding a woman to kill; if he had stabbed Kitty Genovese to death; and if he had attempted to have sex with her dead or dying body. Moseley replied that all those things were true. As he had for the police and the D.A., Moseley gave Sparrow the whole unvarnished story.

In his notes, Sidney Sparrow wrote, “He may be crazy, but he sure is truthful.”

On Wednesday, March 25, Winston Moseley appeared with his new attorneys for a second arraignment before Judge Shapiro. Moseley entered a plea of not guilty. Sparrow moved to have his client committed to the Kings County Medical Center for psychiatric evaluation.

Sparrow received no resistance to this request, neither from the judge, his client, nor his client’s wife.

Following the stunning court appearance on the day of his arrest, a shocked and disbelieving Bettye Moseley had gone to see her husband at the jail. She asked him if he had done the things the police claimed that he did. He told her that he had. He did not say much else to her, although he asked if his dogs were okay.

Fannie Moseley, Winston’s mother, visited him too. Unlike Bettye, she did not ask him about the crimes. Though Fannie of course knew why he was locked up—and told others that she did not believe the accusations against her son—she never discussed the subject with him. Fannie kept things light when talking with Winston, as she always had in the past (except for the times when she had complained bitterly about Alphonso). Fannie had never liked talking of unpleasant things. When she went to see her son in jail, they discussed ordinary topics, common things, as if she had dropped in to see him on his lunch hour at the office rather than in a correctional facility where he was being held without bail on a charge of first-degree murder.

And so her visits to her son at the jail were much like the ones she had made during his childhood; stopping by every so often to see how he was doing, chatting for a bit, carefully avoiding discussion of any gloomy situations or feelings that might spoil their short time together.

FOR MARY ANN
Zielonko, the dramatic new press coverage of her lover’s murder, at least at the outset, was a blur; a wrenching but anticlimactic footnote in an anthology of tragedy and grief. Someday she would care about the news stories, but not now. The worst, after all, had already happened two weeks prior to the appearance of the
New York Times
article, and there was little right at the moment that could distract her from, or even intensify, the permanent state of despondency in which Mary Ann now existed. She stayed in her apartment. She drank heavily.

For Kitty’s family, there was no such isolation. They had no forewarning of the
New York Times
story. Now they had no escape from the news coverage or from the phone calls that suddenly besieged their home.

Seeing the horrible accounts of their sister’s death—and there was no avoiding them, as they were all over the place now—Kitty’s brothers and sister vowed that, as best they could, they would keep these press accounts from their mother. At the time, they could not have imagined what an endless job this would be.

TRUE TO THEIR
promise, the
New York Journal-American
followed up on their front-page story of March 27, 1964, with additional articles on the Kitty Genovese murder case for the next several days. On March 28, they printed an editorial titled, “THE AGONY IGNORED.” It briefly recapped the crime and reprinted some of the statements gathered from Kew Gardens residents the day before. The final paragraph praised the
New York Times
once again. “As newspaper people, we admire a job well done. As humanitarians, we turn our spotlight, too, on this appalling public indifference. All newspapers might well do the same.”

The
New York Times
ran their own brief follow-up editorial this day titled, “WHAT KIND OF PEOPLE ARE WE?” Posing questions about how such “shocking indifference” could be shown by a cross section of New Yorkers, it ended by saying, “We regretfully admit that we do not know the answers.” Which made a perfect lead for the lengthier piece they ran the same day headlined, “APATHY IS PUZZLE IN QUEENS KILLING.” Written by Charles Mohr,
the article was a collection of reactions from law enforcement, mental health professionals, and theologians. Walter Arm, the deputy police commissioner for community relations, was first quoted, calling the case “dramatic and shocking,” but adding that the problem of citizens not reporting crimes was a common one. He announced that the NYPD would be redistributing a leaflet called, “Law and Order Is a Two-Way Street,” which encouraged people to promptly report crimes and suspicious activity. The police department had distributed several hundred thousand of these leaflets in the past, he said, because of their concern about public apathy in reporting crime.

A representative of the Queens Bar Association announced an event to be held May 1 at the upcoming World’s Fair called “Law Day U.S.” Its purpose was to “indoctrinate the public with their responsibility” and to “fight this tendency to look the other way.” It was organized in response to a proclamation by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had asked that such events be held throughout the nation.

According to the article, the mental health professionals they had consulted were unable to give any definitive answers on why people had not called the police during Kitty’s ordeal. They were split on whether the reaction was common or atypical. Some gave answers that were arguably as meaningless as the ones given by witnesses in Kew Gardens, though far less comprehensible. One psychiatrist said, “I would assign this to the effect of the megalopolis in which we live which makes closeness very difficult and leads to the alienation of the individual to the group.” He said he was certain such a thing could never happen in a small community, surmising that the response in that environment “would have been immediate and very human.”

A sociology professor called it a case of “disaster syndrome” that had produced “affect denial,” causing witnesses to ignore the event in order to psychologically withdraw from it.

Another sociologist commented that the Kew Gardens incident “goes to the heart of whether this is a community or a jungle,” referring to persons who fail to defend their fellow members of society as “partners in crime.” He felt the incident was atypical, however, and that New York should not be condemned as a whole.

Another psychiatrist felt the behavior of the witnesses
was
typical of the middle class in cities like New York, saying, “They have a nice life and what happens in the street, the life of the city itself, is a different matter.” He believed it reflected a common feeling New Yorkers shared that society is unjust. “It’s in the air of all New York, the air of injustice. The feeling that you might get hurt if you act and that, whatever you do, you will be the one to suffer.”

Theologians offered more emotional reactions. A minister in Brooklyn had given a sermon in which he referred to the apathy in Kitty’s murder, saying “our society is as sick as the one that crucified Jesus.” Another brought up the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, noting that in that age-old tale, “it was supposedly good people who passed by on the other side.” He observed that people are “reluctant, perhaps, to admit that we haven’t made much progress since then.”

On March 29, Easter Sunday, the
New York Journal-American
presented readers with another major story that included more witness reactions to the plight of Kitty Genovese as well as an account of another attack in Kew Gardens that had happened a few weeks prior to Kitty’s murder. The incident had previously been mentioned by the seventeen-year-old girl in the March 27 article. “DID HUSHED-UP ATTACK ON GIRL COST A LIFE?” the headline beckoned. Reporters Marjorie Farnsworth and Charles Roland opened this article with the bold statement, “If an attack on another girl in Kew Gardens, Queens, five weeks ago, had not been ‘hushed up,’ Kitty Genovese, victim of a vicious knife-wielder, might be alive today.

“That was the judgment of neighbors who disclosed for the first time yesterday that a young girl had been attacked and stabbed in the lobby of the large apartment house at 82-67 Austin St. about Feb. 25. In that instance the girl was rescued before murder was done. No one moved a hand to help Kitty.”

The story then shifted to an account of the weeks-earlier attack on an unnamed victim. Citing a woman who lived in the Mowbray, it told of an incident in which a man had followed a girl into the building. Reporters let the woman they interviewed (who, they wrote, had refused to give her name) tell of this earlier incident in her own
words: “When she [the victim] pressed the elevator button, the operator did not respond.” The attacker had then “seized her and for half an hour terrorized her. He had his right hand around her neck, and a knife at her throat. He was molesting her, he would cut her whenever she protested. Fearing for her life, she could not shout for help. When the fiend took the knife away from her throat she let out one scream, and don’t you know, very few people tried to help. That’s fantastic.

“The elevator operator finally came up from the basement. The man with the knife tried to pretend he was the girl’s boyfriend and kept kissing her. But the [elevator] operator saw the knife.” She then said the elevator operator had run to the door of a first floor apartment, rang the bell and shouted for the man who lived there, a lawyer, to help him. “The elevator operator began battling with the assailant out on the street in the snow,” the woman said. “The lawyer came out with his shotgun but the assailant fled.

“I witnessed this part. I was shocked to think that in the entire [apartment] house, only two men tried to help that girl. I saw her afterwards. She had knife wounds near her throat. I was even more surprised when the incident was hushed up. The girl moved out of the house—and nothing happened. No police came to question anyone. It is possible her assailant was the man who killed Kitty. They never should have hushed it up. If he had known the police were looking for him, he’d (sic) would have never come back.”