You're Wrong About - Kitty Genovese and “Bystander Apathy”

Episode Date: June 20, 2019

“Once you tell a story incorrectly once, you can’t control where it goes.” Sarah tells Mike how The New York Times turned a suburban murder into an urban legend. Digressions include Billy Joel, the World’s Fair and “Ferngully.” This episode marks a triumphant return to Long Island and an unexpected celebration of Pride Month.Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

I don't know. I mean, I do hate every aspect of straight culture because it's all a heteronormative prison, but I don't hate the prisoners. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast that depressingly will never run out of social misconceptions to debunk. You had a little poem going there for a second. I want to stick with that. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast that will never run out of depressing things to debunk. About which to shout. About which to shout.

Boom. Yeah. There it is. Good. It rhymes, so it's technically a jingle. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall, and I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic. And if you would like to support our show until we run out of things to debunk, you can support us at patreon.com slash You're Wrong About. And today, we're talking about kiddie Genovese? Geno... phase?

Genovese. I am extremely excited for this one because I am a total blank slate. Really? I literally didn't know her name before you told me. And all I know is the little story that we always use as a metaphor for urban decay that apparently she was killed in the courtyard of a building where everybody could see it and nobody called the cops. That's the story.

That's literally all I know. I don't know who she was or who killed her or what aspects of that story are not true. Like, I am yours. Hooray. All right, climb on the magic carpet. Do you have any sense of when this happened? I was thinking about this last night and thinking like, was it the 1890s or was it like the 1960s? I can't even place this in geologic time.

Do you know what city it is? New York City. It's in New York. Yeah, this is a story about a real life woman who became a metaphor. And this happened in New York City in 1964 and it happened in Queens. Is that surprising? No, I mean, I said, oh, because it seemed like you needed a reaction. That's a part of New York that I've never been to.

I mean, to me, the first interesting thing just placing this geographically is that it happened in Kew Gardens, which was known at the time as a very safe, quiet, almost suburban neighborhood. At a time in New York when fears about New York City, both outside the city and within it, were focused on the fact that the crime rates were rising, the murder rates were rising. There was a sense that people were living packed into unnaturally close confinement with each other. And the way that people who reflect on Kitty Genevies' murder today tend to put it is that

this was a story that went viral to the extent that something could have gone viral in 1964. Yeah, before we had viruses. So to me, the first interesting thing about Kitty Genevies' murder, and we're going to start with the myth first, is that Kitty Genevies is murdered on March 13, 1964. It receives a little bit of coverage. There's like an initial New York Times story. It's in tabloids. It's like, ah, another murder.

And then two weeks later, on March 27th, the New York Times runs a front page story whose headline is 37 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police? Apathy at Stabbing of Queen's Woman Shocks Inspector. And then the article immediately goes on to say that 38 witnesses didn't call the police. So from the beginning, there was some hint that this had perhaps not been fact-checked to the degree that it deserved. That's interesting. So the myth of the apathy came first. Yeah. And it's like the murder becomes worth thinking about because it illustrates something

bigger than itself. Right. And the story starts, for more than half an hour, 38 respectable law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in queue 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. Oh my god. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault.

One witness called after the woman was dead. Okay. This was two weeks ago today, but Assistant Chief Inspector Frederick M. Lucen, in charge of the borough's detectives and a veteran of 25 years of homicide investigations, is still shocked. He can give a matter of fact recitation of many murders, but the queue garden slang baffles him. Not because it is a murder, but because the quote, good people fail to call the police. Ooh. This is such Sarah bait.

We've got all of these dichotomies, right? We've got like the grizzled inspector who can't believe the callousness of the society. We've also got this binary of like the evil murderer and the good people who wouldn't prevent it. Yeah. We have a whole bunch of binaries. We have like this very neat little paint palette. You know, we have our red and our yellow and our green and our blue. And now we're going to mush them all up and we're going to make turquoise and pink. And we're just going to, you know, we're going to make all the colors because. Because the world is mauve.

So I mean, hearing that account, what would you imagine is potentially more complicated than the way it's painted there? I don't know if this would have occurred to me at the time, but knowing what we know now, the idea that nobody called the cops seems pretty farfetched actually. People call the cops when like their neighbor is practicing the trumpet. People call the cops about whales. I mean, yeah, people call the cops about earthquakes. Like to me, it seems weird that nobody would have called the cops.

Well, you know who loves calling the cops is people who aren't afraid of the cops. Ah, yes. Because one of the things that the New York Times did not talk about is that Kitty Genovese was a lesbian. And the primary witness to her murder was a homosexual, as we said at the time. Is this a Pride Month episode, Sarah? Kind of, because there's nothing to be proud of here. Okay.

Next week, we are doing Stonewall. This is one of our why Stonewall needed to happen episodes, I think. So this is the section of the New York Times article about Carl Ross, who was the final witness to Kitty Genovese's murder and who was a friend of hers and who was gay. The New York Times says it was 350 by the time the police received their first call from a man who was a neighbor of Miss Genovese. In two minutes, they were at the scene. The man explained that he had called the police after much deliberation.

He had phoned a friend in Nassau County for advice and then he had crossed the roof of the building to the apartment of the elderly woman to get her to make the call. Oh, wow. I didn't want to get involved, he sheepishly told the police. Wow. And this is the line that becomes synonymous with the problem in the neighbors, the problem in New York, the problem with humanity, maybe, that people use this crime as an excuse to talk about, you know, that this man said,

I didn't want to get involved, that we have lost the ability to care so deeply that we see someone being murdered and we say, I didn't want to get involved. The tone that it takes on in the years and decades following is of, right, I didn't feel like it. How does this affect me? Like he's sitting there with his legs crossed with a cigarette. Just like, doesn't bother me, whatever. I'm just going to go back to watching Judge Judy.

That's the scene that that quote invokes. Yeah. And Carl Ross shortly after the murder leaves New York and then basically disappears. And this is his legacy in society. The six word statement, I didn't want to get involved, which you can really hear in whatever tone you imagine it would have been set in, or maybe are afraid that you yourself would have put it. I also think that that thing where the cops show up two minutes later is total bullshit.

Really? Knowing what I know about the cops in 1964, it's like two minutes. I don't know, man. Well, so what else did we not yet have in 1964 that we now take for granted as emergency technology? Oh, cell phones. That, and we didn't have 911 yet. Wait, we didn't have 911? Yeah, 911 was invented partly because of the outcry over Kitty Genovese's murder.

What? People were like, we should really have one number that people can call to get the police. I mean, I guess 911 had to be invented at some point, but I didn't know it was that late. Yeah, no, at the time you had to call an operator and get your local precinct, or if you had your precinct number, you could call them. It would take more than two minutes to get a call into the police, I think, at that time. Wow. Yeah, isn't that weird to think about?

It's also the extent to which you just assume that everything in the world has always been there at whatever time you're born, and then throughout your adulthood, you have to basically go back and realize all of the things in your childhood that were completely socially constructed and invented like 10 minutes before you were born. Right. And that there was a reason that it occurred to people that it should be easier to call for help. Yeah. So what's the real story?

So who, like, who is Kitty? What is this entire event before it becomes a myth? So I want to start with a story about Kitty. Okay. So at the time of her death, Kitty was living with a woman named Marianne Zalonko. Okay. Who she had met at what was called a girl bar. Ooh, a girl bar.

A girl bar. Nice. Called the Swing Rendezvous. Swing Rendezvous. So one night in 1963, Marianne is at the Swing Rendezvous, and she meets a very... Kitty was just so cute. She meets this woman named Kitty, and Kitty says, don't I know you from somewhere?

And Marianne is like, no. And Kitty says, I think I do. I'm Kitty. She's like a cool cucumber. I am led to believe. And so she and Marianne dance, and then they lose each other in the crowd. And then weeks later, March 17th, 1963, Kitty figures out where Marianne lives and goes to her apartment and leaves a note on the door that says, I'll call you at seven,

the phone across the street. Oh my god. Isn't that like just, that's game. Yeah, dude. This is like game before there was negging. That was like back when you really went for it. That's terrific. Yeah.

Kitty at the time is 27. She grew up in Brooklyn and an Italian American family. She was named the class cut up in her yearbook when she graduated. And her family moves to Connecticut. After she graduates high school and want her to come with, and she's like, no, I'm going to stay in New York and starts working tending bar, which is what she's doing at the time of her death. She's a bar manager and also a really well liked bartender.

She's described by her coworkers and customers as a kind of person who can cut off a patron and do so in so charming a way that they will still leave her a good tip. Oh, nice. So she's like assertive and funny and charming. Right. What I find myself thinking about the most is like that she was out there and brave and looking for love at a time when her existence was criminalized. It's hard to remember that there was all of this light in the dark ages,

but there was still these brazen romances. And I don't know that love was still stronger than fear, at least at times. And so on their next date, after Kitty calls Marianne on the pay phone, they go to the Seven Steps, which is a famous, not a girl bar, but girl and boy bar. And they drink and they dance. And what Marianne says when she's interviewed for a book called Kitty Genevies by Kevin Cook that comes out 50 years after the murder. What Marianne says is sometimes you meet a person and you just know.

I mean, should we talk about like the social construction of lesbians in the 1960s? Yes, please. Because maybe it is because I'm doing all this stonewall reading, but there is something interesting about like the way that the experience of homosexual women and homosexual men is so different because society finds homosexual men so much more threatening. It's like it has to crack down on any displays of public affection by men at all. And yet men also have more societal power to change their circumstances than women do. So it's like women can get away with maybe dancing in a bar together or maybe holding

hands on the subway a little bit and people just go, oh, they're close friends. It's not that big of a deal. But then on the other hand, when it comes to a political movement of lesbians, there's much more of a sense of like, oh, the girls want rights. It's in that queue and it doesn't really go anywhere, right? And so it feels like it's this weird double bind for lesbians at the time, where in some ways they're better off and in some ways they're worse off than gay men. Yeah.

Or that gay men have both the trauma and the privilege of inspiring fear in society maybe. I've been reading about just the way the police were targeting gay New Yorkers and gay bars. And specifically in 1964, there was an initiative by the mayor at the time to clear the city of homosexuals, basically, because the world's fair was happening. And people from all over the world were going to be coming to New York, and they couldn't possibly be. It was like cleaning up graffiti. They were like, we just, we have to rid the city of deviance.

And then I was reading about how the NYPD and police departments across America, and not just in New York at all, how the NYPD was cracking down, trying to figure out how to clear the city of gay people. And he would, as a cop, go into a gay bar and sometimes flirt with someone for two or three hours in order to get them to go off and hook up with you, and then you would arrest them. Unbelievably inefficient. Right. Also, that's how you can tell someone to cop that they talked to you for two hours before

trying to hook up with you. That's about an hour and 54 minutes longer than I've ever seen it in an actual gay bar. They're like, so what do you think about the Yankees? Okay, so this is from a 2015 dissertation by Anna Levofsky that was for a history doctorate at Harvard called Queer Expertise, Urban Policing and the Construction of Public Knowledge about Homosexuality. Oh, yeah. Levofsky writes, in 1962, REL Master's study, The Homosexual Revolution, reported that the

vice squad's standard operating procedure was to send officers who, quote, had been given formal instruction in common gay mannerism as to the bars in order to lure in homosexual patrons. What? And bars across the nation, plainclothes officers, quote, behave as swishily as they know how to help facilitate arrests. A decoy could pursue a patron into the late hours of the night trying to extract an offer from a timid partner or to convince a worry customer of his own sexual intentions. What?

This just shows how little the cops understand about the gay community because the gay community is extremely misogynistic and a lot of gay men are anti that swishy stuff because it reminds them of women and they're all asshole misogynists. Oh my god, this study is written in the 50s and 60s of these scholarly texts on the homosexual holds a cigarette like this. The homosexual walks like that and it's like they're studying lemurs. Here's another great Lebowski quote. From California to New York, officers drilled peepholes opening directly onto public toilet

stalls. In one lavatory in Los Angeles, officers stationed in an adjacent chamber could walk the length of the men's room alternating among a line of eye holes to watch acts of oral sex in the stalls opposite the wall. What? In New York, an officer hidden in the pipe chamber of the West 4th Street subway station watched for lascivious conduct among errant commuters through a set of openings in the wall. You've got to be kidding me. It's just like, I'm sorry, did the police just want an excuse to experience their own

sexualities? Yeah, I'm going to need to watch like 13 more hours of gay sex before I make any more arrests. Just like officer Cunningham, you know, suiting up, leaving Magge and the kids at home, being like, well, got to go watch gay men through a wall for another eight hours. I'm really saving the city from itself. Although what's really interesting about this is that oftentimes when we talk about like the gay bars or gay rights movement, gay, whatever, we often kind of leave out lesbians, right? We're sort of using that as a shorthand for gay men when sort of straight society finds gay male

sex much more disgusting and much more threatening than lesbians. The weird thing about these sort of like rice squads and stuff, are they doing that on lesbian bars? So at the bars that Kitty and Marianne went to, the cops would raid the bar and basically come looking for a handout. And what would happen was you would be hanging out dancing and then there would be a warning system where a red light would flash and you would scatter and stop dancing with each other. And then the cops would come and they would look for sex acts. Some of them would just take their handouts and then go and some would harass the patrons

for a while because that was also, I think, one of the perks of being a cop rating queer establishments. And this is why I think I find it so, I mean, not amazing because people have been always been doing this, but this is, I think, what makes me really love Kitty and feel like I have a sense of her as a human being that like in this climate of shake downs and humiliation and beatings and having your entire identity be criminalized, she is just on the make. And just like sees a woman she likes and goes for it and is not living in an attitude of like furtive secrecy or shame. And her family is, you know, they're not going to disown her, but they do not want to hear about it. And she just like does not seem to have been

cowed or humiliated into hating her identity. She's living her life, essentially, which that seems like it was really hard to do. Yeah, I always wish there was a way to like go back and give medals of honor to everybody who did that back then because it's like the amount of confidence that it took to do that is really unfathomable now. Yeah, I guess like that there were people even within that, even within that culture. Who were just like the pay phones next door. Give me a jingle. Be there at seven. Yeah.

I don't know. She's just like such a little Bruce Springsteen, right? And it also helps that the photo that we all know of her, if you have an image of Kitty Genevies in your head, is a mug shot. Yeah. I mean, I feel like there's something kind of great about that being the photo that history chose of her, like her staring down the camera with this attitude of like, I do it again, coppers. Yes, it's funny. I was googling this the other day so I could like tweet a photo of her. And it was very clearly a mug shot. And I guess in my head, I was like, well, she's associated with a crime, so she must have been arrested. But like,

obviously there's no way she would have been arrested for her own murder. So like, what is the mug shot from? I feel like being arrested for your own murder is like metaphorically what happens to women in America. But she was busted for taking bets for horse racing when she was working as a bartender. She placed a $9 bet on a horse race for a patron who was an undercover cop. And because her name was Genevies, that was a name of a famous mafioso in New York at the time. So she may have received a lot of extra pressure because she had the same name as a mafia family. This is so intersectional. We're throwing Italian American bias into all of this.

I know. This really is serabate. So, you know, Kitty and Marianne meet. Kitty leaves the note on her door. A couple weeks later, Marianne goes to the pay phone and Kitty calls her. They go to the bar. They go home together. They go to bed together. And in the morning, Marianne says that they knew that they wanted to live together. I'm trying not to make a lesbian joke. I know I can feel it. That's the thing. I have so many great lesbians in my life. We are alive because of the lesbians in our lives and we still make jokes about them. And it's just that you have to make fun of the people who are just making better choices than you.

And so they move in together and they move in together. They move to Q Gardens Queens, which is a very safe residential neighborhood kind of away from the hustle and bustle of the city. So their anniversary is March 17th. That's the night of the pay phone call and Kitty is murdered on March 13th, the following year. Oh, they weren't even together a year. And so Marianne is not welcome, basically, by Kitty's family. She's Kitty's friend. And when the police come, she's like, I'm Kitty's roommate. And just having to lie about the nature of your relationship to someone who you've just lost, it also seems so awful. Yeah. I mean, that's why this stuff matters,

right? It's because the minute something bad happens in your life, the status of your partner really matters, right? It's not your fucking roommate. As your romantic partner, they have rights and this is like the whole thing. This is why I like gay rights. Yeah, and your roommate doesn't get to decide what happens to your body and your roommate doesn't get to visit you in the hospital and your roommate is not in your obituary. You just get erased and your roommate is not mentioned in the sensationalistic New York Times article about your murder. All right, of course. Marianne is nowhere in there. Kitty's lesbianism is nowhere in there. That is kind of ignored and scrubbed from the record for decades. So the way this

happens from Marianne's perspective is Kitty is managing a bar. She works these very long double shifts and so she gets off work after midnight and then she goes and has a meal with a platonic male friend and she gets in her red fiat and she drives home and because there's never really that much parking in the neighborhood, she parks at the LiRR station where commuters can leave their cars for when they go into the city and starts walking home. And a guy named Winston Mosley, who the police will apprehend a few days later, Winston Mosley is black and he specifically tells the police that he goes out looking for a white woman to kill. Jesus Christ. And there's something also very interesting about how the New York Times, at a time when America and New

York City was feeling very anxious about the civil rights movement, you can run the story about a white woman murdered by a black man and not even let on that this is the exemplary murder that you've chosen to talk about and that this is part of what will appeal to your readers too and this is also part of what will confirm their fears because the 38 good citizens who didn't call the police I think is also a code for the 38 white citizens and that the safe neighborhood needs to be protected from this encroachment of the dangerous outside element and that will only work if people call the cops all the time. It's like the perfect tabloid murder because it's a stranger danger murder like somebody you didn't know which we know are very rare but

you've got the racial targeting which also is like a thing that white people say happens much more than it actually happens and you've also got the young attractive white female who's been murdered and who we don't know is a lesbian so we can feel perfectly fine feelings and you can erase all of the like inconvenient stuff about how she lives with her girlfriend and like she's a lesbian like you don't have to put that stuff in the paper you can put the stuff in the paper that fulfills all of these little narrative chapters. Yeah in 1964 there were 636 murders in New York City and this is the one this is the only one that we remember right when there's one crime lifted up out of a field of hundreds you know it's not because it's the worst it's not because it's

the most indicative of the kinds of crime the kinds of murders that are happening in New York City it's not the most brutal because Winston Mosley in fact very shortly before he murdered Kitty had murdered a black woman and no one ever talks about that or remembers it and he had killed her in arguably an even more violent fashion than than the way he killed Kitty so his first victim Annie Mae Johnson has been completely erased from public memory and Kitty is the one that we remember because you know if there are 636 murders in New York City in 1964 then the media and the public and the police have the chance to highlight the one that most embodies the fears and anxieties and prejudices of the dominant culture and this is the one that gets chosen. So what's the actual

what's the actual murder what's the actual what takes place? One of the aspects that it really didn't occur to me to think through until I was doing this research is the time at which it took place okay this is shortly after three in the morning. How in the world are there going to be 38 people just like up and awake and yeah wait a minute yeah like in my head it was at like 9 p.m. when everybody would have been sort of watching TV because that's when 38 people would have been reasonably able to notice something happening on the street outside like it just the way the story is told to us like the 38 is what sticks with you and that's what was hammered in by the headline and then by the quickie book that was published by the the author of that story

later that year. That's just incongruous with three and four a.m. and so you forget that part. And also even the term witnesses implies that you saw something and did nothing whereas it sounds like a lot of people maybe you heard something out of your window you heard some sort of cry but like if you're asleep and something wakes you up you're not lucidly being like that must have been a woman in danger like whatever I heard a thing and now I'm going back to sleep. Right most of the people on the street are asleep and the problem is not that they're you know in this densely populated urban neighborhood where there would be more of a chance of people being awake businesses being open the kind of safety that a city provides they're in a very residential

part of Queens and so there aren't that many people around the streets were empty. So he kills her on the street not in a courtyard not in like a back area? Yeah she parks her car she gets out of her car and starts walking home he parks his car and starts following her down this residential street and stabs her okay outside of a bar. So he just like runs up to her and stabs her yeah and punctures her lung which is what ultimately kills her. So he stabs her she screams according to some witness accounts she says my god I've been stabbed and it's also dark right the sodium lights that we have in cities that were put in New York City by Mayor Lindsey that was because of Kitty's murder it was a dark street where this

happened. So the things that we think would have helped people make the story go differently at the time were the things that were brought into our lives because of the way things went. So this isn't a situation where she's like screaming for minutes? You can't really scream that well when your lung has been punctured you know. So she screams someone opens the window and shouts leave that girl alone. So somebody was awake? Or woke up enough to to have the wherewithal to do that and Winston Mosley flees. Okay.

And also what people who heard something said at the time was that this was near a pub and in 1964 even more so than today it wasn't considered really that problematic to to beat your wife or your girlfriend. And so what a lot of people said was that they heard something and it was outside a bar and that made them think that it was a domestic dispute which they thought of as men of their business. You know if you can't assault a woman who you don't know if you're a man but if she's your wife or your girlfriend then that's like your job. Yeah because it's weird that like the whole thing gets put into this frame of like city dwellers urban apathy like people in cities it's so impersonal when another interpretation is like

oh everyone just thought it was domestic abuse and was like shruggies. Right. Like it's like which one is worse? Urban apathy or like suburban apathy which is really much more what this is based on where it happened. Yeah. So there's a police call box in front of this bar where she seems to have been heading because she noticed someone was following her. She started running but some people have also argued you

know maybe she wasn't going to call the police maybe she was trying to get into the bar and she maybe would have if it hadn't been closed. Right. So a guy named Joseph Fink who works as the assistant super of the apartment building across from the building where Kitty is his first attacked is sitting in the lobby and he has the clearest view of anyone of the first attack and he can see that it's a stabbing. Okay. He sees the shine of the knife's blade.

Wow. Is what he says later and the police say well why what did you okay how did you react to that? Yeah. He says I thought about going downstairs to get my baseball bat and then instead he just goes to the basement to take a nap. Oh my god. So like this is not a story where no one was apathetic. So it wasn't necessarily like 38 people suck it's just one dude sucks.

Yeah I think this to me this is like the only person in the story who unambiguously sucks. Yeah. Because he's like at his job fully awake fully conscious like has the best view of what's going on sees that there's a knife and doesn't call the police and doesn't do anything about it. Right. But assistant super bad guy is not a great New York Times. This one guy in Queens sucks. That's like a daily news headline that's not a New York Times headline.

And also among the 600 plus murders in New York City that year I imagine there's probably a sucky person in many of those murders or some significant portion of those murders. Right. This was not the only murder in New York City where a bystander could have done something. Yeah. And didn't. Yeah. And also like I can't blame someone for like thinking about going to get as bad and then

not doing it like I would not intervene in a knife thing. I don't think like I've never been given the opportunity to know what I would do. But I really I think I would be lying to myself if I said oh yeah for sure I would definitely go get my bat and go you know I do have a really big rolling pin in my car that could potentially be good for that. I mean I think I know you well enough to know that you would not go take a nap. I think that's the critical element. Right.

I think like most of humanity is somewhere in the uncomfortable middle between bat getting a nap. And so many years later a guy who's now a retired cop and at the time was a teenager comes forward and says actually my father called the police early in the attack and nothing happened. Oh. So conveniently left out of the New York Times narrative is that someone did call the police early on and the police didn't respond to the call. What do you believe him or do you think he's retconning it?

I mean you can't verify these things 50 years after the fact but I don't think that either is more or less plausible than the other. 00:32:03,600 --> 00:32:08,720 Like I think it's perfectly likely that he would have called the police and that you know the call would have been not given a high priority. I mean if you're calling and saying a man is attacking a woman outside of a bar and she's screaming like I can see the police not taking that seriously based on the climate of the time.

Yeah. And also there's another person who calls the police but who doesn't speak very good English. She's a frank speaking flight attendant and so she gets flustered and that when they start kind of aggressively questioning her about what she's seen and heard and she freaks out and hangs up. Oh wow. Okay. You know another thing to talk about is that the police in New York City in the 60s are notoriously

ineffectual and corrupt. Yeah. People don't trust the police very much in 1960s in New York not even white people. Right. New York is right later on about you know everyone got their apartment broken into everyone had stuff stolen from them everyone was used to petty crime on the street and the police you know were not going to help you with that like it was just you were a drop in a bucket and like and the police were potentially going to make more problems for you than they were going to solve.

Right. So again we get the story of apathy but there's also the apathy that's created by ineffective cops that if you've called them before and they haven't come the three times maybe you're not calling them because you just don't expect them to do anything. Right or like you expect them to come and abuse you based on the category of human that you are or you reasonably expect them to come if you call about something that they determined to be a domestic dispute which they find to be a waste of their time and then they give you a hard time about it and you've just made a hard time for yourself and not solved anything.

So you know the whole tone of the New York Times article is like why why did no one call the police if only they called the police then the police would have come and everything would have been fine and it's like yeah within that kind of binary narrative that you've created it's like the neighborhood is the problem if only they'd availed themselves of the completely reliable and trustworthy and you know knight in shining armor of the New York City police then everything would have been fine and it's like what it. Yeah it's like any defense of a system right it's like those people that are like well how did you end up homeless didn't you apply for welfare like I don't understand why didn't you just apply for welfare and it's like

do you know how fucking hard it is to get welfare do you know what the paperwork is do you know how much documentation you have to have do you know that it takes months like it's not as easy as like pick up the phone like hello welfare I would like you right people don't know that these systems are broken down and they're just like well why didn't you do the obvious thing it's like well the obvious thing doesn't actually work right and I think that when we tell ourselves these stories it allows those of us who have not been on any side of this position to reinforce our own belief which we you know it's hard to blame people for wanting to believe this that these systems work that like the welfare system works the police work like if people had called the police and everything would have

worked out because the police are the the one non problematic aspect of this story you know and it's all about the badness of the neighbors and the neighborhood yeah there's something else going on too in the 60s where you know this is brewing before the story happens like it's almost like I think the way that news story isn't kind of viral news stories work is that there's some there's a conversation that we really want to have it's like when you're talking with your friend and you like really want to talk about you know your own stuff and you're waiting for like very clumsily for a point of entry and they're like I think I might go to the container store this weekend and you're like I was dumped in a casater store and I'm still not over it you know

you know when you're just like waiting for getting into a game of double dutch like you're just like when can we talk about urban apathy you know and this was the little catalyst for that this conversation that everyone was champing at the bit trying to have because part of it was and you know white anxiety over civil rights white flight to the suburbs yeah the way major american cities were run infrastructurally traumatized a lot of their citizens and kind of forced people to live in poverty and you know created petty crime as a means of survival for citizens who've been kept out of any more meaningful form of of making a living I think that the story that white america really wanted to spin in the 60s and that kitty genovese's murder allowed us to

spin was one where cities are bad and they make people bad and there is this new kind of person who's some sociologist reflecting on the murder called homo urbanis right who has been corrupted and damaged by city life to the extent that like they just are completely apathetic and amoral and yeah antisocial it's not that the people in power are allocating funds badly or that the police department is full of corruption but that you know people are turning bad and there's nothing we can do about it and the problem is that people are becoming evil and right it's it's not something that people in power can possibly fix right right it's also a great driver of defunding cities right that the suburbs comes to be seen as the default and sort of what everybody should be doing yeah

and then all the white people all the people with the means to flee can flee yeah and leave everyone who can't get out to just you know die in a fire right which of course new york was like the most visible part of that whole american narrative that we were telling ourselves and like the weird glee that the rest of america felt when new york city was going bankrupt in the 70s and yeah you know when smoke was drifting in over the world series game and you know because the bronx was burning and i think that like the rest of america was looking at new york kind of starting at the time of kitty genovese's murder and then through the next 20 years kind of rubbing its hands together like see cities don't work yeah just like abandon ship i mean billy joel wrote about all this

how do i know that was coming three two one billy joel yeah you know the reason that these stories become as big as they do is not because there's something that is so compelling about the actual events it's because there's something that allows us to validate the fears and anxieties that we want to validate that we're looking for excuses to validate yeah it's like the primordial ooze it's like the earliest life drifting out of this pond of just random shit and then eventually it takes form and it takes the form of these myths that we start to tell ourselves yeah like the thing in fern gully yes but we haven't even gotten to the gay hero who finally calls the cops what how does all that happen well it's uh it's it's it's rough

oh no okay so let me show you to a picture of the the street where the first attack occurred and by the way the new york times as we may recall says that she was attacked three times it wasn't three times it was twice she was attacked again what yeah there's two attacks what okay so let me show you the street oh it's like a two-story building it's just a bunch of stores with like a one apartment above them yeah it's it's businesses and then apartments on the second story what the hell okay there's not a population density here yeah it's really it's it's more of a long island crime than in new york city crime once again once again this is like our show it's like like in jurassic park where they're like and

we're back in the car again it's like and we're back on long island this basically happened to fucking strip mall and it gets called like an urban america problem right like the image we have in our heads is like you know the building where sharon stone lives in sliver or something yeah yeah and so there's the initial attack on the street and then someone opens the window and says leave that girl alone and winston moseley flees but with great presence of mind moves his car what from where he has parked it he moved his car in the middle of a murder he was committing what the fuck he's a paradoxical guy like he you know when he goes to trial and then every kind of interview and an interaction that you know anyone who has with him and and talks publicly about it has like

he's very calm when describing what he has done and why he thinks he did it and he appears to have been very cool about this whole murder as he was committing it so he's he moves his car and then he changes hats so that he will not be recognized as the initial assailant okay and then he tries to find her again kitty in the meantime has you know with this punctured lung kind of already beginning to suffocate already having a hard time yeah has walked around the corner and to the other side of the buildings on the street which is where the entrance to her apartment is okay and she starts trying you know doors to vestibules to try and just get in and hide the first one she tries won't open the second one opens and she goes in and collapses on the stairwell which leads to her

friend Carl Ross's apartment and that's where Winston Mosley finds her and Mosley catches up with her and starts stabbing her again oh Carl Ross who is in his apartment quite drunk hears it and opens the door and sees them oh my god fuck and he closes the door and is terrified and that's when he calls his friend in nasa county who advises him not to call the police and then calls a friend who tells him to come over to her apartment so he climbs out of his apartment and and onto the roof and then into hers and what then calls a neighbor of kitty and Marianne's named Sophie for our finally who is like for god's sake call the police jesus wow and i just still don't know what to make of that because i i again like i've never had a friend of mine being

stabbed to death outside my front door i have no way of guessing how i would behave i know that i would be scared i can imagine not wanting to call the police as a gay man i can imagine like you know i've had the experience of like when something catastrophic happens you know literally what's going on but you can't absorb it as real like you yeah you almost feel like if you deny that it's really happening then maybe it won't be there's like this weird freezing effect yeah and i can imagine being drunk and scared and and just closing the door and not knowing what to do and it's i think it's not an apathy thing i think it's a bravery thing i think it's what comes across to me is that he he was scared not that he didn't care like i think that

there are emotions bigger than our altruism and compassion and that fear can be bigger than anything i don't think that it's like a lack of emotion i think it's it's you know more going on rather than too little yet has to be because he obviously like he didn't close the door and then like make a sandwich right he closed the door and called his friend like he was clearly extremely upset but didn't know what to do it sounds like yeah oh that's awful though so it was like feet away from him yeah and Winston Mosley you know sees the door open and sees it close and decides that you know this guy's not gonna intervene and he's gonna keep going oh fuck oh that's like even worse Jesus that's really chilling and you know and stabs her and sexually assaults her

oh fuck really yeah which is also not you know such a part of of the public memory yeah shit and uh at the at the bottom of everything it's like i feel like there's something that to me doesn't sit right about like making a murder emblematic of anything because then you know the person disappears and the awfulness of what they experience disappears you know this is not like she was sacrificed so that New Yorkers could have a moral reckoning about themselves and realize they needed to call the cops more i think that we take the realities of of a crime more seriously if we just let it be what it is and not stand in for anything else right because the crime is so horrific yeah and the way that Kevin Cook ends his book which i love that he

did this is that Carl calls Kitty's neighbor Sophie and she's the one who tells him to call the police and she is a young housewife and mother who is a neighbor of of Kitty and Marianne's and she just knowing that someone is stabbing Kitty and not knowing that the killer is gone and not knowing that she isn't putting herself in danger runs to the building and runs into the stairwell and is is with Kitty and is holding her oh my god as she's dying like in her like she wasn't you know this this was a story about a very brave young mom also yeah like this isn't everyone was apathetic this isn't 38 people you know recline comfortably and and walk in neighbor be stabbed to death this is like a lot of people heard or saw a little of something yeah

and didn't respond as heroically as we like to think that we could and one person seems to have really sucked and one person got really really scared and one person did something amazing so the whole spectrum of like responses to something like this right it's like it's not this thing of like all these people behave the same way and it was terrible it's like you had a neighborhood of humans and they showed all of the responses that humans can can show good bad and chicken shit and so what Kevin Cook makes a big point about at the end of his book is that Kenny Genevies did not die alone she died in the arms of her friend of someone who was brave enough to you know rush blindly into the scene of her murder yeah that's lovely yeah this is like also

a story about the the love and bravery of women being erased because then the next morning Marianne wakes up and finds out that her girlfriend has been murdered and the police have her as their prime suspect no the first couple of days because they grill her and get her to admit that she and kitty were lesbians and the police are like well as we all know sexual deviants are more prone to commit murders and so obviously this lesbian lesbians just love killing people Jesus fucking but Carl saw the attack didn't Carl tell them like it was a dude attacker so the police wake Marianne up at four to tell her that kitty is on her way to the hospital and it doesn't look good she dies on the way to the hospital yeah so Carl Ross comes over to Marianne's to keep her company after she's woken

up and they sit there drinking vodka at four in the morning and he doesn't tell her that he saw what he saw I mean yeah I don't know it's chicken shit but it seems like you know it's human yeah we just have to really teach people to not murder each other I feel like that that's my yeah yeah so the police when they start questioning Marianne they get her to tell them that they're lesbians and what she says later is I was upset with myself for revealing that I've always regretted it what right did they have to know they're asking what was their sex life like what sexual positions did they use what really that's relevant right yes I mean that's the whole thing with gayness is that you see this a lot in accounts of East Germany as well that it's like well if you lie

about your homosexuality you must be lying about all this other stuff right it's like they catch you in this completely unrelated lie and they're like well we've got a liar on our hands ladies and gentlemen and then they just don't trust anything else that you say yeah and now you have an excuse to just run a rough shot over their rights and an investigation too yeah and so one of the detectives says about that line of questioning quote one of the most common motives for murder is jealousy it's also our experience that homosexual romances produce more jealousy by far than quote straight romances more jealousy means more chance for violence women in fact can be more possessive toward their lovers than men that's like some mars venus shit that's like super cheap pop psychology

like men are like rubber bands and women are murderers yeah Jesus so there's no evidence whatsoever but they have to question her anyway yeah and then they decide that she must have been having an affair with this guy who she had hung out with for a bit after she got off work that night and clearly she was having an affair and that's why her lesbian lover murdered her like this is like what what the nypd's top minds are coming up with yeah this is a woman who's in a same sex relationship so she's obviously in love with a dude yes right like all lesbians are murderers and they're also not really lesbians they're just waiting to meet the right guy at which point presumably they'll also stop being murderers yes I guess also Marianne's friends stop talking to her

because they're all paranoid about like about the police harassing them as well and having their phones tapped and stuff so this like comes in and breaks up the community that they're a part of so like when she needs social support the most it becomes impossible yeah and I just think that like the degree to which the police had made themselves the enemies of queer new yorkers I just think that's such a big part of this because like it's even if you know that like it's a violent crime you need to report it if these are people that you only see in the context of them harassing you and shaking you down and treating you as something less than human then like I think that would make it so much harder to make that call yeah and to quote get involved

but then all of this is before the New York Times article with the apathy stuff comes out this is where it's basically just like an anonymous murder yeah was on page 31 or whatever of the newspaper this is not a media circus no no one really cares it's just just another lesbian knifing it's one of the two murders that happen every day right I mean it's yeah and so pretty soon after the murder Carl Ross skips town and he is also the first person arrested oh the police want to question Marianne they tell him to screw off they don't like him maybe he's swishy and they don't like that right and he of course being quite drunk is not in the most friendly of moods and so they kind of like kick him out of Marianne's apartment and tell him to

go fly a kite and so he goes down and kicks the door really hard and they arrest him for disorderly conduct oh come on which is also the charge that you apply to people being gay in public yes or in private yeah so the way that Winston Mosley gets arrested is that five days later he is stealing a tv which he is in the habit of doing he will break into a neighbor's house he lives in ozone park which is a neighborhood of queens and takes tv's and then brings them to his dad who sells them for him okay and a neighbor sees him and is like this doesn't seem right I'm gonna call the police so the case of urban apathy gets solved by urban snitching that's the real story here yes and so he gets arrested the police start questioning him and then one thing

that the police noticed because witnesses did notice this and tell the police about it is that there was a white corvair at the crime scene and Winston Mosley was loading his new tv into his white corvair and so they start questioning him about kitty's murder and he starts talking pretty easily about it whoa and so he tells the police that he took the brown wallet that Marianne had given kitty for Christmas the year before and took 49 dollars out of it and then threw the wallet into the weeds by the building where he worked mm-hmm where the police go find it so he confesses convincingly to the murder why also would they just ask and he's like yep I did it yeah sometimes people just seem to really want to confess don't they okay he's just like yes I mean this is weird

behavior but it's also less weird than murdering another person so I guess it's in keeping with what we know about him so far you can also see that we're at this interesting moment in sort of popular and legal understandings of what criminal insanity is or could be because his lawyer Sidney Sparrow which is a great name yeah says you know it's proof that he's insane that he's able to talk so calmly about committing this murder and committing this sexual assault and you know that only an insane person could be so calm about all of this like this is proof that there's something wrong with him healthy people aren't like this but then isn't that that's just an argument for every single murderer basically I mean that would get like 97 percent of murderers

off the hook well Michael I would be fine with that it's like not off the hook right the question is it's you know are you a healthy person to be in society no are you unhealthy for society because you can actively choose between doing good and doing bad or because there's something broken inside of you and we need to protect other people from you until we don't have to anymore these are two different things and we currently do the first one right and that's you know to me the whole philosophy of criminal justice is that you know if you did violence to someone and especially if you committed the kind of stranger assault and murder of a woman that we hold up as the emblematic type of violent crime in America even though it isn't then you must have consciously

and rationally made that choice and therefore we're going to punish you and I think that like the idea that you can rationally choose to murder someone really doesn't make sense to me yeah in 1964 it seems like we hadn't quite landed on that as the animating philosophy behind our legal system that like killing someone is a choice that you can freely make right and it is a choice that you can sanely make right so yeah he gives he confesses very easily and then he confesses to the murder of Annie Mae Johnson who's 24 and a black house wife and then he confesses to a murder that someone else has also confessed to already oh shit and then it doesn't seem he committed and this is how the story gets to the New York Times because one of the New York Times editors is having lunch with

the police commissioner who spends most of their lunch talking about how anxious he is about civil rights and Jesus and it's like anyway the weirdest thing happened this guy confessed to a murder that someone else also confessed to and this is how the New York Times gets turned on to Kitty Genoves and this is how it becomes front page news so he pitched the New York Times a story basically that's like my entire inbox right and it's you know why do the cops come off so well and the story as we know it right possibly because they controlled the narrative from the beginning it's like a PR flak or something it's like I will arrange this whole story for you it is it's like what the exorcist did for the Catholic Church and the reason that it is written that 38 witnesses

saw and heard Kitty being murdered and did nothing is that there are 38 police reports what that doesn't reflect the number of people that the police talk to it certainly doesn't reflect the number of witnesses to the crime so just like a completely arbitrary like number of pieces of paper they have it's the number of pieces of paper it's not even as sophisticated as like counting the number of windows that would have looked on the murder yeah that would have been more reflective you know that would be like the number of units or something yeah so it's just like what the police like their version of it is the version that we know and it's the version where everything would have been fine if people had called them and it was the fault of these

apathetic New Yorkers right if only they would just pick up the phone and call their good friends the police is there any evidence in the actual story that they interviewed any of the neighbors okay so from the New York Times piece a housewife knowingly if quite casual said we thought it was a lover's quarrel a husband and wife both said frankly we were afraid they seemed aware of the fact that events might have been different at a straw woman wiping her hands and her apron said I didn't want my husband to get involved wow so these are people that saw the first attack yeah the fact that nobody says it was 330 seems like that seems like the most important detail of this right and again I will give you this first sentence this crackerjack lead for more

than half an hour 38 respectable law abiding citizens and queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Q gardens yeah that's yeah that's bad Sarah that's bad so it wasn't 38 citizens they didn't watch him stalk her no one saw the entire event you can't really watch something you can't see that well and you can't watch something that happens when you're fucking asleep and most of them if not everyone but Joseph Fink didn't know it was a stabbing yeah and there weren't three attacks yeah so there's at least one two three four five errors in this one sentence did you read this on the New York Times's website I want to know if there's a correction appended there is there is yeah at the

I will read it to you oh my god yes editor's note October 12 2016 52 years later later reporting by the Times and others has called into question the significant elements of this account subsequent Times coverage includes a review of the case on the 40th anniversary the obituary of the killer an essay and video on the case and a Times insider account okay yeah so they're leaving it up to like preserve for historical memory yeah but once again and this is why my life is a bully a base of anxiety once you tell a story incorrectly once you can't control where it goes yeah and so the 38 witnesses watched and did nothing version is you know this is in sociology textbooks this is in the Kaplan prep book for the GRE still yes what it's like everyone knows

that 38 people watched Kitty Genevieve's be murdered anyway this inspired some important research into bystander apathy let's talk about that it's not even like the point of the section it's like this is just cemented in the public mind right and it actually inspired studies on the effect of bystander apathy and what gets termed the bystander effect which researchers later conduct studies suggesting that people are less likely to intervene if they think that there are enough other people around to have already intervened or have already called the police or done something when there is something dangerous I have been a bystander and that has been my response oh yeah I've been at car accidents and you sort of you pull up you stop and you look at

them and you're like there's five other people helping this person you ask does anybody need anything and then it's like you're like it's handled right someone's doing stuff and it's again it's like it's why are we so eager to say that this is apathy when it also just as likely as insecurity we're like I don't think I would be helpful I don't know that I would know what to do right but I think in the end making it a story about bystander apathy is a way for the city of New York to make it about itself right it's not about this woman who was murdered in this terrible way this dope ass lesbian it's not about this amazing lesbian who who we should have around today yeah you know to give us tips on flirting yeah and then it's and you don't have to just sit

with with the pain and the pointlessness of not being with us anymore because if you can make her murder into a parable then it does have a point and it's to teach us all to call the police more often yeah yeah so what happens to Mosley is he sentenced yeah he is tried and convicted so Winston Mosley is sent to Attica and in 1968 there's no delicate way to put this he gets a can from the commissary and he rams it into his rectum what so far that the doctors at the prison cannot remove it and they have to take him to the hospital where he escapes holy shit which is impressive dedication wow he really wanted to bounce so he escapes he finds a vacant house near the hospital in Buffalo the phone is still working and so he calls a cleaning service and

has a maid sent there and when the maid shows up he rapes her no fucking way holy shit and the maid is afraid to call the police presumably because she's black but she finds out the name of the homeowner and calls and says there's something funny going on in that house what the fuck and so the homeowner Janet Kulaga calls the police and asks them to send someone over to take a look at the something funny oh my god and the officer on duty says no there's a shift change coming up we don't have time to send anyone right now like call back later we'll send someone then and so she decides not to wait and she and her husband go over to the house and Mosley ties them up and rapes her are you fucking kidding me what this keeps getting worse yeah oh and then he goes and

holds some other people hostage in a different house this guy really is like the thing that stranger danger was invented for yeah like you can you can see why he's the ideal yeah criminal at the center of the ideal story he is holding the people in this other house hostage he lets one of the women inside go she goes calls her husband her husband calls the FBI and the FBI comes and Mosley tells him that when he was a kid he had wanted to be an FBI agent oh my god and as the FBI agent is negotiating with Mosley a tv reporter calls the house oh Jesus where this FBI negotiation is happening and says will you be done in turn in time for us to do the evening news like is this wrapping up or what oh my god and Mosley gives himself up and they finish in time

for the news i think the happy ending finally what a a lovely ending somebody got their b-roll in time for 530 yeah it's like that's the only redemption that we can possibly get from any of this is that there is someone gets a good story out of it Jesus and so he's taken back to prison and died in 2016 okay wow when he was petitioning for parole this is to me like the textbook definition of hutzpah at one point he was like you know yes i committed a terrible crime but i've reformed myself and think of all the awareness that people have now that they would not have had without the murder that i committed oh i raised awareness of the badness of murder like that's his case uh that's like the bus driver who told rosa parks to sit in the back being like think of

all i did for the civil rights movement right it's like you were you were the antagonist you were the bad thing that happened to create whatever awareness there was if those cops hadn't raided stonewall then would gay pride have even existed right like that this is we can't we thank the nypd for everything in the end thanks to the real heroes yeah so what do what what do we what do we make of this what are our lessons i don't know i think that we turned kitty genovese's life and death into a ghost story that would encourage us to flee back to the old ways you know back into the arms of the police back into the arms of the establishment back into the world as it had always been where you could reasonably think that a you know a a man was assaulting a woman and as long as he

knew her personally then it was fine right we used a story about what was wrong with the society that we already had to make us feel afraid of that society changing in any real way and go even deeper into the behaviors and the traditions that that helped it occur in the first place yeah like once again society figured out that it was sick and decided that the antidote was more poison well didn't we also talk about in the urban legends episode how urban legends in all societies across the globe happen at times of social upheaval and happen at times when there's the updated society versus the traditional society and this was one where there were all these anxieties about society's changing the nature of cities is changing and so this is why the story got repeated i mean

there's lots of front page newspaper stories this one landed because there were all these existing anxieties i mean i think also if we make a story into a parable about what's wrong with society and if we want a story to be either about heroism or villainy then we just lose track of all of the actual humanity within this which is that people were scared people were confused people were asleep some people called the police or tried to some people didn't and that there was also within this like a a woman who lost her lover and was treated with contempt and suspicion by the people who were supposed to help her yeah and that there was a woman who was freely and bravely living her life and who didn't get to continue doing it and that there was a woman who

ran unthinkingly into a violent and terrifying situation so that she could comfort her friend yeah i this is this is also a story that has erased women the story has fucking heroes in it the story has heroes in it legitimate real gay angels this was even a straight lady sometimes straight people can even behave well oh that's off that's off brand for us we're gonna i know we're gonna need to edit that even straight people even straight people are capable of pro-social behavior at times that's our message for pride yeah so this is a story about kitty and maryanne and sophie and in every story that we think that we know extremely well there are probably women and probably lesbians who no one has thought to pay attention to or listen to the experiences of

because they don't conform to the parable that we're trying to tell to fit the needs of white american masculinity and mainstream society and um let's let's go talk to them now find the kick-ass lesbians