The Dying Girl that No One Helped
Loudon Wainright
In the 1960s, folksinger Phil Ochs wrote a song called “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends”. The song includes these lyrics.
O look outside the window
There’s a woman being grabbed
They’ve dragged her to the bushes
And now she’s being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But Monopoly is so much fun
I’d hate to blow the game
And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends
The lyrics relate to the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, an incident that began a national
debate about the responsibility of the average citizen to come to the aid of people in danger. A
young woman was brutally murdered in a New York residential area while at least 38 people
watched. Ever since professional students of human behavior and amateurs alike have
attempted to explain why no one was willing to become involved. In this selection, Loudon
Wainwright briefly records the feelings of some of those who saw Kitty Genovese killed.
To judge from the bitter example given us by the good folks of a respectable New York residential
area, Samaritans are very scarce these days…if the reactions of the 38 witnesses to the murder
of Catherine Genovese provide any true reflection of a national attitude toward our neighbors, we
are becoming a callous, chickenhearted and immoral people... An examination of the pitiful facts
of Miss Genovese’s terminal experience makes very necessary the ugly personal question each
of us must ask: What would I have done?
The story is simple and brutal. As she arrived home in the early morning darkness, Kitty
Genovese, a decent, pretty young woman of 28, was stalked through the streets close to her Kew
Gardens apartment and stabbed again and again by a man who had followed her home and who
took almost a half-hour to kill her. During that bloody little eternity, . . . Kitty screamed and cried
repeatedly for help... “Oh, my God!” she cried out at one point. “He stabbed me! Please help me!
Someone help me !” Minutes later, before the murderer came back and attacked her for the final
time, she screamed, “I’m dying! I’m dying!”
The reason the murderer’s actions and his victim’s calls are so well documented is that police
were able to find 38 of Kitty’s neighbors who admitted they witnessed the awful event. They heard
the screams and most understood her to cry for help. Peeking out their windows, many saw enough
of the killer to provide a good description of his appearance and clothing. A few saw him strike
Kitty and more saw her staggering down the sidewalk after she had been stabbed twice and was
looking for a place to hide. One especially sharp-eyed person was able to report that the
murderer was sucking his finger as he left the scene; he had cut himself during the attack.
Another witness has the awful distinction of being the only person Kitty Genovese recognized in
the audience taking in her final moments. She looked at him and called him by name. He did
not reply.
No one really helped Kitty at all. Only one person shouted at the killer (“Let that girl alone!”), and
the one phone call that was finally made to the police was placed after the murderer had got in
his car and driven off. For the most part, the witnesses, crouching in darkened windows like watchers of a Late Show, looked on until the play had passed beyond their view. Then they went
back to bed...
On the scene a few days after the killer had been caught and confessed, Police Lieutenant
Bernard Jacobs discussed the investigation. “The word we kept hearing from the witnesses later
was ‘involved,’” Jacobs said... “People told us they just didn’t want to get involved,” Jacobs said
to me. “They don’t want to be questioned or have to go to court.” He pointed to an apartment
house directly across the quiet street. “They looked down at this thing,” he went on, “from four
different floors of that building.” …“It’s a nice neighborhood, isn’t it?” he went on. “Doesn’t look
like a jungle. Good, solid people. We don’t expect anybody to come out into the street and fight
this kind of bum. All we want is a phone call. We don’t even need to know who’s making it.
“You know what this man told us after we caught him?” Jacobs asked. “He said he figured
nobody would do anything to help. He heard the windows go up and saw the lights go on. He just
retreated for a while and when things quieted down, he came back to finish the job.”
Later, in one of the apartment houses, a witness to part of Kitty Genovese’s murder talked. His
comments . . . indicate the price in bad conscience he and his neighbors are now paying. “I feel
terrible about it,” he said. “The thing keeps coming back in my mind. You just don’t want to get
involved. They might have picked me up as a suspect if I’d bounced right out there. I was getting
ready, but my wife stopped me. She didn’t want to be a hero’s widow. I woke up about the third
scream. I pulled the blind so hard it came off the window. The girl was on her knees struggling to
get up. I didn’t know if she was drunk or what. 1 never saw the man. She staggered a little when
she walked like she had a few drinks in her. I forgot the screen was there and I almost put my
head through it trying to get a better look. I could see people with their heads out and hear
windows going up and down all along the street.”
“Every time I look out here now,” he said, “it’s like looking out at a nightmare. How could so many
of us have had the same idea that we didn’t need to do anything? But that’s not all that’s wrong.”
Now he sounded betrayed and he told what was really eating him. Those 38 witnesses had, at
least, talked to the police after the murder. The man pointed to a nearby building. “There are
people over there who saw everything,” he said. “And there hasn’t been a peep out of them yet.
Not one peep.”
Questions
1. What were some of the reasons given by the spectators for not becoming involved? Do you
blame the spectators for what they did not do?
2. Does this incident tell us anything about human nature?
3. Do you feel that there should be laws requiring citizens to come to another person’s aid?
4. Does thinking that everybody would act as did these thirty-eight people make it easier for the
rest of us to be indifferent to pain and danger experienced by others? Why?
Definition
Good Samaritan: Someone who comes to the aid of a person in need
Source
Wainwright, Loudon. 1983. The Dying Girl No One Helped. The Holocaust and Genocide: A
Search for Conscience – An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman (ed.). New York.
Anti-Defamation League.
Dorman, Michael. 2009. The Killing of Kitty Genovese --Her public slaying in Queens becomes
a symbol of Americans' failure to get involved. Newsday (Online) Available.
http://www.newsday.com/community/guide/lihistory/ny-history-hs818a,0,7944135.story
It was just after 3 a.m. A red Fiat rolled slowly through the darkness into a parking space adjacent
to the Long Island Rail Road station in Kew Gardens. The young woman behind the wheel
emerged from the car and locked it. She began the 100-foot walk toward her apartment house at
82-70 Austin St. She spotted a man standing along her route. Apparently afraid, she changed
direction and headed toward the intersection of Austin and Lefferts Boulevard -- where there was
a police call box. The man overtook her and grabbed her. She screamed. Residents of nearby
apartment houses turned on their lights and threw open their windows. The woman screamed
again, ”Oh, my God, he stabbed me. Please help me.”
A man in a window shouted, “Let that girl alone.” The attacker walked away. Apartment lights
went out and windows slammed shut. The victim staggered toward her apartment. But the
attacker returned and stabbed her again.
”I'm dying,” she cried. Windows opened again. The attacker entered a car and drove away.
Windows closed, but the attacker soon came back again. His victim had crawled inside the front
door of an apartment house at 82-62 Austin St. He found her sprawled on the floor and stabbed
her still again. This time he killed her.
It was not until 3:50 that morning -- March 13, 1964 -- that a neighbor of the victim called the police.
Officers arrived two minutes later and found the body. They identified the victim as Catherine
Genovese, 28, who had been returning from her job as manager of a bar in Hollis. Neighbors
knew her not as Catherine but as Kitty.
Kitty Genovese was a name that would become symbolic in the public mind for a dark side of the
national character. It would stand for Americans who were too indifferent or too frightened or too
alienated or too self-absorbed to “get involved” in helping a fellow human being in dire trouble. A
term the “Genovese syndrome” would be coined to describe the attitude.
Detectives investigating Genovese's murder discovered that no fewer than 38 of her neighbors
had witnessed at least one of her killer's three attacks but had neither come to her aid or called
the police. The one call made to the police came after Genovese was already dead. Assistant
Chief Inspector Frederick Lussen said that nothing in his 25 years of police work had shocked
him so much as the apathy encountered on the Genovese murder. “As we have reconstructed the
crime, the assailant had three chances to kill this woman for 35 minutes,'' Lussen
said. “If we had been called when he first attacked, this woman might not be dead now.”
Expressions of outrage cascaded not only from public officials and private citizens in the New
York area but from across the country. When detectives asked Genovese's neighbors why they
had not taken action, many said they had been afraid or had not wanted to get involved. Police
Officer Bernard Jacobs noted, “They are in their homes near phones. Why should they be afraid
to call the police?''
Madeline Hartmann, a native of France, was 68 at the time of the murder and lived in the building
where Genovese died. On the 20th Anniversary of the murder, she said in an interview that she
did not feel bad about failing to call the police. So many, many [other] times in the night, I heard
screaming,” she said. “I'm not the police and my English speaking is not perfect.” Police concede
that no law requires someone witnessing a crime to report it to police. However,
they note that morality should oblige a witness to do so.
Six days after the Genovese murder, police arrested a suspect -- Winston Moseley, 29, a
business-machine operator who lived with his wife and two children in Ozone Park. Moseley had
no criminal record. But detectives said he swiftly confessed to killing not only Genovese but also two other women. Moseley said I have an uncontrollable urge to kill.'' He told detectives he
prowled the streets at night while his wife was at work. “I chose women to kill because they were
easier and didn't fight back,'' said Moseley.
Three months after Genovese's death, Moseley went on trial for her murder in State Supreme Court in Queens. He pleaded insanity and testified in painstaking detail about how he had stalked
and stabbed Genovese to satisfy his supposedly uncontrollable urge. On 11 June 1964, a jury
found him guilty. The following month, he was sentenced by Justice J. Irwin Shapiro to die in the
electric chair at Sing Sing prison. “When I see this monster, I wouldn't hesitate to pull the switch
myself,'' the judge said. In 1967, the State Court of Appeals reduced the punishment to life
imprisonment on the ground that Shapiro had erred in refusing to admit evidence on Moseley's
mental condition at a pre-sentence hearing. A year later while being taken from prison to a
Buffalo hospital for minor surgery, Moseley struck a prison guard and escaped. He obtained a
gun, held five-person hostage, raped one of them and squared off for a showdown with FBI
agents in an apartment building. Moseley eventually surrendered.
Moseley's periodic requests for parole have repeatedly been denied. During one parole hearing in
1984, Moseley volunteered that he had written Genovese's relatives a letter “to apologize for the
inconvenience I caused.'' A parole commissioner responded acidly, “That's a good way to say it.
They were inconvenienced.'' Moseley also told the board the murder was as difficult for him as
his victim. “For a victim outside, it's a one-time or one-hour or one-minute affair, but for the
person who is caught, it is forever, “ he said.
Over the years, there have been various scholarly studies of the “Genovese syndrome.” In 1984,
City University of New York psychology professor Stanley Milgram summarized the questions
raised by the Genovese murder. “The case touched on a fundamental issue of the human
condition, our primordial nightmare,” Milgram said. “If we need help, will those around us stand
around and let us be destroyed or will they come to our aid? Are those other creatures out there
to help us sustain our life and values, or are we individual flecks of dust just floating around in a
vacuum?”
Loudon Wainright
In the 1960s, folksinger Phil Ochs wrote a song called “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends”. The song includes these lyrics.
O look outside the window
There’s a woman being grabbed
They’ve dragged her to the bushes
And now she’s being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But Monopoly is so much fun
I’d hate to blow the game
And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends
The lyrics relate to the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, an incident that began a national
debate about the responsibility of the average citizen to come to the aid of people in danger. A
young woman was brutally murdered in a New York residential area while at least 38 people
watched. Ever since professional students of human behavior and amateurs alike have
attempted to explain why no one was willing to become involved. In this selection, Loudon
Wainwright briefly records the feelings of some of those who saw Kitty Genovese killed.
To judge from the bitter example given us by the good folks of a respectable New York residential
area, Samaritans are very scarce these days…if the reactions of the 38 witnesses to the murder
of Catherine Genovese provide any true reflection of a national attitude toward our neighbors, we
are becoming a callous, chickenhearted and immoral people... An examination of the pitiful facts
of Miss Genovese’s terminal experience makes very necessary the ugly personal question each
of us must ask: What would I have done?
The story is simple and brutal. As she arrived home in the early morning darkness, Kitty
Genovese, a decent, pretty young woman of 28, was stalked through the streets close to her Kew
Gardens apartment and stabbed again and again by a man who had followed her home and who
took almost a half-hour to kill her. During that bloody little eternity, . . . Kitty screamed and cried
repeatedly for help... “Oh, my God!” she cried out at one point. “He stabbed me! Please help me!
Someone help me !” Minutes later, before the murderer came back and attacked her for the final
time, she screamed, “I’m dying! I’m dying!”
The reason the murderer’s actions and his victim’s calls are so well documented is that police
were able to find 38 of Kitty’s neighbors who admitted they witnessed the awful event. They heard
the screams and most understood her to cry for help. Peeking out their windows, many saw enough
of the killer to provide a good description of his appearance and clothing. A few saw him strike
Kitty and more saw her staggering down the sidewalk after she had been stabbed twice and was
looking for a place to hide. One especially sharp-eyed person was able to report that the
murderer was sucking his finger as he left the scene; he had cut himself during the attack.
Another witness has the awful distinction of being the only person Kitty Genovese recognized in
the audience taking in her final moments. She looked at him and called him by name. He did
not reply.
No one really helped Kitty at all. Only one person shouted at the killer (“Let that girl alone!”), and
the one phone call that was finally made to the police was placed after the murderer had got in
his car and driven off. For the most part, the witnesses, crouching in darkened windows like watchers of a Late Show, looked on until the play had passed beyond their view. Then they went
back to bed...
On the scene a few days after the killer had been caught and confessed, Police Lieutenant
Bernard Jacobs discussed the investigation. “The word we kept hearing from the witnesses later
was ‘involved,’” Jacobs said... “People told us they just didn’t want to get involved,” Jacobs said
to me. “They don’t want to be questioned or have to go to court.” He pointed to an apartment
house directly across the quiet street. “They looked down at this thing,” he went on, “from four
different floors of that building.” …“It’s a nice neighborhood, isn’t it?” he went on. “Doesn’t look
like a jungle. Good, solid people. We don’t expect anybody to come out into the street and fight
this kind of bum. All we want is a phone call. We don’t even need to know who’s making it.
“You know what this man told us after we caught him?” Jacobs asked. “He said he figured
nobody would do anything to help. He heard the windows go up and saw the lights go on. He just
retreated for a while and when things quieted down, he came back to finish the job.”
Later, in one of the apartment houses, a witness to part of Kitty Genovese’s murder talked. His
comments . . . indicate the price in bad conscience he and his neighbors are now paying. “I feel
terrible about it,” he said. “The thing keeps coming back in my mind. You just don’t want to get
involved. They might have picked me up as a suspect if I’d bounced right out there. I was getting
ready, but my wife stopped me. She didn’t want to be a hero’s widow. I woke up about the third
scream. I pulled the blind so hard it came off the window. The girl was on her knees struggling to
get up. I didn’t know if she was drunk or what. 1 never saw the man. She staggered a little when
she walked like she had a few drinks in her. I forgot the screen was there and I almost put my
head through it trying to get a better look. I could see people with their heads out and hear
windows going up and down all along the street.”
“Every time I look out here now,” he said, “it’s like looking out at a nightmare. How could so many
of us have had the same idea that we didn’t need to do anything? But that’s not all that’s wrong.”
Now he sounded betrayed and he told what was really eating him. Those 38 witnesses had, at
least, talked to the police after the murder. The man pointed to a nearby building. “There are
people over there who saw everything,” he said. “And there hasn’t been a peep out of them yet.
Not one peep.”
Questions
1. What were some of the reasons given by the spectators for not becoming involved? Do you
blame the spectators for what they did not do?
2. Does this incident tell us anything about human nature?
3. Do you feel that there should be laws requiring citizens to come to another person’s aid?
4. Does thinking that everybody would act as did these thirty-eight people make it easier for the
rest of us to be indifferent to pain and danger experienced by others? Why?
Definition
Good Samaritan: Someone who comes to the aid of a person in need
Source
Wainwright, Loudon. 1983. The Dying Girl No One Helped. The Holocaust and Genocide: A
Search for Conscience – An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman (ed.). New York.
Anti-Defamation League.
Dorman, Michael. 2009. The Killing of Kitty Genovese --Her public slaying in Queens becomes
a symbol of Americans' failure to get involved. Newsday (Online) Available.
http://www.newsday.com/community/guide/lihistory/ny-history-hs818a,0,7944135.story
It was just after 3 a.m. A red Fiat rolled slowly through the darkness into a parking space adjacent
to the Long Island Rail Road station in Kew Gardens. The young woman behind the wheel
emerged from the car and locked it. She began the 100-foot walk toward her apartment house at
82-70 Austin St. She spotted a man standing along her route. Apparently afraid, she changed
direction and headed toward the intersection of Austin and Lefferts Boulevard -- where there was
a police call box. The man overtook her and grabbed her. She screamed. Residents of nearby
apartment houses turned on their lights and threw open their windows. The woman screamed
again, ”Oh, my God, he stabbed me. Please help me.”
A man in a window shouted, “Let that girl alone.” The attacker walked away. Apartment lights
went out and windows slammed shut. The victim staggered toward her apartment. But the
attacker returned and stabbed her again.
”I'm dying,” she cried. Windows opened again. The attacker entered a car and drove away.
Windows closed, but the attacker soon came back again. His victim had crawled inside the front
door of an apartment house at 82-62 Austin St. He found her sprawled on the floor and stabbed
her still again. This time he killed her.
It was not until 3:50 that morning -- March 13, 1964 -- that a neighbor of the victim called the police.
Officers arrived two minutes later and found the body. They identified the victim as Catherine
Genovese, 28, who had been returning from her job as manager of a bar in Hollis. Neighbors
knew her not as Catherine but as Kitty.
Kitty Genovese was a name that would become symbolic in the public mind for a dark side of the
national character. It would stand for Americans who were too indifferent or too frightened or too
alienated or too self-absorbed to “get involved” in helping a fellow human being in dire trouble. A
term the “Genovese syndrome” would be coined to describe the attitude.
Detectives investigating Genovese's murder discovered that no fewer than 38 of her neighbors
had witnessed at least one of her killer's three attacks but had neither come to her aid or called
the police. The one call made to the police came after Genovese was already dead. Assistant
Chief Inspector Frederick Lussen said that nothing in his 25 years of police work had shocked
him so much as the apathy encountered on the Genovese murder. “As we have reconstructed the
crime, the assailant had three chances to kill this woman for 35 minutes,'' Lussen
said. “If we had been called when he first attacked, this woman might not be dead now.”
Expressions of outrage cascaded not only from public officials and private citizens in the New
York area but from across the country. When detectives asked Genovese's neighbors why they
had not taken action, many said they had been afraid or had not wanted to get involved. Police
Officer Bernard Jacobs noted, “They are in their homes near phones. Why should they be afraid
to call the police?''
Madeline Hartmann, a native of France, was 68 at the time of the murder and lived in the building
where Genovese died. On the 20th Anniversary of the murder, she said in an interview that she
did not feel bad about failing to call the police. So many, many [other] times in the night, I heard
screaming,” she said. “I'm not the police and my English speaking is not perfect.” Police concede
that no law requires someone witnessing a crime to report it to police. However,
they note that morality should oblige a witness to do so.
Six days after the Genovese murder, police arrested a suspect -- Winston Moseley, 29, a
business-machine operator who lived with his wife and two children in Ozone Park. Moseley had
no criminal record. But detectives said he swiftly confessed to killing not only Genovese but also two other women. Moseley said I have an uncontrollable urge to kill.'' He told detectives he
prowled the streets at night while his wife was at work. “I chose women to kill because they were
easier and didn't fight back,'' said Moseley.
Three months after Genovese's death, Moseley went on trial for her murder in State Supreme Court in Queens. He pleaded insanity and testified in painstaking detail about how he had stalked
and stabbed Genovese to satisfy his supposedly uncontrollable urge. On 11 June 1964, a jury
found him guilty. The following month, he was sentenced by Justice J. Irwin Shapiro to die in the
electric chair at Sing Sing prison. “When I see this monster, I wouldn't hesitate to pull the switch
myself,'' the judge said. In 1967, the State Court of Appeals reduced the punishment to life
imprisonment on the ground that Shapiro had erred in refusing to admit evidence on Moseley's
mental condition at a pre-sentence hearing. A year later while being taken from prison to a
Buffalo hospital for minor surgery, Moseley struck a prison guard and escaped. He obtained a
gun, held five-person hostage, raped one of them and squared off for a showdown with FBI
agents in an apartment building. Moseley eventually surrendered.
Moseley's periodic requests for parole have repeatedly been denied. During one parole hearing in
1984, Moseley volunteered that he had written Genovese's relatives a letter “to apologize for the
inconvenience I caused.'' A parole commissioner responded acidly, “That's a good way to say it.
They were inconvenienced.'' Moseley also told the board the murder was as difficult for him as
his victim. “For a victim outside, it's a one-time or one-hour or one-minute affair, but for the
person who is caught, it is forever, “ he said.
Over the years, there have been various scholarly studies of the “Genovese syndrome.” In 1984,
City University of New York psychology professor Stanley Milgram summarized the questions
raised by the Genovese murder. “The case touched on a fundamental issue of the human
condition, our primordial nightmare,” Milgram said. “If we need help, will those around us stand
around and let us be destroyed or will they come to our aid? Are those other creatures out there
to help us sustain our life and values, or are we individual flecks of dust just floating around in a
vacuum?”
No comments:
Post a Comment