Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences (21 page)

The sexual assault now completed to his satisfaction, he decided to take whatever she had in her pockets. “I looked through her pockets and I took everything she had, which were some keys, some makeup, a bottle of pills, and $49 she had in cash. I took one of the false pads that she had in the brassiere because it had blood on it and I touched it with my finger and I didn’t want to leave it.”

Leave no fingerprints. Smart. But by this point, the detectives already knew he was no idiot. They were not sure what else he was, however. His demeanor seemed all wrong. He had just described a horrific assault in the same calm, casual way he had spoken of the burglaries. He didn’t even show the excitement some killers will exhibit when describing the mechanics of a savage act that thrills them. Regardless of how he told the story, the detectives now knew he was the killer of Kitty Genovese. The information about the missing false
pad from Kitty’s bra had never been disclosed to the press. The only ones who knew that detail were detectives and the medical examiner who performed Kitty’s autopsy. And the man who took it.

Moseley said he looked up the stairs one last time before leaving the victim. He didn’t see anybody up there. Yes, the victim was definitely still alive when he left. He walked out the door. “Instead of going back through the parking lot, I walked around the block and came back on the opposite side of the street.” Had he seen anyone at all? “The only thing I saw was a milk truck with a deliveryman in it.” This had to be Edward Fiesler, making a delivery at the grocery store on Austin Street. “I walked around to the car and back to the street, parallel to the street that I first followed her on, and I started driving home. As I drove home, I threw out the keys, the bottle of makeup, and the case that the pills were in. I got to Hillside Avenue and Van Wyck Expressway and stopped and threw out this false pad from the brassiere that I picked up. From there I went straight home.”

And the hunting knife? “It’s in a toolbox at my house. I washed it first.”

They went over his story again. He remembered that he had changed hats between the first and second attacks. When he first chased her down he had been wearing a dark stocking cap on his head. After going back to his car, he took that off and put on a black fedora before returning to finish the job. He had kept the money he took from Kitty, but he threw her wallet into some bushes at the Raygram parking lot.

He also mentioned the benevolent act he had performed right after the murder. “I got to Hillside Avenue and as I stopped for the light, there was somebody else stopped for the light who was asleep behind the wheel. So I pulled past the light and got out of the car and came back and attempted to wake this person up. He was asleep, with the motor running. I woke him up.”

Then what? The man thanked him and drove away. Moseley got back in his car and proceeded home.

Why didn’t he kill him? He still had his hunting knife. “I did not feel that I wanted to kill that man in particular.”

Why didn’t you hold him up, take whatever money he had? “Well, I didn’t particularly need his money. And I was finished with what I planned to do.”

A CALL WAS
placed to Lieutenant Bernard Jacobs at the 102nd precinct, letting him know of the breakthrough in the Kitty Genovese homicide. Lieutenant Jacobs would await Moseley’s transport to the 102nd for further questioning. Before sending him over there, John Tartaglia and Albert Seedman at the 114th had another very important question to ask Winston Moseley.

Besides Kitty Genovese, who else had he killed?

Moseley didn’t have to think long. The strange smile returned. “That woman over in Jamaica. Annie Mae Johnson.”

Annie Mae Johnson, a twenty-four-year-old housewife, had been murdered at her South Ozone Park home two and a half weeks before, in the early morning hours of Saturday, February 29. Her husband had been cleared and the police had no other suspects in her homicide. Now Moseley claimed he had done it. If he had indeed killed Kitty Genovese, as it seemed he had, the crime fit his modus operandi. Except for one thing.

“I shot her,” Moseley said.

The detectives groaned, threw up their hands. That had to be a lie. The Medical Examiner had determined that Annie Mae Johnson had been stabbed repeatedly, not shot. The detectives were frustrated. He had so many details right about the Kitty Genovese case, but if he would lie about having killed Annie Mae Johnson he could be lying about the Genovese case as well.

Moseley did not lose his composure when they called him a liar. Instead, he looked more content than ever. He kept his cool while the exasperated detectives lost theirs, shouting at him. Some of them left the room. After all that, Moseley was just a weird little thief with a wicked imagination.

“Annie Mae Johnson wasn’t shot, Moseley,” Detective Tartaglia said to him. “She was stabbed.”

The smile. The smooth confidence. “I read that in the papers too. They were wrong. I shot her.”

Something about the way he said it. Something about
him
. They needed to hear what he had to say about it.

As it turned out, he had quite a lot to say. And it was a good thing they listened.

The urge to kill a woman had seized him on Friday, February 28, much as it would two weeks later when he hunted down Kitty Genovese. He had left his house in the dead of night, intent on finding a woman to rape and kill. Or kill and rape.

The falling snow that night had kept him close to home, in his own neighborhood around South Ozone Park. Spotting the woman alone in her car—it was only later, from the newspapers, that he learned her name was Annie Mae Johnson—he followed her in his Corvair. He watched the young woman park her car on a residential street in front of 146-12 133rd Avenue. He thought it was about 3:00 or 3:30 in the morning. The woman got out of her car. As with Kitty Genovese, he had gotten out of his first. He was already close to her by the time she closed her car door.

He held a single-shot .22 rifle by his side. He intended to kill her.

There was another person on the street, a man down the block shoveling snow. It made no difference to Moseley. He followed the woman as she stepped onto her front porch. Hearing him behind her, she turned. He asked for her money and she handed it over. He raised the gun and shot her in the stomach.

He reloaded and shot her in the stomach again.

She slumped down into a sitting position on her porch. She asked him to take her into her house. She handed him her key, told him nobody was home. Leaving her on the porch, he entered the house and went upstairs.

The woman had lied to him. There were people upstairs, asleep. He went back out to the porch and shot her four times in the back.

What about the man down the block shoveling snow? “I never noticed what happened to him,” Moseley said. “I was standing right
there, but I didn’t notice whether he got in the car or whether he went in the house.”

After shooting her in the back, Moseley went back inside Annie Mae Johnson’s house. He went upstairs and found $100 in an empty bedroom. He took the money.

That was another key detail that Moseley had right; the $100 that Annie Mae’s husband had reported missing from the house after the murder had not been disclosed to the newspapers. Now he definitely had the attention of Detective Tartaglia and Albert Seedman, even with the stabbing versus shooting discrepancy. Obviously there was some mistake, but not necessarily on Moseley’s part.

After pocketing the money—and leaving the persons sleeping upstairs undisturbed—Moseley went back outside where he found the woman lying on her stomach in the snow. He turned her over and saw that she was dead. “Then I decided, well, perhaps I’d rape her now that she was dead, so I took off all her clothes that she had right there in the snow.” He used a small pocketknife to cut off her bra. Once he had her undressed, however, he decided it was too cold to rape her out in the snow. He rolled her up the steps and into the house, right into the middle of the living room floor.

First he “licked” her genitals. After that he attempted intercourse, but he was impotent. He laid on top of her and had an orgasm. “Then I decided I’d set the house on fire and leave.” Using newspapers, he started fires in two places in the living room. He took the scarf the woman had been wearing, placed it on her genitals, and set the scarf aflame as well. “After that I went outside, found that I had not brought part of her clothing inside, and I took that, put it in a garbage can that was sitting on the outside and got into the car and went home.”

The details fit. All too well.

Except the curious matter of Moseley insisting he shot Annie Mae. Then again, bullets from a small caliber single-shot like the .22 he claimed to have used could produce marks so slight they could be mistaken for the ice pick wounds the medical examiner reported he found on the body of Annie Mae Johnson.

Exhuming the body was the only way to be sure. An exhumation was not something to be pursued lightly, however, without solid cause.

DETECTIVES FROM THE
Homicide Squad and the 102nd precinct were ready—eager—to book Moseley for the murder of Kitty Genovese. Satisfied they had their man, they wanted to take him back to the 102nd precinct.

John Tartaglia could have made the arrest himself, right there at the 114th squad room, but protocol and Tartaglia’s personal code of ethics dictated that he turn the suspect over to the detectives who had so diligently worked the Genovese homicide. But there were many who worked on the case. Rather than choosing who should officially make the arrest, John Tartaglia and Albert Seedman took Moseley over to the 102nd station house themselves, delivering him to the custody of Lieutenant Bernard Jacobs. Lieutenant Jacobs could decide who should get the collar.

At the 102nd precinct in Richmond Hill, Lieutenant Jacobs and the detectives continued questioning Moseley, going over the details of the Kitty Genovese homicide again. The story remained the same, as did the suspect’s eerily placid telling of it. Nevertheless, as time wore on, Jacobs detected cracks in Moseley’s previously calm exterior. Still, it was difficult if not impossible to gauge whatever this oddly stoic suspect might be feeling. He gave remarkably little indication of any emotion at all, no matter how morbid or incriminating the question. Jacobs asked him what he had done with the knife he used to kill Kitty Genovese. As he had earlier, Moseley stated that he had taken it home and washed it in the sink.

“Was there blood on the knife at that time?” Jacobs asked.

“Oh, yes, there was a lot of blood on the knife.”

“What did you do with the knife after you had washed it?”

“Well, I just dried it and put it in my toolbox, where I kept it.” The toolbox, he added, was in the pantry of his kitchen.

A search warrant would have to be obtained for the Moseley home. Jacobs dispatched detectives to search the locations where
Moseley claimed to have dumped the belongings of Kitty Genovese. They also planned to take the suspect to Kew Gardens that very night to show the detectives exactly where he claimed he had stalked Kitty Genovese, to point out where he had been, what he had done. First, however, detectives in other jurisdictions, having been informed of the capture of a man who admitted killing multiple women, had come to the 102nd precinct to ask Moseley about a few other open cases. This served a dual purpose. Not only were detectives trying to discern if Winston Moseley had committed any additional homicides, but they also wanted to see if he would confess to just
any
homicide—such as those he could not possibly have committed—particularly ones that had received a lot of publicity. Pending the results of the search warrant and recovery of Kitty Genovese’s stolen property, it was another way to test the veracity of Winston Moseley’s claims.

The highest profile unsolved case at the moment was perhaps the grisly double killing in Manhattan that the papers had dubbed the “Career Girls Murder.” In August of 1963, two young women named Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert had been murdered in a savage sex slaying in the apartment they shared on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The murders had occurred during the day. Moseley instantly told them he knew nothing about it except what he had read in the papers. Plus, he said, his employer could verify that he had been at work at the time of the murders. Moseley denied involvement in other cases they brought up as well. Besides Kitty Genovese and Annie Mae Johnson, he said, he had only killed one other person: a girl by the name of Barbara Kralik.

This last admission was a bombshell—primarily because an eighteen-year-old named Alvin Mitchell was set to go on trial next month for the murder of Barbara Kralik.

Fifteen-year-old Barbara Kralik had been murdered in her bed on the night of July 20, 1963, at her family home at 174-17 140th Avenue in a section of Queens called Springfield Gardens. Police had arrested Alvin Mitchell, an acquaintance of the Kralik girl. Under questioning, Mitchell had confessed to entering the Kralik home through a first floor window in the dead of night while the family slept, entering
Barbara’s room, and stabbing her with a pair of scissors. Mitchell had been indicted on a charge of murder in the first degree the previous September. Now Winston Moseley, an admitted predator who had so many of his facts straight in the Kitty Genovese case, and who further denied involvement in other homicides about which he was asked, said that
he
had snuck into the Kralik home that night, that he had stabbed Barbara Kralik with a small steak knife.

Invading homes under cover of darkness and attacking women at random with weapons: both seemed to be Moseley’s forte. In addition, there was his compelling account of the Annie Mae Johnson murder. Despite the one troubling discrepancy about the mode of her death, Moseley had everything else correct, even down to the layout of the Johnson home and the places where the fires had been set. Moseley even made a sketch of the Johnson living room for them—an accurate one, showing the location of the stairs, couch, and a partition dividing the room. He had even included the position of the TV in the Johnson home, although in this case he had not taken it, apparently making necrophilia a priority over the acquisition of another television. Some detectives therefore felt it worth their while to listen to what he had to say about the murder of Barbara Kralik. Other detectives disagreed, however. Those who were convinced they already had the right man in the Kralik case—Alvin Mitchell—did not want to hear this new story about Barbara Kralik from Winston Moseley. Fucking liar, making all this up just to fuck with them.