June 14, 2025 • 36 mins
Most people have heard of the story of Kitty Genovese. She was murdered near her apartment in 1964 and her neighbors didn't do much to help. It caused a nationwide outcry, but the story has often been misrepresented. In this classic episode, we set the record straight.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's me Josh, and for this week's select
I've chosen our twenty sixteen episode on the murder of
Kitty Genevies. Her story is fairly famous. She was murdered
while an entire apartment block of people watched and did nothing.
But that's not exactly the real story. Like most things
in life, there's more to it, and we explained what
(00:21):
actually happened. We relied a lot on the excellent documentary
The Witness for this episode, and I highly recommend watching it.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this one.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry So this
is Stuff you Should Know podcast True Crime Edition. Actually yeah,
but so much more than just a single crime. I agreed,
a crime that echoed throughout a city, throughout the world,
throughout decades. And it's true, man like, there are very
(01:09):
few crimes you can point to that had more of
an impact than the murder of Kitty Genovis.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Agreed, And there are a lot of true crime podcasts
out there. We are not trying to become one. No,
this is just something we do from time to time. Sure,
as I researched this, and as I watched did you
watch The Witness the documentary recently.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
On Netflix right now?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
It is HBO documentary, And I was disturbed, And I'm
glad it finally covered it in the documentary, But I
was disturbed that Kitty Genevie's and we'll get to her murder,
but very quickly she was murdered and became the symbol
for people not helping out.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Right, what came to be known as bystander apathy or
the bystander effect that the more people people who are around,
the less likely anyone is to help.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Yeah, so she became such a symbol that you never
hear about Kitty Genevie's and who she was as a person.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
That was one great thing about that documentary. There are
multiple great things about it, Yeah, but that it really
talked about her and showed her and yeah, revived her spirit.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Which I was really looking for because even in researching online,
it's hard to get a lot of information.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
So some things, some even contemporary articles still aren't mentioning
that she was gay.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Well, yeah, her own brother who made the documentary didn't
know that she was gay.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
No, it's true, but it's it's been out since. I'm
not sure when actually that came out.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
It was just this year.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Oh okay, so it was fairly new this year, last year. Yeah,
that was like in the last five years maybe.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
So in honoring that, why don't we talk a minute
about Catherine Genevieve's Kitty. Yeah, born in nineteen thirty five
and Brooke to Vincent and renee Legendavise, Italian American parents.
And it's weird, I don't see.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah, Rachel was her mother's name. She was Rachel Petroli
at first. So they lived in Brooklyn, and she was
very well loved in school.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Yeah, she was like the leader of her clique.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Yeah, And she was apparently a lot of fun and
a good mimic of her teachers. And she was voted
class cut up in her senior year. Graduating class. She
was to an all girls school in Prospect Heights, and
it was just, by all accounts, this vivacious, fun loving,
really sweet sweet lady, yeah or girl at that point.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Her little brother Bill, who ended up making the being
featured in the documentary The Witness. Yeah, was just in
love with her. She was just amazing.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
They had a very special relationship.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah. I think she was about thirteen years older than him. Yeah,
quite a bit, maybe twelve years older. I had a
sister like that, and like there's a very special relationship.
There's none of that sibling rivalry. Yeah, they're not old
enough to be your mother. That's just a it's a
unique situation to be a younger sibling and to be
(04:18):
able to inherit like all that worldly wisdom. Yeah, and
they're going through all their own things and their own
struggles and their own travails. But to that thirteen year
old younger brother, yeah, they know everything and they're the
coolest person walking the planet, and they're the kindest person
walking the planet because they've lived long enough to like
figure out some of the major stuff, you know.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah, even my own sister is only six years older,
and we very much had and still have that relationship
where and she and my brother are great now too.
But you know, when you're two or three years apart,
there can be a little bit of the knocking of heads.
But by the time I came along, I was like,
you know, my sister was six. It was perfect. I
was a little baby doll for her. So anyway, that
(05:02):
was very much the relationship that Kitty had with Bill,
And it seemed like one of the old older brothers
always had a little bit of a like, yeah, she
always liked him better, Yeah, kind of attitude.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Seemed like everybody kind of knew like she liked Bill
the most.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Yeah, which I kind of felt bad for. But that's
just those family dynamics, man.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
You know. The thing is, whenever you do start to
kind of talk about somebody who's died, especially someone who's
died violently and young, it's easy to canonize. Sure, you know,
I really put them up on a pedestal and forget
their flaws. And of course I'm sure Kitty had tons
of flaws, but she didn't seem to have any from
(05:42):
from what I'm gathering, that were, you know, just terrible
flaws or that made her like a bad person. She
seemed like she was a like a overall above average,
great person.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, agreed. So New York was getting too dangerous for
her family they thought to have all these kids, so
they moved when she graduated high school to New Canaan, Connecticut.
And she said, you know what, I'm staying here in
New York. I'm eighteen now I love it here. She
got married for a brief time to a guy. Was
(06:16):
his name Rocco.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
I don't remember his name, it's either.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Rocky or Roco. And in the documentary Bill tries to
get in touch with him. He's like, I really because
he found out she was gay and was like, you know,
we didn't even know this. I think Rocco can help
shed some light. And he very respectfully asked for his
own privacy.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
He said, my relationship with Kitty will remain forever a mystery. Yeah,
it's like, that's an oddson it was. I think he
just didn't want to. I mean, if she was gay
and they were married for a short time, he either
didn't know and maybe felt the fool or he did
(06:55):
know and was maybe trying to do right by her
in some way. Sure, either way, he didn't want to
talk about it. Right But she worked as a secretary
for a little while. She was a waitress for.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
A little while. Eventually she was a bar made bartender
and then became bar manager at a place in Hollis
Queen's called EV's Eleventh Hour. That is a great barn well,
and from all accounts it was one of those wonderful
neighborhood bars a yeah, where the people were in there
getting sauced pretty early in the day, and everyone knew everyone,
(07:28):
and everyone loved Kitty and she helped take care of everybody,
but was very much an independent kind of firecracker of
a woman. Drove a red Fiat. Her dad used to
tease her about, like when you're going to find the
right guy. She was like, I make more money than
any guy I would go out with. I don't need that,
which is I guess nineteen sixties for dadam gay?
Speaker 1 (07:50):
I'm gay?
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah, and I can't say it. But she did make
pretty good doe as the bar manager. And then in
March nineteen sixty three she met a woman named Marianne
Zelonko at Swing Rendezvous. It was an underground lesbian bar
in the village, and they moved in together shortly thereafter.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Yeah, and Kitty actually used to bring mary Anne home
with her to visit, but her family was all like, well,
they're just good friends and roommates, right, It's the sixties, right,
the early sixties.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Yeah, And there's an audio interview with her in that documentary.
That's really touching.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Hm.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
She didn't want to be on camera, but Bill was
able to speak to her. And I think what was
so compelling about this documentary was that he was It
was a search of a man looking for closure.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
It's a harrowing sometimes almost unbearable to watch.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Yeah, search. It was tough.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
I mean, like he's had odds with his family here there. Yeah,
he he's just just doing things where if you watch
it in the context of the documentary and you follow
along the documentary, it all makes utter and complete sense. Right,
But then if you stop and remove yourself long enough
to be like, this is a documentary, which means this
(09:09):
guy really did this stuff. Yeah, and there was a
camera following him along while he was doing it. I
was like, I couldn't have done half of it. Oh,
I know, you know, he really he just at one
point he calls it an obsession, but it's not. He
doesn't come off as.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Obsessed, right, agreed, you know? All right, So let's detail
the crime and then we will take a break after that.
How does that sound?
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yeah? All right?
Speaker 2 (09:36):
So flash forward to March thirteenth, nineteen sixty four. It's
three point fifteen in the morning, and Kitty geneviez Is,
as she often did, was making her way home from
work late at night as a bar manager, and was
being trailed by a man, a man by the name
of Winston Moseley.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yes, who is definitely the villain of this story, but
is not the only one. It will turn out, right.
So Kitty was twenty eight and at the time she
was killed, and Winston, her killer, was twenty nine, just
turned twenty nine, I think like a week or so before.
And I think he said this is March thirteenth, Yeah,
(10:20):
nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Yeah, he was married with a couple of kids.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Yeah, his wife, Elizabeth worked the night shift. She was
a hospital nurse, and Winston's mother stayed at home with
the kids. So he basically said, you know, oh, my
own house. I've got a great job operating computers. No
one even knows what I'm supposed to be doing with
him yet, but I'm making money doing it.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Yeah. He was a smart guy.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
So I'm gonna indulge myself. I'm gonna go out and
stalk women and murder them in my spare time. That's
what I'm gonna do. So that's what he was doing
on this night. He was cruising around looking for a
woman to kill.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Basically, Yeah, that was his direct quote in question. Yeah,
I was looking for a woman to kill.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yeah. So he saw at a believe a red light,
this little red Fiat convertible caught his eye and there
was Kittie driving. So he started to follow her and
she parked, and she parked in the parking lot for
the Long Island Railway, which the parking lot went backed
up to the side of her apartment building, which is
(11:25):
a two story tutor job that had shops in the
bottom and apartments in the top. Right.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Yeah, this was in Q Gardens and Queen's. So he
followed her on foot. At this point she sees him
and knows that something is going on. He has a
knife in his hand, so she starts running. He catches
up to her by outside of a bookstore and stabs
(11:52):
her twice in the back right off the bat with
this knife.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Right. And she had been running toward a bar that
she thought would be open, but it turned out apparently
there was a new manager and the new manager had
closed down early. So when she stabbed twice in the back,
it's on this darkened street, but right across the street
Austin Street is a ten story apartment building with dozens
(12:15):
of windows looking out onto Austin Street, where she's being
stabbed in the back, and she screamed, she cries out.
I think she said something like, oh God, he stabbed me,
helped me, help me? Is what they said, basically, definitively
is what she screamed. And people who were witnesses to
this recounted that one guy said that he was I
(12:40):
think a ten or eleven year old kid who was
inside one of the apartments in the Mowbray apartment building
and that he was awoke and awakened from a deep sleep.
The scream was so loud, he said it was the
loudest thing he's ever heard. So she screams, and a
man living in the Mowbray apartment buildings window, what's his name?
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Yeah, Robert Moser opened his window and screamed out, hey,
get out of there. What are you doing? And Mosley
took off, Yeah, he took off running away.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
He's very frequently misquoted as having said like let that
girl alone, but even by his own words in his
own testimony, he said, hey, get out of there.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Yeah, at any rate, he scared him away.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
So in between that time, about thirty minutes passes, Kitty
makes her way around to the vestibule of her own building,
right yeah, and goes inside the vestibule, and like you think,
the horror is over for her. She could probably survive
(13:49):
these wounds, right, is in shock, I would imagine. And
then Mosley had went to his car, kind of checked
out the building, saw that some lights had gone on,
and reasoned to himself, no one's going to do anything,
puts on a different hat, and goes back, finds her
in the vestibule and finishes the job in the most
(14:12):
horrific ways you can imagine.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Yeah, he stabbed her at least twelve more times. They
think at least she was stabbed at least fourteen times.
He said he doesn't remember how many times he stabbed her,
but he basically kept stabbing her until she stopped screaming.
She was still alive. I saw that he attempted to
rape her. I've also seen that he raped her. Yeah,
I'm not sure which one's correct, but at one point,
(14:35):
and this is really important here, as he's stabbing her
and she's screaming, in the vestibule, there's a staircase that
leads directly up to a door, and behind that door
lived a man named Carl Ross. And Carl Ross opened
his door and looked down one single flight of stairs
at Winston Moseley stabbing Kitty Geneviez, who was bloody. There's
(15:00):
no confusing what was going on. And he closed the
door and he called his girlfriend, and his girlfriend said,
don't get involved. Yeah, I'm worried for you. Just leave
it alone. It's none in your business. And he did.
He didn't do anything, at least for a little while.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
All right. So that's a good place to break here,
and we're going to come back and talk about who
saw and heard what and what they did about it
right after this, all right. So at this point, Kitty
(15:53):
Genevies is not dead yet, but dying in the vestibule.
A woman did come down and was with her. Her
name is Sophia Ferrar. She's still with us, and she
was a neighbor and friend of Kitty's. And so she
(16:13):
went down there and apparently was with her as she
passed away, tried to calm her down. Evidently did calm
her down, and likes to think that she at least
saw a friendly face and that she was being cared
for as she passed. The weird thing is is that
is not mentioned. I guess we got to get into
(16:34):
the New York Times now.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Yeah, so after the murder, like the next day, the
Times ran four paragraphs on the kitty Geneva's murder. It
was not incredibly newsworthy at first, because that year there
was six hundred and thirty six murders in New York City.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Yeah, and that was just one of them, just one.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
But a couple weeks later, the head the city editor
of the New York Times, a guy named ab Rosenthal,
who's a legendary journalist, was having lunch with I believe,
the police commissioner of the NYPD. And the commissioner said,
did you hear about that Genevieve's murder. That's one for
the books. Thirty eight people standing around watch the whole thing.
(17:15):
Nobody did a thing about it.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Yeah, now you've got a story.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Abrosenthal, legendary journalist, is like, uh, thank you for that. Yeh,
here's my diner's club card. I have to go now
and get this story done. So he did. He assigned
it out to a guy. What was the original reporter's name.
His name was Martin Gansberg, and they wrote on the
(17:39):
front page, I shouldn't say they wrote it was definitely
all Gansburg, but he was assigned and definitely under the
direction of Abrosenthal, like this, this is the story. Yeah,
thirty eight people stood around and did nothing.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yeah, the title of the article was thirty seven. It
was thirty seven at the time. Thirty seven who saw
murder didn't call the police. And basically the entire article
and the entire narrative from that moment forward for decades
was a not about this woman at all. Hardly she
became a symbol a b not necessarily even about the crime,
(18:15):
but about the crime of these people who didn't the
crime of apathy for these thirty seven or thirty eight people.
But it was very much misconstrued in the New York Times,
to the point where in two thousand and four they
all but wrote a retraction with new information because the
(18:35):
original article they said, like these people witnessed it. That
is not true. Maybe only a couple of people might
have actually seen anything with their eyeballs. The other thirty
five or thirty six may have heard someone screaming. They
might have thought it was a drunken couple in their
(18:56):
neighborhood coming home from a bar. There might have been
some apathy involved for sure for some of them. But
to characterize this as thirty seven or thirty eight people
witnessed this horrific crime and literally shut their doors and
windows to it was not accurate at all.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Right, they said, they said specifically, Well, the way that
they put it was that there were The way the
story read was that thirty eight people had watched this
murder which took place. They misreported that there were three attacks,
and that the man had been chased off twice and
came back two more times, but that this whole thing
(19:37):
had taken place over thirty minutes, this long, prolonged attack,
and that thirty eight people had just been sitting there
watching it, doing nothing, And that is definitely a mischaracterization
of what had happened, Like you're saying, for the most part,
people were earwitnesses, not eyewitnesses. There were certainly not thirty
eight eyewitnesses, and most people weren't in a position to
(19:58):
do much, if anything about it physically. But I don't
know if you could call it like a retraction because
the point that ab Rosenthal he never apologized for whatever.
Even in the documentary he's interviewed, Yeah, and he's like,
this is great, I'm glad that it did what it did.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Sure, The point is still there that there was apathy
in that there were two people who could have done
something and they didn't. But then from what the other
witnesses said, the scream was pretty clearly not a purse
snatching and not a couple fighting drunkenly that it was
(20:40):
a violent crime being committed on this woman. And people
still didn't do anything.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah, they misreported, possibly that no one called police. Apparently
perhaps up to three people called the police, although police
logs showed only one call came in. And it may
be a case of these people now telling themselves like
I called the cops that did something, sure, when they
may not have. They did not report at all that Ms.
(21:08):
Farrar had gone down to be with her. She was
not mentioned ever. So I kind of went from feeling like, yeah,
you know this bystander effect it had good. It led
to the nine to one one being created apparently in
some ways, and people study this in class and it
raised awareness. So you know, if they stretched it a
little bit, then it had a good effect. That's what
(21:30):
Abe basically, that was his position, That still is his position.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
But well he's dead now.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Oh did he finally pass away? Yeah? And then I
finally came around and be like, no, you know, the
truth is what you should print. And if you're a
reporter and you run a story, you should print the
truth and not some sensationalized version of it to sell newspapers.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
No, no, absolutely, I agree with you, And I think
the one thing that you can hang on, ab Rosenthal
is that that story was definitely fashioned in a manner
to be as sensational as possible, as shock and outrage
the public as much as possible. But I still think
it's rooted in the basic fact that there was apathy
(22:13):
involved and that it possibly allowed Winston Mosley to finish
the job that Kitty Genevie's might have survived had somebody
done more than just sit up, look out their window
and go back to bed or not even bother to
look out the window. And like you said, Chuck, like
this had a lot of impact because the story comes
(22:35):
out in nineteen sixty four and for forty years, it
wasn't until two thousand and four that the time saw
fit to like go back and really reinvestigate, and they did.
There was a great, great article called Kitty forty years later,
I think, and the author goes through and reinvestigates the
case and really sets a lot of facts straight. But
(22:56):
within that forty year period, the effects that this murder
had were just sweeping. It led to the establishment of
nine to one one. Yeah, it's a big one, sure,
and it created this whole field of psychology that looks
into the psychology of crowds, you know, and why we
would just stand around? What is this diffusion of responsibility?
(23:20):
None of that understanding existed until the kid Eachenevie's murder.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, and weirdly, why is someone Why is a solo
witness more apt to act than a group of people.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
One thing I saw is that it's called social influence,
and that we take our cues from others. So if
inaction is basically what is on the table right, then
we're going to be inactive as well. If people are
starting to move toward it, toward the problem, we'll probably
join in too.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
I could see that or people thinking like, either I'm
not someone else's better equipped to deal with this than me,
or I feel like someone else will do this right,
so I don't have to. Yeah, a lot goes into play.
It's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
One of the less productive things that came out of it, though,
is this idea that when you live in a city,
in a big city, you put enough people together, everybody
stops caring about anybody else. They're all out for number one.
And Q Gardens became the center of this or just
such a symbolic example of urban care uncaring, I guess yeah.
(24:27):
And Kitty Jenaviez became a symbol of that as well,
and the need to do something, to act out to
help other people when you see them need help.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
All right, So let's take another quick break here and
we're going to get back into what happened to mister
Moseley and the further effects of this crime after this.
(25:13):
So a week after this murder, Mosley was breaking into
a house. He's not a good.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Guy, No, he was a terrible guy.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
He was beyond being a sociopath and a psychotic. Was
just a burglar and he would he was just straight
up robbing a house one day of a television and
one of the neighbors saw this called the cops. Cops
came and arrested them.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
No, no, no, no, that's not true. What the neighbor.
Here's the thing, This is the great ironic twist of
the kiddie Jenavie's story. He went to a different neighborhood.
He was robbing a house and the neighbors said, hey,
what are you doing? And he started to run from
the house. The neighbor chased him and tackled him and
held him until the cops came.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Oh well, yeah, he called.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
That's how he went down. Intervention. Yeah yeah, yeah, but
not apathy intervention right a week later?
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yes, okay, So at any rate, he calls the cops.
He gets arrested, and very like matter of factly, says
that he killed Kitty Genevies. And not only that, but
he killed supposedly two other women, a woman named Barbara Kralik,
well actually she was a girl, she's only fifteen, and
then a woman named Annie Mae Johnson. And apparently both
(26:29):
of them had been sexually assaulted. And he was never
tried for those, but he did plead not guilty by
reason of insanity, which did not work. Was sentenced to death,
and by luck of timing was able to appeal and
the death penalty had gone away for most crimes in
that time period, and he was resentenced to life in prison.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Yees. Supposedly the prosecution had withheld some evidence about his
mental state during his sentencing, so he was able to
get it reduced. So he was hanging out during his time,
and he was in Attica, I believe, and he had
injured himself and was being taken to the hospital, and
(27:11):
on the way there he got the gun away from
the guard who was escorting him and took off and
for I think five days, he basically just the city
of Buffalo was in mortal fear of the fact that
the guy who murdered Kitty Genovie's was now on the
loose in their town, and they were afraid, rightfully, so
(27:33):
he raped one woman. When the cops closed in on him,
he got a hold of five people and held him
hostage in a standoff that lasted for a little while
with the FBI before they finally got to him. He
was a bad dude, so they sent him back to
prison and they said you're not getting out here ever.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah. He was later a part of the Attica prison
riots as well, and the one lady that he killed,
he he burned her alive like the family was upstairs. Yeah,
and he broke into her house, raped her, killed her,
and burned her alive in the home and the house
went up in flames. So it sounded like he had
(28:14):
no He sounded like a true sociopath, like he had
no not there's every reason for killing someone, but it
was always just at random because he wanted to do that.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
That's a lot what it sounds like. It was a
self indulgence.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
So in the documentary very powerful scene where the son
I'm sorry, the little brother of Kitty who was told
through his eyes interviews and sits down with one of
the sons of Moseley and it's just like, I mean,
you cut the tension with a knife. Obviously, it's just
(28:50):
so like fraught with tension. And he had told his
son that she was yelling racial slurs at him. So
said that he was just a getaway driver for some
mobster and the Genovese family was related to the crime
mob family, the Genovese family and none of this stuff
(29:12):
is true. And the brother was just like aid, no,
we're not related to that family at all. We have
nothing to do with that, and he just gives him
a look when he talks about the racial slurs, like,
come on, man, that's not what happened. So it was
a really really powerful scene of these two guys kind
of working it out in a way.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
I didn't see them working anything out.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Oh see, I did, which made it even worse for me.
I thought there was some between them. They kind of
came to a nice, nicer place than where they'd started.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
I did not catch that at all.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Well, maybe you skipped forward or something.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Maybe I was like, I can't take this kind of
fest forward.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Well, the Sun was saying, like, you know, I think
you know, we need to know the son of was
saying that they needed to move on from all this,
and and then the brother was saying, I definitely don't
you know the sins of the father and the sins
of the sons. Yeah, he said that, So you know,
I felt like they were better off than when they
started for having that conversation.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
I honestly did not catch that.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Well, regardless, Winston Mosley, after I guess after his second
his first escape, the second little crime spree in Buffalo,
when he was captured, he apparently reformed himself for he
claimed to be reformed. He got a degree in prison.
(30:36):
He wrote an editorial that The New York Times published
where he basically said, I'm a changed man. Yeah, And
everybody said, oh, look at that. It's just about the
time your first parole hearings coming up. This is great timing.
He went up before the parole board and they said no.
He went up before the parole board again, they said no.
He went up eighteen times, when eighteen times the parole
(30:57):
board said no.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
I think the last one was just a couple of
years before he died. But he died in twenty sixteen
at age eighty one in prison.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Yeah, And he the brother tried to get an interview
with him, and he said no, that he didn't want
to be exploited anymore. And you could just feel this
brother's pain of like really wanting to try and to
talk him into it again. And the basically the people
that were the go between like, yeah, you know, you
(31:25):
can try, we can't keep you, but he's not going
to change his mind.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Right.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
So he never got that interview, but I feel like
he got I don't think he was looking for answers.
I mean, in the documentary he went back to many
of these apartment windows just to look at what their
vantage point might have been. He got an actress to
recreate what the screaming would have sounded like from down
(31:50):
there on the street, which was very chilling scene. And
I don't know that he was looking for Like you said,
he was at odds with his family at times. You
could tell the one little brother was like, man, this
is hard on all of us, so you need to stop.
But I don't think he was necessarily looking for the
closure in that I want to find out for sure
if these people could have stopped it. I think the
(32:11):
closure comes more in the journey of learning about his
sister and learning as much as he can about this case.
It's really interesting.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
It was very interesting that two thousand and four Times
article and then now this, this documentary has definitely exonerated
Q Gardens as a whole. They've said, now there's there's
way more nuance to this, there's way more. Yeah, but
two things. Two people that have not been exonerated are
(32:42):
guy named Joseph Fink and a guy named Carl Ross.
Carl Ross was the guy who lived at the top
of the vestibule who opened his door. Yeah, The ironic
thing about Carl Ross is if you notice it says
thirty eight witnesses, thirty seven did nothing. The thirty that
that last thirty eighth witness that the Times was referring
to was Carl Ross. They said, he's the one who
(33:02):
called the police. They called the police like long after
Kitty Genovits was dead. Yeah, so he was. Actually he
was actually, I don't want to say celebrated or whatever,
but he was exonerated initially by this Times article when
it turns out that he was one of the two
people who could have done something and didn't. The other
one was Joseph Fink, who saw the initial attack from
(33:23):
his vantage point in the elevator. He ran the elevator
in the Mowbray apartments across the street, and he apparently
saw what was happening and left his elevator and went
to bed. Yeah that was that. But again, it seems
like the overall feeling is okay. Other than those two guys,
everybody else is fine. I just disagree with that. I
(33:44):
think that there's a lot more that people could have
done that didn't, and I don't think it's a I
just don't think that everybody's off the hook for that.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Yeah, yep, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (33:58):
No, man, If you want to know more about Kitty Genovise,
just search the Internet. There's a lot about her, but
be careful what you read because it's all over the place. Frankly,
and since I said Internet, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Fish fraud follow up. Hey guys, I recently began began
a job as a marine fisheries observer for the Department
of Fish and Game and the Bearing Sea, And just
listen to your fish fraud episode. Each season, a percentage
of vessels fishing here at least are randomly selected to
have an observer on board to monitor the operations and
(34:38):
bycatch that come up in their pots or nets. The
presence of an observer is admittedly a bit of a
drag for this fishermen. We have to put up with
us skinny nerds. Ll He typed that we are generally
a great deterrent of any mischief at sea, But from
what I have seen, most of the fishermen are real sharp,
(34:58):
honest folks who know what they're doing. Of course, this
is only a small portion of all the vessels on
the water, and it isn't going to solve that problem
by any means, but you'd like to know that there
is some coverage on fishing vessels and processors. Thanks for
all the laughs, my dudes. That is from Kevin Alexandrowitz
(35:19):
in Olympia, Washington.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
It's a lot. Kevin had no.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Idea, did you that these people did that.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
That there's basically like a sky Marshall program fighting fish
fraud on the high seas.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Yeah, we talked about that, we did.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Yeah, I don't remember that.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Yeah, we were just like it's just so infrequent and
random that you know, what's what good is it doing?
And sounds like he agrees in some ways, but.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Still have fun out there on the high seas, don't
get seasick. If you want to get in touch with us,
like Kevin did, you can send us an email the
Stuff podcast at House Stuff Works dot com and as always,
joined us at our home on the web. Stuff you
Should Know dot Com.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts Myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, it's me Josh, and for this week's select
I've chosen our twenty sixteen episode on the murder of
Kitty Genevies. Her story is fairly famous. She was murdered
while an entire apartment block of people watched and did nothing.
But that's not exactly the real story. Like most things
in life, there's more to it, and we explained what
(00:21):
actually happened. We relied a lot on the excellent documentary
The Witness for this episode, and I highly recommend watching it.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this one.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry So this
is Stuff you Should Know podcast True Crime Edition. Actually yeah,
but so much more than just a single crime. I agreed,
a crime that echoed throughout a city, throughout the world,
throughout decades. And it's true, man like, there are very
(01:09):
few crimes you can point to that had more of
an impact than the murder of Kitty Genovis.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Agreed, And there are a lot of true crime podcasts
out there. We are not trying to become one. No,
this is just something we do from time to time. Sure,
as I researched this, and as I watched did you
watch The Witness the documentary recently.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
On Netflix right now?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
It is HBO documentary, And I was disturbed, And I'm
glad it finally covered it in the documentary, But I
was disturbed that Kitty Genevie's and we'll get to her murder,
but very quickly she was murdered and became the symbol
for people not helping out.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Right, what came to be known as bystander apathy or
the bystander effect that the more people people who are around,
the less likely anyone is to help.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Yeah, so she became such a symbol that you never
hear about Kitty Genevie's and who she was as a person.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
That was one great thing about that documentary. There are
multiple great things about it, Yeah, but that it really
talked about her and showed her and yeah, revived her spirit.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Which I was really looking for because even in researching online,
it's hard to get a lot of information.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
So some things, some even contemporary articles still aren't mentioning
that she was gay.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Well, yeah, her own brother who made the documentary didn't
know that she was gay.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
No, it's true, but it's it's been out since. I'm
not sure when actually that came out.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
It was just this year.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Oh okay, so it was fairly new this year, last year. Yeah,
that was like in the last five years maybe.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
So in honoring that, why don't we talk a minute
about Catherine Genevieve's Kitty. Yeah, born in nineteen thirty five
and Brooke to Vincent and renee Legendavise, Italian American parents.
And it's weird, I don't see.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah, Rachel was her mother's name. She was Rachel Petroli
at first. So they lived in Brooklyn, and she was
very well loved in school.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Yeah, she was like the leader of her clique.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Yeah, And she was apparently a lot of fun and
a good mimic of her teachers. And she was voted
class cut up in her senior year. Graduating class. She
was to an all girls school in Prospect Heights, and
it was just, by all accounts, this vivacious, fun loving,
really sweet sweet lady, yeah or girl at that point.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Her little brother Bill, who ended up making the being
featured in the documentary The Witness. Yeah, was just in
love with her. She was just amazing.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
They had a very special relationship.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah. I think she was about thirteen years older than him. Yeah,
quite a bit, maybe twelve years older. I had a
sister like that, and like there's a very special relationship.
There's none of that sibling rivalry. Yeah, they're not old
enough to be your mother. That's just a it's a
unique situation to be a younger sibling and to be
(04:18):
able to inherit like all that worldly wisdom. Yeah, and
they're going through all their own things and their own
struggles and their own travails. But to that thirteen year
old younger brother, yeah, they know everything and they're the
coolest person walking the planet, and they're the kindest person
walking the planet because they've lived long enough to like
figure out some of the major stuff, you know.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah, even my own sister is only six years older,
and we very much had and still have that relationship
where and she and my brother are great now too.
But you know, when you're two or three years apart,
there can be a little bit of the knocking of heads.
But by the time I came along, I was like,
you know, my sister was six. It was perfect. I
was a little baby doll for her. So anyway, that
(05:02):
was very much the relationship that Kitty had with Bill,
And it seemed like one of the old older brothers
always had a little bit of a like, yeah, she
always liked him better, Yeah, kind of attitude.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Seemed like everybody kind of knew like she liked Bill
the most.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Yeah, which I kind of felt bad for. But that's
just those family dynamics, man.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
You know. The thing is, whenever you do start to
kind of talk about somebody who's died, especially someone who's
died violently and young, it's easy to canonize. Sure, you know,
I really put them up on a pedestal and forget
their flaws. And of course I'm sure Kitty had tons
of flaws, but she didn't seem to have any from
(05:42):
from what I'm gathering, that were, you know, just terrible
flaws or that made her like a bad person. She
seemed like she was a like a overall above average,
great person.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, agreed. So New York was getting too dangerous for
her family they thought to have all these kids, so
they moved when she graduated high school to New Canaan, Connecticut.
And she said, you know what, I'm staying here in
New York. I'm eighteen now I love it here. She
got married for a brief time to a guy. Was
(06:16):
his name Rocco.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
I don't remember his name, it's either.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Rocky or Roco. And in the documentary Bill tries to
get in touch with him. He's like, I really because
he found out she was gay and was like, you know,
we didn't even know this. I think Rocco can help
shed some light. And he very respectfully asked for his
own privacy.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
He said, my relationship with Kitty will remain forever a mystery. Yeah,
it's like, that's an oddson it was. I think he
just didn't want to. I mean, if she was gay
and they were married for a short time, he either
didn't know and maybe felt the fool or he did
(06:55):
know and was maybe trying to do right by her
in some way. Sure, either way, he didn't want to
talk about it. Right But she worked as a secretary
for a little while. She was a waitress for.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
A little while. Eventually she was a bar made bartender
and then became bar manager at a place in Hollis
Queen's called EV's Eleventh Hour. That is a great barn well,
and from all accounts it was one of those wonderful
neighborhood bars a yeah, where the people were in there
getting sauced pretty early in the day, and everyone knew everyone,
(07:28):
and everyone loved Kitty and she helped take care of everybody,
but was very much an independent kind of firecracker of
a woman. Drove a red Fiat. Her dad used to
tease her about, like when you're going to find the
right guy. She was like, I make more money than
any guy I would go out with. I don't need that,
which is I guess nineteen sixties for dadam gay?
Speaker 1 (07:50):
I'm gay?
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah, and I can't say it. But she did make
pretty good doe as the bar manager. And then in
March nineteen sixty three she met a woman named Marianne
Zelonko at Swing Rendezvous. It was an underground lesbian bar
in the village, and they moved in together shortly thereafter.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Yeah, and Kitty actually used to bring mary Anne home
with her to visit, but her family was all like, well,
they're just good friends and roommates, right, It's the sixties, right,
the early sixties.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Yeah, And there's an audio interview with her in that documentary.
That's really touching.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Hm.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
She didn't want to be on camera, but Bill was
able to speak to her. And I think what was
so compelling about this documentary was that he was It
was a search of a man looking for closure.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
It's a harrowing sometimes almost unbearable to watch.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Yeah, search. It was tough.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
I mean, like he's had odds with his family here there. Yeah,
he he's just just doing things where if you watch
it in the context of the documentary and you follow
along the documentary, it all makes utter and complete sense. Right,
But then if you stop and remove yourself long enough
to be like, this is a documentary, which means this
(09:09):
guy really did this stuff. Yeah, and there was a
camera following him along while he was doing it. I
was like, I couldn't have done half of it. Oh,
I know, you know, he really he just at one
point he calls it an obsession, but it's not. He
doesn't come off as.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Obsessed, right, agreed, you know? All right, So let's detail
the crime and then we will take a break after that.
How does that sound?
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yeah? All right?
Speaker 2 (09:36):
So flash forward to March thirteenth, nineteen sixty four. It's
three point fifteen in the morning, and Kitty geneviez Is,
as she often did, was making her way home from
work late at night as a bar manager, and was
being trailed by a man, a man by the name
of Winston Moseley.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yes, who is definitely the villain of this story, but
is not the only one. It will turn out, right.
So Kitty was twenty eight and at the time she
was killed, and Winston, her killer, was twenty nine, just
turned twenty nine, I think like a week or so before.
And I think he said this is March thirteenth, Yeah,
(10:20):
nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Yeah, he was married with a couple of kids.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Yeah, his wife, Elizabeth worked the night shift. She was
a hospital nurse, and Winston's mother stayed at home with
the kids. So he basically said, you know, oh, my
own house. I've got a great job operating computers. No
one even knows what I'm supposed to be doing with
him yet, but I'm making money doing it.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Yeah. He was a smart guy.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
So I'm gonna indulge myself. I'm gonna go out and
stalk women and murder them in my spare time. That's
what I'm gonna do. So that's what he was doing
on this night. He was cruising around looking for a
woman to kill.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Basically, Yeah, that was his direct quote in question. Yeah,
I was looking for a woman to kill.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yeah. So he saw at a believe a red light,
this little red Fiat convertible caught his eye and there
was Kittie driving. So he started to follow her and
she parked, and she parked in the parking lot for
the Long Island Railway, which the parking lot went backed
up to the side of her apartment building, which is
(11:25):
a two story tutor job that had shops in the
bottom and apartments in the top. Right.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Yeah, this was in Q Gardens and Queen's. So he
followed her on foot. At this point she sees him
and knows that something is going on. He has a
knife in his hand, so she starts running. He catches
up to her by outside of a bookstore and stabs
(11:52):
her twice in the back right off the bat with
this knife.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Right. And she had been running toward a bar that
she thought would be open, but it turned out apparently
there was a new manager and the new manager had
closed down early. So when she stabbed twice in the back,
it's on this darkened street, but right across the street
Austin Street is a ten story apartment building with dozens
(12:15):
of windows looking out onto Austin Street, where she's being
stabbed in the back, and she screamed, she cries out.
I think she said something like, oh God, he stabbed me,
helped me, help me? Is what they said, basically, definitively
is what she screamed. And people who were witnesses to
this recounted that one guy said that he was I
(12:40):
think a ten or eleven year old kid who was
inside one of the apartments in the Mowbray apartment building
and that he was awoke and awakened from a deep sleep.
The scream was so loud, he said it was the
loudest thing he's ever heard. So she screams, and a
man living in the Mowbray apartment buildings window, what's his name?
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Yeah, Robert Moser opened his window and screamed out, hey,
get out of there. What are you doing? And Mosley
took off, Yeah, he took off running away.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
He's very frequently misquoted as having said like let that
girl alone, but even by his own words in his
own testimony, he said, hey, get out of there.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Yeah, at any rate, he scared him away.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
So in between that time, about thirty minutes passes, Kitty
makes her way around to the vestibule of her own building,
right yeah, and goes inside the vestibule, and like you think,
the horror is over for her. She could probably survive
(13:49):
these wounds, right, is in shock, I would imagine. And
then Mosley had went to his car, kind of checked
out the building, saw that some lights had gone on,
and reasoned to himself, no one's going to do anything,
puts on a different hat, and goes back, finds her
in the vestibule and finishes the job in the most
(14:12):
horrific ways you can imagine.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Yeah, he stabbed her at least twelve more times. They
think at least she was stabbed at least fourteen times.
He said he doesn't remember how many times he stabbed her,
but he basically kept stabbing her until she stopped screaming.
She was still alive. I saw that he attempted to
rape her. I've also seen that he raped her. Yeah,
I'm not sure which one's correct, but at one point,
(14:35):
and this is really important here, as he's stabbing her
and she's screaming, in the vestibule, there's a staircase that
leads directly up to a door, and behind that door
lived a man named Carl Ross. And Carl Ross opened
his door and looked down one single flight of stairs
at Winston Moseley stabbing Kitty Geneviez, who was bloody. There's
(15:00):
no confusing what was going on. And he closed the
door and he called his girlfriend, and his girlfriend said,
don't get involved. Yeah, I'm worried for you. Just leave
it alone. It's none in your business. And he did.
He didn't do anything, at least for a little while.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
All right. So that's a good place to break here,
and we're going to come back and talk about who
saw and heard what and what they did about it
right after this, all right. So at this point, Kitty
(15:53):
Genevies is not dead yet, but dying in the vestibule.
A woman did come down and was with her. Her
name is Sophia Ferrar. She's still with us, and she
was a neighbor and friend of Kitty's. And so she
(16:13):
went down there and apparently was with her as she
passed away, tried to calm her down. Evidently did calm
her down, and likes to think that she at least
saw a friendly face and that she was being cared
for as she passed. The weird thing is is that
is not mentioned. I guess we got to get into
(16:34):
the New York Times now.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Yeah, so after the murder, like the next day, the
Times ran four paragraphs on the kitty Geneva's murder. It
was not incredibly newsworthy at first, because that year there
was six hundred and thirty six murders in New York City.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Yeah, and that was just one of them, just one.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
But a couple weeks later, the head the city editor
of the New York Times, a guy named ab Rosenthal,
who's a legendary journalist, was having lunch with I believe,
the police commissioner of the NYPD. And the commissioner said,
did you hear about that Genevieve's murder. That's one for
the books. Thirty eight people standing around watch the whole thing.
(17:15):
Nobody did a thing about it.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Yeah, now you've got a story.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Abrosenthal, legendary journalist, is like, uh, thank you for that. Yeh,
here's my diner's club card. I have to go now
and get this story done. So he did. He assigned
it out to a guy. What was the original reporter's name.
His name was Martin Gansberg, and they wrote on the
(17:39):
front page, I shouldn't say they wrote it was definitely
all Gansburg, but he was assigned and definitely under the
direction of Abrosenthal, like this, this is the story. Yeah,
thirty eight people stood around and did nothing.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yeah, the title of the article was thirty seven. It
was thirty seven at the time. Thirty seven who saw
murder didn't call the police. And basically the entire article
and the entire narrative from that moment forward for decades
was a not about this woman at all. Hardly she
became a symbol a b not necessarily even about the crime,
(18:15):
but about the crime of these people who didn't the
crime of apathy for these thirty seven or thirty eight people.
But it was very much misconstrued in the New York Times,
to the point where in two thousand and four they
all but wrote a retraction with new information because the
(18:35):
original article they said, like these people witnessed it. That
is not true. Maybe only a couple of people might
have actually seen anything with their eyeballs. The other thirty
five or thirty six may have heard someone screaming. They
might have thought it was a drunken couple in their
(18:56):
neighborhood coming home from a bar. There might have been
some apathy involved for sure for some of them. But
to characterize this as thirty seven or thirty eight people
witnessed this horrific crime and literally shut their doors and
windows to it was not accurate at all.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Right, they said, they said specifically, Well, the way that
they put it was that there were The way the
story read was that thirty eight people had watched this
murder which took place. They misreported that there were three attacks,
and that the man had been chased off twice and
came back two more times, but that this whole thing
(19:37):
had taken place over thirty minutes, this long, prolonged attack,
and that thirty eight people had just been sitting there
watching it, doing nothing, And that is definitely a mischaracterization
of what had happened, Like you're saying, for the most part,
people were earwitnesses, not eyewitnesses. There were certainly not thirty
eight eyewitnesses, and most people weren't in a position to
(19:58):
do much, if anything about it physically. But I don't
know if you could call it like a retraction because
the point that ab Rosenthal he never apologized for whatever.
Even in the documentary he's interviewed, Yeah, and he's like,
this is great, I'm glad that it did what it did.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Sure, The point is still there that there was apathy
in that there were two people who could have done
something and they didn't. But then from what the other
witnesses said, the scream was pretty clearly not a purse
snatching and not a couple fighting drunkenly that it was
(20:40):
a violent crime being committed on this woman. And people
still didn't do anything.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah, they misreported, possibly that no one called police. Apparently
perhaps up to three people called the police, although police
logs showed only one call came in. And it may
be a case of these people now telling themselves like
I called the cops that did something, sure, when they
may not have. They did not report at all that Ms.
(21:08):
Farrar had gone down to be with her. She was
not mentioned ever. So I kind of went from feeling like, yeah,
you know this bystander effect it had good. It led
to the nine to one one being created apparently in
some ways, and people study this in class and it
raised awareness. So you know, if they stretched it a
little bit, then it had a good effect. That's what
(21:30):
Abe basically, that was his position, That still is his position.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
But well he's dead now.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Oh did he finally pass away? Yeah? And then I
finally came around and be like, no, you know, the
truth is what you should print. And if you're a
reporter and you run a story, you should print the
truth and not some sensationalized version of it to sell newspapers.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
No, no, absolutely, I agree with you, And I think
the one thing that you can hang on, ab Rosenthal
is that that story was definitely fashioned in a manner
to be as sensational as possible, as shock and outrage
the public as much as possible. But I still think
it's rooted in the basic fact that there was apathy
(22:13):
involved and that it possibly allowed Winston Mosley to finish
the job that Kitty Genevie's might have survived had somebody
done more than just sit up, look out their window
and go back to bed or not even bother to
look out the window. And like you said, Chuck, like
this had a lot of impact because the story comes
(22:35):
out in nineteen sixty four and for forty years, it
wasn't until two thousand and four that the time saw
fit to like go back and really reinvestigate, and they did.
There was a great, great article called Kitty forty years later,
I think, and the author goes through and reinvestigates the
case and really sets a lot of facts straight. But
(22:56):
within that forty year period, the effects that this murder
had were just sweeping. It led to the establishment of
nine to one one. Yeah, it's a big one, sure,
and it created this whole field of psychology that looks
into the psychology of crowds, you know, and why we
would just stand around? What is this diffusion of responsibility?
(23:20):
None of that understanding existed until the kid Eachenevie's murder.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, and weirdly, why is someone Why is a solo
witness more apt to act than a group of people.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
One thing I saw is that it's called social influence,
and that we take our cues from others. So if
inaction is basically what is on the table right, then
we're going to be inactive as well. If people are
starting to move toward it, toward the problem, we'll probably
join in too.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
I could see that or people thinking like, either I'm
not someone else's better equipped to deal with this than me,
or I feel like someone else will do this right,
so I don't have to. Yeah, a lot goes into play.
It's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
One of the less productive things that came out of it, though,
is this idea that when you live in a city,
in a big city, you put enough people together, everybody
stops caring about anybody else. They're all out for number one.
And Q Gardens became the center of this or just
such a symbolic example of urban care uncaring, I guess yeah.
(24:27):
And Kitty Jenaviez became a symbol of that as well,
and the need to do something, to act out to
help other people when you see them need help.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
All right, So let's take another quick break here and
we're going to get back into what happened to mister
Moseley and the further effects of this crime after this.
(25:13):
So a week after this murder, Mosley was breaking into
a house. He's not a good.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Guy, No, he was a terrible guy.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
He was beyond being a sociopath and a psychotic. Was
just a burglar and he would he was just straight
up robbing a house one day of a television and
one of the neighbors saw this called the cops. Cops
came and arrested them.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
No, no, no, no, that's not true. What the neighbor.
Here's the thing, This is the great ironic twist of
the kiddie Jenavie's story. He went to a different neighborhood.
He was robbing a house and the neighbors said, hey,
what are you doing? And he started to run from
the house. The neighbor chased him and tackled him and
held him until the cops came.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Oh well, yeah, he called.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
That's how he went down. Intervention. Yeah yeah, yeah, but
not apathy intervention right a week later?
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yes, okay, So at any rate, he calls the cops.
He gets arrested, and very like matter of factly, says
that he killed Kitty Genevies. And not only that, but
he killed supposedly two other women, a woman named Barbara Kralik,
well actually she was a girl, she's only fifteen, and
then a woman named Annie Mae Johnson. And apparently both
(26:29):
of them had been sexually assaulted. And he was never
tried for those, but he did plead not guilty by
reason of insanity, which did not work. Was sentenced to death,
and by luck of timing was able to appeal and
the death penalty had gone away for most crimes in
that time period, and he was resentenced to life in prison.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Yees. Supposedly the prosecution had withheld some evidence about his
mental state during his sentencing, so he was able to
get it reduced. So he was hanging out during his time,
and he was in Attica, I believe, and he had
injured himself and was being taken to the hospital, and
(27:11):
on the way there he got the gun away from
the guard who was escorting him and took off and
for I think five days, he basically just the city
of Buffalo was in mortal fear of the fact that
the guy who murdered Kitty Genovie's was now on the
loose in their town, and they were afraid, rightfully, so
(27:33):
he raped one woman. When the cops closed in on him,
he got a hold of five people and held him
hostage in a standoff that lasted for a little while
with the FBI before they finally got to him. He
was a bad dude, so they sent him back to
prison and they said you're not getting out here ever.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah. He was later a part of the Attica prison
riots as well, and the one lady that he killed,
he he burned her alive like the family was upstairs. Yeah,
and he broke into her house, raped her, killed her,
and burned her alive in the home and the house
went up in flames. So it sounded like he had
(28:14):
no He sounded like a true sociopath, like he had
no not there's every reason for killing someone, but it
was always just at random because he wanted to do that.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
That's a lot what it sounds like. It was a
self indulgence.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
So in the documentary very powerful scene where the son
I'm sorry, the little brother of Kitty who was told
through his eyes interviews and sits down with one of
the sons of Moseley and it's just like, I mean,
you cut the tension with a knife. Obviously, it's just
(28:50):
so like fraught with tension. And he had told his
son that she was yelling racial slurs at him. So
said that he was just a getaway driver for some
mobster and the Genovese family was related to the crime
mob family, the Genovese family and none of this stuff
(29:12):
is true. And the brother was just like aid, no,
we're not related to that family at all. We have
nothing to do with that, and he just gives him
a look when he talks about the racial slurs, like,
come on, man, that's not what happened. So it was
a really really powerful scene of these two guys kind
of working it out in a way.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
I didn't see them working anything out.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Oh see, I did, which made it even worse for me.
I thought there was some between them. They kind of
came to a nice, nicer place than where they'd started.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
I did not catch that at all.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Well, maybe you skipped forward or something.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Maybe I was like, I can't take this kind of
fest forward.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Well, the Sun was saying, like, you know, I think
you know, we need to know the son of was
saying that they needed to move on from all this,
and and then the brother was saying, I definitely don't
you know the sins of the father and the sins
of the sons. Yeah, he said that, So you know,
I felt like they were better off than when they
started for having that conversation.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
I honestly did not catch that.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Well, regardless, Winston Mosley, after I guess after his second
his first escape, the second little crime spree in Buffalo,
when he was captured, he apparently reformed himself for he
claimed to be reformed. He got a degree in prison.
(30:36):
He wrote an editorial that The New York Times published
where he basically said, I'm a changed man. Yeah, And
everybody said, oh, look at that. It's just about the
time your first parole hearings coming up. This is great timing.
He went up before the parole board and they said no.
He went up before the parole board again, they said no.
He went up eighteen times, when eighteen times the parole
(30:57):
board said no.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
I think the last one was just a couple of
years before he died. But he died in twenty sixteen
at age eighty one in prison.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Yeah, And he the brother tried to get an interview
with him, and he said no, that he didn't want
to be exploited anymore. And you could just feel this
brother's pain of like really wanting to try and to
talk him into it again. And the basically the people
that were the go between like, yeah, you know, you
(31:25):
can try, we can't keep you, but he's not going
to change his mind.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Right.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
So he never got that interview, but I feel like
he got I don't think he was looking for answers.
I mean, in the documentary he went back to many
of these apartment windows just to look at what their
vantage point might have been. He got an actress to
recreate what the screaming would have sounded like from down
(31:50):
there on the street, which was very chilling scene. And
I don't know that he was looking for Like you said,
he was at odds with his family at times. You
could tell the one little brother was like, man, this
is hard on all of us, so you need to stop.
But I don't think he was necessarily looking for the
closure in that I want to find out for sure
if these people could have stopped it. I think the
(32:11):
closure comes more in the journey of learning about his
sister and learning as much as he can about this case.
It's really interesting.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
It was very interesting that two thousand and four Times
article and then now this, this documentary has definitely exonerated
Q Gardens as a whole. They've said, now there's there's
way more nuance to this, there's way more. Yeah, but
two things. Two people that have not been exonerated are
(32:42):
guy named Joseph Fink and a guy named Carl Ross.
Carl Ross was the guy who lived at the top
of the vestibule who opened his door. Yeah, The ironic
thing about Carl Ross is if you notice it says
thirty eight witnesses, thirty seven did nothing. The thirty that
that last thirty eighth witness that the Times was referring
to was Carl Ross. They said, he's the one who
(33:02):
called the police. They called the police like long after
Kitty Genovits was dead. Yeah, so he was. Actually he
was actually, I don't want to say celebrated or whatever,
but he was exonerated initially by this Times article when
it turns out that he was one of the two
people who could have done something and didn't. The other
one was Joseph Fink, who saw the initial attack from
(33:23):
his vantage point in the elevator. He ran the elevator
in the Mowbray apartments across the street, and he apparently
saw what was happening and left his elevator and went
to bed. Yeah that was that. But again, it seems
like the overall feeling is okay. Other than those two guys,
everybody else is fine. I just disagree with that. I
(33:44):
think that there's a lot more that people could have
done that didn't, and I don't think it's a I
just don't think that everybody's off the hook for that.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Yeah, yep, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (33:58):
No, man, If you want to know more about Kitty Genovise,
just search the Internet. There's a lot about her, but
be careful what you read because it's all over the place. Frankly,
and since I said Internet, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Fish fraud follow up. Hey guys, I recently began began
a job as a marine fisheries observer for the Department
of Fish and Game and the Bearing Sea, And just
listen to your fish fraud episode. Each season, a percentage
of vessels fishing here at least are randomly selected to
have an observer on board to monitor the operations and
(34:38):
bycatch that come up in their pots or nets. The
presence of an observer is admittedly a bit of a
drag for this fishermen. We have to put up with
us skinny nerds. Ll He typed that we are generally
a great deterrent of any mischief at sea, But from
what I have seen, most of the fishermen are real sharp,
(34:58):
honest folks who know what they're doing. Of course, this
is only a small portion of all the vessels on
the water, and it isn't going to solve that problem
by any means, but you'd like to know that there
is some coverage on fishing vessels and processors. Thanks for
all the laughs, my dudes. That is from Kevin Alexandrowitz
(35:19):
in Olympia, Washington.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
It's a lot. Kevin had no.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Idea, did you that these people did that.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
That there's basically like a sky Marshall program fighting fish
fraud on the high seas.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Yeah, we talked about that, we did.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Yeah, I don't remember that.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Yeah, we were just like it's just so infrequent and
random that you know, what's what good is it doing?
And sounds like he agrees in some ways, but.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Still have fun out there on the high seas, don't
get seasick. If you want to get in touch with us,
like Kevin did, you can send us an email the
Stuff podcast at House Stuff Works dot com and as always,
joined us at our home on the web. Stuff you
Should Know dot Com.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts Myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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