Winston Moseley, Who Killed Kitty Genovese, Dies in Prison at 81

[Valin]

NY Times

ROBERT D. McFADDEN

APRIL 4, 2016

 

Winston Moseley, who stalked, raped and killed Kitty Genovese in a prolonged knife attack in New York in 1964 while neighbors failed to act on her desperate cries for help — a nightmarish tableau that came to symbolize urban apathy in America — died on March 28, in prison. He was 81.

 

(Snip)

 

Mr. Moseley, a psychopathic serial killer and necrophiliac, died at the maximum security Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y., near the Canadian border. He had been imprisoned for almost 52 years, since July 7, 1964, and was one of the state’s longest-serving inmates.

 

(Snip)

 

A half-century after the slow killing of Ms. Genovese, which began in the dead of night on a deserted street in Kew Gardens, Queens, and ended half an hour later in the vestibule of her building, the case still resonates with terror and collective regret in the popular imagination, sustained by films, books, behavioral studies, psychology classes and endless debates over the responsibilities of citizens who witness a crime.

 

Ghastly as the details of Mr. Moseley’s attack were — selecting Ms. Genovese at random, stabbing her at least 14 times as she screamed and pleaded for help, retreating into the shadows as lights went on in apartments overhead, returning to rape and finally kill her — they by themselves might not have placed the case, or the Moseley name, into the annals of crime.

 

(Snip)

[Draggingtree]

Kitty Genovese Case

Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police

New York Times
Martin Gansberg
March 27, 1964

 

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 Kew Gardens.

 

Twice their chatter 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. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.

 

That was two weeks ago today.

 

Still shocked is Assistant Chief Inspector Frederick M. Lussen, in charge of the borough’s detectives and a veteran of 25 years of homicide investigations. He can give a matter-of-fact recitation on many murders. But the Kew Gardens slaying baffles him–not because it is a murder, but because the “good people” failed to call the police.

 

“As we have reconstructed the crime,” he said, “the assailant had three chances to kill this woman during a 35-minute period. He returned twice to complete the job. If we had been called when he first attacked, the woman might not be dead now.”

 

This is what the police say happened at 3:20 A.M. in the staid, middle-class, tree-lined Austin Street area:

 

Twenty-eight-year-old Catherine Genovese, who was called Kitty by almost everyone in the neighborhood, was returning home from her job as manager of a bar in Hollis.

http://learn.bowdoin.edu/courses/sociology-211-fall-2010/2010/11/kitty-genovese-case/