Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences (41 page)

Among those who had moved were Karl Ross and Mary Ann Zielonko.

UNKNOWN TO MAX
Heilbrunn at the time of that interview, the Interlude would be among those forced out of the Tudor building as a result of the negative publicity. Customers were replaced by gawkers who came for a glimpse of the infamous murder scene next door. As Arlene Heilbrunn, wife of the owner, recalled, “The death of Kitty Genovese affected the Interlude Coffee House and my family greatly. It became quite a crime scene for days. It was March and spring was on the horizon, and my husband was hopeful that business would pick up after a very slow winter. In this area of Kew Gardens lived many refugee Germans who loved to sit out in the fresh air and enjoy their coffee and pastry, and the Interlude did that for them. Some people came, but mostly to see [the murder scene]. Weekend folk musicals helped some, but business began to fade.”

A musician who played regularly at the Interlude recalled people walking out of the café at night occasionally giving mock calls of “Help me! Somebody help me, I’m stabbed!”

Before the end of 1965, the Interlude closed its doors permanently.

The
New York Times
printed a separate article on the same day as Gansberg’s one-year retrospective with the headline, “POLICE REPORT SOME GAIN IN COOPERATION BY PUBLIC.” Deputy Commissioner Walter Arm was quoted, “There has been an increase in public concern because of the dramatic nature of the Genovese case,” but added that police officers arriving at the scene of a
crime are told most often by the people they find there, “I didn’t see anything.” The article noted that a citywide emergency telephone number for the police, 440-1234, had been introduced the previous November, with mixed results. According to the article, some callers complained of bad experiences with rude police officers, and others claimed that it took the police too long to respond once a complaint had been phoned in to the citywide number.

Detective Robert Roselle of the 102nd precinct in Richmond Hill, the precinct that had handled the Genovese investigation, said, “It’s still very difficult to get the people here to cooperate. You can only speculate on whether the people are any more willing to help us now. We’ve had cases since then where people told us they didn’t want to get involved.”

IN MARCH OF
1965, Martin Gansberg received an award from the Newspaper Reporters Association of New York City for excellent feature treatment for his account of the Kitty Genovese murder. The following month, the Silurians, a society of present and former New York newspapermen, also honored his Kitty Genovese article, presenting him with their award for the best news story of the last year.

“ONE WITNESS BETTER
THAN 38 IN A CRISIS, STUDY HERE SHOWS.” The article appeared in the
New York Times
on July 10, 1966, telling of a study undertaken as a result of the Kitty Genovese murder. Two college professors—Bibb Latané, an assistant professor of social psychology at Columbia University, and John M. Darley, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University—had conducted a two-year inquiry into how witnesses behaved in emergency situations. Their findings indicated that a victim of an attack had a greater chance of being helped if there was only one witness rather than several.

Latané and Darley’s study would expand and continue over the coming years.

KITTY’S BROTHER, BILL
Genovese, who had been sixteen years old at the time of his sister’s murder, enlisted in the United States Marine Corps when he turned eighteen. Haunted by his sister’s death and the heartbreaking accounts of how no one had helped her, Bill had become obsessed with doing the right moral thing, vowing never to turn his back on anyone in peril. It was with this attitude that he frequently volunteered for hazardous missions in Vietnam. During one such mission, a landmine exploded as he attempted to disable it. The blast tore off both of his legs at the hip. The date was March 13, 1967, three years to the day after his sister’s murder.

He returned to the United States as a decorated war hero, bound to a wheelchair for life.

ON JUNE 1, 1967,
the Court of Appeals reduced Winston Moseley’s sentence from death to life in prison. The Court unanimously agreed with the contention made by Sidney Sparrow on appeal that the trial court had committed “substantial error” in not allowing testimony of medical insanity at the sentencing hearing.

New York State had abolished the death penalty in 1965, except for the killing of a police officer or a murder committed in prison by a convict serving a life sentence. The Queens District Attorney’s Office had argued that the new law should not be applied retroactively to those already under a sentence of death, although Governor Nelson Rockefeller, in May of 1966, had already advised that the sentences of those in the death house at Sing Sing would be commuted to life in prison.

The ruling of the appeals court now made it a moot point for Winston Moseley. He would not be put to death.

chapter 17

AS HE WOULD
later say, Winston Moseley knew he could not escape from Attica Prison.

After the commutation of his sentence, Moseley had been transferred from Sing Sing to Attica, the fortress-like maximum security prison located in the western part of New York State. Since its construction in the 1930s, Attica had housed some of the most dangerous and notorious criminals of the twentieth century. The prison sat amid the rolling hills of rural Wyoming County, about forty miles east of Buffalo.

On Monday, March 18, 1968, the fourth anniversary of his arrest, Winston Moseley was at Meyer Memorial Hospital in the city of Buffalo, recovering from minor surgery performed a few days before. He had injured his rectum with a juice can, necessitating the surgery. On this afternoon of March 18, he was scheduled for discharge and transport back to Attica.

As he said later, Moseley had inflicted the injury on himself knowing that he would need treatment beyond what could be done in the prison infirmary. He may have hoped they would take him to one of the small suburban hospitals in the vicinity of the prison rather than into the city.

Corrections officer Herman Spencer escorted the limping Moseley through the hospital corridors, leading him to the vehicle that would return him to Attica. When they reached the lobby, Moseley, who
was not handcuffed, assaulted Spencer. Turning suddenly with catlike reflexes, Moseley punched his guard in the face, then fled out the front door of the hospital. The corrections officer managed to fire one shot at the escapee. He missed.

It had all happened in an instant.

By the time Herman Spencer recovered and the shocked staff in the hospital lobby had time to react, Winston Moseley, clad in a gray prison shirt and slacks and moving rapidly despite a limp, had disappeared into the streets of Buffalo.

Law enforcement launched a massive manhunt. Trains and buses were stopped and searched. Federal authorities issued a sixteen-state alarm for the fugitive. Guards at the nearby Canadian border were put on high alert. Buffalo Police notified their counterparts in New York City to keep a close watch on the home of Moseley’s wife. Bettye was still married to Winston and still lived in the house in South Ozone Park. New York City newspapers, including the
New York Times
, ran articles on Moseley’s escape. Martin Gansberg wrote an account for the
Times
headlined, “GENOVESE KILLER IS HUNTED WIDELY.” Photographs of the fugitive appeared in newspapers and on television. Leon Vincent, deputy warden at Attica Correctional Facility, said, “Up to now, he had a clean prison record.”

Despite the immediate response by police and the simultaneous, widespread media coverage of the escape, the fugitive remained at large as night fell on March 18.

It was the beginning of three days of terror.

ON WEDNESDAY MORNING,
March 20, an employment service in Buffalo received a phone call from a man who identified himself as Matthew Kulaga. He asked that a cleaning woman be sent to 278 Dewey Avenue, a single-family home on the east side of Buffalo.

There was nothing unusual in the request. The agency had sent housekeepers to this address before. The home at 278 Dewey was owned by an elderly woman, but the owner’s daughter and son-in-law, Janet and Matthew Kulaga, who lived in the Buffalo suburb of Grand
Island, usually took care of such maintenance arrangements. Later that day, the agency telephoned Janet Kulaga at her home in Grand Island to ask if the cleaning woman’s services had been satisfactory.

Mrs. Kulaga said that they had made no such request for a cleaning woman that day. But the agency insisted they had sent a cleaning woman, a twenty-two-year-old married mother of three, to the Dewey Avenue address.

Mrs. Kulaga was perplexed. Neither she nor her husband had called for a cleaning woman. Her mother’s home in Buffalo, though still fully furnished, was unoccupied, since Mrs. Kulaga’s mother was staying with them in Grand Island. Concerned, Mrs. Kulaga called a neighbor on Dewey Avenue that evening to ask if the neighbor had seen anything suspicious at her mother’s house.

The neighbor told her that the house looked fine. The only thing unusual she had noticed was a cleaning woman entering the house on Wednesday morning and leaving in the afternoon.

As the Kulagas wondered what might be going on over at Dewey Avenue, Mrs. Kulaga received another very unusual phone call that night. The caller was a woman. The voice was not familiar. The woman did not give her name, but gave Janet Kulaga a desperate, cryptic warning:
“Stay away from the house on Dewey Avenue!”

EARLY ON THURSDAY
morning, Matthew and Janet Kulaga drove to 278 Dewey Avenue. Mrs. Kulaga had called the Buffalo Police the day before and asked them to check on her mother’s vacant house. The police had found the house apparently intact, the front door locked. Because of the two odd phone calls they had received, however, the Kulagas wanted to check for themselves.

The Kulagas pulled up in their 1962 white Comet shortly before 8:00 a.m. Before entering the house, Matthew Kulaga armed himself with a crowbar. There had been a series of break-ins around the neighborhood, and the house had been sitting empty, making it a potential target for burglary. Mr. Kulaga thought it wise to have a weapon in hand, just in case they encountered a trespasser inside. Unfortunately
for the Kulagas, the crowbar at Matthew’s side was no match for the .32 revolver that Winston Moseley pointed at them when they entered the living room.

AT 9:45 A.M.,
a monotone call went out from a Buffalo police dispatcher: “Hold-up at 278 Dewey Avenue.”

Minutes later, the police car that had responded to the call radioed back an urgent, excited reply: “The man says it was Moseley and he has his car!”

Within minutes of the announcement, 278 Dewey Avenue and the surrounding area were inundated by police. Patrolmen, plainclothes, and even some off-duty officers rushed to the scene. Radio and television stations interrupted their programming with the announcement that the fugitive murderer had been spotted on the east side of Buffalo but was still at large, thought to be driving a white 1962 Comet belonging to his latest victims.

Moseley had left Matthew and Janet Kulaga tied up and traumatized, but alive. At gunpoint, he had ordered the Kulagas to an upstairs bedroom. He forced Mrs. Kulaga to tie her husband’s hands and feet with clothesline. She had complied. Moseley tightened his bonds, then tied Mrs. Kulaga’s hands behind her back. He left Mrs. Kulaga beside her husband and exited the bedroom. He had returned moments later, however, and took Mrs. Kulaga into another bedroom. There he had removed some of her clothing, slashed her undergarments open, and molested her. Afterward he returned her to the bedroom with her husband. He then forced Matthew Kulaga to undress.

Moseley dressed himself in Mr. Kulaga’s clothing. He checked to make sure their bonds were tight, then stuffed material into the mouths of both victims to keep them silent. He took Mr. Kulaga’s wallet and car keys. Before leaving, he had said to them, “I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want to get away.”

The Kulagas had managed to free themselves and call police. They had been rushed to Meyer Memorial Hospital, a stone’s throw from where it had all begun three days earlier.

THE FBI, NEW
York State Police, and the Erie County Sheriff’s Office joined the Buffalo Police Department in the hunt for Winston Moseley. Residents were in a panic. Police switchboards were flooded with calls from people claiming to have seen him.

Buffalo Police Commissioner Frank Felicetta was an exceptionally dynamic, hands-on chief. Felicetta had joined the force in 1929. Though he had since risen through the ranks to become the department’s top commander, at heart he remained a police officer, pure and simple. When the alarm had gone out, he had responded like any other police officer: he hastened to 278 Dewey Avenue. He was not there to supervise, but rather to physically take part in the search for a dangerous fugitive. Canvassing homes in the vicinity, the sixty-one-year-old police commissioner climbed into darkened attics, checked basements, and strode into garages alone. He walked through a nearby lot, peering in the windows of parked cars. A reporter tailing Felicetta noted the police commissioner’s doggedness. The reporter wrote that Felicetta kept saying of the fugitive, “I want him . . . . I want him . . . .”

Moseley had chosen the wrong city for his escape. It seemed that the entire Buffalo Police Department was engaged in the search along with the Erie County Sheriff’s Office and agents from the FBI’s Buffalo field office. In addition to the hindrance created by the large, skilled police force in Buffalo, Winston Moseley did not know his way around this part of New York.

THE KULAGAS WERE
giving their statements at Buffalo Police headquarters later that day when they received word that Mrs. Kulaga’s elderly mother, who was babysitting her grandchildren in the Kulaga’s Grand Island home, had suffered a nervous seizure. Sympathetic police officers offered to rush the Kulagas back to Grand Island in a squad car.