Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences (6 page)

From the start, Sang had suspected that Karl Ross knew more than he was telling about the assaults on Kitty Genovese, particularly the attack at the bottom of his stairs. Now here he was in the victim’s apartment just a couple hours later, cocktail glass in hand, ostensibly comforting her roommate, actually just boozing and interrupting Sang’s questioning. Detective Sang had had enough of Karl Ross. He asked him to leave. Ross refused, indignant. This was Mary Ann’s apartment, he told Sang, and he could stay as long as
she
said it was okay. Mary Ann didn’t say anything, oblivious to the presence of Karl Ross and his ministrations of comfort as she was to everything else. Detective Sang told Ross he needed to finish speaking with Mary Ann alone. Without waiting for a response, he took Ross by the arm and led him out the front door and down the stairs.

Sang had not even made his way back up to the apartment before he heard Ross shouting curses behind him, followed by the sound of a violent crack. Detective Sang turned and looked down the stairwell. The son of a bitch had kicked in the bottom panel of the street-level door. Mitch Sang flew down the stairs, handcuffed Karl Ross, and hauled him off to the 102nd precinct on a charge of disorderly conduct.

Mary Ann sat in her apartment, barely noting Karl’s departure or the melee that ensued. Feeling perhaps more alone and isolated than she ever had before, Mary Ann could not express her grief. Even in solitary moments it was difficult for her to fully vent her emotions, so accustomed was she to the suppression of them. Indeed, she feared the police finding out the nature and depth of her loss. If speaking of Kitty’s death—about which she knew nothing except what she’d been told—filled her with horror, the idea of speaking about Kitty’s life,
their
life, brought on feelings of true terror.

She had no idea what to do, what to say. What
not
to say. Their private life had nothing to do with Kitty’s death, but still—could the police do something to her if they knew? Mary Ann did not know. She only knew what had happened to others.

The one person who would know what to do was Kitty. But Kitty was truly gone. In spite of the shock, the desperate denial, the reality had already begun sinking in, affirming what Mary Ann had at some level feared all along: her life with Kitty
had
been too good to be true. Nothing more than a year-long dream from which she had now awakened, roused by the stark figure of a homicide detective.

As the morning light dawned, Mary Ann Zielonko, alone in the world, sat at her kitchen table and poured herself a stiff drink.

THE POLICE HAD
some basic information on the victim. They knew where Kitty Genovese had ended up at 3:50 a.m. From witnesses they knew where she had been at 3:20 a.m. as well as that long half-hour in between. Now they had to work backward to trace where she had been before that, and with whom. They headed for an area of Queens about four miles directly east of Kew Gardens.

chapter 4

EV’S ELEVENTH HOUR
was the type of neighborhood bar that all small tavern owners dream of: ideally located, always busy, trouble free. It was not a big place, but just the right size for a homey pub catering to the same customers day after day. The location was Jamaica Avenue at 193rd Street in the Hollis section of Queens, a working-class area in the best sense of the term. The roster of regulars, mostly homegrown and ever loyal to their neighborhood joints, accounted for the steady business and congenial atmosphere. A row of tankards with the names or nicknames of the regular customers written on them—Paddy, Tommy B., Hungry for Gold—hung above the bar, a testament to the familiarity between the bartenders at Ev’s and their clientele.

Victor Horan worked behind the bar as Thursday night became the wee hours of Friday, March 13, 1964. Even then, and even though it was a weekday night/morning, Ev’s still had a few patrons sitting at tables or leaning against the thick polished wood of the bar, drinking their beer and sharing a few laughs as the jukebox played in the background and cigarette smoke swirled above.

It was a cold night, barely above 30 degrees, but the light snow that had fallen on Thursday morning had melted away hours before, leaving the streets clear. Not that driving conditions really mattered much anyway since most of the customers lived within walking distance, some even within the three-story yellow brick building that housed Ev’s Eleventh Hour on its ground floor.

It had been an unremarkable, ordinary night, with nothing much new for the regulars and barkeeps to talk about. They chatted about the same things as usual—work, the upcoming softball season (Ev’s had its own softball team that played against teams from other taverns in the area), the horse races at Roosevelt. Familiar voices discussed familiar topics, with never a hint that their conversations the next day would be hushed and serious, dominated by a single, extraordinary subject.

As Victor Horan recalled, Kitty Genovese walked in the front door of Ev’s sometime after 2:00 a.m. Though Kitty was the day manager at Ev’s and had in fact worked her normal 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. shift on Thursday, her appearance at this time was not unusual. She had been expected.

The place always lit up when Kitty walked in, as if she had an energy around her that instantly lifted spirits. She entered to a barrage of smiles and familiar greetings, “Hey, there she is!” and calls of “Hi, Kitty!”

Victor, noticing the door close behind her with no one following, asked, “Where’s Jack?”

“He dropped me off. I told him I had to call it a night. I guess he went home.”

“This early?” Vic replied. “That’d be a first.”

Kitty shrugged and smiled. The others laughed. Jack Timmins, a local and devoted regular at Ev’s, did not have a reputation for being an early bird. Jack was an affable guy, one of the neighborhood favorites. A longshoreman by trade, he loved a stiff drink or two, good company, and a good laugh. Jack had picked Kitty up at Ev’s when her shift ended the prior evening and they had gone on a planned night out for dinner and drinks at the home of Jack’s brother Teddy over in Brooklyn. Kitty and the Timmins brothers were friends, but this was the first time she and Jack had been out together. Vic wondered how it went, but before he could inquire, Kitty asked, “How was your birthday?”

“Eh, I spent most of it here, you know?” Vic answered. He had turned twenty-nine the day before, March 12. Kitty had greeted him with happy birthday wishes earlier that night, when he had come in at
6:00 p.m. to relieve her at the bar. Though Vic did not care much about his birthday one way or the other, he appreciated Kitty remembering. She was considerate that way, thoughtful of others. That’s why, last November, when the call had come that Victor’s wife had given birth to their fourth child, a girl, he was grateful but not surprised when Kitty had immediately said, “Come on, let’s go see your wife. I’ll take you to the hospital.” And she had driven him to Flushing Hospital and accompanied him inside to congratulate his wife and admire their new baby girl.

Victor and Kitty had been casual friends for the past few years, predating their employment at Ev’s. They had mutual friends and shared an interest in the trotters at Roosevelt Raceway, occasionally heading out to the races with others who enjoyed placing a few dollars on a thoroughbred. Group outings to the track were the only instances when Victor saw Kitty socially, however. He was of course a married family man, and aside from knowing that Kitty was unmarried, lived in Queens, and that she was good at her job and very well liked around Ev’s, he knew very little about her personal life. And when detectives showed up at his home early that Friday morning, asking if he knew of any reason someone might want to harm Kitty Genovese, he was at a complete loss.

Vincent Genovese often said that he never had to support his daughter after she finished high school, that she always earned enough, always took care of herself. When people would ask Kitty when she was going to “find a nice man, settle down,” she would firmly answer that she did not need a man, that she had always made as much money as a man. In fact, there was neither any special man nor any romantic entanglements with the men in her life, but not for her lack of appeal.

At twenty-eight years old, Kitty weighed barely over one hundred pounds, the same as when she had graduated from high school. Physically she had changed very little since her teen years. Petite in stature, she stood just two inches over five feet, her figure shapely and slender. Her Italian ancestry shone through in an olive complexion and dark features that were sharp and well-defined. Her hair was such
a deep brown that it appeared almost black, worn in a pixie style that framed her heart-shaped face. Beneath prominent, well-manicured eyebrows, her brown eyes were surrounded by lashes naturally long and full. Her mouth had a delicate look and appeared small unless her full lips were parted in a smile, as they often were, showing a tiny gap between her two front teeth.

As far as most of her friends and acquaintances knew—and Kitty, friendly and well liked as she was, seemed to have many more acquaintances than close friends in her adult years—she lived in Queens, had formerly been a barmaid in a couple other places much like the one where she worked now, and had been the manager at Ev’s Eleventh Hour for about the past three years.

As her family, certain friends, and those who had shared a part of her history knew, Catherine Susan Genovese was born July 7, 1935, in Brooklyn, the most populous borough of New York City at the time, with more than two million residents within its borders.

Born at the depths of the Great Depression, growing up in the shadow of World War II and then the Korean War, her childhood had nevertheless been a comfortable one spent in the embrace of loving parents and a large extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. She had been named Catherine after her paternal grandmother, which was in keeping with Italian custom (though friends from as far back as elementary school remember always calling her Kitty), and of course the family was Catholic, though as the years progressed Kitty would remain so more in name than in practice. Eventually she would find herself in conflict with certain expectations of the church, but that would come later. As a child, religion and its rituals were simply a natural thread in the fabric of a world woven from traditions shared by most of her peers, and the scope of this world did not extend much beyond walking distance from her home.

Kitty’s father, Vincent, was an intelligent, hard-working son of Italian immigrants who had worked his way up from salesman to entrepreneur by the time she was a young child. He owned and operated his own small business in Brooklyn called the Bay Ridge Coat, Apron & Towel Supply Company while Rachel tended their home
and growing family. After Kitty came her brother Vincent, Jr., two years younger. Eight years later came sister Susan, followed by brothers Bill and Frank. The gap in their ages actually accounted in part for the close relationships between Kitty and her younger siblings; she had been like a second mother to them, a role she embraced.

Throughout Kitty’s childhood, the family lived in a classic brownstone at 29 St. Johns Place in Park Slope, a vibrant area in western Brooklyn, home to scenic Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Park Slope at the time was heavily populated by working class families of Italian heritage much like her own, living in the close quarters of the four-story brick row houses and brownstones that lined the side streets.

Her childhood was not unlike that of other kids growing up in Brooklyn of that era, walking to and from school, playing on the stoops and sidewalks, roller skating on streets bereft of cars due to gas rationing during World War II—the upbringing of city kids in the pre-electronics age, with leisure time spent largely outdoors on concrete playgrounds of their own making. The apartments in which they lived were usually too small and crowded for indoor play, particularly since households back then tended to have more members.

May Trezza grew up a block away from Kitty and was a friend of hers from elementary through high school. She could not recall ever being inside Kitty’s home or having Kitty inside hers. “We just stayed outside in those days,” May remembered. “Outside and in our own neighborhood, but that’s how we all got to know each other. Wherever you were, there was someone who knew you or your parents. It was sort of like having the whole block as your babysitter.”

Neighborhoods typically were ethnic enclaves, separated by boundaries no less distinct for being imaginary. Staying within those boundaries meant streets that felt familiar and safe. It was common to find groups of kids playing outside without any adult supervision in sight. With parents occupied by tending the home or trying to scratch out a living during those lean Depression years, kids often supervised themselves in free time, the older kids looking out for the younger ones.

May Trezza recalled the structure of their growing up years. “Everybody’s routine was pretty much the same. We got out of school early on Wednesdays to go to religion classes. Even if you went to public school, your teachers insisted that you go to your church class.