Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America by Kevin Cook

Author:Kevin Cook [Cook, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, True Crime, History, Crime, Psychology, United States
ISBN: 9780393242911
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-03-02T13:00:00+00:00

On Tuesday, the second day of the trial, Cacciatore called Robert Mozer to the stand. Mozer lived on the seventh floor of the Mowbray Apartments, the building that loomed over the crime scene on the north side of Austin Street. Kitty’s cries woke him from a sound sleep between 3:15 and 3:20 a.m. “I heard a girl saying, ‘Help me, help me.’” Mozer told the court. He said he went to his window and saw a man bent over a woman on the sidewalk, striking her. A domestic spat, he figured—unpleasant but not unusual outside Bailey’s Pub. Still it wasn’t right to hit a woman. Mozer lifted his window and yelled, “Leave that girl alone!” The attacker ran away. Mozer watched Kitty stand up and walk to the corner drugstore toward the railroad tracks. Then she wandered around the corner, out of sight. He went back to bed.

Stewardess Andrée Picq lived on the Mowbray’s fourth floor, three floors below Mozer. She testified that she heard Mozer shout, “Leave that girl alone!” and saw the attacker skitter away. Unlike Mozer, Picq stayed at her window, “kind of frozen,” she recalled. “A few minutes later the man came back.” She watched the man, now wearing a sporty fedora with a feather in the brim, check the doors at the train station. Finding them locked, he walked toward the back of the Tudor building. Then she lost sight of him. She dialed the police, “but I was gasping for breath,” she testified. Unsure of her English, unsure of what she had just seen, afraid to identify herself to the authorities, she put down the phone.

“Anything else you saw, Miss Picq?” Cacciatore asked.

“No,” she said. After the man rounded the corner of Kitty’s building, “I did not see anything. But I heard the last two screams. ‘Help, help.’”

Another witness, Irene Frost, testified that she saw Kitty kneeling on the sidewalk and heard her call out, “Please help me, God. I have been stabbed.”

Later that morning Cacciatore called Sophie Farrar to the stand. Sophie, the neighbor who invited Kitty over for coffee, the one Kitty confided in, hated thinking that her friend would never have the chance to explore her options in life. She wondered whether Kitty would have stayed with Mary Ann or gotten her operation and had children someday or—who could say in the 1960s and beyond?—done both? Nobody would ever know. Winston Moseley had stolen Kitty’s future. Now four-foot-eleven Sophie, barely visible to the gallery as she stepped past the defense table, glanced at Moseley. If a look could kill there would have been no need for an electric chair. Moments later she was telling the court about hearing Kitty’s voice during Moseley’s initial attack. “I heard a scream. Then I listened and didn’t hear anything. I went back to bed.” Half an hour passed before the phone rang. Greta Schwartz, another neighbor, said someone was stabbing Kitty Genovese.

“What? Where?” Sophie asked.

“In the hall—downstairs from Karl’s apartment!” Schwartz said.

“Call the police!”

Sophie Farrar was the last eyewitness to testify.

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