Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences (46 page)

The French girl Greta referred to was obviously Andree Picq, although Greta’s claim that Andree hung up the phone because the police made fun of her accent did not jibe with any previous accounts, not even with the many statements Andree Picq herself had made to reporters over the years.

Robert McDermott, a police officer at the 102nd precinct for thirty years, said: “I don’t think it is at all possible that we could have ignored earlier calls. It was an aloof community, and the police were considered a necessary evil. They only tolerated us if and when they needed us. I shouldn’t rap the community, but they took better care of their lawns than they did their neighbors.”

Officer McDermott also said that the neighborhood had changed since then, with residents much more involved in the community now than they had been at the time of Kitty’s murder.

AROUND THE TIME
of Moseley’s bid for a new trial in 1995,
Newsday
, along with other newspapers, covered the story again. In an article that appeared on July 23, 1995, a reporter who visited Kew Gardens wrote of how weary the residents were of the story. One shop owner on Austin Street—after saying that everybody had cared about what had happened to Kitty and two people had called the police that night—said the blame, if any, should be put on the police, for being slow to respond. The reporter then wrote, “In reports immediately following
the crime, police admitted receiving several calls, but said the caller hung up before they got any information.” This was not true. There are no records or accounts of any police officer having said any such thing.

Like the killer who had stalked their streets in the darkest hours of March 13, 1964, and who desperately wanted his freedom back, it seemed that some residents of Kew Gardens, wishing to remove the stain of infamy from their community, were willing to throw as much at the wall as possible in the hope that something might stick. A decade later, something did.

MARCH OF 2004
marked the fortieth anniversary. On February 8, the
New York Times
printed an article called, “KITTY, 40 YEARS LATER.” Written by a freelancer named Jim Rasenberger, it began, “Kew Gardens does not look much like the setting of an urban horror story.”

A brief account of the crime and its far-reaching impact was given. “But for all that has been said and written about Ms. Genovese’s murder, important questions persist. Some Kew Gardens residents maintain, even now, that there were fewer than 38 witnesses and that many of them could not have seen much of the killing—in other words, that there was less cold-heartedness in Kew Gardens than has been commonly portrayed.” Describing the fallout on the community, the article says that some of the residents afterward began complaining about the unfair portrayal of their community, claiming the famous story had been exaggerated by police and journalists.

Martin Gansberg had passed away in 1995. Rasenberger spoke with Abe Rosenthal, who stood by the forty-year-old story, right down to the word “watched” in its opening sentence. As for the residents questioning its veracity, Rosenthal said: “In a story that gets a lot of attention, there’s always somebody who’s saying, ‘Well, that’s not really what it’s supposed to be.’ ” Rosenthal, who by this time was retired from the
New York Times,
said there may have been minor inaccuracies in the story, but none that altered its essential meaning. “There may have been 38, there may have been 39,” Rosenthal said, “but the whole picture, as I saw it, was very affecting.”

Charles Skoller, the former assistant DA who had assisted Frank Cacciatore with the prosecution of Winston Moseley, was quoted: “I don’t think 38 people witnessed it. I don’t know where that came from, the 38. I didn’t count 38. We only found half a dozen that saw what was going on, that we could use.” Though it was not explained in this article, Charles Skoller, in other interviews and in his own later book, explained that witnesses “we could use” meant eyewitnesses that the prosecution felt comfortable calling to testify in court. They did not want to call Joseph Fink or Karl Ross, nor others who either changed their accounts or were unwilling to testify. Rasenberger further quotes Skoller: “I believe that many people heard the screams. It could have been more than 38. And anyone that heard the screams had to know there was a vicious crime taking place. There’s no doubt in my mind about that.”

Jim Rasenberger neither quoted nor even mentioned any of the police officers or detectives who had investigated the crime.

He spoke with some Kew Gardens residents. Forty years after the crime, none of the actual witnesses were still living in the neighborhood. Most had since died. He was left speaking with some who raised legitimate questions, such as the discrepancy between the report of three attacks instead of two, and others who simply insisted, based on their own gut feelings (and likely on lies told to them by some of their neighbors after the story had exploded) that the story
must
have been exaggerated.

One of the Kew Gardens residents Rasenberger spoke with for his 40th anniversary article was Joseph De May. De May had moved to Kew Gardens in 1974, ten years after Kitty’s murder. In 2002, De May had created a website devoted to the community’s history. Included on the site was a lengthy section on the murder and an analysis by De May of the original
New York Times
article. Based on what he currently knew of the neighborhood, conversations with some of the long-time residents, and excerpts he had read from the 1964 trial, Joseph De May argued that the
Times
article had exaggerated the number of witnesses. He expressed doubts about what the witnesses saw or heard, questioning if it had been enough for them to realize that a violent
crime was taking place. He contended that the
New York Times
had gotten the story wrong, but readily acknowledged that his research was incomplete.

Considering the decades-long pummeling Kew Gardens had taken, it was natural that the people who lived there wanted the bad press to stop, and further wanted their neighborhood cast in a better, fuller light for once, rather than being singularly and perpetually defined by a murder. Nor does it seem unusual that people who had moved to the neighborhood long after that night in 1964 had questions and doubts about what had happened. Martin Gansberg’s original story for the
New York Times
seemed to be the only point of reference. Many of the other newspapers that had covered the story at the time, such as the
New York Journal-American
, the
New York World-Telegram and Sun
, and the
Long Island Star-Journal,
had ceased publication decades earlier. The only easily accessible news accounts from that time period were from the
New York Times
. It’s unlikely that the people living in Kew Gardens by 2004 were aware of these other news accounts that supported—and supplemented—what the
Times
had printed in 1964. And thus there were, as there had been for at least the past twenty years, people in Kew Gardens protesting that the
New York Times
story had been an exaggeration. The Internet now made it possible to air these grievances to a wide audience.

With the stigma and the lack of other available references, it is perhaps not surprising that some people in Kew Gardens felt—or hoped—that the original news accounts may have been exaggerated. It’s not even surprising, all things considered, that some residents suggested, based on the little bits and pieces of information that they had, a revised version of events.

What does seem surprising is how readily and unquestioningly some journalists accepted the revisions.

Jim Rasenberger spoke at the Catherine Genovese Memorial Conference at Fordham University in March of 2004, where he said to the audience, “The death of Kitty Genovese is arguably one of the preeminent urban myths of the latter half of the 20th century. But like most urban myths, it’s not exactly true . . . As a simple matter of
geography, it cannot be the case that thirty-eight witnesses saw all or even much of the attack on Kitty Genovese. She was stabbed in two completely different locations and one of them was completely out of sight of thirty-seven of the thirty-eight witnesses.” He failed to note that the
New York Times
story had included photographs, including the aerial shot that clearly showed the path Kitty had taken from the front of Austin Street around to the back of the building.

Rasenberger’s point seemed to be that not all thirty-eight witnesses had watched for all thirty-five minutes. He claimed that the great majority had been ear witnesses rather than eyewitnesses, “and what they saw, or more likely heard, was not clear and conclusive, but fragmentary and vague and puzzling.” He conceded that “plenty of people heard Kitty Genovese scream that night. And as Mr. Skoller has pointed out to me, there may well have been more than thirty-eight people who heard the events of that night. And certainly many of them heard enough to prompt at least a phone call to the police. So I’m not acquitting anyone of moral responsibility here. Even if you accept, as I do, that the original
Times
story and many subsequent media accounts exaggerated what happened that night, it’s still plenty horrifying. And it’s still difficult to understand or forgive. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that what happened is less shocking and less extreme and is far more complex than what is commonly supposed.” Rasenberger concluded, “The irony of course is that if the story had not been exaggerated, it would have been a three-day story, maybe a five-day story, rather than a forty-year story, and we would not be sitting here today talking about this.”

An audience member asked Jim Rasenberger the obvious: If the original accounts had been so exaggerated, why had no one set the record straight in the forty years since? Rasenberger answered that he didn’t know.

The last speaker at the 2004 conference was Abe Rosenthal. Now eighty-one years old, Rosenthal had not been scheduled to speak, but accepted the chance to do so when Professor Harold Takooshian asked if he had anything he wanted to say. Rosenthal rose and slowly made his way to the podium. In addition to his 1964 book,
Thirty-Eight
Witnesses
, Rosenthal had written of and referenced the murder of Kitty Genovese in many articles throughout the years. In a voice that was still strong despite his advanced age, Rosenthal told the 2004 conference attendees, “I am still discovering why that story meant so much to me.”

Discussing the night of March 13, 1964, and the
New York Times
account, he turned and looked directly at Rasenberger, who sat with other speakers at a long table behind the podium. “Thirty-eight,” Rosenthal said firmly. “Yes, thirty-eight. I never said, nor did anybody at the
New York Times
or any reporter with a brain say there were thirty-eight
peering
out of a window. It was a total of thirty-eight, and we [relied on] the intelligence of the reader to understand that.”

Abe Rosenthal died in May of 2006 at the age of eighty-four. The same year, Jim Rasenberger wrote an article for
American Heritage Magazine
titled, “NIGHTMARE ON AUSTIN STREET.” A subheading read, “It was a story so disturbing that we all still remember it. But what if it wasn’t true?”

The article contained some very heady—and completely unsubstantiated—claims about what had happened on Austin Street on March 13, 1964.

After a description of the famous
New York Times
story and its tremendous impact, Rasenberger wrote, “All of which brings us, 42 years later, to what may be the most peculiar aspect of the case. The
Times
article that incited all this industry about an urban horror was almost certainly a misleading account of what happened.

“Almost from the start there were murmurs that the
Times
had exaggerated details of the case.” In support of this, Rasenberger mentions the
New York Daily News
article of 1984. Skipping the question of how a twenty-year gap constitutes murmurs of exaggeration “almost from the start,” the
Daily News
article had based the implication that the story might have been exaggerated solely on the opinion of a Kew Gardens resident who insisted that she just didn’t believe it.

Rasenberger conceded that some Kew Gardens residents could and should have done more to help Kitty. “But that description of 38 people watching the murder for more than half an hour
struck many as implausible. Indeed, as a matter of geography, it seems impossible.”

As the police records and trial testimony show, several people watched the ordeal of Kitty Genovese for an extended period of time. As those records and newspaper interviews also show, plenty of people saw, heard, and knew that a young woman was repeatedly screaming and crying for help, even if they did not watch the entire 35-minute episode from grisly start to gruesome finish. As one of the original investigating detectives had put it, “How much do you need to see?”

Rasenberger writes in his
American Heritage
article, “The true number of eyewitnesses was not 38, but 6 or 7. To be sure, far more residents heard something, but the perceptions of eyewitnesses and earwitnesses alike were mostly fleeting and inchoate.”

The police reports, of course, paint a starkly different portrait, as does every single one of the contemporary news accounts.

With the exception of repeating Abe Rosenthal’s quote from Rasenberger’s 2004 “KITTY, 40 YEARS LATER” piece, the
American Heritage
article cites not a single person who was actually involved with the case in 1964 (and Rosenthal, of course, had not participated in the reportage, and certainly not in the police investigation). The final line reads, “One final irony, though: None of us would still be writing, or reading, about Kitty Genovese 42 years later if the
Times
had gotten the story right in the first place.”

Historical revisionism of the Kitty Genovese story was underway, and the beautiful twilight of falsehood did indeed enhance it into something far less blinding than the burning glare of the truth. Other publications began parroting the claim that the original
New York Times
story had been exaggerated, citing these new “sources” of information, apparently not realizing that said sources had based the revised version on essentially nothing more than the opinions of a small handful of people in Kew Gardens who had the great game advantage of having outlived Martin Gansberg and nearly all of the original detectives.