What Happened to Kitty Genovese

Key Takeaways

If you’ve ever taken an introductory psychology course or scanned any psychology textbook, then it is likely that you have encountered the term “ bystander effect .”

Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death outside her Queens apartment in the early hours of 13 March 1964. A New York Times report claimed 38 witnesses saw or heard the attack and did nothing, inspiring the concept later called the bystander effect.

That witness count was later found to be far too high.

Who Is Kitty Genovese?

Catherine Susan “Kitty” Genovese was born on July 7th, 1935, in Brooklyn, New York, to Italian-American parents. She was the oldest of five children.

The family was raised in a four-family row house in Park Slope, a neighborhood known for its Italian and Irish families.

As a teenager, Genovese attended Prospect Heights High School, an all-girls school. She thrived in her English and music classes and was elected “Class Cut-Up” by her graduating class of 712 students.

She was always known as a talkative and energetic person who was very popular in school (Worthen, 2019).

In 1954, her mother witnessed a horrifying murder that prompted the family to move out of the city and to New Canaan, Connecticut.

Genovese had just graduated from high school. Rather than follow her family to the suburbs, she stayed in the city with her grandparents to prepare for her marriage to Rocco Anthony Fazzolare.

Fazzolare, an army officer and engineer, dated Genovese while he was in college and she was in high school. And although the couple did marry on October 31st, 1954, the marriage was soon annulled, and the two divorced in 1956 (Worthen, 2019).

In the late 1950s, Genovese moved into her own apartment in Brooklyn. She found office work as a secretary unappealing, so she became a bartender instead.

In August 1961, Genovese was arrested for bookmaking. She and a friend, Dee Guarnieri, had been taking bets on horse races from bar patrons; both were fined $50, and Genovese lost her job (Worthen, 2019).

Genovese was a headstrong and hardworking individual, so she soon found a job at Ev’s Eleventh Hour Bar in Hollis, Queens. She eventually became the manager, filling in for the absentee owner.

Genovese was reliable and hardworking, and her salary reflected it: about $750 a month, roughly $6,800 today. She was saving this money to open her own Italian restaurant (Worthen, 2019).

On March 13th, 1963, Genovese met Mary Ann Zielonko at Swing Rendezvous, an underground lesbian bar in Greenwich Village. The two fell fast for one another and ultimately decided to move in together.

They found an apartment on the second floor of a two-story building next to the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) in Kew Gardens, Queens (Worthen, 2019).

This new apartment in Kew Gardens would be the last place Genovese ever lived.

On March 13th, 1964, exactly a year after she met Zielonko, Genovese was stabbed to death. She was coming home from a late-night shift at the bar.

Her murder devastated the community. When reports later claimed that 38 witnesses saw or heard the attack and did nothing, Genovese’s story gained widespread attention.

Her legacy lives on in movies, books, music, and psychology textbooks. Scholars still study the “bystander effect” her case inspired, and piece together what really happened that March night (Worthen, 2019).

The Murder of Kitty Genovese

Around 2:30 a.m. on March 13th, 1964, Genovese began driving home to her Kew Gardens apartment. She was eager to see her girlfriend on their first anniversary.

At a traffic light on Hoover Avenue, Genovese was first spotted by Winston Moseley as he sat in his parked car. Moseley, a 29-year-old business-machine operator, had left his wife and two sons asleep at home in South Ozone Park, Queens, around 1 a.m.

He drove around for hours, with a sharp hunting knife in his pocket, looking for a victim. And just as he was about to give up, he spotted Genovese at around 3 a.m. (Skoller, 2008).

Roughly 45 minutes after leaving the bar, Genovese parked in the Kew Gardens LIRR lot, just feet from her building’s front door. As she walked toward the entrance, Moseley got out of his own car, parked nearby on Austin Street (see diagram below).

He caught her with a hunting knife as she tried to run toward the building. He overtook her and stabbed her twice in the back (Skoller, 2008).

Diagram by Joseph De May (2004), based on the map used at Winston Moseley’s 1964 trial. It traces his route and marks where witnesses were located.

Being three in the morning, the area was completely desolate. Franken’s Pharmacy and Interlude Coffeehouse were both closed, and most people were asleep. However, Robert Mozer, one of Genovese’s neighbors, awoke, saw the struggle below, and called out, “Let that girl alone!” (Krajicek, 2011).

Realizing that residents had awoken after Genovese screamed, “Oh my God, he stabbed me! Help me!” and in fear of being identified, Moseley quickly fled from the scene and back into his car.

Genovese got to her feet, not having suffered any fatal wounds, and tried to make it to her building’s entrance. Finally, inside, she collapsed in the vestibule right before the stairs.

Moseley drove off, covering his face with a wide-brimmed hat, but returned 10 minutes later and found Genovese barely conscious in a hallway at the back of the building. Out of sight of the street, he stabbed her again, raped her, and stole $49 from her wallet (Krajicek, 2011).

About 30 minutes after the attack began, Moseley fled the scene. Sophia Farrar, a close friend, found Genovese and held her until help arrived (Lemann, 2014).

The first call to police was logged at around 3:50 a.m., and officers arrived within two minutes. Genovese died of her stab wounds on the way to Queens General Hospital.

She was buried three days later in Lakeview Cemetery in New Canaan, Connecticut (Pelonero, 2014).

The Aftermath

Moseley’s Conviction

Following the incident, the coroner’s report found 13 stab wounds and several other defensive wounds, showing that Genovese had fought back.

Homicide detectives began the search for her attacker, initially interviewing Zielonko, Genovese’s girlfriend. They quickly dismissed her as a suspect but only after having grilled her for six hours about her relationship with Genovese.

Six days after the murder, police arrested Winston Moseley on suspicion of robbery in Ozone Park, Queens. A television set found in his car’s trunk linked him to the crime.

A detective remembered that the same color car had been reported by witnesses to Genovese’s murder. During questioning, Moseley admitted to having murdered Genovese and two other women, Annie Mae Johnson and Barbara Kralik.

He was found guilty of all three murders and sentenced to death on June 15th, 1964. However, his sentence was later reduced to 20 years to life.

Moseley later escaped from Attica Prison in 1968, adding 30 years to his sentence, and was denied parole 18 times. He died in prison on March 28th, 2016, at age 81 (Kassin, 2017).

Public Response

Genovese’s murder barely made news at first. The New York Times ran only a short item, “Queens Woman Is Stabbed to Death in Front of Home,” on March 14th.

That changed two weeks later, when NYPD Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy mentioned the case to Times metropolitan editor A. M. Rosenthal over lunch. Rosenthal commissioned Martin Gansberg to write it up.

The resulting article, “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police,” ran on March 27th, 1964, and claimed 38 witnesses stood by as Genovese was stabbed. It made national headlines, and the presumed public apathy sparked widespread debate about bystander intervention.

The Bystander Effect

The bystander effect is the psychological finding that people are less likely to help a victim when other people are present. It is often used to explain why Genovese’s neighbors were slow to act.

Two mechanisms explain the effect. Diffusion of responsibility is when each witness assumes someone else will step in. Pluralistic ignorance is when an ambiguous situation is misread as safe because no one looks alarmed.

Aim: Darley and Latané (1968) designed an experiment to isolate diffusion of responsibility from other explanations, by placing bystanders where they could not see or hear each other.

Method: 72 students at New York University discussed personal problems over an intercom, believing one to five other students were listening in separate rooms. Partway through, one “student” (an actor on tape) appeared to have a seizure and called for help.

Results: The more people participants believed were listening, the less likely and the slower they were to report the seizure. 85% helped when they thought they were the only other listener, compared with just 31% when they believed four others were also listening.

Conclusion: Non-intervention was not indifference. Participants who did not help still showed visible signs of distress, but they had diffused their sense of personal responsibility across the group they believed was listening.

Aim: Latané and Darley (1968) tested whether other people’s calm reactions stop someone from recognising an ambiguous event, like smoke seeping into a room, as a real emergency.

Method: Male students filled out a questionnaire in a waiting room as smoke puffed in through a vent. Some sat alone, some sat with two passive actors told to ignore it, and some sat with two other real participants.

Results: 75% of participants sitting alone reported the smoke. Only 10% did when seated with two actors who shrugged it off, and just 38% of the three-person groups produced even one reporter.

Conclusion: Seeing other people stay calm made participants reinterpret the smoke as something harmless, like steam or air conditioning, rather than a fire. The presence of others did not just discourage action, it changed how people understood the situation itself.

The Genovese case itself illustrates the effect, although the popular “38 witnesses” story was later shown to be exaggerated (see Inaccuracies Uncovered, below).

Psychologists have also mapped how people decide whether to help, in five steps:

• Notice: Register that something out of the ordinary is happening.
• Interpret: Decide the situation really is an emergency.
• Take responsibility: Judge that helping is personally up to them.
• Choose how to help: Work out what form of help to give.
• Act: Carry out the chosen helping behaviour.

Another approach is a simple cost-benefit analysis: bystanders weigh up the costs and benefits of helping, then choose whichever option seems to work out best for them (Blagg, 2019).

How likely someone is to help also depends on how clearly the situation reads as an emergency. In one study, only 34% of people gave a stranger a dime when simply asked, but 72% did when told the dime was needed because a wallet had been stolen (Latané, 1970).

Bystanders also respond more when a situation is clearly severe. One study of real emergency medical calls found that the level of bystander help tracked how serious the emergency was (Faul et al., 2016).

People are also more likely to step in when the victim belongs to their own social group rather than to strangers (Rutkowski et al., 1983).

Inaccuracies Uncovered

The “38 witnesses” figure has not held up. A 2004 New York Times article and a formal 2007 study both challenged the original report, and a 2015 documentary, The Witness, added more detail.

Aim: Manning, Levine, and Collins (2007) tested whether the textbook story of “38 witnesses who did nothing” is actually supported by the historical record.

Method: They examined the trial record, police files, press reports, and the standard psychology-textbook retelling, checking three specific claims: that there were 38 witnesses, that they watched the murder, and that they did nothing.

Results: All three claims fell apart. The “38” figure appears nowhere in police records, and the murder happened in two attacks ten minutes apart.

The fatal second attack took place in a vestibule almost no one could see. At least two neighbors called the police, one man shouted and drove Moseley off, and a friend held the dying Genovese in her arms.

Conclusion: Manning and colleagues concluded that the Genovese story works better as a modern parable than as historical fact. They argued the myth had narrowed psychology’s questions toward why bystanders fail, rather than what makes intervention succeed, without denying that the bystander effect itself is real.

Although about a dozen people did hear or see part of the attack, many assumed it was a domestic quarrel or a drunken brawl rather than a real emergency (Rasenberger, 2006).

The first attack had already punctured Genovese’s lungs, so she likely could not scream loudly enough to make the danger obvious.

A 2015 documentary, The Witness, later found that investigators knew about these errors back in 1964, but the reporter kept them out of the story rather than undercut it. Some people, it seems, cared more about a dramatic narrative than about what actually happened that night.

In Pop Culture

In addition to the documentary, Genovese’s story has been the subject of many television episodes, books, and songs.

The case inspired the Law & Order episode “Remand” and the Law & Order: SVU episode “41 Witnesses.” It also inspired season 2, episode 1 of the Investigation Discovery Channel’s A Crime to Remember.

Harlan Ellison’s short story “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, and Ryan David Jahn’s novel Good Neighbors all draw on the case.

The case also inspired two songs: Phil Ochs’s “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends” and Ruby Lynn Reyner’s “Kitty.”

Although there are many controversies surrounding this brutal murder, Genovese continues to live on through many avenues of society today.

Legal and Cultural Legacy

The Push for a National Emergency Number

Beyond psychology, the Genovese case helped push the United States toward a national emergency number. Until the late 1960s, callers had to know their local precinct’s number, and the belief that Genovese’s neighbors could not easily call for help fed the push for a single, simple number.

AT&T announced 911 as the national emergency number in 1968, and the first call was placed in Haleyville, Alabama, on 16 February 1968. The United Kingdom’s 999 service, created in 1937, expanded around the same time, and policy briefings during the Genovese aftermath cited it as a model.

Duty-to-Rescue Laws

The case also fuelled a lasting legal debate about the duty to rescue. Common law in the US and UK has traditionally placed no general obligation on a stranger to help a stranger.

A minority of US states, including Vermont, Minnesota, and Rhode Island, now have “Bad Samaritan” laws. Several European countries have similar laws, making it an offence to withhold reasonable help from someone in grave danger. Vermont’s 1967 duty-to-rescue statute directly cited the Genovese case.

In March 1984, experts gathered in New York for the Catherine (Kitty) Genovese Memorial Conference on Bad Samaritanism. Stanley Milgram, the psychologist famous for his obedience experiments, said the case “struck to the very heart of the nature of human fear.”

Critical Evaluation

The bystander effect is one of social psychology’s best-documented findings, but the Genovese case that inspired it was exaggerated. Modern research supports the phenomenon while showing it is smaller and more context-dependent than the original story suggested.

Contemporary Research

The 2011 Meta-Analysis: Is the Effect Real?

Aim: Fischer et al. (2011) conducted the first modern meta-analysis of the bystander effect, testing whether it holds up in dangerous emergencies as well as in the safe, staged emergencies used in most studies.

Method: The team combined 105 effect sizes from more than 7,700 participants across the bystander literature from the 1960s to 2010, then tested whether danger, the type of bystander, and other factors changed the size of the effect.

Results: The overall effect was small but reliable (g = −0.35): people were less likely to help when others were present. The effect shrank in dangerous situations and disappeared, or reversed, when a perpetrator was physically present.

Conclusion: The bystander effect is real but modest, and far smaller than the dramatic contrasts seen in the original 1968 experiments. In genuinely dangerous emergencies, bystanders are often a source of help rather than inhibition.

CCTV Evidence: Intervention Is the Norm

Philpot et al. (2020) took a different approach: instead of a lab experiment, they analysed CCTV footage of 219 real public conflicts in Amsterdam, Cape Town, and Lancaster. At least one bystander stepped in during 90.9% of incidents, and each extra bystander made help slightly more likely, not less.

This finding flips the classic story: in real, unambiguous public attacks, intervention is the norm rather than the exception. It suggests the bystander effect is partly an artefact of the safe, staged, ambiguous scenarios used in lab studies.

The Neuroscience of Freezing

Aim: Hortensius and de Gelder (2018) reviewed a decade of brain-imaging research to ask whether bystander inaction is better explained as a fast, automatic reflex than as a slow, reasoned decision.

Method: They combined findings from brain-scanning (fMRI), brain-wave (EEG), and skin-conductance studies of people witnessing emergencies alone or with others present.

Findings: When others are present, brain regions that prepare the body to act become less active, while regions tied to self-focused threat, like the anterior insula, become more active. People who feel more empathy than personal distress are the ones who help.

Conclusion: Freezing in an emergency looks more like a fast neural competition between fear and empathy than a slow, five-step decision. This reframes the classic model as a description of what people report afterwards, not what their brains do in the moment.

References

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Darley, J. M., & Latané, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8(4, Pt. 1), 377–383.

Faul, M., Aikman, S. N., & Sasser, S. M. (2016). Bystander intervention prior to the arrival of emergency medical services: comparing assistance across types of medical emergencies. Prehospital Emergency Care, 20 (3), 317-323.

Fischer, P., Krueger, J. I., Greitemeyer, T., Vogrincic, C., Kastenmüller, A., Frey, D., Heene, M., Wicher, M., & Kainbacher, M. (2011). The bystander-effect: A meta-analytic review on bystander intervention in dangerous and non-dangerous emergencies. Psychological Bulletin, 137(4), 517–537.

Gansberg, M. (1964, March 27). 37 who saw murder didn”t call the police. The New York Times, p. 1.

Hortensius, R., & de Gelder, B. (2018). From empathy to apathy: The bystander effect revisited. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(4), 249–256.

Kassin, S. M. (2017). The killing of Kitty Genovese: what else does this case tell us?. Perspectives on psychological Science, 12 (3), 374-381.

Krajicek, D. (2011). The killing of Kitty Genovese: 47 years later, still holds sway over New Yorkers. New York Daily News .

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Lemann, N. (2014, March 10). A call for help: What the Kitty Genovese story really means. The New Yorker.

Manning, R., Levine, M., & Collins, A. (2007). The Kitty Genovese murder and the social psychology of helping: The parable of the 38 witnesses. American Psychologist, 62 (6), 555–562.

Pelonero, C. (2014). Kitty Genovese: A true account of a public murder and its private consequences. Skyhorse Publishing.

Philpot, R., Liebst, L. S., Levine, M., Bernasco, W., & Lindegaard, M. R. (2020). Would I be helped? Cross-national CCTV footage shows that intervention is the norm in public conflicts. American Psychologist, 75(1), 66–75.

Queens Woman Is Stabbed to Death in Front of Home. (1964). The New York Times, p. 26.

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Rasenberger, J. (2006). Nightmare on Austin street. American Heritage Publishing Company, Incorporated.

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Rutkowski, G. K., Gruder, C. L., & Romer, D. (1983). Group cohesiveness, social norms, and bystander intervention. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44 (3), 545.

Skoller, C. E. (2008). Twisted confessions: The true story behind the Kitty Genovese and Barbara Kralik murder trials. BookPros, LLC.
Solomon, J. (Director). (2015). The Witness [Video file]. FilmRise.

Worthen, M. (2019). Kitty Genovese. Retrieved from https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/kitty-genovese