When the Edgar nominations were released I was pleased to see that Kevin Cook’s true crime novel, Kitty Genovese, The Murder, The Bystanders, The Crime That Changed America was on the list for Best Fact Crime (True Crime).It is my “car” book, that is, the book that I keep in the car and read while waiting to pick up one grandchild or another from school or soccer.
The murder occurred in March of 1964. Kitty Genovese was killed between 3 and 3:30 am as she walked from her car to her home in Kew Gardens, Queens. She had just finished her night tour as the manager of a bar in Hollis, Queens. A man followed her and attacked her with a knife at least two separate times during that half hour. What makes this murder so memorable is that dozens of neighbors heard the attack, some actually witnessed the attack. One yelled, “Leave that girl alone” but it took nearly thirty minutes for anyone to decide that the problem was serious enough for them to dial the phone and call the police.
As a kid in the Bronx, I was horrified, not as much by the murder but by the lack of community response. I knew if it happened near my house, my father would have hustled down all five flights of stairs, yelling behind him to my mother, “Call the cops.” I’d seen him do it. More than once.
I wrote off the witnesses as wimps. And life moved on. But all these years later I still wanted to read the book, to see if there was more to know.
And while still in the midst of reading about Kitty Genovese, I took a few hours off from writing to see the movie, SELMA, which depicted events in Selma, Alabama in March 1965. Again a story of real people, but the major difference was that these were people who stood up and risked their lives for the right of all Americans to vote.
If any of the folks marching for freedom in Selma had been in the apartments in Kew Gardens when Kitty Genovese was attacked, I am sure that they, like my father, would have responded. They would have tried to help. Kevin Cook exonerates any of the neighbors who heard but did not see anything. After all they couldn’t be sure. I don’t exonerate a one. I can’t. It has always been my opinion that it is better to make an unneeded effort to help than to not make a needed one.
Still Cook points out that the tragedy of Kitty Genovese’s murder led to some good things happening for society in general, including the development of a unified 911 system for emergency calls and passage of Good Samaritan laws. I would expect we could have figured out that those things were necessary before the senseless murder of a young woman on her way home from work.
Terrie
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