Original subtitles

I remember that night like it was yesterday.

Those screams still echo through my nightmares.

And I'm not the only one.

A lot of us heard those screams that night.

And a few saw the horror, too.

There were hundreds of murders that year in the city.

But only this one became famous all the world over.

Not because of the victim.

Not because of the killer.

But because of the witnesses.

Because of people like me.

You know the Kitty Genovese case, right?

Of course you do.

Thirty -eight of her neighbors watched a woman die.

She recognized one of them and called to him for help while she was being

stabbed to death.

But he never answered her. Forty persons heard her scream, but no one knew.

People up there were sitting right on top of the crime. When it was over, they

all went back to bed.

Kitty was the girl in New York City who was stabbed to death by a maniac in

front of her house while all of her neighbors stood around and did nothing.

Kitty Genovese revealed to the world how apathetic society had become.

Kitty Genovese showed us how living in cities turned us into animals.

Kitty Genovese was a modern martyr.

That's the Kitty Genovese, right?

At 3 .50 a .m. on March 13th, the 102nd Precinct received a call from a man who

says that a woman has been attacked in his hallway.

Two minutes later, patrolmen arrived on scene at a Tudor -style building.

Oh, there's an ambulance coming.

Help's on the way. She'll be here in just a few minutes.

Do you know this woman? Catherine Genovese.

And she goes by Kitty.

Kitty's clothes are cut and torn. She has multiple stab wounds in her chest

stomach, and her throat is slashed. How do you know her?

She lives across from me.

The hallway was absolutely drenched in blood.

Hang in there, Kitty.

It's a very small, confined hallway.

And the staircase that goes up to two more apartments, this woman was trapped.

Breathe, Kitty.

In 1964, you didn't call 911. It did not exist.

What you did was dial the police precinct directly.

So it was quite some time before the ambulance arrived.

They told us she died on the way to the hospital.

She never woke up.

And now, our little block in Queens with the... scene of a murder.

There was a trail of blood on Austin Street.

So they figured out that Kitty Genovese was attacked first in front of her own

apartment building.

So there are two attacks.

The police tried to keep us away, but it was all right there for us to see.

And as it got later and the sun came up, it was all the more vivid and horrible.

This was directly across from the 10 -story building, the Malbury apartment

house.

And so there possibly could have been a whole audience looking down at where she

was attacked.

All right, you take the right, take the left.

Excuse me, ma 'am.

3 .20.

That's when I heard the first scream.

The police were able to find people who told them that they heard these screams.

At first, we couldn't see her. We just heard her yelling.

Samuel Koshkin and his wife live in an apartment building called the West

Virginia, the same side of the street as the Tudor building, in a corner

apartment.

Samuel Koshkin heard the screams and he heard the woman say that she had been

stabbed.

You hear screams?

And I get up quick and look through my window and

saw a man beating a girl.

Andre Peek, a woman who lived in the Mowbray, saw a man standing over a

standing over Kitty, and clearly...

Something bad was occurring.

She did reach for the telephone.

Robert Moser and his wife lived on the seventh floor of the Malbray apartment

house, directly across from where Kitty was attacked.

I thought maybe it was domestic spat.

Hey! You leave that girl alone!

No, you yelled from where?

From... Our apartment up there.

Okay. Now, you didn't hear her screaming that she'd been stabbed at all? No.

What did she do after that?

Moser remained at the window, and they watched her walk back down the street.

She's slowly zigzagging and walking. They think she might be drunk, and she

disappears behind the Tudor building.

You know this woman's being hurt.

Why didn't you call the police?

Well, I did.

Andre calls the police.

102nd.

Hello, 102nd.

As the phone is being picked up, she panics. And to her

great sadness afterward, put the phone back down.

So what do you do after that?

I saw a man run into his car.

Samuel Koshkin sees a man run back to a car, which he described as a white

compact car.

And he backs out a few.

And then the man came back.

But this time wearing a fedora.

I'm calling the police.

You called the police?

I told him not to.

I thought for sure at least 30 people had called before then.

I'm going to go out. I put my coat on, and I'm going to look for the car to get

the license, but she wouldn't allow it. I was scared for his life.

I told him to stay out of it and just wait for the police.

Can you identify the man?

Some of the descriptions, it's a black man. Some of the descriptions, it's a

white man. Some of the descriptions, it's taller or shorter.

There were a couple people who thought that it might be a woman, but everyone

had said that the assailant seemed to be a slender person wearing dark pants.

There were a lot of us, but when you got right down to it, we hadn't seen that

much. At least not enough to get the guy.

But everybody on the block knew that there were two people who probably were

a position to know more.

Sir, how are you doing today?

Joseph Fink was the doorman at the Mulberry apartment house.

At any point did you see or hear a woman screaming?

Mr. Fink was on duty that night.

I didn't see anything.

He refused to give them any information.

All right, buddy. I think you're coming with us.

Well, the police weren't going to put up with that, so they took Mr.

Fink down to the station house.

And the other person we all thought might have seen something more was Carl

Ross.

It was his stairwell that Kitty wound up in.

It was Carl Ross who called the police.

The detective had a very strong suspicion that Carl Ross had seen and

of the attack than he was letting on.

It had been just hours ago that those screams had woken me up, but it seems

years.

We all went over it again and again.

What we'd heard, what we'd seen, it was a nightmare.

How were any of us to know that the nightmare was only beginning?

Kitty Genovese, our neighbor, our Kitty, was dead.

Murdered right outside of our building.

Lots of us heard a shout, me included, and some saw a scuffle, but none of us

ever imagined we were hearing a murder.

And also, who would want to kill Kitty?

Everyone loved Kitty. She was a doll.

My dream job in like five years is to maybe open up a little restaurant, La

Gatina, with my dad.

Oh, that would be... Yeah, I don't know.

It's just a little bit of a dream.

I love this song. Come on, Michael. I need a dance partner.

She was a very, very upbeat and vivacious person.

Oh, yeah.

She was extremely well -read, knew a lot about history, kept up with the news

and politics.

She comes from a family in Brooklyn.

Kitty tried Connecticut for a while, but she really preferred living in the

city. When I was 12 years old, the two family walk up and one door was our

family and next door was Kitty's apartment.

Oh, thank you, Sophie.

How's Mikey?

Getting dressed, I hope.

She was a very generous and nice person.

I remember I would shovel the snow during the winter, and she would give me

five bucks. Back then, that was a lot of money.

She was a good friend of my mom.

So how are your parents? They good?

Yeah, they're good.

Are you ready for lift -off, partner?

Yeah. Yeah?

She used to drive myself and my sister to school once in a while.

All right. Have a good day, you two. Bye.

My mom really did like her, but she was a toughie.

My mom said that. She says nobody got away with anything with Kitty. She could

take care of herself.

You sit where you sit, and you're going to tell me that you didn't see a thing?

I saw nothing.

Joseph Fink insists that he didn't see anything because he was down in the

basement on a coffee break.

Come on, fake me.

Just come clean. Make it easy on yourself.

It's alright.

What do you see?

What did he look like?

He was slender.

He describes him as a man who's about five foot eight.

Leave that girl alone!

Saw the killer get up and run.

And he sees Kitty get up and walk back towards the end of the Tudor building.

Joe Fink says, well, everything must be fine.

And now he goes downstairs, and now he takes a nap.

Why didn't you call the police?

For whatever reason, they just did not want to get involved in this case at

There's got to be something we can charge him with.

What? For being a son of a bitch? We'd have to book the whole city.

There's no law in the book saying that a citizen must come to the aid of

another.

And then they talked to Carl Ross.

Now he was a piece of work.

What time did you hear the screams?

Well, I'd been drinking.

So I don't recall hearing anything. No, no, I don't. Come on, Carl. She ran

right under your window screaming.

You heard her, didn't you? I didn't know that was Kitty out there. I swear I

didn't know that was her.

His story kept changing.

So you hear the screams.

What did you do then?

Carl! Carl, it's Kitty!

Kitty?

Carl Ross dithered.

He was afraid. He was drunk. He spent precious minutes wondering what to do.

They ask him, well, why didn't you call us right away?

I don't know. I didn't want to get involved.

I was scared.

I'll bet you Carl Ross regretted saying those words the minute they were out of

his mouth. And if he didn't, he should have.

Later that day, detectives came back to the neighborhood to talk to Kitty's

roommate, Mary Ann.

She was the one who had to go to the morgue to identify Kitty's body, poor

thing. The detectives thought that being Kitty's roommate and all, she might

know something that could help.

But Mary Ann knew the least

of anyone.

She'd slept right through the whole thing.

The last time she saw Kitty, she was leaving for work.

Kitty was working at a place called Ev's 11th Hour, and she was the manager

there. She was extremely well -liked there.

Someone had had too much to drink. She knew how to tell someone, you know, that

they were cut off.

I have a few questions for you, if that's all right. Of course, anything I

do to help.

What exactly did Ms. Genovese have planned on the night of the murder?

Kitty, your date's here.

Hey, Jack.

You almost ready? One more minute.

All right, take your time.

On the night of Thursday, March 12th, Kitty had a date with a man named Jack

Timmons, who was a patron at Ev, and this was a first date for them.

Good night. Take care of her now.

The police go and they pick Jack Timmons up and they take him to the precinct

house for questioning.

What exactly did you and the victim do?

I picked Kitty up around 6 o 'clock.

They were going to his brother's house for dinner.

They leave about 12 .30.

They stopped at a bar, had a couple drinks, and then Jack Timmons dropped

off back at Ev's about 2 a .m. And I had another day, so...

Police questioned Timmons' other date, and she verified that he had been at her

apartment until about 4 .45 a .m., and then he had gone home.

Two dates in one night, huh?

Got ourselves a real Romeo here.

I don't think you understand.

Kitty didn't like men.

Of course, we're talking the mid -60s, and Kitty and Marianne were closeted.

What is that? Happy Valentine's Day.

Kitty loved folk music. She loved coffeehouses.

In 1963, she meets Marianne Polanco in Greenwich Village. They hit it off

immediately.

Are you serious?

Mm -hmm.

Oh, my gosh.

You got it!

Thank you. Happy Valentine's Day.

Marianne calls herself somewhat reserved, bashful, and agnostic, while

more ebullient and very Catholic at the time.

He was a friend of mine.

were soon lovers and found a place to live together there in Kew Garden.

My mother knew that they were lesbians.

And my mother never mentioned to her that she knew.

They both respected each other.

And

when the

police found out about this... They had a few more questions for Mary Ann.

It seems odd to me that two women are sharing one bed.

Well, that's all we could afford.

Look, I don't see what the problem is.

The problem is that there was something else going on that you're not telling me

about.

Nothing was going on.

Really? Because the neighbors are all saying that you and Kitty were a lot

than just roommates.

Obviously, someone's just trying to cause a little bit of trouble.

You're going to find yourself in a lot of trouble if you keep lying to us.

Did you have a lesbian relationship with Katie Genovese?

Did you?

Mm -hmm.

The detectives interrogated Mary Ann Zalonko for six hours.

It was perfectly legal at this time for police to harass homosexuals. This is

not the NYPD's finest hour.

Mary Ann left like a week later.

It was a sad thing.

Nick.

Nick.

There were a lot of witnesses, but all the police really knew was that the

killer was a slender man wearing a fedora who was brazen enough to come

Kitty even after he was spotted once.

It was strange, all right, but it wasn't any way to catch someone.

Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Doing what good detectives do,

find out who would be in the area between 3 a .m. and 4 a .m.

So, sir, for the record, what is your name?

Edward Feisler.

And he managed to find a milkman.

Did you happen to see anybody out at that hour?

As he's carrying his milk to the store, a young guy passes right

by him.

Well, can you describe him?

Yeah, I know exactly what he looks like.

The milkman says he's got a fedora, he's got a trench coat, he's about 5

'8", maybe 140 pounds.

And he's a light -skinned black man.

Yeah, that's him.

But as good as this description was, it could have matched thousands of people.

This was New York City, after all.

The detectives were going to have to wait until this guy slipped up somehow.

Like I said before, you probably think you know all there is to know about the

Kitty Genovese murder.

Heard it dozens of times, right?

But I got news for you.

You don't know the half of it.

Kitty Genovese had been stabbed to death outside her apartment in Queens.

And the maniac who killed her had gotten away.

It really wasn't that surprising.

The sad truth was lots of murders went unsolved in New York every year.

What was surprising?

was what happened next.

Five days later, working class, community, Jackson Heights, Queens.

This one guy sees what appears to be a burglary in broad daylight.

Hey there, what are you doing on the banisters?

Hey, it's okay. I'm helping them move.

This didn't sound right to him.

So he consulted another neighbor and he said, do you know anything about them

moving? And he said, no, I'm sure they're not moving.

They were a little confused.

If this man was a burglar, why didn't he take off as soon as he was confronted?

They get the brainy idea to play around inside this car and call the police.

Now the guy comes out of the house.

Car doesn't go.

He didn't panic. He simply got out of the car and started walking.

Two police officers come and they arrest him.

His name is Winston Mosley. He's 29 years old.

They take Mr.

Mosley to see Detective John Tartaglia.

You don't mind if I smoke, do you?

No.

He's a second -grade detective, World War II vet. He's a very, very bright

So let me get this straight.

You were burglarized in that home in East Elmhurst.

Yeah, I guess so.

Where are you from?

I'm from South Ozone Park.

You married?

Yeah. So where do you work? What do you do for a living?

Ray Ram Corporation.

Detective Tartaglia is really perplexed by this man.

He's married. He has a family. He owns a house. Has a good job.

He had no prior arrest record.

In other words, this man is about the last person in the world who should be a

burglar.

Have you committed any other burglaries?

Yes, ma 'am.

Oh, yeah, how many?

30 to 40.

There was something very eerie about his demeanor.

So this immediately gets the detective thinking. I wonder what else he could

have done.

Wait, why don't you come with me?

So he keeps him talking.

It's going to be a long night.

And they eventually start talking about assault.

January 31st. You put a screwdriver up to a woman's neck, you forced her into a

vacant lot, and you made her suck you.

Didn't you?

Then on February 15th, you snuck her to a woman's bedroom, and you tried to rape

her.

I didn't do any of that stuff.

Sure about that?

Because I'll bring those women down here, and they're going to identify you

faster than you can blink.

Yes, I did.

Mosley was just on a roll confessing.

What they were wearing, what they looked like, what he did. He's fessing up to

everything in a very cool demeanor.

That's everything, man.

It really is.

Tartaglia remembers that Mosley was captured driving a white compact car, a

Chevy Corvair.

And he thinks of the murder of Kitty Genovese.

And the story goes that Detective Tartaglia played a hunch.

He called the detectives from Hugh Garden, the ones working on Kitty's

Take a look at this.

I have this guy downstairs right now.

You're joking.

Let's go.

Listen, this is Detective Strang and Detective Coward Homicide.

One of those cuts on your hand, where'd you get them?

This.

I scratched them working around the house. I scratched them working around

house. No, that's not what happened. You got those from Kitty Genovese when you

were stabbing her in the throat.

Did you kill Kitty Genovese?

Did you kill Kitty Genovese?

Okay I killed her

almost with a shrug, as though he were admitting to jaywalking. He said, yeah,

killed her.

Tell us what happened.

Start from the beginning.

I came home around 9 p .m., fed my dog.

My wife works the night shift, so I kissed her goodbye.

And then I got the idea to go find a girl to kill.

So I got in my car and I went looking for her.

He was out hunting for hours.

He was looking for someone to murder and rape in that order.

He was close to giving it up for that night when he found Kitty Genovese.

She sees him.

And as he described it, she was frightened right away.

He attacks her and stabs her multiple times in the back.

deeply enough to puncture one of her lungs.

Joseph Fink sees the first attack.

Robert Moser lifts his window and yells, Hey!

Leave that girl alone!

So he runs back to his car.

He backs it down the street and he waits.

girl get up so i waited for about 10 minutes for the lights to

turn off you didn't wonder if anyone was going to call the cops oh i knew they

wouldn't people don't do that stuff late at night they they just go back to

sleep she's not fatally injured but she does have a

punctured lung she can't make as much noise as she was able to before

She's staggering around the corner where she is no longer visible to all the

people looking out their windows.

At that point,

he takes off the stocking cap he was wearing and puts on a fedora.

He wanted to finish the job.

Kitty gets to 8262 Austin Street.

And she knows Karl Roth lives up the top of the stairs.

And she's calling to him.

And then the

monster appears again.

And he pounces down on her and he stabs her first in the throat to stop her from

screaming.

Then he stabs her several more times.

And he proceeds to rape Kitty.

And no one saw you in the vestibule

with her?

That little man who lived up on top of this stairs did.

I heard the door open.

I looked up at him.

I made shut the door real quick.

I wasn't worried. He wasn't going to do nothing.

Six days after Kitty was murdered, the NYPD had found her killer and gotten a

full confession.

Pretty fast, right?

At this point, the story hadn't gone much beyond our neighborhood in Queens.

And like I said, this was one of hundreds of murders in New York City

So why was it that eight more days pass, and then Kitty Genovese's name is on

the lips of the entire city?

Well, that's the part of the story that you haven't heard.

Chief. How are you? Going well, yourself?

I'm good, good.

And it all began with a quiet meeting between two very powerful men.

Kitty Genovese was murdered and her killer was caught six days later in New

City, hardly noticed.

But two weeks after that, she was the most famous murder victim in American

history.

Ten days after the murder, the Metropolitan editor of the New York

Rosenthal, goes to lunch with the police commissioner of the city of New York,

Michael Murphy.

Rosenthal begins to ask about another murder case that he was interested in.

I was wondering what you'd tell me about that.

And the police commissioner wasn't ready to talk about that case. To change the

subject, he said, boy, we had a doozy of a case out in Queens.

38 witnesses watched a girl get killed.

And nobody tried to save her.

Rosenthal felt the hackles on the back of his neck rise up.

He knew instantly that this was a story that he wanted to play on.

Her neighbors watched a woman die.

She recognized one of them and called to him for help while she was being

stabbed to death.

But no one acted.

On Friday, March 27, 1964, the New York Times printed a story on their front

page. And the headline read, 37 who saw murder did not call the police.

There would have been 38, but even the New York Times had to admit that Carl

Ross had called the police, eventually.

It says, for more than half an hour, 38 respectable, law -abiding citizens

watched as a woman was stalked and stabbed on the street where she lived.

Immediately, it was picked up by other newspapers, and it went around the

Life magazine sent a reporter.

Mike Wallace did a radio special called The Apathetic American.

The image that was portrayed, both in New York City... and of Kew Gardens in

particular, where people had become so hardened that they were no longer

affected by ordinary human suffering.

But it was wrong. It wasn't the whole story.

38 respectable law -abiding people did not watch a woman be stalked and stabbed

for 30 minutes.

Gansberg wrote that there were three attacks upon Kitty.

There were two attacks, but the really troubling...

thing from an accuracy point of view is the 38 witnesses exactly what is a

witness is it somebody who actually saw the attack many of the ear witnesses

they got up and looked out the window by that time there's nothing to see and

there is the false specificity of the number 38 no one has known precisely

it came from for half a century i believe i found the document

It is a collection of the initial interviews.

There are 38 entries, and I believe that some harried civil servant gave that

number to Commissioner Murphy, who gave it to the Times, and it enters American

history from there.

The story made it sound as if we all stood around watching Kitty get killed,

like it was presented to us on a stage, under a spotlight, and we turned our

backs. But that's not how it was.

In 1964, you're not calling 911.

You're calling and getting some desk sergeant, and you may well be invited to

mind your own business.

The 911 emergency phone system grew from the outcry over Kitty's murder.

And then there were people like the Koshkins. They wanted to help, but

surely someone else already did.

I'm calling the police.

In the years following, a number of specialists began studies to determine

exactly would cause bystanders to fail to intervene.

And the theories that developed from those studies came to be known as the

bystanders effect, also known as the Genovese syndrome.

The more people who are present when a person is in peril, the less chance that

person has of being helped.

The idea is that...

Someone will call the police. It doesn't have to be me.

And people have a tendency to think that if no one else is helping, maybe the

person really doesn't need help.

So it's much more about social inhibition than it is about apathy.

It was the despicable behavior of two men that we all got blamed for.

And even then, if you look at it from another angle, Carl Ross's behavior made

kind of sense.

It's likely that Carl Ross was gay. That would definitely be a reason not to

want to call the police.

The police harassed the homosexual community.

So he's afraid to talk to anybody.

And the real insult to all of us was the one person the paper

didn't mention.

The phone rings, and it was a neighbor.

My mom started to run past me, saying the kitty was bleeding.

Sophie Farrar, who was all of 4 feet 11 inches tall, for all she knows, there is

a murder in progress, and she's running straight to it.

Her husband is still trying to get his pants on and follow her. She didn't

hesitate.

Oh my God, Kitty, what happened?

Kitty, it's Sophie. I'm here. When Sophie Farrar leans down and puts her

around Kitty, Kitty in her last moments of consciousness is waving her hands,

still trying to fight her off.

Carl!

Carl!

Carl! Are you up there?

Call the police!

Sophie! She ordered Carl Ross to call the police.

And that was what finally made him do so. I'm here.

Sophie's here.

Sophie's here. It's okay.

My mom was cradling her until the ambulance arrived.

Kitty Genovese fits the role as urban martyr.

That... somehow teaches society a lesson about apathy. Let's not be apathetic.

I don't believe that Kitty Genovese has to be symbolic of something. I don't

think she died to teach the rest of us a lesson.

Apathy did not kill Kitty Genovese. A monster named Winston Mosley killed

Genovese.

He was a friend of mine.

Kitty became famous for being the woman whose callous neighbors watched her die.

A woman no one cared about.

Not even in her darkest hour.

But Kitty was more than that.

She was as full of past, present, and future as any woman.

She loved and was loved.

And she deserves better from us now.

He was a friend of mine.