In the early hours of 13 March 1964, a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Catherine Genovese, known to everyone as Kitty, was returning home from her job managing a bar to her apartment in the Kew Gardens neighbourhood of Queens, New York. In the street outside she was attacked by a stranger, Winston Moseley, who stabbed her, fled when disturbed, and then returned minutes later to attack her again and kill her. It was a brutal and terrible crime, but on its own it might have been just one more grim entry in the city's ledger. What made the Kitty Genovese case one of the most famous murders of the twentieth century was not the killing. It was the story a newspaper told about the people who lived nearby.
Thirty-eight witnesses
Two weeks after the murder, The New York Times ran a front-page article under the arresting claim that thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens had watched a killer stalk and stab a woman over more than half an hour, in three separate attacks, and that not one of them had lifted the telephone to call the police while she was being murdered. The image was unforgettable and damning: a whole apartment block of people standing at their windows, watching a woman die, and doing nothing. The story tapped into deep anxieties about the coldness of modern city life, about apathy and alienation, and it spread across the country and around the world. It became a parable of urban indifference.
It also launched a whole line of scientific research. Two social psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latané, were struck by the case and set out to study, in controlled experiments, why bystanders fail to help. What they found was subtler and, in a way, more troubling than simple heartlessness. In experiment after experiment they showed that the more people who are present when someone needs help, the less likely any one of them is to intervene. They called it the bystander effect, and its engine is what they named the diffusion of responsibility: when many people witness an emergency, each assumes someone else will act, or will have already called for help, and so the responsibility dissolves among the crowd until no one does anything. A lone witness, feeling the full weight of responsibility, is often more likely to help than one of many. The Genovese case became the textbook illustration of the idea, taught to psychology students ever since.
The story unravels
There was only one problem. The famous account was, in crucial respects, false. Later investigations — by journalists, scholars and, eventually, by the participants' own families — established that the "thirty-eight witnesses who saw and did nothing" was a serious distortion. It is doubtful that anything like thirty-eight people actually witnessed the attack; most of those in the buildings heard only fragments of a disturbance in the dark and had no clear idea that a murder was taking place. Several people did in fact respond. At least one neighbour shouted from a window, which frightened the attacker off the first time. Others reported that calls were made to the police. And a neighbour named Sophia Farrar ran out into the night and reached Kitty Genovese as she lay dying, cradling her so that she did not die alone. Far from a scene of universal indifference, there were people who called out, called in, and came running.
The reporters had, in effect, sharpened a messy reality into a clean and shocking morality tale. Decades on, even the newspaper that published the original story acknowledged that it had been exaggerated. Kitty Genovese's own brother made a documentary re-examining the case and uncovering the neighbours who had, in fact, tried to help.
The double irony is that the myth did real good. The public horror at the supposed thirty-eight witnesses helped spur the creation of the centralised 911 emergency telephone system in the United States, so that reporting a crime no longer meant fumbling for a local precinct's number. And the psychology it inspired — the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility — is genuinely sound, replicated many times, even though the founding anecdote was flawed. Winston Moseley was caught within days, confessed, and spent the rest of his long life in prison. Kitty Genovese, remembered chiefly for the way she died and the false story told about it, has in recent years been reclaimed as a person, and the neighbours unjustly branded as cowards have been given back some of their truth.
Quiz nuggets
- Kitty Genovese was murdered on 13 March 1964 in the Kew Gardens area of Queens, New York, by Winston Moseley.
- A 1964 New York Times article claimed 38 witnesses watched and did nothing — an account later shown to be greatly exaggerated.
- The case inspired psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané to study the "bystander effect" and "diffusion of responsibility."
- In reality several neighbours reacted; Sophia Farrar went to Genovese as she was dying.
- Public reaction to the case helped drive the creation of the 911 emergency phone system.