Stuff You Should Know - The Kitty Genovese Story

Episode Date: November 22, 2016

Most people have heard of the story of Kitty Genovese. She was murdered near her apartment in 1964 and her neighbors didn't do much to help. It caused a nationwide outcry, but the story has often been misrepresented. We'll set the record straight. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey San Francisco, we're coming out to see you. We got invited back to San Francisco Sketch Fest this year, and we are pretty excited because we are doing a Sunday afternoon show for the first time.

So consider us a football game. We're gonna be January 15th, Sunday at 1 p.m., and get your tickets fast, because they're definitely gonna sell out. Just go to sfsketchfest.com, where you can Google that junk, and just follow the ticket links, and there's lots of great shows. So I would recommend just making a weekend out of it.

But check us out Sunday afternoon, January 15th, 1 p.m., in San Francisco. Can't wait to see everybody there. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry.

So this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. True crime edition, actually. Yeah, but so much more than just a single crime agreed. A crime that echoed throughout a city, throughout the world, throughout decades. And it's true, man. Like, there are very few crimes you can point to that had more of an impact

than the murder of Kitty Genovese. Agreed. And there are a lot of true crime podcasts out there. We are not trying to become one. No. This is just something we do from time to time. Sure. I had somebody on Facebook.

Oh, don't get me started on that. I'm the Hintrackifec murderer, zero. This is so played, everyone's done this. Who doesn't know about this? A bunch of people were like, well, I haven't heard about it. Yeah, but I have. That's what counts.

I had never heard about it. I hadn't heard about it until like a year or two ago. Oh, it's so played. And then of course later on, all these people were like, oh man, what a jerk. He's like, did the whole, well, I'm sorry if anyone was offended. All I meant was is this has been well covered.

I think they do. It has nothing to do with the way I said it. The 2016 election has proven that if you add if into your apology, it's not an actual apology. Yeah, I'm sorry if you're offended is not an apology. That's putting it back on the person. Right.

It's you. Yeah. You worm. You piece of garbage. Oh yeah, yeah. Man, sorry, Kitty Genevies and her family. I know, and you know what? As I researched this and as I watched,

did you watch the witness? Of course. The documentary recently on Netflix right now. It is HBO documentary. And I was disturbed and I'm glad it finally covered it in the documentary, but I was disturbed that Kitty Genevies and we'll get to her murder,

but very quickly she was murdered and became the symbol for people not helping out. Right. What came to be known as bystander apathy or the bystander effect that the more people who are around the less likely anyone is to help. Yeah, so she became such a symbol that you never hear about Kitty Genevies

and who she was as a person. That was one great thing about that documentary and there are multiple great things about it, but that it really talked about her and showed her and revived her spirit. Which I was really looking for because even in researching online, it's hard to get a lot of information.

So something, some even contemporary articles still aren't mentioning that she was gay. Well, yeah, her own brother who made the documentary didn't know that she was gay. No, it's true, but it's been out since, I'm not sure when actually that came out. It was just this year. Oh, okay.

So it was fairly new. This year, last year, yeah. I thought it was like in the last five years maybe. So in honoring that, why don't we talk a minute about Catherine Genevies? Kitty. Yep. She was born in 1935 in Brooklyn

to Vincent Andronelle Genevies, Italian-American parents. And it's weird. I don't see, oh yeah, Rachel was her mother's name. She was Rachel Petroli at first. So they lived in Brooklyn and she was very well loved in school. Yes, she was like the leader of her clique.

Yeah, she was apparently a lot of fun and a good mimic of her teachers and she was voted class cut up in her senior year graduating class. She went to an all-girls school in Prospect Heights and it was just by all accounts, this vivacious, fun-loving, really sweet, sweet lady. Yeah.

Or girl at that point. Her little brother, Bill, who ended up being featured in the documentary, The Witness, was just in love with her. She was just amazing to him. They had a very special relationship. Yeah, I think she was about 13 years older than him. Yeah, quite a bit.

Maybe 12 years older. I had a sister like that. Like there's a very special relationship. There's none of that sibling rivalry. They're not old enough to be your mother. It's just a unique situation to be a younger sibling and to be able to inherit all that worldly wisdom. And they're going through all their own things

and their own struggles and their own travails but to that 13-year-old younger brother, they know everything and they're the coolest person walking the planet and they're the kindest person walking the planet. Cause they've lived long enough to figure out some of the major stuff, you know? Yeah, even my own sister is only six years older

and we very much had and still have that relationship where, and she and my brother are great now too, but when you're two or three years apart, there can be a little bit of the knocking of heads. But by the time I came along, I was like, you know, my sister was six, it was perfect. I was a little baby doll for her. So anyway, that was very much the relationship

that Kitty had with Bill. And it seemed like one of the older brothers always had a little bit of a like, yeah, she always liked him better kind of attitude. It seemed like everybody kind of knew like she liked Bill the most. Yeah, which I kind of felt bad for, but that's just those family dynamics, man.

You know, the thing is, whenever you do start to kind of talk about somebody who's died, especially someone who's died violently and young, it's easy to canonize them, you know? Really put them up on a pedestal and forget their flaws. And of course, I'm sure Kitty had tons of flaws, but she didn't seem to have any from what I'm gathering

that were just terrible flaws or that made her like a bad person. She seemed like she was like an overall, above average, great person. Yeah, agreed. So New York was getting too dangerous for her family, they thought, to have all these kids. So they moved when she graduated high school

to New Canaan, Connecticut. And she said, you know what? I'm staying here in New York. I'm 18 now. I love it here. She got married for a brief time to a guy, what's his name, Rocco? I don't remember his name.

It's either Rocky or Rocco. And in the documentary, Bill tries to get in touch with him. He's like, I really, because he found out she was gay and was like, you know, we didn't even know this. I think Rocco can help shed some light. And he very respectfully asked for his own privacy. He said, my relationship with Kitty

will remain forever a mystery. Yeah. It's like, that's an odd response. It was, I think he just didn't wanna, I mean, if she was gay and they were married for a short time, he either didn't know and maybe felt the fool or he did know and was maybe trying to do

right by her in some way. Sure. Either way, he didn't wanna talk about it. Right. But she worked as a secretary for a little while. She was a waitress for a little while. Eventually she was a bar maid, bartender, and then became bar manager at a place

in Hollis, Queens called Ev's 11th Hour. That is a great bar name. Well, and from all accounts, it was one of those wonderful neighborhood bars. Opened at 8 a.m. Yeah, where the people were in there getting sauce pretty early in the day. Sure.

And everyone knew everyone and everyone loved Kitty and she helped take care of everybody but was very much an independent kind of firecracker of a woman. Sure. She had a red fiat. Mm-hmm, convertible.

Her dad used to tease her about like, when are you gonna find the right guy? She's like, I make more money than any guy. I would go out with. I don't need that. Which is, I guess, 1960s for dad and gay. I'm gay. Yeah.

And I can't say it. But she did make pretty good dough as the bar manager. And then in March, 1963, she met a woman named Marianne Zalonco at Swing Rendezvous. It was an underground lesbian bar in the village and they moved in together shortly thereafter. Yeah.

Kitty actually used to bring Marianne home with her to visit but her family was all like, well, just good friends and roommates. Right. It's the 60s. Right. The early 60s. Yeah, and there's an audio interview with her

in that documentary that's really touching. Mm-hmm. She didn't wanna be on camera but Bill was able to speak to her and I think what was so compelling about this documentary was that he was, it was a search of a man looking for closure. It's a harrowing, sometimes almost unbearable,

to watch. Yeah. Search. No stuff. I mean, like he's at odds with his family here or there. Yeah. He, he's just doing things where if you watch it in the context of the documentary

and you just follow along the documentary, it all makes uttering complete sense. Right. But then if you stop and remove yourself long enough to be like, this is a documentary which means this guy really did this stuff. Yeah. And there was a camera following him along

while he was doing it. I was like, I couldn't have done half of it. Oh, I know. You know, he really, he just, at one point he calls it an obsession but it's, it's not, he doesn't come off as obsessed. Right, agreed. You know?

All right, so let's detail the crime and then we will take a break after that. How does that sound? Yeah. All right, so flash forward to March 13th, 1964. It's 315 in the morning. And Kitty Genovese is, as she often did, was making her way home from work late at night

as a bar manager. Yeah. And was being trailed by a man. A man by the name of Winston Mosley. Yes. Who is definitely the villain of this story but is not the only one that will turn out. Right.

So Kitty was 28 and at the time she was killed. And Winston, her killer was 29, just turned 29, I think like a week or so before. And I think he said this is March 13th, 1964. Yeah, he was married with a couple of kids. Yeah, his wife, Elizabeth, worked the night shift. She was a hospital nurse. And Winston's mother stayed at home with the kids.

So he basically said, you know, I own my own house. I've got a great job operating computers. No one even knows what I'm supposed to be doing with him yet but I'm making money doing it. Yeah, he was a smart guy. So I'm gonna indulge myself. I'm gonna go out and stalk women and murder them in my spare time.

That's what I'm gonna do. So that's what he was doing on this night. He was cruising around looking for a woman to kill, basically. Yeah, that was his direct quote in questioning. Yeah. I was looking for a woman to kill. Yeah.

So he saw at I believe a red light, this little red fiat convertible caught his eye and there was Kitty driving. So he started to follow her and she parked. And she parked in the parking lot for the Long Island Railway, which the parking lot went backed up to the side of her apartment building,

which is a two story tutor job that had shops in the bottom and apartments in the top, right? Yeah, this was in Q Gardens in Queens. So he followed her on foot at this point. She sees him and knows that something is going on. He has a knife in his hand. So she starts running.

He catches up to her by outside of a bookstore and stabs her twice in the back right off the bat with this knife. Right. And she had been running toward a bar that she thought would be open, but it turned out apparently there was a new manager and the new manager had closed down early.

So when she stabbed twice in the back, it's on this darkened street, but right across the street, Austin Street, is a 10 story apartment building with dozens of windows looking out onto Austin Street where she's being stabbed in the back. And she screams, she cries out. I think she said something like,

oh God, he stabbed me. Help me, help me, is what they said basically definitively is what she screamed. And people who were witnesses to this recounted that one guy said that he was, I think a 10 or 11 year old kid who was inside one of the apartments in the Mobri apartment building

and that he was awoken from a deep sleep. The scream was so loud. He said it was the loudest thing he's ever heard. So she screams and a man living in the Mobri apartment buildings opens his window. What's his name? Yeah, Robert Moser opened his window and screamed out, hey, get out of there.

What are you doing? And Mosley took off, took off running away. He's very frequently misquoted as having said like, let that girl alone. But even by his own words in his own testimony, he said, hey, get out of there. Yeah, at any rate, he scared him away. Right.

So in between that time, about 30 minutes passes, Kitty makes her way around to the vestibule of her own building, right? Yeah. And goes inside the vestibule and like, you think the horror is over for her. She could probably survive these wounds. Right.

Is in shock, I would imagine. And then Mosley went to his car, kind of checked out the building, saw that some lights had gone on, and reasoned to himself, no one's going to do anything. Puts on a different hat and goes back, finds her in the vestibule, and finishes the job in the most horrific ways you can imagine. Yeah, he stabbed her at least 12 more times.

They think at least she was stabbed at least 14 times. He said he doesn't remember how many times he stabbed her. But he basically kept stabbing her until she stopped screaming. She was still alive. I saw that he attempted to rape her. I've also seen that he raped her. Yeah.

I'm not sure which one's correct. Yeah. But at one point, and this is really important here, as he's stabbing her and she's screaming, in the vestibule, there's a staircase that leads directly up to a door. And behind that door lived a man named Carl Ross. And Carl Ross opened his door and looked down one single flight of stairs at Winston Mosley,

stabbing Kitty Genovese, who was bloody. There was no confusing what was going on. And he closed the door, and he called his girlfriend. And his girlfriend said, don't get involved. Yeah. I'm worried for you. Just leave it alone. It's none of your business.

And he did. He didn't do anything, at least for a little while. All right, so that's a good place to break here. And we're going to come back and talk about who saw and heard what and what they did about it right after this. Ooh, station now. You know, Josh, starting your own business

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And while you're there, be sure to use our special GWIS offer code WORKS, W-O-R-K-S. And you will get 10% off your first purchase. Google and Squarespace, make it professional, make it beautiful. All right, so at this point, Kitty Genovese is not dead yet, but dying in the vestibule. A woman did come down and was with her.

Her name is Sophia Ferrar. She's still with us. And she was a neighbor and friend of Kitty's. And so she went down there and apparently was with her as she passed away, tried to calm her down, evidently did calm her down. And likes to think that she at least saw a friendly face and that she was being cared for as she passed.

The weird thing is, that is not mentioned. I guess we've got to get into the New York Times now. Yeah, so after the murder, like the next day, the Times ran four paragraphs on the Kitty Genovese murder. It was not incredibly newsworthy at first. Because that year, there were 636 murders in New York City. Yeah, and that was just one of them. Just one.

But a couple weeks later, the head, the city editor of the New York Times, a guy named Abe Rosenthal, who's a legendary journalist, was having lunch with, I believe, the police commissioner of the NYPD. And the commissioner said, did you hear about that Genovese murder? That's one for the books. 38 people standing around watched the whole thing.

Nobody did a thing about it. Yeah, now you've got a story. Abe Rosenthal, legendary journalist, is like, thank you for that. Here's my diners club card. I have to go now and get this story done. So he did. He assigned it out to a guy.

What was the original reporter's name? His name was Martin Gansberg. And they wrote, on the front page, I shouldn't say they wrote. It was definitely all Gansberg. But he was assigned and definitely under the direction of Abe Rosenthal, like, this is the story. 38 people stood around and did nothing.

Yeah, the title of the article was 37. It was 37 at the time. 37 who saw murder didn't call the police. And basically, the entire article and the entire narrative from that moment forward for decades was, A, not about this woman at all, hardly. She became a symbol. B, not necessarily even about the crime,

but about the crime of these people who didn't, the crime of apathy for these 37 or 38 people. But it was very much misconstrued in the New York Times to the point where, in 2004, they all but wrote a retraction with new information. Because the original article, they said, like, these people witnessed it. That is not true.

Maybe only a couple of people might have actually seen anything with their eyeballs. The other 35 or 36 may have heard someone screaming. They might have thought it was a drunken couple in their neighborhood coming home from a bar. There might have been some apathy involved, for sure, for some of them. But to characterize this as 37 or 38 people

witnessed this horrific crime and literally shut their doors and windows to it was not accurate at all. Right. They said specifically, well, the way that they put it was that there were, the way the story read was that 38 people had watched this murder, which took place. They misreported that there were three attacks and that the man had been chased off twice

and came back two more times. But that this whole thing had taken place over 30 minutes, this long prolonged attack, and that 38 people had just been sitting there watching it doing nothing. And that is definitely a mischaracterization of what had happened, like you're saying. For the most part, people were ear witnesses, not eye witnesses.

There were certainly not 38 eye witnesses to it. And most people weren't in a position to do much, if anything, about it, certainly physically. But I don't know if you could call it like a retraction, because the point that Abraham Rosenthal, he never apologized for it ever. Even in the documentary he's interviewed. And he's like, this is great.

I'm glad that it did what it did. The point is still there, that there was apathy in that there were two people who could have done something and they didn't. But then from what the other witnesses said, the scream was pretty clearly not a purse snatching and not a couple fighting drunkenly, that it was a violent crime being committed on this woman.

And people still didn't do anything. Yeah, they misreported, possibly, that no one called police. Apparently, perhaps up to three people called the police, although police logs showed only one call came in. And it may be a case of these people now telling themselves, like, I called the cops. I did something when they may not have.

They did not report at all that Ms. Farrar had gone down to be with her. She was not mentioned ever. So I went from feeling like, yeah, this bystander effect, it had good. It led to the 911 being created, apparently, in some ways. And people studied this in class and it raised awareness. So if they stretched it a little bit, then it had a good effect.

That's what Abe, basically. That was his position. That still is his position. Well, he's dead now. Oh, did he finally pass away? Yeah. And then I finally came around and be like, no. The truth is what you should print.

And if you're a reporter and you run a story, you should print the truth and not some sensationalized version of it to sell newspapers. No, no, absolutely. I agree with you. And I think the one thing that you can hang on Abe Rosenthal is that that story was definitely fashioned in a manner to be as sensational as possible, a shock,

and outrage the public as much as possible. But I still think it's rooted in the basic fact that there was apathy involved and that it possibly allowed Winston Mosley to finish the job, that Kitty Genovese might have survived, had somebody done more than just sit up, look out their window, and go back to bed. Or not even bother to look out the window.

And like you said, Chuck, this had a lot of impact. Because the story comes out in 1964. And for 40 years, it wasn't until 2004 that the Times saw fit to go back and really reinvestigate. And they did. There was a great article called Kitty 40 Years Later, I think. And the author goes through and reinvestigates the case

and really sets a lot of facts straight. But within that 40-year period, the effects that this murder had were just sweeping. It led to the establishment of 911, the big one. And it created this whole field of psychology that looks into the psychology of crowds, and why we would just stand around it. What is this diffusion of responsibility?

None of that understanding existed until the Kitty Genovese murder. Yeah, and weirdly, why is someone, why is a solo witness more apt to act than a group of people? One thing I saw is that it's called social influence, and that we take our cues from others. So if inaction is basically what is on the table right then, we're going to be inactive as well.

If people are starting to move toward it, toward the problem, we'll probably join in, too. I could see that. Or people thinking like either I'm not, someone else is better equipped to deal with this than me. Or I feel like someone else will do this, so I don't have to. A lot goes into play. It's pretty interesting.

One of the less productive things that came out of it, though, is this idea that when you live in a city, in a big city, you put enough people together, everybody stops caring about anybody else. They're all out for number one. And Q Gardens became the center of this, or just such a symbolic example of urban uncaring, I guess. And Kitty Jonavies became a symbol of that as well,

and the need to do something, to act out, to help other people when you see them need help. All right, so let's take another quick break here, and we're going to get back into what happened to Mr. Mosley and the further effects of this crime after this. Ooh, ah, stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

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So a week after this murder, Mosley was breaking into a house. He's not a good guy. No, he's a terrible guy. He was, um, beyond being a sociopath and a psychotic, was, uh, just a burglar. And he would, he was just straight up robbing a house one day of a television. And, uh, one of the neighbors saw this, called the cops.

Cops came and arrested him. No, no, no. No, that's not true. What? The neighbor, here's the thing. This is the great ironic twist of the Kitty Genovese story. He went to a different neighborhood. He was robbing a house and the neighbor said,

hey, what are you doing? And he started to run from the house. The neighbor chased him and tackled him and held him until the cops came. Oh, well, yeah. He called the cops. That's how he went down. Intervention.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But not apathy. Intervention. Right. A week later. Yes. OK. So at any rate, he calls the cops.

He gets arrested and very, like, uh, matter of factly says that he killed Kitty Genovese. And not only that, but he killed, uh, supposedly two other women, uh, a woman named Barbara Kralik. Uh, actually, she was a girl. She's only 15. And then a woman named Annie Mae Johnson. And apparently both of them had been sexually assaulted.

And he was never tried for those. But, um, he did plead not guilty by reason of insanity, which did not work, was sentenced to death. And by luck of timing, was able to appeal and the death penalty had gone away for most crimes in that time period. And he, um, was res sentenced to life in prison. Yeah. Supposedly the prosecution had withheld some evidence

about his mental state during his sentencing. So he was able to get it reduced. So he was hanging out, doing his time. Um, and he was in Attica, I believe. And he had injured himself and was being taken to the hospital. And on the way there, he got, uh, the gun away from the guard who was escorting him and took off. And for, I think five days, he basically, just the city of Buffalo

was in mortal fear of the fact that the guy who murdered Kitty Genovese was now on the loose in their town. And they were afraid rightfully so. He raped one woman. When the cops closed in on him, he, uh, got ahold of five people and held them hostage in a standoff that lasted for a little while with the FBI before they finally got to him. Um, he was a bad dude.

So they sent him back to prison and, uh, they said, you're not getting out of here ever. Yeah. He was later a part of the Attica prison riots as well. And, um, the, the one lady that he killed, he, he burned her alive. Like the family was upstairs and he broke into her house, uh, raped her, killed her and burned her alive in the home and the house went up in flames.

Right. So it sounded like he had no, he sounded like a true sociopath. Like he had no, um, not that there's ever a reason for killing someone, but it was always just at random because he wanted to do that. That's a lot what it sounds like. It was a self indulgence. So in the documentary, um, very powerful scene where the son, uh, I'm sorry, the little brother of Kitty who it's told through his eyes,

interviews and sits down with one of the sons of Mosley. And it's just like, I mean, you cut the tension with a knife, obviously. It's just so like fraught with tension. And, um, he had told his son that she was yelling racial slurs at him. He also said that he was just a getaway driver, um, for some mobster and the Genovese family was related to the crime mob family, the Genovese family. And none of this stuff is true. And, uh, the brother was just like, A, no, we're not related to that family at all.

We have nothing to do with that. And he just gives him a look when he talks about the racial slurs. Like, come on, man, that's not what happened. So it was really, really powerful scene of, uh, these two guys kind of working it out in a way. I didn't see them working anything out. Oh, see, I did, which made it even worse for me. I thought there was some between them. They kind of came to a nice, nice replace than where they'd started.

I did not catch that at all. Oh, maybe you just skip forward or something. Maybe I was like, I can't take this kind of fast forward. Well, the son was saying like, you know, I think it's, you know, we need, we need to bill. No, the son of Winston Mosley was saying that they needed to move on from all this. And then the brother was saying, I definitely don't, you know, the sins of the father aren't the sins of the sons.

Yeah. He said that. So, um, you know, I felt, I felt like they were better off than when they started for having that conversation. I honestly did not catch that. Yeah. Well, regardless, um, Winston Mosley after, I guess after his second, his first escape, the second little crime spree in Buffalo, um, he, uh, when he was captured, he, he apparently

reformed himself or he claimed to be reformed, he got a degree in prison. Um, he wrote an editorial that the New York Times published where he basically said, I'm a changed man. Yeah. And everybody said, oh, look at that. It's just about the time your first parole hearings coming up. This is great timing. Uh, he went up before the parole board and they said, no, yeah, uh, he went up before

the parole board again. They said, no, he went up 18 times, uh, when 18 times, the parole board said, no, yeah. I think the last one was just a couple of years before he died, but he died in 2016 at age 81 in prison. Yeah. And he, uh, the brother tried to get an interview with him and he said, uh, no, that he didn't want to be exploited anymore. And you could just feel this brother's pain of like really wanting to try to talk him into

it again. Um, and the, basically the people that, that were the go between like, yeah, you know, you can try, we can't keep you, but, uh, he's not going to change his mind. Right. So he never got that interview, uh, but I feel like he got, I don't think he was looking for answers. I mean, in the documentary, he went back to many of these apartment windows just to look at what their vantage point might have been.

He got an actress to, uh, recreate, um, what the screaming would have sounded like, uh, from down there on the street, which was very chilling, uh, scene. And I don't know that he was looking for, like you said, he was at odds with his family at times. He could tell the one little brother was like, man, this is hard on all of us. So you need to stop. Right. Um, but I don't think he was necessarily looking for the closure in that I want to find out

for sure if these people could have stopped it. I think the closure comes more in the journey of learning about his sister and learning as much as he can about this case. Right. It's really interesting. It was very interesting. Um, that 2004 times article, and then now this, this documentary has definitely exonerated Q gardens as a whole.

They've said now there's, there's way more nuances. There's way more. Yeah. Um, but two things, two people that have, um, not been exonerated are guy named Joseph Fink and a guy named Carl Ross. Carl Ross was the guy who lived at the top of the vestibule who opened his door. Yeah. And the thing about Carl Ross is if you notice it says 38 witnesses, 37 did nothing.

The 30, that, that, that last 38th witness that the times is referring to was Carl Ross. They said he's the one who called the police. We called the police like long after Kitty Jenovice was dead. Oh yeah. Yeah. So he was actually, he was actually, I don't want to say celebrated or whatever, but he was exonerated initially by this times article when it turns out that he was one of the two people who could have done something and didn't.

The other one was Joseph Fink who saw the initial attack from his vantage point in the elevator. He ran the elevator in the mobri apartments across the street and he, um, apparently saw what was happening and left his, his elevator and went to bed. Yeah. And that was that. But again, it seems like the overall feeling is okay, other than those two guys, everybody else is fine. I just disagree with that.

I think that there's a lot more that people could have done that didn't. And I don't think it's a, I just don't think that everybody's off the hook for that. Yeah. Yep. You got anything else? No, man. Uh, if you want to know more about Kitty Jenovice, just search the internet. There's a lot about her, but be careful what you read because it's all over the place, frankly.

Uh, and since I said internet, it's time for listener mail. Fish fraud follow up. Hey guys, I recently began, uh, began a job as a Marine Fisheries Observer for the Department of Fish and Game and the Bering Sea. And uh, just listening to your fish fraud episode, uh, each season, a percentage of vessels fishing here at least are randomly selected, have an observer on board to monitor the operations and bycatch that come up in their pots or nets. So the presence of an observer is admittedly a bit of a drag for this fisherman who have

to put up with us skinny nerds. L-O-L. Type that. Uh, we are generally a great deterrent of any mischief at sea, but from what I have seen most of the fishermen are real sharp honest folks who know what they're doing. Uh, of course, this is only a small portion of all the vessels on the water and it isn't going to solve that problem by any means, but you'd like to know that there is some coverage on fishing vessels and processors.

Thanks for all the laughs, my dudes. That is from Kevin, uh, Alexandra Witts in Olympia, Washington. L-That's a lot, Kevin. Had no idea, did you? L-Who did these people did that? L-That there's basically like a, uh, a sky marshal program fighting fish fraud on the high seas. L-Yeah, we talked about that.

L-We did. L-Yeah. L-I don't remember that. L-Yeah. L-I don't remember that, you know, in frequent and random that, you know, what's, what good is it doing? And it sounds okay at grace in some ways. L-Yeah, I guess so.

But still, have fun out there on the high seas. Don't get seasick. Uh, if you want to get in touch with us, like Kevin did, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastathousetheforks.com and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffhorks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90's called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of

the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90's. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90's called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.