Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old bartender, was raped and stabbed to death on March 13, 1964, outside the apartment building where she lived in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York City, United States. Two weeks after the murder, The New York Times published an article claiming that thirty-seven witnesses saw or heard the attack, and that none of them called the police or came to her aid. The incident prompted inquiries into what became known as the bystander effect, or "Genovese syndrome," and the lack of any urgent response by many of Genovese's neighbors became a topic reviewed in U.S. psychology textbooks for the next four decades.

Researchers have since uncovered major inaccuracies in the Times article, and police interviews revealed that some witnesses had attempted to contact authorities. In 1964, reporters at a competing news organization discovered that the Times article was inconsistent with the facts, but were unwilling at the time to challenge Times editor Abe Rosenthal. In 2007, an article in the American Psychologist found "no evidence for the presence of 38 witnesses, or that witnesses observed the murder, or that witnesses remained inactive". In 2016, the Times called its own reporting "flawed", stating that the original story "grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived".

Winston Moseley, a 29-year-old Manhattan native, was arrested during a house burglary six days after the murder. While in custody, he confessed to killing Genovese. At his trial, Moseley was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Moseley died in prison on March 28, 2016, at the age of 81, having served 52 years.

| death_cause = Murder (asphyxiation from stab to lung) the eldest of five children of Italian-American parents Rachel () and Vincent Andronelle Genovese. Genovese was raised Catholic, living in a brownstone residence at 29 St. John's Place in Park Slope, a western Brooklyn neighborhood populated mainly by families of Italian and Irish heritage.

In her teenage years, Genovese attended the all-girl Prospect Heights High School, where she was recalled as being "self-assured beyond her years" and having a "sunny disposition". In 1954, after her mother witnessed a murder, Genovese's family moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, while Genovese, who had recently graduated from high school, remained in Brooklyn with her grandparents to prepare for her upcoming marriage. Later that year, the couple wed, but the marriage was annulled near the end of 1954 due to Genovese's sexuality as a lesbian.

After moving into an apartment in Brooklyn, Genovese worked in clerical jobs, which she found unappealing. By the late 1950s, she had accepted a position as a bartender. In August 1961 she was briefly arrested for bookmaking, as she had been taking bets on horse races from bar patrons. She and a friend, Dee Guarnieri, were fined $50 each () and she lost her job.

Genovese obtained another bartending position at Ev's Eleventh Hour Bar on Jamaica Avenue and 193rd Street in Hollis, Queens, and was soon managing the bar on behalf of its absentee owner. By working double shifts she was able to save money, which she intended to use to open an Italian restaurant. She shared her Kew Gardens apartment at 82–70 Austin Street with Mary Ann Zielonko, her girlfriend since 1963; Zielonko died in 2024 at the age of 85.

Attack

At approximately 2:30 a.m. on March 13, 1964, Genovese left Ev's Eleventh Hour Bar and began driving home in her red Fiat. While waiting for a traffic light to change on Hoover Avenue, she was spotted by Winston Moseley, who was sitting in his parked Chevrolet Corvair. Genovese arrived home around 3:15 a.m. and parked her car in the Kew Gardens Long Island Rail Road station parking lot, about from the door to her apartment, in an alleyway at the rear of the building. As she walked toward the building, Moseley, who had followed her home, exited his vehicle, which he had parked at a corner bus stop on Austin Street. Armed with a hunting knife, he approached Genovese.

Genovese ran toward the front of the building, and Moseley ran after her, overtook her and stabbed her twice in the back. Genovese screamed, "Oh my God, he stabbed me! Help me!" Several neighbors heard her cry, but only a few of them recognized the sound as a cry for help. When Robert Mozer, one of the neighbors, shouted at the attacker, "Let that girl alone!", Moseley ran away and Genovese slowly made her way toward the rear of the building, Out of view of the street and of those who may have heard or seen any sign of the initial attack, Moseley stabbed Genovese several more times before raping her, stealing $49 from her and running away again.

Records of the earliest calls to police are unclear, but the calls were not given a high priority; the incident occurred four years before New York City implemented the 9-1-1 emergency call system. One witness said his father called the police after the first attack and reported that a woman was "beat up, but got up and was staggering around". A few minutes after the second attack, another witness, Karl Ross, called friends for advice on what to do before calling the police. Genovese was picked up by an ambulance at 4:15 a.m., and died en route to the hospital. She was buried on March 16, 1964, in Lakeview Cemetery in New Canaan, Connecticut.

Police investigation

Zielonko, Genovese's girlfriend, was questioned by Detective Mitchell Sang at 7:00 a.m. on the morning after the murder. She was later interrogated for six hours by two homicide detectives, John Carroll and Jerry Burns, whose questioning centered on her relationship with Genovese. This was also the police's focus when they questioned the couple's neighbors. Initially, Zielonko was considered to be a suspect.

On March 19, 1964, six days after the stabbing, A detective recalled that a white car similar to Moseley's had been reported by some of the witnesses to Genovese's murder, and he informed Detectives Carroll and Sang. During questioning, Moseley admitted to the murders of Genovese and two other women – Annie Mae Johnson, who had been shot and burned to death in her apartment in South Ozone Park a few weeks earlier; and 15-year-old Barbara Kralik, who had been killed in her parents' Springfield Gardens home the previous July.

Trial

Moseley was charged with the murder of Genovese but was not charged with the other two murders he had admitted to.

On June 23, Moseley appeared as a defense witness in the trial of Alvin Mitchell for the murder of Barbara Kralik. After being granted immunity from prosecution, he testified that he had killed Kralik. The trial produced a hung jury, but Mitchell was convicted in a second trial.

Imprisonment and death

On March 18, 1968, Moseley escaped while being transported back to prison from Meyer Memorial Hospital in Buffalo, where he had undergone minor surgery for a self-inflicted injury. He hit the transporting correctional officer, stole his weapon and fled to a nearby vacant house owned by a Grand Island couple, Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Kulaga, where he stayed undetected for three days. On March 21, the Kulagas went to check on the house, where they encountered Moseley, who held them hostage for more than an hour, binding and gagging Mr. Kulaga and raping Mrs. Kulaga. He then took the couple's car and fled.

Moseley traveled to Grand Island where, on March 22, he broke into another house and held a woman and her daughter hostage for two hours before releasing them unharmed. He surrendered to police shortly afterward and was charged with escape and kidnapping, to which he pleaded guilty. Moseley was given two additional fifteen-year sentences to run concurrently with his life sentence.

In September 1971, Moseley participated in the Attica Prison riot. Later in the same decade, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts in sociology in prison from Niagara University. He became eligible for parole in 1984. During his first parole hearing, he told the parole board that the notoriety he faced due to his crimes made him a victim, stating, "For a victim outside, it's a one-time or one-hour or one-minute affair, but for the person who's caught, it's forever."

Moseley returned for a parole hearing on March 13, 2008, the 44th anniversary of Genovese's murder, and was again denied parole. Genovese's brother Vincent was unaware of the 2008 hearing until he was contacted by reporters for the New York Daily News.

Moseley was denied parole an eighteenth time in November 2015 and died in prison on March 28, 2016,

Reaction

Public reaction

The murder did not receive much immediate media attention. It took a remark from New York City Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy to New York Times metropolitan editor Abe Rosenthal over lunch – Rosenthal later quoted Murphy as saying, "That Queens story is one for the books" – to motivate the Times into publishing an investigative report. written by Martin Gansberg and published two weeks after the murder, claimed that thirty-eight witnesses saw the murder, but an error reduced the number of witnesses by one in the headline, "37 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police". It has been quoted and reproduced since 1964 with a corrected headline of "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police". The public view of the story crystallized around a quote from the article by an unidentified neighbor who saw part of the attack but deliberated before finally getting another neighbor to call the police, saying, "I didn't want to get involved." His June 1988 article in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (later reprinted in his book Harlan Ellison's Watching) referred to the murder as "witnessed by thirty-eight neighbors, not one of whom made the slightest effort to save her, to scream at the killer, or even to call the police". He cited reports he claimed to have read that one man, "viewing the murder from his third-floor apartment window, stated later that he rushed to turn up his radio so he wouldn't hear the woman's screams".

Public reaction to murders happening in the neighborhood supposedly did not change. According to a Times article dated December 27, 1974, ten years after Genovese's murder, 25-year-old Sandra Zahler was beaten to death early Christmas morning in an apartment within a building that overlooked the site of the Genovese attack. Neighbors again said they heard screams and "fierce struggles" but did nothing.

In an interview on NPR on March 3, 2014, Kevin Cook, author of Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America, said:

<blockquote>Thirty-eight witnesses – that was the story that came from the police. And it really is what made the story stick. Over the course of many months of research, I wound up finding a document that was a collection of the first interviews. Oddly enough, there were 49 witnesses. I was puzzled by that until I added up the entries themselves. Some of them were interviews with two or three people [who] lived in the same apartment. I believe that some harried civil servant gave that number to the police commissioner who gave it to Rosenthal, and it entered the modern history of America after that.</blockquote>

Two decades after the murder, the Chicago Tribune began an article titled "Justice in the wrong hands" by saying:

Psychological research

Harold Takooshian, writing in Psychology Today, stated that:

Psychologist Frances Cherry has suggested the interpretation of the murder as an issue of bystander intervention is incomplete. She has pointed to additional research such as that of Borofsky and Shotland demonstrating that people, especially at that time, were unlikely to intervene if they believed a man was attacking his wife or girlfriend. She has suggested that the issue might be better understood in terms of male/female power relations. The reasons include the fact that onlookers see that others are not helping either, that onlookers believe others will know better how to help, and that onlookers feel uncertain about helping while others are watching. The Genovese case thus became a classic feature of social psychology textbooks in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Inaccuracy of original reports

More recent investigations have questioned the original version of events. A 2004 article in the Times by Jim Rasenberger, published on the fortieth anniversary of Genovese's murder, raised numerous questions about claims in the original Times article. A 2007 study (confirmed in 2014 Only one witness, Joseph Fink, was aware Genovese was stabbed in the first attack, and only Karl Ross was aware of it in the second attack. Many were entirely unaware that an assault or homicide had taken place; some thought what they saw or heard was a domestic quarrel, a drunken brawl or a group of friends leaving the bar when Moseley first approached Genovese.

A 2015 documentary titled The Witness, featuring Genovese's brother William, discovered that other crime reporters knew of many problems with the story even in 1964. Immediately after the story broke, WNBC police reporter Danny Meehan discovered many inconsistencies in the original Times article, asking Gansberg why his article failed to reveal that witnesses did not feel that a murder was happening. Gansberg replied, "It would have ruined the story." Not wishing to jeopardize his career by attacking a powerful figure like Rosenthal, Meehan kept his findings secret and passed his notes to fellow WNBC reporter Gabe Pressman. As a journalism instructor, Pressman taught a course in which some of his students called Rosenthal and confronted him with the evidence. Rosenthal was irate that his editorial decisions were being questioned by journalism students and angrily berated Pressman in a phone call.

On October 12, 2016, the Times appended an Editor's Note to the online version of its 1964 article, stating that, "Later reporting by The Times and others has called into question significant elements of this account."

A confirming PBS report wrote how "papers and media outlets ran with the story;" they also added "nearly a dozen books" and when it came to film, mentioned "James Solomon's film The Witness" more than once.