Kitty and the Times

In Britain and other parts of the U.K., a fortnight is a span of 14 days. Easy to understand the word is derived from Old English for 14. It is not a word we use in the States, but you will hear it, especially if you're into those public television British shows. It's one of the words I didn't have to look up

The diving back in to the Kitty Genovese story has been a bit like opening one of those cold case boxes and dumping out the ancient evidence, looking for fresh insights. In this case, the old evidence are the newspaper stories that chronicled the crime. And there have been plenty of stories, books, psychology courses, all kinds of examinations of human behavior based on the premise that there were 38 silent witnesses to the crime.

The murder itself did not remain a cold case. The perpetrator, Winston Moseley was quickly caught, convicted, and is still in a New York prison, 80 years of age, thanks in part to no New York death penalty and 16 parole denials. Mr. Moseley escaped from Attica in 1968 and raped again before being caught and returned to prison. Parole would seem completely out of the question.

(The film '37' unfortunately landed on the poor headline that appeared in the NYT on March 27, 1964. The number 37 contradicts the urban legend that was established by the story's lede, (38 silent witnesses) as well as the A.M. Rosenthal book, Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case. Mr. Rosenthal's December 1964 book was an expansion of his Sunday May 3, 1964 Times piece, 'Study of the Sickness called Apathy." My guess is since the movie people are deep into freshly created promotional material that uses the 37 number, they're not going to abandon it. It was, after all, really just a number pulled out of the air.)

A 2003 piece in the NYT by Leslie Kaufman dissects the source of the number 38.

It was a gruesome story that made perfect tabloid fodder, but soon it became much more. Mr. Rosenthal, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who would go on to become the executive editor of The New York Times, was then a new and ambitious metropolitan editor for the paper who happened to be having lunch with the police commissioner 10 days after the crime. The commissioner mentioned that 38 people had witnessed the murder, and yet no one had come to Ms. Genovese’s aid or called the police.

If the police commissioner, or the editor Mr. Rosenthal is the source of the number, 38 might not really matter anymore. The number became etched in urban legend as the ultimate in human apathy. Mr. Rosenthal ran with the number he created, or was told. In 1994, on the 30th anniversary of the murder. Mr. Rosenthal published an Opinion piece that looked back at the crime and the number of uncaring witnesses.

Interesting in that Opinion piece Mr. Rosenthal claimed there was a four paragraph piece in the paper reporting the crime. No date is given for that brief mention, but it would not be inconceivable that a short mention would be what the story initially got. And so-called "outer borough" reporting (the crime took place in Queens) was pretty much nada in that era for the Times.

The opening wording in his Sunday piece might lead you to believe that the 38 silent witness part of the story emerged as soon as the crime itself was being reported. This is clearly not so.

If anyone remembers newspapers of the 1960s era they would remember papers that were considerable smaller in page count than the relative door-stoppers that appear today, even given the inroads of online reporting.

But was the crime even initially reported before the lunch with the police commissioner? An alert reader put me onto a New York Public Library service that lets you ask a question online, a chat session can ensue, and perhaps a valuable answer can be attained. (The website for this free, member or non-member service is: http://www.nypl.org/ask-nypl/about.)

The question put to the librarian who signed on was: was there a story in the New York Times reporting the murder of Kitty Genovese at any point between March 13, 1964, and the March 27, 1964 date of the Martin Gansberg piece?

The answer came back that a search of the ProQuest database (what I would have had to use if I actually made the trip to the library. NYPL online access of NYT articles requires you to be at the library, no home online access, even for members) that no, there was nothing.

March 13 to March 27, 14 days. What a fortnight can bring.

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