Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences (3 page)

“No.”

THE MAN IN
the fedora was about ready to give up. He had searched for several minutes, but his victim was nowhere to be seen. He stood at the top of the walkway next to the train tracks and looked down the long silent concrete path. He tried the door to the coffee shop on the corner.
It was locked. He thought she must have made it home, for surely she must live around here. On impulse he tried one last door—the next one. A plain brown entry door. 82-62 Austin Street.

She was lying on the floor. She looked up at him and let out a horrific scream—her last. People still at their windows around the other side of the block heard her last two cries of “HELP! HELP!”

The door closed behind him. And then he was upon her.

He straddled her where she lay and plunged the hunting knife into her throat to silence the screams. Unable to cry out, she moaned and struggled as he squatted down on her and cut open her jacket and blouse. She raised her gloved right hand in an effort to push him away but he slashed at her outstretched hand with the knife, cutting deep enough to tear her glove open and slice her palm. He cut through the center of her bra and discovered that her breasts were not as big as he had thought. She wore falsies. Infuriated by this, he slashed her right breast. Still she continued to twist and struggle beneath him, and now he was really fed up with her—fed up with her deception with the falsies and her defiance in
still
trying to get away. He took the hunting knife and stabbed her in the stomach, once, twice, and then again and again, not using all his strength, not deep enough to cause immediate death, but enough to make her still.

Now, finally, he could do what he wanted.

He pulled up her skirt. Underneath she wore layers of clothing—girdle, tennis shorts, nylons, and panties. He took the knife and cut through them all as the woman lay motionless and bleeding in the dank stairwell, moaning through the hole in her throat.

A door at the top of the stairs opened.

The man glanced up. Unfazed, he turned his attention back to his victim.

The door at the top of the stairs closed.

GRETA SCHWARTZ COULD
not quite make sense of what her neighbor Karl Ross was telling her. What time was it, anyway? Close to 4:00 a.m. it
looked like. She tried to listen carefully and understand him because there must be a good reason for him to call her at this hour.

Greta and her husband lived in one of the rear apartments down near Lefferts Boulevard. Karl babbled something about screaming on the street.
Screaming?
Greta did not know what he meant. She had been sound asleep until the phone rang. Karl said something about Kitty being hurt in his hallway and then something about calling Sophie to come over and check on her. It was confusing.

Greta knew who Kitty was—one of the two young girls, the dark-haired one, who lived across the hall from young Sophie Farrar and her family. Close to sixty years of age herself, Greta considered them all young. None of this was making much sense and she could not understand why Karl would be asking her to call Sophie in the dead of night. There must be something going on though. Greta told Karl she’d be right over and hung up the phone. She threw on a robe and slippers and went downstairs.

Stepping outside into the walkway, Greta turned right and walked toward the entrance to Karl’s apartment down near the corner. There was no one else on the street. She had no idea that a man in a fedora, headed in the opposite direction toward Lefferts Boulevard, had passed by only a moment before.

Greta reached the door of 82-62 Austin and pushed on it, but it would only open a few inches. It seemed there was something inside blocking the door. She put pressure on it and forced the door open enough to slip inside.

Strange, raw smells filled the air, different from the usual stagnant musty odor of the narrow stairwells. It looked like somebody was lying on the floor. Greta looked down, straining to see in the darkness. As her eyes adjusted to the dim of the hallway she saw that it
was
Kitty lying there. She heard a moan. Kitty’s skirt looked like it was hiked up. She must have fallen, Greta thought.

“Kitty?”

Instinctively she bent down to fix Kitty’s skirt—and that’s when she saw.

Greta Schwartz could not even find her own voice to scream. The sight of the carnage in front of her would haunt the rest of her days.

Greta scrambled up and clawed her way outside. As she fled the blood-drenched stairwell she thought,
My God, she’s still alive,
but the thought was tinged with more pity than relief.

RIGHT AROUND 4:00 A.M.,
at an intersection near Hillside Avenue and the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens, a man had dozed off behind the wheel of his parked car. A passing motorist waiting at the traffic signal noticed the man asleep in the car and also noted that the car was idling. He pulled his own vehicle over to the curb, approached the sleeping man’s car, and tapped gently on the glass to rouse him.

Now awake, the man rolled down his window and looked into the pleasant face of a young man wearing a fedora.

“You shouldn’t be sleeping here like that,” the man in the fedora said in a placid, kind voice. “The carbon monoxide builds up. Or somebody could come along and do something bad to you.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” the man replied, grateful for the stranger’s concern. “Just drifted off. You’re a good fella. Thanks.”

The Good Samaritan in the fedora nodded and smiled, returned to his white Chevy Corvair, and drove off.

chapter 2

SOPHIE FARRAR LIVED
in the Tudor building on Austin Street with her husband and their two young children. The building, which ran the length of the block from Lefferts Boulevard to the train station parking lot, was a modest structure by neighborhood standards, smaller and shabbier than the rest. Locals referred to it simply as “the Tudor.” It had only two stories, the ground floor occupied by a string of storefront businesses and the second floor housing sixteen walk-up apartments, with entrances to all but four of the apartments located in the rear, adjacent to the tracks of the Long Island Railroad.

The night of March 12–13, 1964, had been even quieter than usual since the Austin Bar & Grill, on the first floor of the Tudor near the corner of Austin and Lefferts, had closed earlier than normal, as had the pizza parlor around the block on Lefferts. As the pizza parlor manager later told police, he had closed early due to it being such a slow night. Patrons and employees were long gone by the wee hours, leaving Austin Street silent and lifeless.

Until about 3:20 a.m.

“Did you hear that?” Sophie Farrar’s husband nudged her awake. He had awoken just a moment before, jolted from sleep by a piercing noise. In the darkness of their bedroom Sophie now heard it too: screams, loud and frightening, coming from somewhere outside.

Screams in the night—ghastly, visceral cries like these—were not the norm in this neighborhood. Not in Kew Gardens, this solid
middle-class community of working people and retirees. Nights were usually so peaceful and subdued, which is perhaps why the screams were heard by so many people.

Sophie had no idea who else had heard them. In the isolation of her own apartment Sophie knew only that she and her husband heard something terrible—shrieks that chilled her to the bone and sent her stumbling out of bed to her window overlooking Austin Street.

Peering out, Sophie saw nothing but the usual sights: the gray concrete façade of the Mowbray apartment building across the street, partially obscured by the branches of winter-stripped trees; parked cars sitting frosted and dormant by the curb; stretches of bare sidewalk lit dimly by the yellow glow of street lamps. Through her closed window she could not see the sidewalk directly beneath her. She had no view of anyone lying on the pavement down the block in front of the bookstore, or staggering alongside the storefronts of her own building.

She stayed at her window for a minute or so, looking out and listening for anything unusual, but all remained quiet. For Sophie Farrar, tranquility had returned and the night looked as still and unperturbed as always. She returned to her bed, awake and uneasy in the darkness, unaware of what had happened, unsuspecting of what awaited her.

Sophie was a petite woman in her thirties whose slender, delicate frame belied her strength. Her husband worked long hours, leaving her with the responsibility of running their small but active household. Her days were spent caring for her baby daughter, getting her son off to school, and managing an insulated but busy life with the self-sufficiency common to working-class homemakers. She rarely went out during the day. When she did, she stayed close to home.

Directly beneath her apartment was a small upholstery shop called Fairchild Decorators. During the eight years Sophie had lived here she had become friends with the owner, a man named Tony Corrado. Tony and his family lived a couple blocks away on Talbot Street, but he spent a good deal of time at his business, which had been there for the past fifteen years, since 1949.
Nothing ever happens in Kew Gardens
, Tony often said with a measure of satisfaction. Many people would likely
have agreed. Sophie Farrar said later that what happened next was her first experience with violence, in Kew Gardens or anywhere else.

Twenty minutes after Sophie heard the screams she was jolted once again by another shrill sound in the night: the ring of her telephone. She picked it up quickly, perhaps as eager to answer before it woke her children as she was to find out who could be calling.

Greta Schwartz, possibly in a state of shock, probably overcome by panic, had rushed back to her own apartment after finding Kitty. She called Sophie.

Answering her phone, Sophie listened to Greta’s voice, frantic, breathless. Greta explained—tried to explain—what she had seen. It came down to a single jarring sentence.

“I saw Kitty lying in Karl’s hallway and she looked like she was dead . . .”

Dead?
Kitty, their neighbor? Dead?

Sophie told Greta she’d come right down. She hung up the phone, bewildered. “I never thought of murder,” she said later. “I put on my slacks and ran down to see what was wrong with Kitty.”

Kitty and her roommate, a shy and pretty young blonde named Mary Ann, lived in the apartment across the hall from Sophie and she knew them well, particularly Kitty, who was the more outgoing of the two. The Farrars lived in the larger front apartment overlooking Austin Street. Kitty and Mary Ann, who had moved in just last spring, occupied the rear unit facing the railroad tracks. They shared a common entrance at street level in the rear of the Tudor. The address was 82-70 Austin Street.

And that was something—why was Kitty in the hallway at 82-62 Austin, down at the other end of the building? Karl Ross lived there. Kitty and Karl were friends, so maybe Kitty had been visiting him? Whatever the case, the only important thing was to find out what happened to Kitty.

Sophie rushed down the stairwell and out the street-level door, stepping into a biting blast of winter night air. Greta met her and they hurried down the walkway, shivering more with trepidation than from the near-freezing temperature. Only later did Sophie
question whether she would have run outside had she known the situation, had she known she was dashing headlong into a bloody scene where a killer might still be lurking. As she later said, “I ran to help. It seemed the natural thing to do. I never thought of myself in danger.”

Reaching the entrance at 82-62 Austin, Sophie pushed the door open and stepped inside. Entering the gloom of the hallway, she heard a low moan and looked down.

Sophie Farrar, young mother and homemaker who had never known violence, let out a gasp.

Kitty lay flat on her back, her head facing the door, as if she had tried to climb the stairs and had fallen backwards. But even in the darkness it was obvious this was no accident. Kitty’s grey skirt was hiked up to her waist. Her shoes were off. Her legs were splayed and her blouse and undergarments torn apart.

Perhaps the motherly instinct in Sophie had become a reflex or perhaps she simply reacted to a friend in mortal distress; she dropped to her knees and slipped her arms around Kitty’s back and shoulder, cradling her as she would one of her children.

“Kitty! Kitty, what happened? What happened?”

Kitty instantly tensed at Sophie’s touch. Her hands came up in a weak pathetic flail of defense, still fighting off her attacker.

“Kitty, it’s Sophie . . . it’s
Sophie!
It’s me . . . I’m here . . .”

Kitty must have understood. She relaxed, the tenseness in her body subsiding. She moaned. Her mouth was agape, her narrowed eyes rolling, blinking. She moved slightly inward toward Sophie’s embrace, toward the last comforting human touch she would ever feel, and Sophie saw the holes in the back of her coat. Sharp slices in the fabric of the upper back.

“Kitty, who did this to you?” Sophie asked. Guttural noises came from Kitty, but nothing Sophie could distinguish as words. Kitty moved again, a slow-motion thrash from the warmth of Sophie toward the cold wall stained with her own wet blood. “That’s when I saw that her throat had been slashed,” Sophie later recalled. Slipping her arm from Kitty’s back, Sophie now saw blood, all over her own hands.

The shock, the sheer horror of it all, made it almost beyond belief, as if Sophie had somehow stepped not into a hallway in her own apartment building but into some strange macabre universe. Sophie may have vaguely wondered how she got here, to this nightmare, this unthinkable gruesome scene, with the freezing air swirling in and the warm blood soaking her, the sounds of Kitty’s moans and the plaintive muttering of Greta Schwartz, standing behind her saying, “That poor girl. That poor, poor girl . . .”

Sophie placed her hand behind Kitty’s head, holding her so that they faced each other, hoping Kitty could see her, hoping she would know someone was here, someone who wasn’t going to hurt her. “I’m here, Kitty, I’m here . . .”