It was around 3:15 a.m. when Catherine “Kitty” Genovese drove into a parking lot near her apartment in Kew Gardens, a residential neighborhood located in the New York City borough of Queens. Genovese had just finished her shift as manager of a bar called Ev’s Eleventh Hour, and after a full night of pouring drinks and chatting with beer-soaked customers, the 28-year-old probably looked forward to nothing more than putting up her feet and getting some well-deserved rest.

As she stepped out of her car on that early morning of March 13, 1964, Genovese began walking toward her apartment, located at the far end of a two-story structure that also housed a bar, a coffee shop, and other businesses. She had made the same trip many times before. Despite the late hour, Genovese—known for her confident, friendly nature—had little to fear. Kew Gardens was a quiet, middle-class community, and she had less than a city block to cover before she would be out of the late winter chill and into her modest but warm flat, which she would enter via a door at the rear of the building.

That night, however, Kew Gardens wasn’t as quiet as usual. From behind Genovese, a car door slammed. Then came the sound of approaching footsteps. Realizing she was being followed, Genovese ran to the front of the building, hoping to avoid trouble by staying within sight of the road and the Mowbray apartment complex across the street. She hurried by the drug store on the corner, and had just made it past a bookstore when the car’s occupant caught up to her. With no motive and no warning, the pursuer plunged a hunting knife twice into her back.

Genovese’s panicked screams alerted a man in the Mowbray, who opened his window and shouted at the attacker to leave Genovese alone. The assailant ran away, giving a critically injured Genovese the chance to stagger to the rear of the building and the sought-after safety of her apartment.

Her respite was brief. About 10 minutes later, Genovese’s assailant returned, determined to see his crime through to completion. After searching the area, he found Genovese lying in a first-floor vestibule. The man stabbed her several more times, then sexually assaulted her before leaving with $49 he had taken from her wallet. At that point a neighbor who lived in Genovese’s building called the police. A rescue crew arrived, but not soon enough to save Genovese, who died on her way to the hospital.

Only an hour had passed between the time Genovese left her vehicle and the time she died in the back of an ambulance, but it must have been the longest hour of Genovese’s life—and one that would become the focus of intense media and academic scrutiny for decades to come.

The sad story of Kitty Genovese is perhaps best known not for the grisly details of the murder itself, but for what was said to be the reluctance of Kew Gardens residents to come to her aid or notify the police despite the fact that they had allegedly heard Genovese’s screams—and, in some cases, had actually witnessed the crime in progress. A story published in The New York Times two weeks after Genovese’s death claimed that 38 people had seen the attack and essentially done nothing. The idea that more than three dozen people could peer at the street from behind the safety of their curtains and refuse to stop a murder in progress scandalized the city and the nation. So foreign was the concept to popular assumptions regarding human decency and behavior that it inspired a new realm of social psychological research—the “bystander effect,” a phenomenon in which individuals who know that a victim is in peril, but who also know that other people are aware of the same fact, will refrain from offering assistance, assuming that someone else will come forward instead.

In the five decades since Genovese’s murder, psychology students have read her story in their textbooks. Television viewers have watched fictionalized versions of the event portrayed on screen, and pundits have lambasted the residents of Kew Gardens—and, by extension, humanity itself—for the apathy that led to the young woman’s death. However, the passage of time has revealed that the scenario described in The New York Times was not entirely accurate. In fact, in an effort to sensationalize an already heart-wrenching story, the paper may have done a disservice not only to the memory of Genovese, but to the reputations of her neighbors in Kew Gardens, many of whom did more to help Genovese than society has been led to believe.

The Times story, published on March 27, 1964, boldly stated that of the 38 people who allegedly witnessed the attack, “not one…made the slightest effort to save her, to scream at the killer, or even to call the police.” However, contemporary scholars of the case have established that no one person who heard Genovese’s cries had a complete view of the incident from beginning to end. Because the worst of the attack took place behind Genovese’s apartment building, in a vestibule hidden from public view, people who witnessed the assault or heard Genovese’s cries during the initial assault at the front of the building weren’t aware of the second incident. Many people who saw the first stabbing didn’t realize the severity of the crime and assumed they were merely witnessing a spat between lovers or drunks. Some even called the police to report the incident as such, but no authorities responded to those initial calls, deeming them not serious enough to merit attention.

In addition, despite The Times’ statement to the contrary, one of Genovese’s neighbors, as previously mentioned, did call out to the attacker. This neighbor was unaware that Genovese had been stabbed; he assumed, like others, that what he was witnessing was a minor squabble. Further complicating the situation was the fact that several residents had closed their windows against the cold night air, preventing them from identifying Genovese’s screams as coming from a woman in peril or from hearing the screams altogether.

To be fair, at least two Kew Gardens residents were aware of the severity of the attack and either did nothing or offered assistance only after it was too late. A superintendent of the Mowbray witnessed the attack on Genovese and knew she was being stabbed, but instead of soliciting help, he went to sleep. In addition, the neighbor who placed the call that ultimately brought authorities to the scene had opened his apartment door and seen the assailant stabbing Genovese in the vestibule, but had done nothing to intervene and had actually waited 20 minutes to call the police, a period of time during which Genovese’s life slowly bled out of her.

Still, the inability of two residents to respond with courage and compassion to a horrifying crime doesn’t negate the fact that The Times had published a grossly inaccurate account demonizing the entire community. In fact, after Genovese’s murderer died in prison in 2016, the newspaper acknowledged in his obituary that the original article, which it called “flawed,” had “grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived.”

Ultimately, perhaps, one of the article’s primary effects was to vilify the residents of Kew Gardens at the expense of the true criminal, a 29-year-old machine operator named Winston Moseley. On that fateful night, Moseley left his sleeping family in their Queens home and hit the borough’s streets for the sole purpose of finding a woman to kill. He had murdered two other people before that night—15-year-old Barbara Kralik in July 1963 and 24-year-old Annie Mae Johnson in February 1964. A month after Johnson’s death, Moseley caught a glimpse of Genovese during her drive home from Ev’s Eleventh Hour and followed her to Kew Gardens. After his attack on Genovese, Moseley evaded capture, but police eventually apprehended him during a burglary six days later. Despite pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, Moseley was convicted of Genovese’s murder and sentenced to death. (Due to a technicality, he ended up serving a life sentence instead.) Moseley escaped from custody in March 1968 and took two separate families hostage in upstate New York before ultimately surrendering. He received two additional 15-year sentences for those crimes. He died in March 2016 at the age of 81. Moseley had spent almost 52 years behind bars, making him one of New York State’s longest-serving prisoners.

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