Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences (24 page)

Why settle for just a job? What do you want to do? Mary Ann didn’t have an answer for that. She was not like Kitty, with all her confidence and her plans for the future.

Kitty encouraged her to try bartending. It beat the monotony of an office, plus it was only a stepping stone. Kitty managed a bar. Eventually she was going to own one, a bar and restaurant, a nice place. If Mary Ann liked the business, maybe they could open one together.

Mary Ann had never thought of herself as an entrepreneur—or as much of anything, really. But Kitty—smart, kind, dynamic Kitty—made everything seem possible. So Mary Ann had embarked on
something new in her work life. With Kitty’s moral support, she also started taking art lessons at the little studio on the first floor of their apartment building. Kitty stopped in every so often to see how she was doing there. Her new lover was behind her all the way, encouraging her to expand her horizons, lending Mary Ann some of the selfassurance she lacked.

Kitty had once been married, she told Mary Ann, but she had ended the marriage quickly. Pretending to be straight had not made her so, nor would it. The best she could do was correct the mistake she had made. Kitty, who normally talked a lot and liked to discuss everything under the sun, spoke very little about it.

Mary Ann had not been particularly surprised hearing about the marriage. Kitty was certainly not the only one who had tried to make a go of the straight life.

If the relationship of Kitty and Mary Ann had to be lived largely in secret, it was a union nonetheless full. They went to parties, restaurants. Before long they had a routine that included their own special places where they went for dinner or to hear music. They had their own love song: “Just One Look” by Doris Troy.

Kitty introduced Mary Ann to new people, new ideas. She even took Mary Ann to meet her family in Connecticut. Kitty visited them every weekend and Mary Ann usually went with her. She had Mary Ann come by Ev’s and meet her friends there. She wanted Mary Ann to be a part of her life. She assured her that life was good—a happy experience!—and anything was possible. For Christmas—their only Christmas together, as it turned out—Kitty gave her the miniature poodle, to complete their happy home.

Mary Ann had never felt so loved in her entire life.

“What do you do in bed?”

One of the detectives asked this of Mary Ann, after she had confessed about herself and Kitty.

Mary Ann was too young, frightened, guileless to refuse to answer the question. So she told the detectives. She gave an honest answer to a most personal—not to mention irrelevant—question.

She didn’t know if they were disgusted or titillated or some combination of the two. She felt sick, humiliated.

In later years, Mary Ann would wish she could go back to that moment so she could give him a different, much shorter answer.
None of your fucking business, officer
.

At the time she could never have imagined saying such a thing. Even if she had had the personality for it, who knows what might have happened to her, back in 1964?

Back then, the memory of her interrogation was just one more thing to try and block from her mind.

The list of things Mary Ann wished to forget was becoming lengthy—the morgue, the detectives, the betrayals. Not to mention the dark stains all over the floor and walls of Karl’s hallway when she went to see him on the day it happened.

As if she didn’t have enough nightmares already with Kitty’s sudden death, she had to walk right past the area literally covered with the blood of her lover.

“IT SEEMED LIKE
the blood stayed there forever,” said Candace Henschel. A young girl at the time of Kitty’s murder, Candy lived with her family in the Roger Williams, an apartment building on Austin Street just across Lefferts Boulevard. Like so many kids who lived in Kew Gardens at the time, Candy long remembered the bloodstains on the sidewalk on Austin Street and the bloody hallway in back of the Tudor.

“Walking to school that morning we all saw the police cars and the barricades. They had the entire block shut down from Lefferts to the parking lot.

“We lived too far down to have heard anything the night it happened, and we were way too far to have seen it, but some people in our building heard her. Her screams were
that
loud. I remember the adults talking about it the next day and some of them saying, ‘So that’s what all that screaming was about last night.’

“A lot of kids were talking about it at school. A lot of us passed right by that part of Austin Street on our way to school and it was
obvious something big was going on, but you couldn’t get that close first thing in the morning because of the police. So when we got out of school that day of course we all wanted to check it out, being curious kids.”

Larry Gross lived in the Texas apartments, across the street from the Roger Williams. Eleven years old at the time, Larry was on the safety patrol at P.S. 99, which meant he had to leave for school a little earlier than his classmates. He also recalled passing by the barricaded crime scene that morning. “I don’t remember exactly when we knew it was a murder, but word traveled pretty quick. Later that day we came back and I remember we saw the blood on the windows. This is where she was first attacked, in front of the bookstore. You could see the bloody finger marks dragging down, like she was trying to hold on. It was pretty graphic.

“There were a couple bloodstains on the window. They were in close proximity, so you could see she had been trying to get up or something like that. Blood was splattered on the sidewalk. I remember it being like a trail. Then we went around the other side, to the back of the building.

“We opened the door and actually saw the pool of blood at the bottom of the staircase. A dry pool of blood. That whole bottom of the stairwell was filled with dried blood.”

There were also the bloody smears on the wall. Candy Henschel recalled these as particularly disturbing. “They were on one side of the wall, and I mean it was gruesome. The floor was bad enough, but actually seeing her hand prints in blood on the wall! It was almost too much to comprehend, especially for kids. We just stood there staring.

“You know, as a kid, you hear about something, but it doesn’t seem real. Well, it sure seemed real after that. It was a sight you’d never forget, that’s for sure. Afterward I wished I hadn’t seen what I did.

“Some of the kids went more than once. One of the boys who lived in the Tudor building was showing them. He was kind of a wild and crazy kid, but of course he was just a kid. I don’t remember seeing any of the adults looking in there, but I remember one commenting that somebody ought to do something about it.”

Michael Titowsky’s father owned the Austin Book Shop. Just seven years old at the time, Michael did not venture to the bloody hallway, but he recalled that day at school, and the blood on the front of his father’s shop. The Titowsky family lived in Kew Gardens, but their home was several blocks away from the bookstore. “The police were all over Austin Street. When I got to school, kids were talking and the rumor mill was going crazy. Our teachers knew about it, or something about it, and they were talking to each other in whispers. Naturally they weren’t going to discuss it with us, a bunch of seven and eight year old kids.

“When I went home for lunch that day I remember my mother being upset. I don’t know how much we knew by then—she obviously knew more than I did, because she was very upset. At some point we heard a girl had been killed.

“My dad’s bookstore was a neighborhood hangout. It had old, rare, and out-of-print books. It was closed at the time [the murder] happened, of course. He was a schoolteacher at the time, running the bookstore part-time, and he usually opened it around 4:00 in the afternoon on weekdays. Later I saw the blood on the sidewalk and on the store itself. The smears on the door frame were about eye-level for a seven year old kid. I remember thinking,
Wow, this really did happen.
For a long time afterward there were kids who were afraid to walk by there.”

As Larry Gross recalled, the blood on the Austin Street windows was cleaned off fairly soon, but the stains on the sidewalk remained. Lenny Bloch, another elementary school student at P.S. 99 at the time, recalled, “The blood stayed on the sidewalk, it seemed, for years. I was eight years old and we lived in the attached row of Tudor homes up the block, heading north from the train station. We didn’t hear anything that night, and I was actually the first one in my family to know that something had happened when I saw all the police cars down the block as I was walking to school the next morning.

“I used to walk up that part of Austin Street all the time to get to the stores on Lefferts. When I saw [the blood] they were just stains. Big red stains on the ground, but they were pretty sizeable, and you
definitely knew it was blood. One day I’m walking up to the candy store with a friend who had come home from school with me. I remember it was a rainy day and I said to him, ‘This is where that lady got murdered.’ It seems like this was a couple of months after it happened. We just gawked at it, like little boys would. He goes home and tells his mother he saw blood on the ground in Lenny’s neighborhood, and I’m sure he won’t be coming back to visit me again.”

Naturally enough, the murder became the prime topic of conversation in the neighborhood among adults and curious youngsters alike.

“Kew Gardens was a very close-knit community,” said Larry Gross. “Our block was a big family. I mean, you knew everyone. In the evenings people would hang out on the streets and everyone was talking about it. There was a lot of chatter. Everyone was very tense. A couple days after the murder, somebody found a knife in some bushes near the school, P.S. 99, and the whole thing was, ‘That’s the murder weapon!’ It wasn’t, but there was a big to-do about that. The neighborhood was very tense, everybody really on edge.”

The young woman’s murder had no doubt been a horrifying event for the neighborhood—complete with lingering gruesome reminders etched in blood. Most residents looked forward to the talk dying down, the bad memory of it all receding with time. Understandably, they wished to get back to normalcy, peace, the comfort of ordinary life, when talk of a grisly murder on Austin Street would no longer be the primary topic of conversation, when residents would stop talking about and shuddering over the screams they had heard, when the occasional outsider would stop inquiring about what had happened that night. When it could all be in the past, like a fleeting collective nightmare the community had endured, fading with time into the recesses of a troubling memory best left forgotten.

Even more so than the Queens District Attorney’s Office, they were to be severely disappointed.

5
   Renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport later that year following the president’s assassination.

chapter 12

ON MONDAY, MARCH 23,
1964, a Queens grand jury indicted Winston Moseley for the first-degree murder of Catherine Genovese. He entered a plea of not guilty.

On the same day, a newspaperman had lunch at a restaurant in Manhattan with the New York City police commissioner.

The newspaperman was Abe Rosenthal, metropolitan editor of the New
York Times
. The police commissioner was Michael J. Murphy, a veteran of New York City law enforcement.

Rosenthal had recently assumed the post of metro editor after returning from a years-long assignment abroad for the
New York Times
, the staff of which he had joined back in 1944 as a fledgling reporter. The son of a Canadian fur trapper/trader–turned Bronx house painter, Abraham Rosenthal had relied on grit, brains, and an indomitable will to pull himself up from a childhood fraught by poverty and illness through the ranks of professional journalism. He was now forty-one years old and widely respected at both the
Times
and in journalistic circles in general, having won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1960. As a correspondent, Rosenthal had covered, in addition to New York City, the United Nations, Poland, India, and other territories throughout the world. The communist government in Poland had kicked him out in 1959 for “probing too deeply.”

As metropolitan editor (a position formerly referred to as city editor), Rosenthal had naturally shifted his focus back to New York
City. His lunch on this day with Police Commissioner Murphy, whom he had met two or three times before, was part of his ongoing effort to build relationships with influential persons in the city, reacquainting himself with New York and the individuals at the backbone of the city’s power structure.

As the two men lunched on this Monday afternoon, their conversation revolved primarily on the police chief’s concerns about the tensions and threats spurred by the civil rights movement; the implications for his police force if riots or violent demonstrations were to erupt around the city. It was a fear shared by law enforcement and politicians alike in cities throughout the United States during the spring of 1964. This was the kind of big-picture issue on which a police commissioner needed to fixate. Rosenthal, however, had a much simpler question for Murphy.