When I saw the teaser on the front page of this morning's NYT that William Moseley had passed away at 81, I thought there was a better than a good chance that when I turned to the obituary I would find it bylined by Robert D. McFadden. And of course when I turned, that's exactly what I found.
With a lede that rival's Clark Gable's classroom lede that he turns into the teacher, Doris Day, as he masquerades as a journalism student rather then the seasoned reporter he is in the movie 'Teacher's Pet,' Mr. McFadden summarizes what many of us have come to know about the case: Kitty Genovese was killed while there were those who did nothing to come to her aid or alert authorities.
But as time has rolled on, it has come to be known that there were those, a very few, who did try and help, and there weren't as many as claimed who did nothing.
All this is in Mr. McFadden's obituary of Mr. Moseley, along with a little implied protection of the reporters who in the NYT reported that 38 individuals saw or heard something but did nothing while the sustained attack on Kitty played on.
Mr. McFadden mentions a four paragraph piece that appeared in the Times that reported on the murder the day after. The murder took place in the early hours of March 13, 1964.
In a prior posting I mentioned how a NYPL librarian couldn't find this short piece doing an online search. With my full NYT subscription I get digital access to their archives, and this time I did find the piece, just as described, a four paragraph, unbylined report of the slaying that appeared on page 26 of a 52 page newspaper, published the day after.
Exactly two weeks after the slaying, Martin Gansberg in the NYT reported the slaying in more detail. The story appeared on the front page, below the fold, on March 27, 1964, complete with an aerial photo of the site where Kitty was killed. Obviously, more was known later, and some was invented.
The headline to the piece loudly proclaimed: "37 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police." The lede to the story, in its first sentence, contradicts the 37 number, and says "...38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman..." I've come to almost laugh that the NYT, in its own story, on the front page, contradicts itself over the number they claim witnessed the slaying. Talk about a typo.
As mentioned by Mr. McFadden, the number, which came to be accepted as 38, took on a life of its own. Another, almost funny thing is that a movie made about the slaying by Danish filmmaker Puk Grasten that premiered in part at the 2013 Sundance festival, is titled "37." They peeled off the headline and went no further.
The 38 became a symbol of urban apathy toward crime. Aside from Mr. Gansberg's reporting, the metropolitan editor at the time, Abraham Rosenthal, wrote a book published in June 1964, "Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case." The book followed a May 1964 Sunday Times magazine piece by Mr. Rosenthal. 38 has lived on in infamy, even though the number has been challenged.
When Mr. Rosenthal's book was reissued in digital form in December 2012, a Times reporter, Leslie Kaufman, wrote a piece that perhaps it was time to apply some fact-checking to the book and its use of the number 38. The number has been staunchly defended, although it has been shown to be completely uncorroborated.
The "floating" of the number that originally came from a police commissioner's lunch-time conversation with Mr. Rosenthal, then the Metropolitan editor of the NYT, has been defended by Mr. Rosenthal as required to add further gravitas and disgust to the event. For years and years the people of Kew Gardens were all tainted by the number, and became unwitting collateral participants to the horrific rape and murder. A select few actually were.
Mr. McFadden acknowledges that the NYT did report a number that was in no way accurate, "the article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses...," but he keeps his colleague's names out of the paper. And why not? They are not part of Winston Moseley's story or the horrific slaying of Kitty Genovese. They are part of the reporting that emanated from the grisly crime. They created an additional story.
Reading the obituary of Mr. Moseley I was struck by what I either no longer remembered about the case, or never knew from the start.
First, that Moseley had confessed to two prior slayings, one of which was against a 15 year old girl. That he was a necrophiliac. That judge Irwin J. Shapiro, who imposed the electric chair death penalty based on the guilty verdict, told the court he didn't believe in capital punishment, but based on the lurid and violent details that emerged from the case, he "wouldn't hesitate to pull the switch on him myself." That's an angry judge volunteering for another job.
That Winston Moseley, considered to be a "psychopathic serial killer," earned a degree in sociology from Niagara University in 1977. Talk about trying to know thyself.
I knew his constant applications for parole were always turned down. I didn't know there were 18 of them, the most recent one last year.
Certainly Moseley's escape from a hospital in 1968 after being treated for self-inflicted wounds, and his subsequent rape of a woman and holding hostages during the few days he spent on the run couldn't have endeared him to the parole board.
I've mentioned the Kitty Genovese story in several prior blog postings. From Day One it hasn't gone away for anyone who grew up with it and is still with us. Is it over? Not with the engraved 38 hanging in the air, and that's probably good, despite its wholesale inaccuracy.
And certainly not over when they finish and finally release the full movie titled '37.'
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
Prior posts:
http://onofframp.blogspot.com/2012/10/suttons-place.html
http://onofframp.blogspot.com/2015/07/kitty-genovese-and-nine-one-one.html
http://onofframp.blogspot.com/2015/07/kitty-and-times.html
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com/2015/07/letters-to-editor.html
No comments:
Post a Comment