Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences (18 page)

While the milkman had provided some potentially key information, he was the only non-resident who had anything of value to add to the investigation. The police, therefore, had to shift their focus back to the neighbors. The apartment buildings were canvassed three to four times, much to the irritation of some occupants. “We got some attitude, some people saying, ‘How many times you guys gonna come around here?’ and that kind of thing,” recalled Detective Charles Prestia. In view of the seriousness of the crime, detectives needed to gain as much information as they could. The investigation took priority over the desire of some neighbors to be left alone.

Re-canvassing is standard procedure. Not only do police want to question anyone they missed the first time around, but they also know from experience that some witnesses are not immediately or completely forthcoming, whether intentional or not, the first time they are interviewed. Sometimes they recall more details during a
follow-up interview, or add things they did not wish to divulge the first time around.

At times the most valuable information from a witness comes forth gradually, leaking in drips and drops as if from a clogged faucet, choked by the detritus of fear and self-interest. Detectives determined to solve a case will wait like parched men, holding cups beneath the sluggish stream of information trickling out, hopeful of catching that drip or drop that might prove crucial.

It often pays off. At times the metaphorical faucet will suddenly open with a shower of new information. A case in point was Mrs. Archer, an occupant of the Tudor building, who gave police a far more detailed account of what she had witnessed on the night of March 13 during a second interview on March 16. Speaking with her in her apartment in the Tudor building, Detective Joseph Price took her story down in detail.

At about 3:20 a.m., Mrs. Archer was in front of the TV in her living room watching the movie,
Letter to an Unknown Woman
. Toward the end of the movie (“at the part when Louis Jourdan was reading the letter”) she heard a female shouting “Help Me” two or three times. At first she thought the sounds were coming from the apartment next door to hers. She got up and listened at the wall but didn’t hear anything.

When she heard the next cry of “Help Me” she went to her bedroom window. Detective Price noted that this window was directly over the place of occurrence. Mrs. Archer looked out the closed double-hung window and saw nothing. She then heard a piercing scream, “Help me. Please, if somebody doesn’t help me, I’m going to die!”

Looking out the top part of her window, Mrs. Archer looked down and saw a female. She could only see part of her, so she opened the bottom half of the window and put her head out so she could observe the whole block. It was quiet at this time and at first she didn’t hear or see anything further, except for the woman on the sidewalk directly below her. The woman was squatting, facing downward. A woman with a black coat and dark hair.

Mrs. Archer then closed her window. She said to someone in her apartment, “There is a woman on the ground.” She then looked out
the top part of her window again and observed this woman getting up. Mrs. Archer continued: “I looked across the street to see if the elevator man in the apartment house [Mowbray] came out.” She thought he might, with all the screams. But he didn’t.

Mrs. Archer turned her attention back to the woman on the sidewalk. “I then watched her walking, zig zag, to the corner. It appeared that she was turning toward the drugstore. She definitely wasn’t going straight.”

After this, Mrs. Archer noticed a man coming across the street. He headed in the same direction the woman had gone. Her description of him was “male, white, late 20s or early 30s, he was average, not tall nor short, average build, don’t remember a hat, grey coat, rain or shine type, full length.” She added that this man “should have heard her screams and saw the deceased at the corner by the drugstore.” Per the statements from other witnesses, police knew the man who headed after Kitty was her attacker. At the time she saw him, however, Mrs. Archer did not realize this. Upon seeing this man follow after the woman, Mrs. Archer had commented to her husband, “He’ll probably help her, if she needs help.”

Mrs. Archer said she thought the woman was drunk, sick to her stomach.

At this point, someone else in the Archer apartment awoke, distracting Mrs. Archer for a minute or so. She estimated the time that elapsed from the first scream to this time was about four to five minutes.

After speaking briefly with her husband, Mrs. Archer returned to the television. She was watching the end of the movie when she heard banging. Thinking at first that the banging came from her front door, she didn’t answer it right away because she was frightened, thinking somebody was trying to break in. She put on her robe, went into the dining room and called, “Who is it?” A male voice replied, “I’m your neighbor, I’m on the roof.”

Mrs. Archer went to the window in her living room, a window that faced not Austin Street but a flat, inner area on the roof of the building. She pulled up the shade to find her neighbor Karl Ross
standing outside. Immediately she heard a woman’s voice calling, “Help me, it’s Kitty . . .”

Mrs. Archer then told Detective Price, “I said to my neighbor Karl, ‘I heard screams.’ He stated he didn’t hear them, he was sleeping. He said for me to phone Sophie Farrar, she lives in her building [sic], she should come over and see if it is Kitty, and I said I don’t know her number and I don’t have a phone, the only number I know is Greta Schwartz.” Mrs. Archer gave him Greta’s phone number.

“Karl also stated that he didn’t want to get involved, he wanted somebody else to see if it was Kitty. He thought she was drunk.”

According to Mrs. Archer, she then left her window and walked into her bedroom. She told her husband about the woman moaning in Karl’s hallway and asked if he thought she should call the police over the police call box, to which he replied “No.” The police call box, a freestanding phone that linked a caller directly with the 102nd precinct, stood on the corner of Austin Street and Lefferts Boulevard.

Once again, she heard banging on her window. Karl had returned, telling her he had spoken to Greta but hadn’t heard back from her. (Greta Schwartz at this time would have been on her way downstairs to see what was wrong with Kitty.) Mrs. Archer continued: “Karl then stated, ‘Should I call the police?,’ and I told him that’s what I would do. Karl then left to call the police.”

Mrs. Archer said that the time elapsed from the first cry of help to when Karl called the police was about twenty minutes.

Detective Price ended his report of the interview by noting that Mrs. Archer was willing to take a lie detector test. He assured her that if she had any additional information, her identity would remain a secret.

Karl Ross confirmed that he had crossed the roof to Mrs. Archer’s apartment that morning, although his reasoning had been that he wanted her or another neighbor to call the police because he had been too drunk. This did not jibe with what Mrs. Archer claimed Ross had told her, that he had not heard the first screams because he had been asleep. And of course Ross had had the presence of mind to phone his
friend in Nassau County for advice (which he had then ignored), cross the roof to Mrs. Archer’s, and then phone Greta Schwartz to come over and “see if it really is Kitty.” He also acknowledged that he had opened his front door during the attack in his hallway, but claimed he only opened the door enough to listen.

Police now had the sequence of events after Kitty had entered the back of the Tudor building at 82-62 Austin Street:

Kitty called for help. She called for Karl Ross by name, calling that it was her, crying out that she had been stabbed.

Karl Ross called his friend in Nassau County, who told him to call the police. He hung up on her, climbed out onto the roof, and banged on Mrs. Archer’s living room window.

Mrs. Archer heard Kitty calling for help. She gave Greta Schwartz’s phone number to Karl Ross. Ross left and called Greta.

Greta came down, found Kitty in the hallway, and hurried back to her own apartment, where she called Sophie Farrar.

Sophie Farrar came downstairs and she and Greta went to Karl’s hallway.

Sophie held Kitty in her arms while Karl Ross called the police. The squad car from the 102nd arrived at the scene two minutes after receiving Ross’s call.

From her apartment above the bookstore, Mrs. Archer had heard Kitty’s pleading in the hallway, which had apparently lasted some minutes. Was it possible then that the persons in the other three apartments by the corner had
not
heard?

The only absolute certainty was that no one had responded in any meaningful way to the last words Kitty Genovese would ever speak.

The killer had been lucky.

Or perhaps he knew the city better than Inspector Frederick Lussen or the detectives did.

ON MONDAY, MARCH 16,
the same day Mrs. Archer gave her extended account of the crime, the funeral of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese took place near her parents’ home in New Canaan, Connecticut.

Her family chose a white dress for her burial. For some reason this detail would stay with Mary Ann. How strange, seeing Kitty wearing a white dress. It reminded Mary Ann of a wedding gown. Sometimes, afterward, she would dream of Kitty in the ghostly white dress, when she wasn’t dreaming of her on the steel table at the morgue.

Mary Ann kept a low profile, as befitting a mere friend of the deceased. She could not shout,
Give her back to me!
, as she wished to. She could only push herself through the ceremonies, offer quiet condolences to Kitty’s family.

This, then, was really the end. Kitty would be buried, the only truly happy year of Mary’s Ann life slipping forever beneath the earth along with her.

Among the many mourners who made the trip to New Canaan to pay their respects was Kitty’s coworker, Victor Horan. “Two things I’ll never forget. First was the mother, Kitty’s mother, breaking down. Just sobbing. She was really brokenhearted, poor woman.

“The second thing was the detectives. The same two detectives who came to my house the morning it happened came to the wake. Judy Anderson, Evelyn [Randolph]’s maid, walked in and one of the detectives asked me, ‘Who’s the black gal?’ I told them she was Evelyn’s maid. She knew Kitty from the bar.”

The detectives had come to see if they spotted any suspicious individuals in attendance at Kitty’s funeral services. Women are often killed by a person known to them. But there was no one here who seemed suspect.

Church bells tolled for Kitty Genovese. In a death shadowed by cruel happenstance and bitter ironies, the very last of these may have been her solemn burial in New Canaan, a small town she often said did not appeal to her because she never felt alive there.

Certainly her traumatized family never intended any such irony, just as twenty-eight-year-old Kitty had certainly never given instructions on where she wanted to be buried.

It all made little difference now anyway.

AFTER FIVE DAYS
of investigation and scores of interviews, police were left with little more than the alarm for the suspect that had been transmitted by Detective Mitchell Sang:

4
   Ross is variously identified in documents of the time as both “Karl” and “Carl.” In the interest of simplicity, he is called “Karl” throughout this book except in cases when a direct quotation is made from a source giving his name with the alternate spelling “Carl.”

chapter 9

“WINSTON?”

Elizabeth Moseley stepped toward the bedroom. Entering the room, she found her husband alone, sitting in a chair by the window.

“Winston?” She stepped toward him. “What are you doing? You have to go to work,” she said.

It was March 18, 1964, a Wednesday morning. Bettye Moseley had just come home from her night shift at Elmhurst General Hospital. Normally her husband was heading out the door by the time she arrived, but not this morning. When she did not see him in the driveway, the kitchen, or anywhere downstairs, she first called to him, then walked upstairs. Here he was in their bedroom, sitting, staring blankly out the window, not answering.

Bettye approached him, speaking his name again. He still did not respond. She went to shake him and saw that he looked pale, white. He appeared to be in some sort of daze.

“Are you going to work?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“Well, you are late already.”

“Call my job. Tell them I’ll be there.”

“Winston, what’s wrong?”

He wouldn’t tell her. He would not say anything, except to insist that she call his work and tell them he would be there later. Winston and Bettye Moseley then had their first, and perhaps last, loud
argument. As a trained nurse, Bettye knew how to keep her cool, how to weather a stressful situation with calm control. But this, this bizarre new spectacle—her husband sitting transfixed, as if in a waking coma, barely communicating, late for work . . .
What was happening here?

For months now she had stood by patiently, helplessly, while her husband slowly collapsed under some invisible weight. The stony silences, the constant beer drinking, the gradual inward slide. She had reached for him, but he never reached back.

Bettye Moseley had finally reached the limits of her endurance. She knew something was wrong. Very wrong. This time she insisted he tell her. She raised her voice, demanding an answer, but to no avail. All he wanted her to do was call work for him. She refused. Bettye would not be placated, not this time. Still, he would not relent, would not give her any explanation. “Just call work for me and tell them I’ll be there,” he said.