The 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, and the 38 witnesses who allegedly refused to help her, were the subject of what is still one of the most famous articles in New York Times history. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite true.
Over 50 years have passed since the brutal rape and murder of 26 year-old Kitty Genovese in Kew Gardens, Queens, and the case is still mentioned in news stories citing The Genovese Syndrome, aka The Bystander Effect.
This legendary tale of urban apathy has been dusted off and used as an example once again in editorial pieces about the 40 people who reportedly watched a recent gang rape broadcast on Facebook Live and did not call the police. Comparisons to the Genovese murder reminded me of how the facts of this case continue to be obscured by the initial faulty reporting.
Photo courtesy of The Witness Film LLC.
The events took place in March of 1964 and the story perfectly played into the fears of the day: Only four months after the JFK assassination, there was a growing fear of random acts of violence as crime rates began to rise …. not to mention anxiety about the anonymity of urban life and the racial unrest percolating throughout the country at the time.
The headline of the aforementioned article screamed: “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call Police!” It led with: “For more than half an hour, 37 respectable, law-abiding citizens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks… Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.”
When I first read this, I admit I pictured blank people eating popcorn and watching the attack from their tenement windows. What happened to the New York subway’s friendly reminder: If you see something, say something?
A 2014 magazine article revisiting the slaying confirmed its sensationalism: “The New York Times story fed into a version of reality that was molded to conform to a theory…” The takeaway was basically that life was cheap in the naked city, baby. You are just one in a million and those cold, heartless bastards wouldn’t cross the street to save your life. It became one of those “Boogey Man” stories that suburban parents would tell their children to warn them about the evils of leaving home to venture off to metropolis.
The outrage over this story was never about the killer, or even the actual killing. The attacker, Winston Moseley, had already been captured and confessed by the time the Times article ran two weeks after the murder. This was about the 37 – later amended to 38 – supposedly apathetic people who saw something and said nothing. This was also about selling newspapers by scaring the crap out of everyone.
The highly-competitive newsmen of the era were just as eager to get an eye-grabbing headline as many are today.
New York Times editor A.M. Rosenthal later recounted his meeting with the Police Commissioner, during which he was told of the apathetic witnesses in the Genovese murder. He immediately realized that by reporting with the angle on the apathetic witnesses, rather than just another tale of urban violence, he had a “resonant incident” – something that would startle his readers in a new and different way.
He assigned headline and lead sentence to a staff reporter and told him to fill in the blanks. Several days later it was featured on the front page. The story took off from there.
Editorials worldwide were written about the case. Songs. Books. Sermons. More than one Law & Order episode ripped it from the headlines. The hugely-popular HBO show Girls had a whole episode that referenced it.
There were psychological and sociological studies that created a now-commonplace term: “The Genovese Syndrome.” – In short, bystanders fail to intervene when a crime is taking place. This all snowballed from the New York Times article. And because of the prestige of that news source, nobody looked further to see if the story was accurately reported.
It wasn’t. Residents of the Kew Gardens neighborhood knew it. If this occurred today, some might have used social media to attempt to set the record straight.
Instead, it took 40 years before anyone in print media started to try get it right.
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Here’s what really happened.
At around 3am on March 13, 1964, Kitty was on her way home from her shift as a bar manager when she was spotted by Moseley, who was driving around looking for, in his words, “a woman to kill.” She parked her car and must have realized she was being followed because she didn’t go around back to the footpath that led to her apartment. She started to run instead to a bar she found was closed. She screamed for help when he caught up to her and stabbed her several times.
Some people in the apartment building across the street later said they thought they heard a drunken altercation or a lover’s quarrel outside the bar. One man opened his window and yelled “Leave that girl alone!” It was enough to momentarily scare off Moseley. Kitty slowly headed towards her apartment around the back of the building – out of site of anyone who witnessed the initial attack. She got as far as the vestibule of an adjoining building when Moseley returned. He found her, raped and stabbed her again.
Two attacks in two different places. Nobody could have seen or heard both. Someone actually did call an ambulance. Kitty was cradled by neighbor Sophia Ferrar–a 4’ 11”, middle-aged mother, who comforted her until the ambulance arrived.
None of this fit the grand narrative of urban indifference.
And then there was Karl Ross, a neighbor and friend of Kitty and her girlfriend/roommate Mary Ann. He was described as possibly drunk and definitely skittish, with a distrust of the police. He opened his apartment door, saw something going on with Kitty and a stranger in the vestibule, closed his door, called a friend, and went out the window to another tenant’s apartment where he eventually called the police. He did not blithely say, as it was infamously reported, “I didn’t wanna get involved” and go back to bed.
Photo courtesy of The Witness Film LLC.
The reverberating fallout from the Genovese case is often cited as a major catalyst for the creation of the 911 emergency call system, to allow witnesses a quicker and easier way to report crime. In 1964, a person had to wait for an operator to connect you to a local precinct or look up the direct number in the phone book.
In this particular case, it turns out people did actually call the police. One person who called said that they were told by the precinct that “police were already aware of the situation.” But the police were not dispatched. Why? It has been speculated that, because the initial attack was perceived to be a domestic dispute, it was ignored.
50 years ago, people were less likely to get involved in how a man disciplined his woman. That was considered to be nobody’s business.
The 2016 documentary The Witness followed Kitty’s younger brother Bill in his search for the truth about his beloved sister’s death. In the film, Times editor Rosenthal admits that the number of witnesses reported could not be proven. Even still, he insisted that the Times version of the story had done a lot of good and brought to light things that needed to be said.
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What if the focus of the New York Times article had taken another angle? At least as important, to this writer, is the police reluctance to get involved in what some perceived as a domestic dispute. If some witnesses didn’t call the police because of this—or worse, the police didn’t send someone because of this—couldn’t that have been the shocking focus of the piece?
Trust in the New York Times account got in the way of looking into the actual issues failed responses to her attack might suggest—that people would not get involved in what was perceived as a domestic dispute, or that the police did not respond to the original calls that described a domestic dispute outside of a bar.
Interestingly, the author of a 2004 revisit in the New York Times pointed out: “If the story had been reported more accurately, it would have been a two- or three-day, maybe even a four-day story, but it would not have been a fifty-year story. We would not still be sitting here talking about it today.”
As sure as Mama Cass did not choke on a ham sandwich—another erroneously reported but widely-believed story later disproved–38 people did not stand by and let this woman get murdered.
But you can’t fix an urban legend.
38 witnesses. Even now, after years of books, articles and movies trying to correct the story, the number remains. 38 witnesses. Recent articles about the Bystander Effect in regards to social media are sure to mention Kitty Genovese and the 38 people who watched her die. That number is still being used to drive the point home—even if, buried deep in the article, the reporter admits that the number is inaccurate.
This made me think back to the 2014 magazine article, which concluded:
The real Kitty Genovese syndrome has to do with our susceptibility to narratives that echo our preconceptions and anxieties.
Picture a link to the original Kitty Genovese New York Times story while scrolling through your newsfeed today. Let’s assume that you already view New York City as a dangerous, apathetic cesspool. You read that article, express your outrage and shake your head and your fist and fire off a visceral response along with a one-click “share.” And off it spreads.
All from one embellished source.
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I guess what I’m saying is … If you see something … Check around a little. Google. Look at multiple sources. In today’s news climate, we owe it to ourselves and to those with whom we share information to be fully informed. That means taking the time to filter out what is “fake” and what is not.
And then, say something.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
The post What Happens When Fake News Becomes Legend? appeared first on The Good Men Project.
