Beyond the Headlines: Rethinking Kitty Genovese

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Hello and welcome to the Eastern Crime Zone, a show about investigations of real, true crime cases.

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I'm your host, Cassie Malay, and every week I'll take you through new details about cases you're familiar with and completely new cases you've never heard of before.

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If you have ever taken any psychology classes, you have most likely heard about the murder of Kitty Genovese.

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The brutal murder of a young woman caused controversy in the United States after it was reported that many witnesses to the crime failed to report it to police.

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In the years since, the death of Kitty Genovese has been studied in psychology as a social theory known as the bystander effect, in which people are less likely to help a victim when in the presence of other people thinking that someone else would step up to help, but no individuals actually taking action.

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More recent studies and research have cast doubt on the original reporting of the 1964 murder, and journalists have since proven that the claims that none of the witnesses reported the crime was misleading and that during the assault and rape of Kitty Genovese, several calls were made to police.

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The case has been twisted depending on who has written the story and for what purpose, which makes finding the truth a little murky.

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So if you're ready, grab your detective hat and get settled in for another true crime case.

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This is Eastern Crime Zone.

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Born on July 7, 1935, catherine Susan Genovese, known as Kitty to her family and friends, was raised in Brooklyn, new York City.

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The Genovese family lived in a brownstone residence at 29 St John's Place in Park Slope.

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This western Brooklyn neighborhood was populated by families of Italian and Irish heritage, and young Kitty was raised Catholic.

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Like many others from that area, she attended the all-girl Prospect Heights High School, where she was described by teachers as having a sunny disposition and being self-assured beyond her years.

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In the 1940s, kitty's father started his own business of supplying coats and aprons to local businesses.

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It was called the Bay Ridge Coat and Apron Supply Company and became moderately successful.

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In 1954, her mother, rachel, witnessed a shooting near their home, and so the Genovese family relocated to New Canaan, connecticut.

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Kitty, an attractive and outgoing young woman, had recently graduated from high school and decided to remain in Brooklyn with her grandparents in order to prepare for her upcoming marriage.

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That same year the couple married, but the union was annulled before the end of 1954.

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Because Kitty's sexuality as a lesbian, she soon moved into her own apartment in Kew Gardens, a quiet, mostly residential area which she shared with her girlfriend, mary Ann Zolonko.

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Only a few friends and family knew about their romantic relationship with Kitty's family, referring to Mary Ann as a close friend or roommate.

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She eventually accepted a job in the late 1950s as a bartender, which she preferred.

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In August 1961, she was briefly arrested for bookmaking after she was found to be taking bets on horse races made by bar patrons.

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She was fined, along with a friend, $50 each and she subsequently lost her job.

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Luckily for Kitty, she soon found another job, bartending at Ev's 11th Hour Club, a small neighborhood tavern on Jamaica Avenue and 193rd Street in the Hollis section of Queens.

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Eventually, kitty was managing the bar on the behalf of the owner.

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By working double shifts she was able to save money which she intended to use to open her own Italian restaurant.

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The club and bar was about five miles from her apartment and she drove her red Fiat to the restaurant nearly every night.

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Returning to her apartment after dark did make her nervous, as it would most women, but as a lifelong city girl, kitty possessed the typical resiliency and determination of a native New Yorker.

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Around 3 am on March 13, 1964, kitty Genovese was leaving her job as the bar manager at Ev's 11th Hour Bar.

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This was on Jamaica Avenue and 193rd Street.

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Unknown to her, a man in a Chevrolet Corvair had seen her get into her car alone and began to follow her.

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He hadn't planned on following Kitty specifically, rather than any woman who was alone that night.

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She had parked her car in the Kew Gardens Long Island Railroad Station parking lot, which was only 100 feet from her apartment door.

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The man parked his car in front of a bus stop within view of Kitty and her red sports car.

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No one else was around at this hour.

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All the cars were empty and businesses nearby had closed down for the night.

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He stood at the edge of the parking lot and watched her.

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Kitty saw him and strode quickly towards home with a sense of urgency.

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This man followed Kitty with his right arm held down by his side so she wouldn't see the hunting knife he was holding.

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When she looked back, kitty must have had an overwhelming feeling of dread to realize that this man was following her.

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This urgency she had turned to all-out panic.

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She changed direction to the left, sprinted towards Austin Street.

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Kitty screamed for help as she passed closed businesses and apartments.

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The man caught up with Kitty and stabbed her in her upper back several times.

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She fell to the sidewalk and continued her screams for help as this man continued his attack.

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Lots of apartments were within earshot of this attack and few residents' voices rang out into the night.

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Air Lights were coming on in the 10-story apartment building across the street, one after the other.

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The attacker fled back down Austin Street towards the train station.

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Some witnesses claim they saw him run past the train station and others say they saw him get into his car and reverse it all the way back down Austin Street and up 82nd Road.

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Kitty still laid on the sidewalk sobbing and crying out for help, saying if someone doesn't help me, I'm going to die.

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She moved onto her back and tried to stagger away from the scene, with witnesses saying she was not having an easy time of it.

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Her wounds at this point were not fatal, thanks to her winter jacket, but her lungs were punctured and air was slowly leaking into Kitty's cavity.

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She reached her own apartment building at this point and rounded the corner to the entrance of the building, which was in the back.

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The train station was on her right and behind that was a seven-story apartment building where onlookers still had Kitty in their sights.

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Kitty kept going and found an unlocked door to the apartment entrance.

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It was then that her attacker reappeared.

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He had taken off his stocking cap and now wore a dark fedora with his hands in his pockets.

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He was looking around, presumably for Kitty.

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Kitty had entered into a small foyer with no doors on the ground floor, only stairs leading to two apartments.

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Her apartment was a few doors further, but Kitty must have known she would not make it that far.

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Kitty knew the people who lived in these units and called up saying Carl, carl, help me, I've been stabbed.

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This friend, Carl Ross, had known Kitty and her girlfriend and considered them good friends.

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It was very relevant to note that Carl was a very anxious man who self-medicated with alcohol and was most likely inebriated.

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At this point, the roles that Carl played or didn't play that night are heavily contested and vastly different, but most sources point to Carl making a few calls to friends and neighbors.

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Allegedly, carl called a friend and asked what to do about the woman calling for help from downstairs, and she instructed him not to get involved.

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Later, carl would be quoted saying he didn't want to get involved.

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He would, however, call a neighbor who told him to call police, and he did.

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The attacker at this point had been trying different doors and was about to end his pursuit when he opened the one that Kitty laid behind.

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Kitty screamed only twice as he came upon her.

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The man plunged his hunting knife into her several more times, including to her throat, which ultimately silenced her pleas for help before raping her and stealing $49 from her wallet.

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Carl was upstairs and had called a woman named Greta Schwartz to let her know about the situation downstairs.

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Greta hung up from this call and went to check for herself to see what was going on there.

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She found Kitty bloody and barely alive.

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Greta rushed back to her apartment to call another friend, sophie Farrer.

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Sophie rushed downstairs to the entrance that Kitty was at.

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Sophie would later say I ran to help.

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It seemed like the natural thing to do.

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I never thought of myself in danger, but when she saw Kitty in the state she was in, sophie dropped to her knees and put her arms around her friend.

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At this point some sources say that Carl appeared and Sophie instructed him to call police, and this is when he made the phone call.

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Police arrived by 3 52 am.

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Sophie would remain with Kitty and try to comfort her until the ambulance could arrive.

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This ambulance arrived painfully late, at 4 25 am and at this point Kitty was alive, but barely.

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Emts or emergency medical technicians would not become standard personnel in New York City until the 1970s, so no one on the ambulance would tend to Kitty's wounds whatsoever.

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They only transported her to the hospital, but she passed away from her injuries.

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Before they made it, police made a search of the neighborhood that turned up several witnesses, including one that had notified the police.

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Once they had finished questioning neighbors, police had at least 38 people who potentially heard or observed some part of the fatal assault of Kitty Genovese.

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Police then turned their attention to Kitty's private life.

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Her girlfriend, mary Ann Zinolco, was questioned by police detective Mitchell Sang at 7 am the same morning of the murder.

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She would later be questioned for six hours by other homicide detectives who asked her repeated questions about her relationship with Kitty.

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Initially, mary Ann was considered a suspect by the investigators.

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A break in the case came on March 19, 1964, six days after the murder.

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A local of Ozone Park, raul Cleary, reported to police that he saw a suspicious-looking man removing a television from a neighbor's house.

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When police arrived they found 29-year-old Winston Mosley with a television set in the trunk of his car.

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Mosley was married and owned a home in Queens and had two kids.

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He worked as a machine operator who worked in Mount Vernon in nearby Westchester County and his arrest record listed his occupation as Remington Rand tab operator.

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Mosley quickly confessed to killing Kitty and, more shockingly, he admitted to two other murders.

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He told interrogators he shot to death 24-year-old Annie Mae Johnson of South Ozone Park, queens, on February 29th.

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He also admitted to killing 15-year-old Barbara Kralik, who was murdered the previous July in Springfield Gardens in Queens.

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Both of these crimes involved sexual assault.

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However, police had already arrested a suspect in the Kralik case.

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Another man, alvin the Monster Mitchell, a local gang member, was already in custody for that crime and had allegedly also confessed to the teenager's murder.

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But Mosley was insistent he had killed them all.

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He told police.

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When committing the murder of Annie Mae Johnson, mosley insisted that he had shot the victim several times, saying I shot her in the stomach, I reloaded and shot her again in the stomach.

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However, the autopsy listed the cause of death as puncture wounds inflicted by a sharp object such as a screwdriver or a file.

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So how could Mosley have committed this crime but not know how he had done it.

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Based on this information, the body of Johnson was exhumed from a cemetery in Moncks Corner, south Carolina, and a second autopsy was performed Through the use of x-ray equipment borrowed from South Carolina Medical College in Charleston.

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The coroner found six bullets inside of Johnson's body.

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Four of these bullets were recovered.

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Queens District Attorney Frank O'Connor told the press the finding of these bullets adds a lot of credence to Winston Mosley's other statements.

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In the case of 15-year-old Barbara Kralik's murder, blood evidence was available.

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However, no test yet existed that could compare bodily fluids for conclusive DNA identification.

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In his confession, mosley was able to supply details that conformed the existing evidence.

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Detectives were satisfied that they had the right man this time.

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Even his own court-appointed attorney, Sidney G Sparrow, believed Mosley.

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I'm convinced Mosley did all of these killings.

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He would tell reporters there are too many things that he knew that only the killer would know.

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But Winston Mosley had a lot more to tell police.

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He confessed to other attacks during his nighttime expeditions, during which he would roam the streets in search of victims to attack at random.

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He admitted to raping many women, frequently robbing them during the vicious assault in much the same way he had done to Kitty.

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Mosley also admitted to dozens of burglaries, but for police it was the sexual assaults that piqued their interest.

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Although charged with the murder of Kitty Genovese, mosley was not charged with the other two murders he had admitted to.

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The cases proved too complicated to prosecute, as the other man, elvin Mitchell, had confessed to the murder of Barbara Kralik.

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But investigators had enough evidence to charge Mosley with the brutal murder and rape of Kitty Genovese.

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His trial began on June 8, 1964, with Judge J Irwin Shapiro presiding.

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At first Mosley pleaded not guilty, but his attorney, sidney G Sparrow, later changed his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity.

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With his signed confession already given, and having previously been judged sane by a stake psychiatrist, mosley went into detail about the crime, dressed in a neat, short-sleeved white shirt and speaking in a detached, clear and concise manner.

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He answered almost every question from his attorney.

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He said that he went out on the night of March 13th for the sole purpose of killing someone.

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Attorney, he said that he went out on the night of March 13th for the sole purpose of killing someone.

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I went out that night intending to kill a woman.

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He told the court when I got such a thought.

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It remained with me, regardless of what else I might be thinking.

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I had a hunting knife that I had taken from a previous burglary and took that with me.

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He described for the court how he followed Kitty from her car in the railroad parking lot to a nearby building where he stabbed her for the first time.

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He said how he saw lights come on in the building across the street and then returned to his car to move it.

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He said I realized the car was parked where some people could see it and me, so I moved it some distance away.

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He then heard some of the tenants of the building yelling down at him but said he was unconcerned.

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I had a feeling this man would close his window and go back to sleep, he would say to cops, and sure enough he did.

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The resident who yelled at him was Robert Moser, who told the court how he shouted at the assailant, who then ran away.

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I hollered hey, get out of here, what are you doing?

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He jumped up and ran like a scared rabbit, took off real quick.

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He told the court.

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Moser was one of only four residents of the Kew Gardens neighborhood who testified at the trial.

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Another was Ms Peek, who said that she saw Kitty Genovese lying on the street.

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The poor girl got up, slowly walking to the parking lot.

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I heard two last screams for help, but they didn't see her.

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The jury deliberated for seven hours before returning a guilty verdict around 10.30 pm on June 11th.

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On June 15th, winston Mosley was sentenced to death for the murder of Kitty Genovese.

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When the jury foreman read the sentence, mosley showed no emotion, while some spectators applauded and cheered.

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Judge Shapiro added I don't believe in capital punishment, but when I see a monster like this, I wouldn't hesitate to pull the switch myself.

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Mosley appeared as a defense witness in the trial of Alvin Mitchell for the murder of Barbara Kralik on June 23rd.

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After being granted immunity from prosecution, he testified that he had killed Kralik.

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The trial produced a hung jury, but Mitchell was convicted.

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In a second trial On June 1st 1967, the New York Court of Appeals found that Mosley should have been able to argue that he was medically insane at the sentencing hearing, despite the trial court finding that he had been legally sane.

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This sentence was commuted to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after 30 years.

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Now this next part is kind of funny.

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I'm just going to say it did make me laugh just a little bit.

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The part right after that, immediately awful, but the next sentence is freaking hilarious.

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In 1968, Mosley stuck a spam tin into his rectum, hoping that the injuries would force him to be transferred from his cell in Attica Prison to a hospital.

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Sorry, that made me laugh like a lot.

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But it gets worse because he does escape from the transport van and break into an empty house in Buffalo, new York.

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After three days of watching TV and eating canned food, he called a local employment office and asked them to send a maid.

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When she arrived, he threatened her with a gun he'd found in the house.

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Then he raped her, warning if she told anyone he would find and kill her children.

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She did leave behind a scared and confused message for the homeowners.

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When the homeowners did arrive, mosley tied up the husband and raped the wife.

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For some fucking reason the district attorney filed charges against the cleaning woman for failing to report her rape to the police.

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After a standoff in downtown Buffalo, william Mosley was arrested again and returned to jail.

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By 1984, he became eligible for parole.

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1984, he became eligible for parole.

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However, due to his notoriety, he was convinced he would never get a fair hearing and explained how he had never intended to kill Kitty Genovese and considered it a simple mugging gone wrong.

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His request for parole was rightfully denied.

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Mosley's next parole hearing was in March 2008, on the 44th anniversary of Kitty's murder.

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He continued to show little remorse for the crime and was again denied parole by November 2015,.

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He had been denied parole for an 18th time and died the following year at age 81 on March 28, 2016.

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He was one of the longest serving inmates of the New York State prison system, going back in time.

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10 days after Katie's murder in 1964, new York Police Commissioner Michael Bull Murphy gave the New York Times editor AM Rosenthal the narrative of the 38 witnesses who didn't call police.

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Rosenthal then assigned the story to Martin Gainsbourg, who wrote the article titled 37 who Saw Murder Didn't Call Police.

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Immediately after the story broke, wnbc police reporter Danny Meehan discovered many inconsistencies in the article.

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Meehan asked the New York Times reporter Martin Gansberg why his article failed to reveal that witnesses did not feel the murder was happening.

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Gansberg replied it would have ruined the story.

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Decades later, researchers confirmed the serious flaws in the New York Times article.

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Only a dozen people saw or heard the attack and none of them saw the entire incident.

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The newspaper admitted in 2016 that witnesses did not know that a murder was taking place.

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Turning Kitty's death into a parable erases all the facts that contributed to this crime taking place and the structures that allowed it to happen.

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Sexism and a lack of emergency infrastructure contributed more than journalists at the time would have been willing to admit.

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First of all, multiple people did call police, but some didn't.

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The reason why these witnesses did not call had less to do with the bystander effect and more to do with boring old sexism.

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At the time, violence inflicted by a man on his wife was widely considered private and should be something solved at home.

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Of course Kitty and her attacker were not married and didn't even know each other, but witnesses would have no way of knowing that without knowing them personally.

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Until 1993, a man legally could not even rape his wife.

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Quotes from witnesses that are usually left out of modern retellings of this case reveal that this, more than anything, was why most of these witnesses did not call authorities.

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Here are some quotes from witnesses.

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I figured it was a lover's quarrel and that her man had knocked her down.

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So my wife and I went back to bed.

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What was she doing out so late anyway?

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At one point I thought maybe a girl was being raped.

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But if she was out alone at that hour, it served her right Another witness, and if that girl had been where she belongs, this never would have happened.

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Even today, if sexism can be overlooked for a different thing, it will be.

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New York Times started the ball rolling with their original article covering the case, which inspired researchers to use this case as a basis for the research into the bystander effect.

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The first researchers to do so, in 1968, john Darley and Bib Letain, published Bystander Intervention in Emergencies.

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The bystander effect has been proven to be a real phenomenon, but more complex than originally thought.

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Without getting too off track, newer research shows that people are more likely to intervene in dangerous situations when there are more bystanders.

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A study of CCTV footage in Amsterdam, cape Town and Lancaster, england, found that people on busy streets are more likely to intervene in volatile incidents.

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Additionally, a meta-analysis of more than 50 studies found that people are more likely to help if there are bystanders, especially in dangerous situations.

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There's also the other problems with the lack of 911 and emergency medical technicians at the time.

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As this crime happened four years before the introduction of the 911 emergency call system, records of the earliest calls to police are unclear and were not given a high priority.

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One call made by the father of a witness after the initial attack made mention of a woman who was beat up but got up and was staggering around Because 911 did not exist yet.

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The way to summon help was calling the police or fire department nearest you directly, depending on the type of emergency.

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People could also dial zero and ask the operator to connect them.

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It wasn't until three years after Kitty's death that President Lyndon Johnson's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice released a report that recommended people to have the ability to call one number to reach police departments.

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A few years later, in 1968, at&t, which operated nearly all telephone connections in the US at the time, put a 911 line in place nationwide.

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The number 911 was chosen because it was short rotary phones were being used then and has never been used as an area code or service code previously and was easy to remember.

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Let's not forget, the ambulance that Kitty would ultimately pass away in Police arrived at 3.52 am, but the ambulance did not arrive until 4.25 am, which is a huge amount of time for a life-threatening condition.

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Not only that, but, like I mentioned, the ambulance was not equipped with any EMTs or life-saving equipment Mobile Advanced Life Support, which is the pre-hospital emergency service that provides care at a higher level for injured patients, was not established until 1969 in New York City.

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Federal regulations mandating new national EMT qualifications as minimum requirements for ambulance staff were established in 1970.

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All of these facts were left out of the public eye until the past few years.

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I actually remember learning about this case from a book years ago, and a lot of this was left out to sell a more sensational narrative.

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The rape and murder of Kitty Genovese did matter and did change the world, but not in the simplified version that I was taught in AP psychology.

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Her life ended because of several shortcomings that were not the result of apathetic New Yorkers alone.

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This is a super complicated and confusing case with lots of historical information, so hopefully I structured it in a way that made sense.

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I'll be back with another case next week.

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If you have any case suggestions, please let me know in the comments or on my Instagram at Eastern Crime Zone.

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Until then, stay safe, be kind and remember to question everything.

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Bye.