The List That Was Never Made

This is the paragraph, as printed on the front page of the New York Times on 27 March 1964, two weeks after the murder.

"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. Twice, the sound of their voices and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out and stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead."

The reporter was Martin Gansberg. The headline was "37 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police. Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector". The editor who drove it, A. M. Rosenthal, published a book later that year called Thirty Eight Witnesses.

Kitty Genovese was murdered and sexually assaulted in the early morning of 13 March 1964 in Kew Gardens. The killing had already been reported the same day by the Long Island Press, in a short item headed "Woman, 28, Knifed to Death". It was the Times piece a fortnight later that made it permanent.

What the trial record contains

In 2007 three psychologists, Rachel Manning, Mark Levine and Alan Collins, went back to the transcripts of the trial of Winston Moseley and to the archive around it, and published what they found in American Psychologist.

Five witnesses from the apartments overlooking Austin Street were called: Robert Mozer, Andre Picq, Irene Frost, Samuel Koshkin and Sophie Farrar. Of the five, three were eyewitnesses who saw Genovese and Moseley together.

It is possible there were others who would not come forward. Charles Skoller, the assistant district attorney at the time, said two witnesses were kept off the stand because their conduct might have distracted the jury from the death penalty he wanted. He also said, plainly, that he believed many people heard the screams and that it could have been more than thirty eight. But on what could be used in court his account is exact: "we only found about half a dozen that saw what was going on, that we could use".

No list of the thirty eight has ever been made available.

What could be seen from a window

There were two attacks, not three. That was corrected in later Times reporting.

The first was on the street. Moseley was interrupted and left. Genovese, badly hurt, moved round to the back of the building, out of the line of sight of everyone in the apartments across the road. The second attack, the sexual assault and the killing, happened inside the stairwell of 92 to 96 Austin Street, where none of the trial witnesses could see anything at all.

The geometry did the work that the story attributes to character. Given where the buildings stand and where each attack happened, it was impossible for all but one of the known witnesses to have followed the whole thing.

What the eyewitnesses described seeing, in their own words at trial, is not what the parable requires either. Irene Frost looked out and saw two people "standing close together, not fighting or anything", and went back to bed. Andre Picq saw a woman "laying down and a man was bending over her and beating her". Robert Mozer looked out and shouted, and Moseley went away. There was, in other words, enough intervention from those windows to break off the first attack, which is the opposite of the thing the story is famous for.

Somebody called, and somebody came

On the question of the police, two things need saying at once.

The first is that a sworn affidavit from a former New York police officer, who was a fifteen year old eyewitness that night, states that his father telephoned the police station after the first attack. Residents made similar claims when Moseley applied unsuccessfully for a retrial in 1995.

The second is what telephoning the police meant in 1964. There was no 911 system. You rang your local precinct, and Rosenthal himself recorded that callers were often given what he called the bitter edge of officers' tongues. Austin Street had a bar on it with a reputation for trouble, which cannot have helped, and one report has that bar closing early that night because a fight had broken out.

And then there is Sophie Farrar, who lived on Austin Street. Carl Ross telephoned her about what was happening. She called the police and went round to the building, and she was with Kitty Genovese in the stairwell. Genovese was still alive when the police arrived.

The researchers are careful here and it is worth being careful with them: a collection of retrospective accounts is not firm ground for deciding exactly who did what. Their conclusion is narrower and harder to argue with. The available evidence does not support the story of the thirty eight.

Why it stuck

The story went into psychology and stayed. Bibb Latané and John Darley began the laboratory work on bystander intervention because of it, and that work was elegant, inventive and correct: the effect they demonstrated is real, and nothing in the archive touches it.

The problem is the parable rather than the research. Manning and her colleagues surveyed the standard introductory textbooks and found the story in all of them, with its own box or subsection in seven. Almost every one says the witnesses watched from their windows as the murder unfolded, and that nobody intervened or called until she was dead.

Their sharpest point is about what a story like that does to a field. Almost from the start, they write, this became a kind of modern parable, the exact inverse of the good Samaritan: where that one honours the individual who stops while the crowd walks past, this one teaches the malign influence of others. A discipline that has that story at its foundation spends decades investigating why groups fail to help, and is slow to ask how groups can be organised to help.

The parable needs nobody to come. Somebody came, she called the police first, and her name is written down in the trial record.

Sources

• Rachel Manning, Mark Levine and Alan Collins, "The Kitty Genovese Murder and the Social Psychology of Helping: The Parable of the 38 Witnesses", American Psychologist volume 62 number 6, September 2007 (the absence of evidence for thirty eight witnesses, for witnesses observing the murder, or for witnesses remaining inactive; the murder in the early morning of 13 March 1964 and the same day report in the Long Island Press; Gansberg's article of 27 March 1964 on page one, its headline and its opening paragraph, and Rosenthal's book Thirty Eight Witnesses; the five trial witnesses from the Austin Street apartments and the three who were eyewitnesses; Charles Skoller's statements about half a dozen usable witnesses, about believing many heard the screams, and about two witnesses kept off the stand; the absence of any list of the thirty eight; the two attacks rather than three; the second and fatal attack inside the stairwell of 92 to 96 Austin Street where no trial witness could see; the finding that only one known witness could have observed the sequence entire; the trial testimony of Frost, Picq and Mozer; the sufficiency of intervention to break off the first attack; the affidavit from the former police officer about his father's call and the 1995 claims by residents; the absence of a 911 system and Rosenthal's own note about the reception callers received; the bar on Austin Street; Sophie Farrar being telephoned by Carl Ross, calling the police and going to Genovese; Latané and Darley beginning their research because of the story; the textbook survey; and the framing of the story as the antonym of the parable of the good Samaritan).
• National Library of Medicine, "The Kitty Genovese murder and the social psychology of helping: the parable of the 38 witnesses" (the bibliographic record of the paper).
• British Psychological Society Research Digest, "The truth behind the story of Kitty Genovese and the bystander effect" (the professional body's own account of how the case has been re-examined).
• American Psychological Association, "The Kitty Genovese murder and the social psychology of helping: The parable of the 38 witnesses" (the paper of record, American Psychologist volume 62, issue 6, pages 555 to 562).