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Twenty-eight-year-old Catherine Genovese, who was called Kitty by almost
everyone in the neighborhood, was returning home from her job as manager
of a bar in Hollis. She parked her red Fiat in a lot adjacent to the Kew
Gardens Long Island Railroad Station, facing Mowbray Place. Like many
residents of the neighborhood, she had parked there day after day since
her arrival from Connecticut a year ago, although the railroad frowns
on the practice.
She turned off the lights of her car, locked the door, and started to
walk the 100 feet to the entrance of her apartment at 82-70 Austin Street,
which is in a Tudor building, with stores in the first floor and apartments
on the second.
The entrance to the apartment is in the rear of the building because
the front is rented to retail stores. At night the quiet neigborhood is
shrouded in the slumbering darkness that marks most residential areas.
Miss Genovese noticed a man at the far end of the lot, near a seven-story
apartment house at 82-40 Austin Street. She halted. Then, nervously, she
headed up Austin Street toward Lefferts Boulevard, where there is a call
box to the 102nd Police Precinct in nearby Richmond Hill.
She got as far as a street light in front of a bookstore before the man
grabbed her. She screamed. Lights went on in the 10-story apartment house
at 82-67 Austin Street, which faces the bookstore. Windows slid open and
voices punctuated the early-morning stillness.
Miss Genovese screamed: "Oh, my God, he stabbed me! Please help
me! Please help me!"
From one of the upper windows in the apartment house, a man called down:
"Let that girl alone!"
The assailant looked up at him, shrugged, and walked down Austin Street
toward a white sedan parked a short distance away. Miss Genovese struggled
to her feet.
Lights went out. The killer returned to Miss Genovese, now trying to
make her way around the side of the building by the parking lot to get
to her apartment. The assailant stabbed her again.
"I'm dying!" she shrieked. "I'm dying!"
Windows were opened again, and lights went on in many apartments. The
assailant got into his car and drove away. Miss Genovese staggered to
her feet. A city bus, 0-10, the Lefferts Boulevard line to Kennedy International
Airport, passed. It was 3:35 A.M.
The assailant returned. By then, Miss Genovese had crawled to the back
of the building, where the freshly painted brown doors to the apartment
house held out hope for safety. The killer tried the first door; she wasn't
there. At the second door, 82-62 Austin Street, he saw her slumped on
the floor at the foot of the stairs. He stabbed her a third time--fatally.
It was 3:50 by the time the police received their first call, from a
man who was a neighbor of Miss Genovese. In two minutes they were at the
scene. The neighbor, a 70-year-old woman, and another woman were the only
persons on the street. Nobody else came forward.
The man explained that he had called the police after much deliberation.
He had phoned a friend in Nassau County for advice and then he had crossed
the roof of the building to the apartment of the elderly woman to get
her to make the call.
"I didn't want to get involved," he sheepishly told police.
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Six days later, the police arrested Winston Moseley, a 29-year-old business
machine operator, and charged him with homicide. Moseley had no previous
record. He is married, has two children and owns a home at 133-19 Sutter
Avenue, South Ozone Park, Queens. On Wednesday, a court committed him
to Kings County Hospital for psychiatric observation.
When questioned by the police, Moseley also said he had slain Mrs. Annie
May Johnson, 24, of 146-12 133d Avenue, Jamaica, on Feb. 29 and Barbara
Kralik, 15, of 174-17 140th Avenue, Springfield Gardens, last July. In
the Kralik case, the police are holding Alvin L. Mitchell, who is said
to have confessed to that slaying.
The police stressed how simple it would have been to have gotten in touch
with them. "A phone call," said one of the detectives, "would
have done it." The police may be reached by dialing "0"
for operator or SPring 7-3100.
 Today
witnesses from the neighborhood, which is made up of one-family homes
in the $35,000 to $60,000 range with the exception of the two apartment
houses near the railroad station, find it difficult to explain why they
didn't call the police.
A housewife, knowingly if quite casually, said, "We thought it was
a lovers' quarrel." A husband and wife both said, "Frankly,
we were afraid." They seemed aware of the fact that events might
have been different. A distraught woman, wiping her hands in her apron,
said, "I didn't want my husband to get involved."
One couple, now willing to talk about that night, said they heard the
first screams. The husband looked thoughtfully at the bookstore where
the killer first grabbed Miss Genovese.
"We went to the window to see what was happening," he said,
"but the light from our bedroom made it difficult to see the street."
The wife, still apprehensive, added: "I put out the light and we
were able to see better."
 Asked
why they hadn't called the police, she shrugged and replied: "I don't
know."
A man peeked out from a slight opening in the doorway to his apartment
and rattled off an account of the killer's second attack. Why hadn't he
called the police at the time? "I was tired," he said without
emotion. "I went back to bed."
It was 4:25 A.M. when the ambulance arrived to take the body of Miss
Genovese. It drove off. "Then," a solemn police detective said,
"the people came out."
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