Hey, everybody, it's me Josh, and for this week's select I've chosen our twenty sixteen episode on the murder of Kitty Genevies. Her story is fairly famous. She was murdered while an entire apartment block of people watched and did nothing. But that's not exactly the real story. Like most things in life, there's more to it, and we explained what actually happened. We relied a lot on the excellent documentary The Witness for this episode, and I highly recommend watching it.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this one.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry So this is Stuff you Should Know podcast True Crime Edition. Actually yeah, but so much more than just a single crime. I agreed, a crime that echoed throughout a city, throughout the world, throughout decades. And it's true, man like, there are very few crimes you can point to that had more of an impact than the murder of Kitty Genovis.
Agreed, And there are a lot of true crime podcasts out there. We are not trying to become one. No, this is just something we do from time to time. Sure, as I researched this, and as I watched did you watch The Witness the documentary recently.
On Netflix right now?
It is HBO documentary, And I was disturbed, And I'm glad it finally covered it in the documentary, But I was disturbed that Kitty Genevie's and we'll get to her murder, but very quickly she was murdered and became the symbol for people not helping out.
Right, what came to be known as bystander apathy or the bystander effect that the more people people who are around, the less likely anyone is to help.
Yeah, so she became such a symbol that you never hear about Kitty Genevie's and who she was as a person.
That was one great thing about that documentary. There are multiple great things about it, Yeah, but that it really talked about her and showed her and yeah, revived her spirit.
Which I was really looking for because even in researching online, it's hard to get a lot of information.
So some things, some even contemporary articles still aren't mentioning that she was gay.
Well, yeah, her own brother who made the documentary didn't know that she was gay.
No, it's true, but it's it's been out since. I'm not sure when actually that came out.
It was just this year.
Oh okay, so it was fairly new this year, last year. Yeah, that was like in the last five years maybe.
So in honoring that, why don't we talk a minute about Catherine Genevieve's Kitty. Yeah, born in nineteen thirty five and Brooke to Vincent and renee Legendavise, Italian American parents. And it's weird, I don't see.
Oh.
Yeah, Rachel was her mother's name. She was Rachel Petroli at first. So they lived in Brooklyn, and she was very well loved in school.
Yeah, she was like the leader of her clique.
Yeah, And she was apparently a lot of fun and a good mimic of her teachers. And she was voted class cut up in her senior year. Graduating class. She was to an all girls school in Prospect Heights, and it was just, by all accounts, this vivacious, fun loving, really sweet sweet lady, yeah or girl at that point.
Her little brother Bill, who ended up making the being featured in the documentary The Witness. Yeah, was just in love with her. She was just amazing.
They had a very special relationship.
Yeah. I think she was about thirteen years older than him. Yeah, quite a bit, maybe twelve years older. I had a sister like that, and like there's a very special relationship. There's none of that sibling rivalry. Yeah, they're not old enough to be your mother. That's just a it's a unique situation to be a younger sibling and to be able to inherit like all that worldly wisdom. Yeah, and they're going through all their own things and their own
struggles and their own travails. But to that thirteen year old younger brother, yeah, they know everything and they're the coolest person walking the planet, and they're the kindest person walking the planet because they've lived long enough to like figure out some of the major stuff, you know.
Yeah, even my own sister is only six years older, and we very much had and still have that relationship where and she and my brother are great now too. But you know, when you're two or three years apart, there can be a little bit of the knocking of heads. But by the time I came along, I was like, you know, my sister was six. It was perfect. I
was a little baby doll for her. So anyway, that was very much the relationship that Kitty had with Bill, And it seemed like one of the old older brothers always had a little bit of a like, yeah, she always liked him better, Yeah, kind of attitude.
Seemed like everybody kind of knew like she liked Bill the most.
Yeah, which I kind of felt bad for. But that's just those family dynamics, man.
You know. The thing is, whenever you do start to kind of talk about somebody who's died, especially someone who's died violently and young, it's easy to canonize. Sure, you know, I really put them up on a pedestal and forget their flaws. And of course I'm sure Kitty had tons of flaws, but she didn't seem to have any from from what I'm gathering, that were, you know, just terrible flaws or that made her like a bad person. She seemed like she was a like a overall above average, great person.
Yeah, agreed. So New York was getting too dangerous for her family they thought to have all these kids, so they moved when she graduated high school to New Canaan, Connecticut. And she said, you know what, I'm staying here in New York. I'm eighteen now I love it here. She got married for a brief time to a guy. Was his name Rocco.
I don't remember his name, it's either.
Rocky or Roco. And in the documentary Bill tries to get in touch with him. He's like, I really because he found out she was gay and was like, you know, we didn't even know this. I think Rocco can help shed some light. And he very respectfully asked for his own privacy.
He said, my relationship with Kitty will remain forever a mystery. Yeah, it's like, that's an oddson it was. I think he just didn't want to. I mean, if she was gay and they were married for a short time, he either didn't know and maybe felt the fool or he did know and was maybe trying to do right by her in some way. Sure, either way, he didn't want to talk about it. Right But she worked as a secretary for a little while. She was a waitress for.
A little while. Eventually she was a bar made bartender and then became bar manager at a place in Hollis Queen's called EV's Eleventh Hour. That is a great barn well, and from all accounts it was one of those wonderful neighborhood bars a yeah, where the people were in there getting sauced pretty early in the day, and everyone knew everyone, and everyone loved Kitty and she helped take care of everybody, but was very much an independent kind of firecracker of
a woman. Drove a red Fiat. Her dad used to tease her about, like when you're going to find the right guy. She was like, I make more money than any guy I would go out with. I don't need that, which is I guess nineteen sixties for dadam gay?
I'm gay?
Yeah, and I can't say it. But she did make pretty good doe as the bar manager. And then in March nineteen sixty three she met a woman named Marianne Zelonko at Swing Rendezvous. It was an underground lesbian bar in the village, and they moved in together shortly thereafter.
Yeah, and Kitty actually used to bring mary Anne home with her to visit, but her family was all like, well, they're just good friends and roommates, right, It's the sixties, right, the early sixties.
Yeah, And there's an audio interview with her in that documentary. That's really touching.
Hm.
She didn't want to be on camera, but Bill was able to speak to her. And I think what was so compelling about this documentary was that he was It was a search of a man looking for closure.
It's a harrowing sometimes almost unbearable to watch.
Yeah, search. It was tough.
I mean, like he's had odds with his family here there. Yeah, he he's just just doing things where if you watch it in the context of the documentary and you follow along the documentary, it all makes utter and complete sense. Right, But then if you stop and remove yourself long enough to be like, this is a documentary, which means this guy really did this stuff. Yeah, and there was a camera following him along while he was doing it. I
was like, I couldn't have done half of it. Oh, I know, you know, he really he just at one point he calls it an obsession, but it's not. He doesn't come off as.
Obsessed, right, agreed, you know? All right, So let's detail the crime and then we will take a break after that. How does that sound?
Yeah? All right?
So flash forward to March thirteenth, nineteen sixty four. It's three point fifteen in the morning, and Kitty geneviez Is, as she often did, was making her way home from work late at night as a bar manager, and was being trailed by a man, a man by the name of Winston Moseley.
Yes, who is definitely the villain of this story, but is not the only one. It will turn out, right. So Kitty was twenty eight and at the time she was killed, and Winston, her killer, was twenty nine, just turned twenty nine, I think like a week or so before. And I think he said this is March thirteenth, Yeah, nineteen sixty four.
Yeah, he was married with a couple of kids.
Yeah, his wife, Elizabeth worked the night shift. She was a hospital nurse, and Winston's mother stayed at home with the kids. So he basically said, you know, oh, my own house. I've got a great job operating computers. No one even knows what I'm supposed to be doing with him yet, but I'm making money doing it.
Yeah. He was a smart guy.
So I'm gonna indulge myself. I'm gonna go out and stalk women and murder them in my spare time. That's what I'm gonna do. So that's what he was doing on this night. He was cruising around looking for a woman to kill.
Basically, Yeah, that was his direct quote in question. Yeah, I was looking for a woman to kill.
Yeah. So he saw at a believe a red light, this little red Fiat convertible caught his eye and there was Kittie driving. So he started to follow her and she parked, and she parked in the parking lot for the Long Island Railway, which the parking lot went backed up to the side of her apartment building, which is a two story tutor job that had shops in the bottom and apartments in the top. Right.
Yeah, this was in Q Gardens and Queen's. So he followed her on foot. At this point she sees him and knows that something is going on. He has a knife in his hand, so she starts running. He catches up to her by outside of a bookstore and stabs her twice in the back right off the bat with this knife.
Right. And she had been running toward a bar that she thought would be open, but it turned out apparently there was a new manager and the new manager had closed down early. So when she stabbed twice in the back, it's on this darkened street, but right across the street Austin Street is a ten story apartment building with dozens of windows looking out onto Austin Street, where she's being stabbed in the back, and she screamed, she cries out. I think she said something like, oh God, he stabbed me,
helped me, help me? Is what they said, basically, definitively is what she screamed. And people who were witnesses to this recounted that one guy said that he was I think a ten or eleven year old kid who was inside one of the apartments in the Mowbray apartment building and that he was awoke and awakened from a deep sleep. The scream was so loud, he said it was the loudest thing he's ever heard. So she screams, and a man living in the Mowbray apartment buildings window, what's his name?
Yeah, Robert Moser opened his window and screamed out, hey, get out of there. What are you doing? And Mosley took off, Yeah, he took off running away.
He's very frequently misquoted as having said like let that girl alone, but even by his own words in his own testimony, he said, hey, get out of there.
Yeah, at any rate, he scared him away.
Right.
So in between that time, about thirty minutes passes, Kitty makes her way around to the vestibule of her own building, right yeah, and goes inside the vestibule, and like you think, the horror is over for her. She could probably survive
these wounds, right, is in shock, I would imagine. And then Mosley had went to his car, kind of checked out the building, saw that some lights had gone on, and reasoned to himself, no one's going to do anything, puts on a different hat, and goes back, finds her in the vestibule and finishes the job in the most horrific ways you can imagine.
Yeah, he stabbed her at least twelve more times. They think at least she was stabbed at least fourteen times. He said he doesn't remember how many times he stabbed her, but he basically kept stabbing her until she stopped screaming. She was still alive. I saw that he attempted to
rape her. I've also seen that he raped her. Yeah, I'm not sure which one's correct, but at one point, and this is really important here, as he's stabbing her and she's screaming, in the vestibule, there's a staircase that leads directly up to a door, and behind that door lived a man named Carl Ross. And Carl Ross opened his door and looked down one single flight of stairs at Winston Moseley stabbing Kitty Geneviez, who was bloody. There's
no confusing what was going on. And he closed the door and he called his girlfriend, and his girlfriend said, don't get involved. Yeah, I'm worried for you. Just leave it alone. It's none in your business. And he did. He didn't do anything, at least for a little while.
All right. So that's a good place to break here, and we're going to come back and talk about who saw and heard what and what they did about it right after this, all right. So at this point, Kitty Genevies is not dead yet, but dying in the vestibule. A woman did come down and was with her. Her name is Sophia Ferrar. She's still with us, and she was a neighbor and friend of Kitty's. And so she went down there and apparently was with her as she
passed away, tried to calm her down. Evidently did calm her down, and likes to think that she at least saw a friendly face and that she was being cared for as she passed. The weird thing is is that is not mentioned. I guess we got to get into the New York Times now.
Yeah, so after the murder, like the next day, the Times ran four paragraphs on the kitty Geneva's murder. It was not incredibly newsworthy at first, because that year there was six hundred and thirty six murders in New York City.
Yeah, and that was just one of them, just one.
But a couple weeks later, the head the city editor of the New York Times, a guy named ab Rosenthal, who's a legendary journalist, was having lunch with I believe, the police commissioner of the NYPD. And the commissioner said, did you hear about that Genevieve's murder. That's one for the books. Thirty eight people standing around watch the whole thing. Nobody did a thing about it.
Yeah, now you've got a story.
Abrosenthal, legendary journalist, is like, uh, thank you for that. Yeh, here's my diner's club card. I have to go now and get this story done. So he did. He assigned it out to a guy. What was the original reporter's name. His name was Martin Gansberg, and they wrote on the front page, I shouldn't say they wrote it was definitely all Gansburg, but he was assigned and definitely under the
direction of Abrosenthal, like this, this is the story. Yeah, thirty eight people stood around and did nothing.
Yeah, the title of the article was thirty seven. It was thirty seven at the time. Thirty seven who saw murder didn't call the police. And basically the entire article and the entire narrative from that moment forward for decades was a not about this woman at all. Hardly she became a symbol a b not necessarily even about the crime, but about the crime of these people who didn't the crime of apathy for these thirty seven or thirty eight people.
But it was very much misconstrued in the New York Times, to the point where in two thousand and four they all but wrote a retraction with new information because the original article they said, like these people witnessed it. That is not true. Maybe only a couple of people might have actually seen anything with their eyeballs. The other thirty five or thirty six may have heard someone screaming. They might have thought it was a drunken couple in their
neighborhood coming home from a bar. There might have been some apathy involved for sure for some of them. But to characterize this as thirty seven or thirty eight people witnessed this horrific crime and literally shut their doors and windows to it was not accurate at all.
Right, they said, they said specifically, Well, the way that they put it was that there were The way the story read was that thirty eight people had watched this
murder which took place. They misreported that there were three attacks, and that the man had been chased off twice and came back two more times, but that this whole thing had taken place over thirty minutes, this long, prolonged attack, and that thirty eight people had just been sitting there watching it, doing nothing, And that is definitely a mischaracterization of what had happened, Like you're saying, for the most part,
people were earwitnesses, not eyewitnesses. There were certainly not thirty eight eyewitnesses, and most people weren't in a position to do much, if anything about it physically. But I don't know if you could call it like a retraction because the point that ab Rosenthal he never apologized for whatever. Even in the documentary he's interviewed, Yeah, and he's like, this is great, I'm glad that it did what it did.
Yeah.
Sure, The point is still there that there was apathy in that there were two people who could have done something and they didn't. But then from what the other witnesses said, the scream was pretty clearly not a purse snatching and not a couple fighting drunkenly that it was a violent crime being committed on this woman. And people still didn't do anything.
Yeah, they misreported, possibly that no one called police. Apparently perhaps up to three people called the police, although police logs showed only one call came in. And it may be a case of these people now telling themselves like I called the cops that did something, sure, when they may not have. They did not report at all that Ms. Farrar had gone down to be with her. She was not mentioned ever. So I kind of went from feeling like, yeah,
you know this bystander effect it had good. It led to the nine to one one being created apparently in some ways, and people study this in class and it raised awareness. So you know, if they stretched it a little bit, then it had a good effect. That's what Abe basically, that was his position, That still is his position.
But well he's dead now.
Oh did he finally pass away? Yeah? And then I finally came around and be like, no, you know, the truth is what you should print. And if you're a reporter and you run a story, you should print the truth and not some sensationalized version of it to sell newspapers.
No, no, absolutely, I agree with you, And I think the one thing that you can hang on, ab Rosenthal is that that story was definitely fashioned in a manner to be as sensational as possible, as shock and outrage
the public as much as possible. But I still think it's rooted in the basic fact that there was apathy involved and that it possibly allowed Winston Mosley to finish the job that Kitty Genevie's might have survived had somebody done more than just sit up, look out their window and go back to bed or not even bother to
look out the window. And like you said, Chuck, like this had a lot of impact because the story comes out in nineteen sixty four and for forty years, it wasn't until two thousand and four that the time saw fit to like go back and really reinvestigate, and they did. There was a great, great article called Kitty forty years later, I think, and the author goes through and reinvestigates the case and really sets a lot of facts straight. But within that forty year period, the effects that this murder
had were just sweeping. It led to the establishment of nine to one one. Yeah, it's a big one, sure, and it created this whole field of psychology that looks into the psychology of crowds, you know, and why we would just stand around? What is this diffusion of responsibility? None of that understanding existed until the kid Eachenevie's murder.
Yeah, and weirdly, why is someone Why is a solo witness more apt to act than a group of people.
One thing I saw is that it's called social influence, and that we take our cues from others. So if inaction is basically what is on the table right, then we're going to be inactive as well. If people are starting to move toward it, toward the problem, we'll probably join in too.
I could see that or people thinking like, either I'm not someone else's better equipped to deal with this than me, or I feel like someone else will do this right, so I don't have to. Yeah, a lot goes into play. It's pretty interesting.
One of the less productive things that came out of it, though, is this idea that when you live in a city, in a big city, you put enough people together, everybody stops caring about anybody else. They're all out for number one. And Q Gardens became the center of this or just such a symbolic example of urban care uncaring, I guess yeah. And Kitty Jenaviez became a symbol of that as well, and the need to do something, to act out to help other people when you see them need help.
All right, So let's take another quick break here and we're going to get back into what happened to mister Moseley and the further effects of this crime after this. So a week after this murder, Mosley was breaking into a house. He's not a good.
Guy, No, he was a terrible guy.
He was beyond being a sociopath and a psychotic. Was just a burglar and he would he was just straight up robbing a house one day of a television and one of the neighbors saw this called the cops. Cops came and arrested them.
No, no, no, no, that's not true. What the neighbor. Here's the thing, This is the great ironic twist of the kiddie Jenavie's story. He went to a different neighborhood. He was robbing a house and the neighbors said, hey, what are you doing? And he started to run from the house. The neighbor chased him and tackled him and held him until the cops came.
Oh well, yeah, he called.
That's how he went down. Intervention. Yeah yeah, yeah, but not apathy intervention right a week later?
Yes, okay, So at any rate, he calls the cops. He gets arrested, and very like matter of factly, says that he killed Kitty Genevies. And not only that, but he killed supposedly two other women, a woman named Barbara Kralik, well actually she was a girl, she's only fifteen, and then a woman named Annie Mae Johnson. And apparently both of them had been sexually assaulted. And he was never tried for those, but he did plead not guilty by
reason of insanity, which did not work. Was sentenced to death, and by luck of timing was able to appeal and the death penalty had gone away for most crimes in that time period, and he was resentenced to life in prison.
Yees. Supposedly the prosecution had withheld some evidence about his mental state during his sentencing, so he was able to
get it reduced. So he was hanging out during his time, and he was in Attica, I believe, and he had injured himself and was being taken to the hospital, and on the way there he got the gun away from the guard who was escorting him and took off and for I think five days, he basically just the city of Buffalo was in mortal fear of the fact that the guy who murdered Kitty Genovie's was now on the loose in their town, and they were afraid, rightfully, so
he raped one woman. When the cops closed in on him, he got a hold of five people and held him hostage in a standoff that lasted for a little while with the FBI before they finally got to him. He was a bad dude, so they sent him back to prison and they said you're not getting out here ever.
Yeah. He was later a part of the Attica prison riots as well, and the one lady that he killed, he he burned her alive like the family was upstairs. Yeah, and he broke into her house, raped her, killed her, and burned her alive in the home and the house went up in flames. So it sounded like he had no He sounded like a true sociopath, like he had no not there's every reason for killing someone, but it was always just at random because he wanted to do that.
That's a lot what it sounds like. It was a self indulgence.
So in the documentary very powerful scene where the son I'm sorry, the little brother of Kitty who was told through his eyes interviews and sits down with one of the sons of Moseley and it's just like, I mean, you cut the tension with a knife. Obviously, it's just so like fraught with tension. And he had told his
son that she was yelling racial slurs at him. So said that he was just a getaway driver for some mobster and the Genovese family was related to the crime mob family, the Genovese family and none of this stuff is true. And the brother was just like aid, no, we're not related to that family at all. We have nothing to do with that, and he just gives him a look when he talks about the racial slurs, like,
come on, man, that's not what happened. So it was a really really powerful scene of these two guys kind of working it out in a way.
I didn't see them working anything out.
Oh see, I did, which made it even worse for me. I thought there was some between them. They kind of came to a nice, nicer place than where they'd started.
I did not catch that at all.
Well, maybe you skipped forward or something.
Maybe I was like, I can't take this kind of fest forward.
Well, the Sun was saying, like, you know, I think you know, we need to know the son of was saying that they needed to move on from all this, and and then the brother was saying, I definitely don't you know the sins of the father and the sins of the sons. Yeah, he said that, So you know, I felt like they were better off than when they started for having that conversation.
I honestly did not catch that.
Yeah.
Well, regardless, Winston Mosley, after I guess after his second his first escape, the second little crime spree in Buffalo, when he was captured, he apparently reformed himself for he claimed to be reformed. He got a degree in prison. He wrote an editorial that The New York Times published where he basically said, I'm a changed man. Yeah, And everybody said, oh, look at that. It's just about the time your first parole hearings coming up. This is great timing.
He went up before the parole board and they said no. He went up before the parole board again, they said no. He went up eighteen times, when eighteen times the parole board said no.
Yeah.
I think the last one was just a couple of years before he died. But he died in twenty sixteen at age eighty one in prison.
Yeah, And he the brother tried to get an interview with him, and he said no, that he didn't want to be exploited anymore. And you could just feel this brother's pain of like really wanting to try and to talk him into it again. And the basically the people that were the go between like, yeah, you know, you can try, we can't keep you, but he's not going to change his mind.
Right.
So he never got that interview, but I feel like he got I don't think he was looking for answers. I mean, in the documentary he went back to many of these apartment windows just to look at what their vantage point might have been. He got an actress to recreate what the screaming would have sounded like from down there on the street, which was very chilling scene. And I don't know that he was looking for Like you said,
he was at odds with his family at times. You could tell the one little brother was like, man, this is hard on all of us, so you need to stop. But I don't think he was necessarily looking for the closure in that I want to find out for sure if these people could have stopped it. I think the closure comes more in the journey of learning about his sister and learning as much as he can about this case. It's really interesting.
It was very interesting that two thousand and four Times article and then now this, this documentary has definitely exonerated Q Gardens as a whole. They've said, now there's there's way more nuance to this, there's way more. Yeah, but two things. Two people that have not been exonerated are guy named Joseph Fink and a guy named Carl Ross. Carl Ross was the guy who lived at the top of the vestibule who opened his door. Yeah, The ironic thing about Carl Ross is if you notice it says
thirty eight witnesses, thirty seven did nothing. The thirty that that last thirty eighth witness that the Times was referring to was Carl Ross. They said, he's the one who called the police. They called the police like long after Kitty Genovits was dead. Yeah, so he was. Actually he was actually, I don't want to say celebrated or whatever, but he was exonerated initially by this Times article when it turns out that he was one of the two
people who could have done something and didn't. The other one was Joseph Fink, who saw the initial attack from his vantage point in the elevator. He ran the elevator in the Mowbray apartments across the street, and he apparently saw what was happening and left his elevator and went to bed. Yeah that was that. But again, it seems like the overall feeling is okay. Other than those two guys,
everybody else is fine. I just disagree with that. I think that there's a lot more that people could have done that didn't, and I don't think it's a I just don't think that everybody's off the hook for that.
Yeah, yep, you got anything else?
No, man, If you want to know more about Kitty Genovise, just search the Internet. There's a lot about her, but be careful what you read because it's all over the place. Frankly, and since I said Internet, it's time for listener mail.
Fish fraud follow up. Hey guys, I recently began began a job as a marine fisheries observer for the Department of Fish and Game and the Bearing Sea, And just listen to your fish fraud episode. Each season, a percentage of vessels fishing here at least are randomly selected to have an observer on board to monitor the operations and bycatch that come up in their pots or nets. The presence of an observer is admittedly a bit of a drag for this fishermen. We have to put up with
us skinny nerds. Ll He typed that we are generally a great deterrent of any mischief at sea, But from what I have seen, most of the fishermen are real sharp, honest folks who know what they're doing. Of course, this is only a small portion of all the vessels on the water, and it isn't going to solve that problem by any means, but you'd like to know that there is some coverage on fishing vessels and processors. Thanks for
all the laughs, my dudes. That is from Kevin Alexandrowitz in Olympia, Washington.
It's a lot. Kevin had no.
Idea, did you that these people did that.
That there's basically like a sky Marshall program fighting fish fraud on the high seas.
Yeah, we talked about that, we did.
Yeah, I don't remember that.
Yeah, we were just like it's just so infrequent and random that you know, what's what good is it doing? And sounds like he agrees in some ways, but.
Still have fun out there on the high seas, don't get seasick. If you want to get in touch with us, like Kevin did, you can send us an email the Stuff podcast at House Stuff Works dot com and as always, joined us at our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot Com.
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