Super Freakonomics Part 14

The thirty-eight witnesses who watched Kitty Genovese's brutal murder come to mind. What's so puzzling about this case is how little altruism was required for someone to have called the police from the safety of his or her home. That's why the same question-how could those people have acted so horribly?-has lingered all these years.

But perhaps there's a better question: did they act so horribly?

The foundation for nearly everything ever written or said about Genovese's murder was that provocative New York Times article, which wasn't published until two weeks after the crime. It had been conceived at a lunch between two men: A.M. Rosenthal, the paper's metro editor, and Michael Joseph Murphy, the city's police commissioner.

Genovese's killer, Winston Moseley, was already under arrest and had confessed to the crime. The story wasn't big news, especially in the Times. It was just another murder, way out in Queens, not the kind of thing the paper of record gave much s.p.a.ce.

Strangely, though, Moseley also confessed to a second murder even though the police had already arrested a different man for that crime.

"What about that double confession out in Queens?" Rosenthal asked Murphy at lunch. "What's that story all about anyway?"

Instead of answering, Murphy changed the subject.

"That Queens story is something else," he said, and then told Rosenthal that thirty-eight people had watched Kitty Genovese be murdered without calling the police.

"Thirty-eight?" Rosenthal asked.

"Yes, thirty-eight," Murphy said. "I've been in this business a long time, but this beats everything."

Rosenthal, as he later wrote, "was sure that the Commissioner was exaggerating." If so, Murphy may have had sufficient incentive. A story about two men arrested for the same murder clearly had the potential to embarra.s.s the police. Furthermore, given the prolonged and brutal nature of the Genovese murder, the police may have been touchy about who caught the blame. Why hadn't they been able to stop it?

Despite Rosenthal's skepticism, he sent Martin Gansberg, a longtime copy editor who'd recently become a reporter, to Kew Gardens. Four days later, one of the most indelible first sentences in newspaper history appeared on the Times's front page:

For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.

For a brand-new reporter like Gansberg and an ambitious editor like Rosenthal-he later wrote a book, Thirty-Eight Witnesses, about the case and became the Times's top editor-it was an unqualified blockbuster. It isn't often that a pair of lowly newspapermen can tell a tale that will set the public agenda, for decades hence, on a topic as heady as civic apathy. So they certainly had strong incentives to tell the story.

But was it true?

The best person to answer that question may be Joseph De May Jr., a sixty-year-old maritime lawyer who lives in Kew Gardens. He has an open face, thinning black hair, hazel eyes, and a hearty disposition. On a brisk Sunday morning not long ago, he gave us a tour of the neighborhood.

"Now the first attack occurred roughly in here," he said, pausing on the sidewalk in front of a small shop on Austin Street. "And Kitty parked her car over there, in the train station parking lot," he said, gesturing to an area perhaps thirty-five yards away.

The neighborhood has changed little since the crime. The buildings, streets, sidewalks, and parking areas remain as they were. The Mowbray, a well-kept brick apartment house, still stands across the street from the scene of the first attack.

De May moved to the neighborhood in 1974, a decade after Genovese was killed. The murder wasn't something he thought about much. Several years ago, De May, a member of the local historical society, built a website devoted to Kew Gardens history. After a time, he felt he should add a section about the Genovese murder, since it was the only reason Kew Gardens was known to the outside world, if it was known at all.

As he gathered old photographs and news clippings, he began to find discrepancies with the official Genovese history. The more intently he reconstructed the crime, chasing down legal doc.u.ments and interviewing old-timers, the more convinced he became that the legendary story of the thirty-eight apathetic witnesses was-well, a bit too heavy on legend. Like the lawyer he is, De May dissected the Times article and identified six factual errors in the first paragraph alone.

The legend held that thirty-eight people "remained at their windows in fascination" and "watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks" but "not one person telephoned the police during the a.s.sault."

The real story, according to De May, went more like this:

The first attack occurred at about 3:20 A.M., when most people were asleep. Genovese cried out for help when Moseley stabbed her in the back. This awoke some Mowbray tenants, who rushed to their windows.

The sidewalk was not well lit, so it may have been hard to make sense of what was happening. As Moseley later testified, "[I]t was late at night and I was pretty sure that n.o.body could see that well out of the window." What someone likely would have seen at that point was a man standing over a woman on the ground.

At least one Mowbray tenant, a man, shouted out the window: "Leave that girl alone!" This prompted Moseley to run back to his car, which was parked less than a block away. "I could see that she had gotten up and wasn't dead," Moseley testified. He backed his car down the street, he said, to obscure his license plate.

Genovese struggled to her feet and slowly made her way around to the back of the building, toward her apartment's entrance. But she didn't make it all the way, collapsing inside the vestibule of a neighboring apartment.

Roughly ten minutes after the first attack, Moseley returned. It is unclear how he tracked her in the dark; he may have followed a trail of blood. He attacked her again inside the vestibule, then fled for good.

The Times article, as with most crime articles, especially of that era, relied heavily on information given by the police. At first the police said Moseley attacked Genovese three separate times, so that is what the newspaper published. But only two attacks occurred. (The police eventually corrected this but, as in a game of Telephone, the error took on a life of its own.)

So the first attack, which was brief, occurred in the middle of the night on a darkened sidewalk. And the second attack occurred some time later, in an enclosed vestibule, out of view of anyone who might have seen the first attack.

Who, then, were "the thirty-eight witnesses"?

That number, also supplied by the police, was apparently a whopping overstatement. "We only found half a dozen that saw what was going on, that we could use," one of the prosecutors later recalled. This included one neighbor who, according to De May, may have witnessed part of the second attack, but was apparently so drunk that he was reluctant to phone the police.

But still: even if the murder was not a b.l.o.o.d.y and prolonged spectacle that took place in full view of dozens of neighbors, why didn't anyone call the police for help?

Even that part of the legend may be false. When De May's website went live, one reader who found it was named Mike Hoffman. He was just shy of fifteen years old when Genovese was murdered, and he lived on the Mowbray's second floor.

As Hoffman recalls, he was awakened by a commotion on the street. He opened his bedroom window but still couldn't make out what was being said. He thought perhaps it was a lovers' quarrel and, more angry than concerned, he "yelled for them to 'Shut the f.u.c.k up!'"

Hoffman says he heard other people shouting, and when he looked out the window, he saw a man run away. To keep the man in view, Hoffman went to the other window in his room, but the figure faded into the darkness. Hoffman returned to the first window and saw a woman on the sidewalk stagger to her feet. "That's when my dad came in my room and yelled at me for yelling and waking him up."

Hoffman told his father what happened. "This guy just beat up a lady and ran away!" Hoffman and his father watched as the woman, walking with great difficulty, rounded the corner. Then everything was quiet. "Dad called the police in case she was hurt badly and needed medical attention," Hoffman says. "In those days, there was no 911. We had to dial the operator and wait for the eventual connection to the police operator. It took several minutes to get connected to the police and my father told them what we had seen and heard, and that she did walk away but appeared dazed. At that point we couldn't see or hear anything else and we all went back to sleep."

It wasn't until morning that the Hoffmans found out what happened. "We were interviewed by detectives and learned that she had went around the back of the building across the street, and the guy came back to finish her off," Hoffman says. "I remember my dad saying to them that if they had come when we called them, she'd probably still be alive."

Hoffman believes the police response was slow because the situation his father described was not a murder in progress but rather a domestic disturbance-which, by the looks of it, had concluded. The attacker had fled and the victim had walked off, if shakily, under her own power. With a low-priority call like that, Hoffman says, "the cops don't put down the donuts as fast as if it were to come across as a homicide call."

The police acknowledged that someone did call after the second attack, in the vestibule, and they arrived shortly thereafter. But Hoffman believes their response may have been based on his father's original call. Or, perhaps, there was more than one call: Joseph De May has heard from other Mowbray tenants who claim to have phoned the police after the first attack.

It is hard to say how reliable Hoffman's memory of the events may be. (He did write and sign an affidavit of his recollections.) It is also hard to say if De May's revisionist history is fully accurate. (To his credit, he points out that "an undetermined number of ear witnesses reacted badly" that night, and perhaps could have done more to help; he is also reluctant to cast himself as the infallible source on all things Genovese.)

De May and Hoffman both have an incentive to exonerate their neighborhood from the black eye the Genovese murder gave it. That said, De May strives hard to not be an apologist, and Hoffman seems to be a pretty good witness-a man who, now in his late fifties and living in Florida, spent twenty years as a New York City policeman and retired as a lieutenant.

Now, considering the various incentives at play, which is more unbelievable: the De MayHoffman version of events or the conventional wisdom that a whole neighborhood of people stood around and watched, refusing to help, as a man murdered a woman?

Before you answer, consider also the circ.u.mstances under which Winston Moseley was ultimately arrested. It happened a few days after the Genovese murder. At about three o'clock in the afternoon in Corona, another Queens neighborhood, Moseley was seen carrying a television out of a home belonging to a family named Bannister and loading it into his car.

A neighbor approached and asked what he was doing. Moseley said he was helping the Bannisters move. The neighbor went back in his house and phoned another neighbor to ask if the Bannisters were really moving.

"Absolutely not," said the second neighbor. He called the police while the first neighbor went back outside and loosened the distributor cap on Moseley's car.

When Moseley returned to his car and found it wouldn't start, he fled on foot but was soon chased down by a policeman. Under interrogation, he freely admitted to killing Kitty Genovese a few nights earlier.

Which means that a man who became infamous because he murdered a woman whose neighbors failed to intervene was ultimately captured because of...a neighbor's intervention.