Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences (45 page)

The results were disheartening. In the simulated auto break-ins, in 100 out of 300 trials, a bystander stopped and gaped at the crime in progress but did not challenge the thief. The experiment was repeated in 190 trials throughout nineteen cities across the United States and Canada. The overall rate of intervention—when a bystander either questioned the thief or sought a police officer—was 11% overall, 3% in New York City.

It is worth noting that these experiments were conducted in the early 1980s, before the advent of cell phones. In some trials, however, a uniformed police officer was purposely stationed not more than 100 feet from the crime in progress, to see if perhaps
fear was the main factor that kept people from speaking up (the idea being that a witness could easily inform the police officer of what was going on just a short distance away, thus putting the risk of confronting the thief into the hands of the officer). The presence of a police officer made little difference, however. In two instances, people actually warned the
thief
to be careful, telling him there was a cop nearby.

In several instances, Professor Takooshian and his associates identified themselves afterward to people who had obviously noticed the crime, asking why they had not acted. Some said they were uncertain what was going on. Others bluntly told them, “It’s not my car, it’s not my business.” One man, a vendor doing business a few feet away from one of the staged car break-ins who had observed the action for several minutes, told the psychology professor, “I don’t care which car he breaks into, as long as it’s not mine.”

Conducting hundreds of experiments like these, Takooshian came to refer to this as “the secret of street crime,” as criminals know they can usually count on people not intervening.

Professor Takooshian appeared as a guest on a number of television programs, including NBC’s
Today
show with Jane Pauley and the early reality program
That’s Incredible!
, which aired footage from his experiments. One particularly disturbing segment aired on
That’s Incredible!
Going beyond inaction to crime, Dr. Takooshian had staged an experiment in which a boy of about ten years old told people on a busy street in Manhattan that he was lost and asked if they would help him call his mother. A hidden camera filmed the scene and a microphone concealed on the boy’s collar recorded the voices. “Excuse me, I’m lost; can you help me call my mother?” The little boy, clad in a winter jacket and stocking cap against the cold, asked this question of dozens of different people as they walked by.

The three-minute film is difficult to watch. Most people walked on, completely ignoring the boy’s plea. One man told the child, “Look for a policeman up by the corner,” before briskly walking away. Another man slowed down long enough to tell the child that he wished he could help, but he had a bus to catch. A woman said, “Check with a
policeman, he’ll help you,” and walked away. Not one person helped the child.

Professor Takooshian did not regard his research with clinical detachment. For him, it was both deeply personal and deeply troubling. He wanted to increase awareness in the hope of changing attitudes. In March of 1984, Professor Takooshian organized the first Catherine Genovese Memorial Conference at Fordham University.

Sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Justice, and Fordham University, the conference was held March 107–12 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Harold Takooshian co-hosted the conference with his colleague, Peter J. O’Connor, a professor of law at Fordham. The three-day conference brought together one hundred specialists in the fields of psychology and law along with government officials. Among the many esteemed presenters was Dr. Stanley Milgram, the social psychologist noted for his provocative human behavior experiments on obedience to authority.

C. Everett Koop, Surgeon General of the United States, gave the keynote address. “I am not pleased to be here at all,” Dr. Koop told the audience. “I wish there were no event to commemorate . . . I wish Catherine Genovese were still alive. She would be forty-eight years old now, maybe married, maybe a mother. Or maybe she’d still be single, a working woman, one of the twelve million single women in the work force today.”

C. Everett Koop called for duty-to-assist legislation, holding bystanders legally accountable for failing to assist a victim in an emergency. Conceding that such a law might be unenforceable, Dr. Koop said, “The mere act of getting the law on the books would help to educate the public about good and bad Samaritanism.” Professor Takooshian also supported a nationwide adoption of duty-to-assist statutes.

The conference attracted media coverage (referred to in some press accounts as the “Kitty Genovese Memorial Seminar on Bad Samaritanism”). In an article for the
New York Times
, Maureen Dowd quoted panelist Mario Merola, the Bronx district attorney: “The
conduct by the witnesses in the Genovese case was a natural, normal reaction. It happens day in and day out. The average person is fearful, apprehensive and doesn’t want to get involved. They want [someone else] to do it. The effect on the criminal justice system every day of people who witness crimes and don’t want to get involved is horrible.”

Fordham law professor and conference co-chair Peter J. O’Connor commented on the lasting interest in the Kitty Genovese murder case even now, two decades removed. “It’s held the imagination because looking at those 38 people, we were really looking at ourselves. We might not have done anything either. That’s the ugly side of human nature.”

The 1984 Catherine Genovese Memorial Conference marked the first of a series of recurring conferences at Fordham University held in her name and memory.

The year 1984 also seemed to mark the first public claims by some residents in Kew Gardens that no such terrible thing had actually happened in their community.

chapter 21

THE KITTY GENOVESE
case received a good deal of attention in the press in 1984, particularly in newspapers in the New York City area. In addition to the major conference held at Fordham University, there was considerable press coverage of Winston Moseley’s first parole hearing in late January of that year. Following the parole hearing,
Buffalo News
columnist Ray Hill wrote an article recounting the crimes of Winston Moseley. Hill received an angry letter from Fannie Moseley.

She accused Hill of exaggerating Winston’s crime spree in Buffalo, then wrote that Winston’s family was greatly hurt and incensed by Hill’s suggestion that he should never be released from prison. Fannie continued:

MARCH OF 1984
also marked, of course, the twenty-year anniversary of what was undoubtedly one of the highest-profile crimes in New York City history, if not American history.

The
New York Daily News
printed an article on March 11, 1984, under the headline, “KITTY’S DEATH STILL HAUNTS US.” It included a small picture of Kitty Genovese and a larger photo of Surgeon General C. Everett Koop at the Fordham symposium. The article quoted a resident of Kew Gardens, an elderly woman who did not want her name published, saying: “It’s a shame you news people have to bring this up all the time. Don’t you have anything else to write about?

“Nobody in here is apathetic. I know it isn’t true that 37 people heard her screams and failed to call the police. I was here, and we are not like that.”

A neighbor of hers added: “We are not bad.”

A dissenting opinion came from another woman who had lived there at the time. Calling the neighborhood “a disgrace,” she said: “I believe that people heard but didn’t want to help. I don’t think they’d help today, either.”

Former Chief of Detectives Albert Seedman echoed this, saying he didn’t think the people of Kew Gardens would lift a finger today.

Oddly, the article takes a sudden and inexplicable turn toward advocacy, stating that the issues raised by the case were so basic that it was unrealistic to see them changed by a single event “however out of proportion it may have been blown.”

Aside from the statement by the elderly Kew Gardens resident who said she didn’t believe that thirty-seven people had not called, it offered nothing to support a claim that anything had, in fact, been blown out of proportion. The article ends on an equally strange note, saying that the killing of Kitty Genovese may have been “more private and less public than has been suggested by some police officers and some reporters—and it should be noted that both groups had something to gain from the way they told the tale.” Again, nothing was given to support this, nor was there any explanation of what the
New York Times
or the New York City Police Department might have had to gain from demonizing a small community that few people had ever heard of in a murder case that few people had ever heard of prior to March 27, 1964. Ironically, no observation was made that residents of Kew Gardens had something to gain by minimizing their role.

A reporter from
Newsday
writing about the case at this time also heard some denials in Kew Gardens. In an article that appeared on the same date, March 11, 1984, liquor store owner Bobby Tobin told the reporter: “You want the truth? The truth is it didn’t happen. There weren’t 38 people who heard that. No way.” Tobin gave no explanation of what the truth actually was; most of the deniers offered no explanation beyond their own personal feeling that the story was just not true.

Another of the shop owners on Austin Street said it was a very noisy street; the witnesses mistook Kitty’s murder for “just noisy customers from the bar.” (The same man would be quoted in another interview years later as saying that people didn’t react because the area was so quiet and crime-free that they didn’t believe a murder could happen).

A woman who claimed she had slept through the murder and had not heard a thing also said, “And I happen to know someone called the police. I believe that there were two calls.”

The denials and revisions became more egregious with the passing of time. A few years later, one resident would tell a reporter that there had been seventeen calls.

The boldest claim in the 1984
Newsday
article came from a person who reporter Kenneth Gross identified as “one of the old-timers, one of the German-American residents,” who said: “We don’t know what happened here. What happened that night has become a myth. It is what we have read about. We don’t know what is true and what is myth. This event doesn’t exist.”

In 1989, Martin Gansberg, retired from the
New York Times
and now a former chairman of the journalism department at Fairleigh Dickinson University, revisited his much-lauded 1964 article in a short feature for
Memories
magazine. It began, “Fear. Fear of getting involved. Fear of dealing with police. Fear of reprisals. These were some of the reasons given to me by the 38 witnesses to the murder of Kitty Genovese 25 years ago.” He wrote of the lies people told him. “The lies bothered me then. They bother me today.”

Gansberg wrote that he had returned from living in Paris shortly before covering the crime and he had forgotten how callous New Yorkers could be. He had returned to Kew Gardens many times over the years and had received a mixed reception. Some people treated him with disdain while others were kind, even expressing gratitude on occasion. “The owner of a local luncheonette wouldn’t let me pay for a malted and a piece of pound cake. ‘You’re the man who opened our eyes,’ he said.”

Gansberg’s story was supplemented by several quotes from Kew Gardens residents gathered by another reporter. The owner of the Kew Gardens Market, who had lived in the neighborhood most of his life, said: “I had customers who said they heard her screaming, but none of them called the cops. They didn’t want to get involved. It’s a real tragedy . . . such a young girl. And it could happen again. It
will
happen again.”

Another man who was a resident at the time said he thought the press had exaggerated the story. “There’s no way that 38 people could have heard and not one of them picked up the phone.”

Greta Schwartz, now in her eighties, also spoke with the reporter. “I never heard any screaming. My bedroom is in the middle of the building, not in the front, and you can’t hear anything. But the police
were
called. An ambulance
was
called. One girl from across the street, a French girl, said she called the police. But they made fun of her accent and so she hung up on them. She was the only one who called right away—she was coming home from her job at the airport. I helped—I tried to help—but it was too late. A neighbor called me, saying that I should go and see Kitty, and so I went over right away, not suspecting anything. There she was, lying on the floor. But it was too late. It was awful.”