Kitty Genovese murder case

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The murder case of Kitty Genovese became known through the supposed inaction of the neighbors and led to psychological investigations into the phenomenon known as the " spectator effect " or "Genovese syndrome". The victim Catherine Susan Genovese (born July 7, 1935 in Brooklyn , † March 13, 1964 in Queens ), better known under the name Kitty Genovese, was a New Yorker who stabbed to death near her home in the Queensian district of Kew Gardens of Winston Moseley has been.

prehistory

Catherine "Kitty" Genovese grew up as the eldest child of Rachael and Vincent Genovese in Brooklyn , New York. Kitty was sociable, articulate, and interested in Latin music and dance. In 1954 she graduated from Prospect Heights High School successfully. That same year, the family decided to move to New Canaan , Connecticut , after their mother witnessed a murder in the city. Kitty, on the other hand, was 19 years old at the time and decided to stay in New York.

In 1964 she worked as the bar manager at Ev's 11th Hour Sports Bar . She shared her apartment with her friend Mary Ann Zielonko.

The attack

Genovese drove home in the early morning of March 13, 1964. She arrived around 3:15 a.m. and parked about 30 meters from the door of her apartment. Moseley ran after Genovese and stabbed her twice in the back. She exclaimed, “Oh my god, he stung me! Help! ”Lights came on in a ten-story apartment building on Austin Street. A citizen opened the window and shouted: “Leave the girl alone!” Moseley ran to his car and drove away. Some residents later said they assumed the noise was around the usual closing time of Old Bailey, a busy corner bar. A man who saw the attack testified that he called the police.

Genovese dragged himself around the corner of the building to her apartment at around 3:30 a.m. She was badly injured, but now out of the sight of anyone who would have reason to believe she might need help. Moseley was waiting in his car a few blocks away to see if the police were coming. When this was not the case, he made the decision to return. He disguised himself with a hat and systematically searched the apartment complex until he found Genovese at the back entrance. Defensive cuts on her hands indicated that Genovese had been fighting for her life when Moseley attacked her with a knife, raped her, and robbed her of $ 49.

At around 3:50 a.m., a few minutes after the second attack, the witness Karl Ross called the police. There was a significant delay because Ross was homosexual and therefore did not want to get into trouble with the authorities. Homosexuality was forbidden and the police regularly attacked homosexuals. Therefore Ross did not want to call the police from his phone and he later said the famous sentence "I didn't want to get involved" (I didn't want to get involved). So instead of using his own phone, he first climbed the roof into a friend's apartment and called the police from there. He may not have been the first to call the police, but records of all previous calls are fuzzy and have not been given high priority by the police as they suspected a perfectly normal relationship argument. Police and medical personnel arrived minutes after Ross called; However, Genovese died while driving to the hospital.

In the later investigations, 38 people were interviewed by the police. The vast majority of these 38 people were not eyewitnesses. Some had only heard something, others hadn't even woken up, and many had no idea that an assault or murder was going on; some thought what they saw or heard was a relationship fight or a group of friends leaving the bar. Only Karl Ross and another neighbor by the name of Joseph Fink had seen the attack clearly. Fink had done nothing afterwards.

The culprit

Winston Moseley (* 1935, † March 28, 2016), an Office Assistant ( business machine operator ) , was arrested five days later in connection with another crime. He was just removing valuables from someone else's apartment in Queens when neighbor Raoul Cleary asked him what he was doing there. Moseley claimed to be a moving house, whereupon Cleary called an acquaintance and found out that none of his neighbors were moving. Cleary called the police and Moseley was arrested; so he was arrested by the intervention of an innocent bystander.

In police custody, Moseley confessed not only to the murder of Kitty Genovese, but also to two other murders, both of which had involved sexual assault. Subsequent psychiatric examinations indicated that Moseley was a necrophile . He was sentenced to death for murder, but the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. During a trip to a hospital in Buffalo, New York to be operated on, he overpowered a security guard in 1968 and took five hostages, one of whom he sexually assaulted before he could be arrested again.

Moseley died in custody on March 28, 2016, aged 81, after having been incarcerated for nearly 52 years since 1964.

The reaction

The story of Genovese's murder almost instantly became a parable of the assumed coldness of feeling, or at least apathy towards the distress of another person, be it New York City or America in general. Much of that assessment of the event was in response to an article in the New York Times published two weeks after the murder. The article carried the lurid headline Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police ("Thirty-eight saw the murder and did n't call the police"); Public opinion on the event was shaped by a quote from the last line of the article, which reproduces an unknown neighbor: “ I didn't want to get involved ” (German: “ I didn't want to be involved”).

While this article vilified Genovese's neighbors, the thought of "thirty-eight onlookers idling" was misleading. The article started like this:

"For more than half an hour thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens."

"For over half an hour, thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens of Queens watched a killer chase a woman and stab her in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens."

This entry is dramatic, but factually wrong. There were no 38 witnesses, rather this corresponded to the number of the first interrogations. Due to the layout of the building and the fact that each attack took place in a different location due to Genovese's attempt to escape her attacker, no witness would have been able to see the entire attack. Most heard only parts of the incident without realizing the seriousness of the situation, a few saw only a small portion of the initial assault, and there were no witnesses to see the eventual rape and attack in the outer hallway that led to Genovese's death .

Rebecca Solnit explains the inaction of the neighbors in the wider context of sexual violence against women. She writes: "Terms for acts like date rape, rape in marriage, sexual abuse within or outside the family had yet to be invented." Peter Baker recalls the misinterpretation of the assumed coldness of feeling when he writes that the neighbors viewed the stranger's brutal attack as an act of relationship.

Regardless, media attention paid to the murder led to reform of the NYPD's telephone reporting system ; the system at the time of the murder was often inefficient and directed callers to the wrong departments. The melodramatic reporting also led to extensive research into the bystander effect in the field of psychology. In addition, some communities organized neighborhood watch programs and equivalents for apartment complexes to help people in need.

Artistic reactions

The book An act of violence by Ryan David Jahn based on the Murder of Kitty Genovese. The event is represented by fictional people, but the author put quotes from the original police reports into their mouths.

Folk singer Phil Ochs alludes to the Genovese murder in the first lines of his song Outside a Small Circle of Friends .

In the Watchmen comic series , a woman orders a dress made of a new material, but she doesn't pick it up, whereupon Walter Joseph Kovacs takes it home and experiments with it. Upon learning of Kitty Genovese's death and her neighbors' alleged indifference to the crime, he concludes that she was the woman who ordered the dress. He cuts the fabric into a mask and takes on a new identity as the superhero Rorschach in order to avenge powerless victims of crime.

The cult film The Bloody Path of God begins with a priest who uses the story of Kitty Genovese in a sermon to illustrate that inactive observation of a bad deed is as bad, or even worse, than the bad deed itself.

The 1975 television movie Death Scream was vaguely based on the murder of Kitty Genovese.

The French writer Didier Decoin processed the murder of Kitty Genoveve in 2009 in his novel Est-ce ainsi que les femmes meurent? ( Is this how women die? ). In 2011 a German translation was published under the title Der Tod der Kitty Genovese . In terms of content, Decoins work adheres closely to the actual events and was filmed in 2012 by Lucas Belvaux under the title 38 témoins .

The British composer Will Todd dealt with the situation in his piece The Screams of Kitty Genovese for 12 singing actors and small ensemble (1999).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bryan Ethier: True Crime: New York City: The City's Most Notorious Criminal Cases . Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, PA 2010, ISBN 978-0-8117-3629-9 , pp. 26-27.
  2. ↑ a b c d nydailynews.com: The killing of Kitty Genovese: 47 years later, still holds sway over New Yorkers ( Memento from October 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ^ A b Rutger Bregman, “Basically good: A new history of humanity” Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2020, ISBN 978-3-498-00200-8
  4. ↑ ROBERT D. McFADDEN: Winston Moseley, Who Killed Kitty Genovese, Dies in Prison at 81. April 4, 2016, accessed April 5, 2016 .
  5. ↑ Saul M. Kassin, 'The Killing of Kitty Genovese: What Else Does This Case Tell Us?' Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol. 12, Issue 3 (2017)
  6. ^ Martin Gansberg: Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police. In: New York Times. March 27, 1964, accessed July 24, 2007 .
  7. ↑ Rebecca Solnit: When Men Explain the World to Me: Extended new edition with 2 new and previously unpublished essays . Tempo, 2017, ISBN 978-3-455-00348-2 ( google.ch [accessed on February 22, 2020]).
  8. ↑ The "viewer effect" is also available for rats , on n-tv from July 9, 2020
  9. ^ Text of the song by Phil Ochs: Outside of A Small Circle of Friends. Retrieved July 24, 2007 .
  10. ↑ Decoin, Didier: Est ce ainsi que les femmes meurent? Grasset & Fasquelle, ISBN 2-246-68221-5
  11. ↑ Decoin, Didier: The death of the Kitty Genovese Ark, trans. v. Bettina Bach, ISBN 3-7160-2660-3