Psychology students have been studying her death for decades, and the 1964 killing of Kitty Genovese—in which the 28-year-old was brutally raped and stabbed to death in the hallway of her Queens apartment building while neighbors allegedly failed to call for help when they heard her screams—remains one of the most chilling and infamous murders in the city's recent history. Now a new book reopens the allegations against Genovese's neighbors, reminding us all that New Yorkers are pretty good at ignoring the plight of other people sometimes.
DNAinfo reports that the book, titled Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and its Private Consequences, alleges that after Genovese was stabbed by attacker Winston Moseley outside her Kew Gardens apartment complex, she crawled into the building where she "laid in that hallway calling up the stairs repeatedly for help, long enough for her 'friend' Karl Ross — whom she called to by name — to open his window and scurry across the roof to another neighbor’s apartment, where they both then stood talking at the window about what they should do amidst Kitty’s cries that she had been stabbed," according to author Catherine Pelonero.
Ross, meanwhile, reportedly told his friend, "I think she’s drunk," and didn't call the cops for a half hour; in that time period, Genovese had her throat slashed, was raped, repeatedly stabbed in the stomach and eventually died.
Though initial reports about Genovese's death noted that there were "38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens" who witnessed the murder and did nothing to help, more recent reporting debunked those allegations, inferring that as few as six people may have witnessed the attack, her screams were faint and, at 3 a.m., people just didn't know what to do. But Pelonero—who used witness accounts, court records and personal correspondence with Moseley to construct the book—told DNAinfo she hopes reopening the story will remind people that their actions matter. "If you think someone might be in trouble, err on the side of caution,” she said. “If just one person had called out to her, 'Do you need help? Should I call the police?' — the whole story could have been different.”
1964 wasn't the last time New Yorkers missed a dying human's cries—to name a few, the screams of a Queens woman who was stabbed to death in 2008 were allegedly ignored by a neighbor who thought she was drunk, and in 2010 a homeless man who was stabbed to death on the sidewalk was denied help by bystanders who reportedly snapped photographs of him instead of calling the cops.
