His killing of Genovese shocked the nation

Published 12:00 am Thursday, April 7, 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 March 28 in prison. He was 81.

Patrick Bailey, a spokesman for the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, confirmed the death Monday. A medical examiner would determine the cause of death, Bailey said.

Moseley, a psychopathic serial killer and necrophiliac, died at the maximum security Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, 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.

His life behind bars had been relatively eventful. Moseley was condemned to die in the electric chair, but in 1967, two years after New York state abolished most capital punishments, he won an appeal that reduced his sentence to an indeterminate life term. While at Attica Correctional Facility, in 1968, he escaped while on a hospital visit to Buffalo, raped a woman and held hostages at gunpoint before being recaptured. He joined in the 1971 Attica uprising; earned a college degree in 1977; and was rejected 18 times at parole hearings, the last time in 2015.

A half-century after the slow killing of 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 Moseley’s attack were — selecting 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.

It was one of 636 murders in the city that year. The New York Times ran four paragraphs on it.

Two weeks later, The Times published a more extensive, though flawed, front-page account quoting the police and Genovese’s neighbors. “For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens,” it began.

“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. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.”

“I didn’t want to get involved,” a witness said, using a phrase that was thought to encapsulate the age.

While there was no question that the attack occurred, and that some neighbors ignored cries for help, the portrayal of 38 witnesses as fully aware and unresponsive was erroneous. The article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed parts of it, or recognized the cries for help. Many thought they had heard lovers or drunks quarreling. There were two attacks, not three. And afterward, two people did call the police. A 70-year-old woman ventured out and cradled the dying victim in her arms until they arrived. Genovese died on the way to a hospital.

But the account of 38 witnesses heartlessly ignoring a murderous attack was widely disseminated and took on a life of its own, shocking the national conscience and starting an avalanche of academic studies, investigations, films, books, even a theatrical production and a musical. The soul-searching went on for decades, long after the original errors were debunked, evolving into more parable than fact but continuing to reinforce images of urban Americans as too callous or fearful to call for help, even with a life at stake.

Psychologists and criminologists called the reluctance of witnesses to involve themselves the “bystander effect,” or the “Kitty Genovese Syndrome.” Studies discerned a “diffusion of responsibility,” finding that people in a crowd were less likely to step forward and help a victim. Some communities organized neighborhood-watch patrols. In New York, an emergency call to the police was simplified later in 1964 — from dialing “O” for operator or a precinct or a borough headquarters, to a central police number. The unified 911 system was not established until 1968.

Moseley seemed an unlikely serial killer. Soft-spoken, intelligent, with no criminal record, he was 29, a married father of two who owned his home in Queens, and operated business machines in Mount Vernon, New York. Later, in confessions and testimony, he said he had driven around late at night seeking victims, and had killed three women, raped eight and committed 30 or 40 burglaries.

Captured five days after the killing during a burglary, Moseley confessed to the murders of Genovese and two other Queens residents, Annie Mae Johnson, 24, who had been shot and burned to death in her apartment in February, and Barbara Kralik, 15, who had been stabbed in her parents’ home the previous July. Both women had been sexually assaulted.

Moseley was never tried for the deaths of Johnson or Kralik, though he recited details only the killer could have known, the police said. He testified at the trial of Alvin Mitchell, who had already been charged in Kralik’s murder. The conflicting accounts left a hung jury. Mitchell was convicted in a second trial.

At his own trial, Moseley pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the killing of Genovese, but was found legally sane, convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death at a time when New York state still employed the electric chair. (The state abolished the death penalty in 1965 for all but limited circumstances.)

As spectators cheered the verdict, the presiding judge, Justice Irwin Shapiro of State Supreme Court, said he did not believe in capital punishment, but added, “I must say I feel this may be improper when I see this monster. I wouldn’t hesitate to pull the switch on him myself.”

Winston Moseley was born in Manhattan on March 2, 1935, to Fannie Moseley. Her husband, Alphonse Moseley, was not his biological father, a fact withheld from the boy until late in his childhood. His parents were often separated. Winston grew up a bright but troubled boy, who had an inordinate fascination with ants.

Moseley and his first wife, Pauline, whom he married in 1954, were divorced. In 1961, he married Elizabeth Grant.

After Moseley earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Niagara University in 1977, The Times published an Op-Ed article by him, in which he expressed his regret for killing Genovese and said he was a changed man, “determined to do constructive, not destructive things.”

Many viewed the article as an attempt to lay the groundwork for his seeking his release in a series of later parole hearings, all of which denied him freedom.