Winston Moseley, convicted in Kitty Genovese murder
1964 case became shorthand for U.S. urban alienation
Winston Moseley, whose rape and fatal stabbing of Kitty Genovese in New York more than 50 years ago provoked enduring outrage, reflection and regret over the alleged failure of a large number of witnesses and bystanders to act as she cried out for help, died March 28 in a New York prison. He was 81.
He died at the Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Dannemora, N.Y., according to a spokesman for the New York prison system. He had been serving a life sentence in the March 13, 1964, murder of Genovese, and was described as one of the longest-serving prisoners in the system. The cause of death was awaiting an autopsy.
A celebrated news account published in the New York Times shortly after Genovese was slain focused not so much on her killing as on what it said were the 38 witnesses who did nothing to help her.
The alleged inaction of all of the reputed 38 appeared to stem from the motivation expressed by just one: “I didn’t want to get involved.”
The name of Kitty Genovese, or the Kitty Genovese syndrome, became shorthand for a diagnosis of the disintegration and alienation inherent in modern American society, particular urban society. The murder was dissected in university sociology classes, on television programs and in books, songs and stage shows, including a musical.
As scholars and journalists later probed the facts of the case, the original description of events was challenged, and the challenges proved persuasive. The number of witnesses seemed exaggerated, and the contention that no one lifted a finger to help was also cast into severe doubt.
At the time of his arrest, Moseley was a 29-year-old married father. He had been born in Manhattan, on March 2, 1935, and grew up in a troubled home. His first marriage, to Pauline Sisco, with whom he had two children, ended in divorce. In 1961, he married Elizabeth Grant, a nurse, and they had a child.
Moseley worked as a business machine operator and had never been convicted of any crime. His wife’s occasional overnight shift freed him to go on secretive crime sprees, burglarizing homes and preying on women in the pre-dawn hours.
At 3:15 a.m. the night of her death, Genovese, a 28-yearold bar manager, was nearing her apartment in the Kew Gardens area of Queens. Moseley, who had been prowling in his car for 90 minutes looking for a victim, spotted her, parked and began to trail her on foot. She ran but he attacked, jabbing a knife in her back.
“Oh, my God!” she cried. “He stabbed me! Help me!”
One neighbor shouted, “Let that girl alone!” Moseley hurried back to his car, parking it farther from view, and then returned to find Genovese lying near the back of her building. “I came back because I knew I’d not finished what I set out to do,” Moseley later testified.
He stabbed her several more times, then raped her and stole her money. She died of her wounds as he went off to his day job.
The murder might have gone without great public notice except for a chilling account in the Times published shortly thereafter. “For more than half an hour,” it began, “38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens. ... Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.”
Moseley, soon taken into custody for a burglary, confessed to killing Genovese and sexually assaulting and killing two other women in Queens.
He was never tried for the two other deaths. For the Genovese killing, his insanity plea was rejected. He was convicted by a jury of first-degree murder and, when a death sentence was handed down, applause broke out in the courtroom and the presiding judge called him a “monster” and said he, himself, “wouldn’t hesitate to pull the switch on him.”
His sentence was later altered to life imprisonment. In 1968, while at a prison hospital in Buffalo, he overpowered a guard and went on a crime rampage. In the words of the Buffalo News, he terrorized the region during “three days of rape, home invasions and hostage-takings.”
Moseley took correspondence courses that earned him a bachelor’s degree from Niagara University in 1977, and he also participated in other prison programs. He was repeatedly denied parole.
Meanwhile, the Genovese case was never far from the public imagination. Reassessments of what happened concluded that there were many errors in the original reporting.
There had been two attacks, not three. There were far fewer witnesses, and what they had heard or seen and how they had perceived it was not as portrayed. Some neighbors assumed that Genovese’s pleas were from a drunken argument outside the neighborhood bar, a common occurrence. The police were, in fact, called, and someone went out to hold the victim in her arms.
In an article published in the New Yorker in 2014, journalist Nicholas Lemann found the original article “inaccurate in a number of significant ways.”
A Kitty Genovese syndrome did exist, he concluded, but it was not the one of which people had once been confident. Instead, he wrote, the “real Kitty Genovese syndrome has to do with our susceptibility to narratives that echo our preconceptions and anxieties.”
As for just what did happen to Genovese, the full story remained unclear. Last year, a documentary was released showing efforts made by Bill Genovese, the victim’s brother, to discover the facts.
“I’ve come to realize that the whole truth about Kitty’s death will never be known,” Bill Genovese said in the documentary. “But maybe that’s why the story continues to fascinate people.”