What Happened to Kitty Genovese? Revisiting Her Harrowing Murder 61 Years Later and Why It Helped Created the 911 System

Kitty Genovese’s murder became a symbol of “the bystander effect,” but her family and other loved ones are still trying to publicly correct the inaccurate details of her death in the decades since.

In March 1964, a 28-year-old Kitty was raped and stabbed to death in two separate attacks while she was returning home in the New York City borough of Queens. An early report by The New York Times claimed that as many as 38 witnesses saw Kitty being attacked three times, and no one tried to help her or called the police at their local precincts, as 911 didn’t exist at the time.

However, it was later revealed that there were far fewer witnesses than initially reported, and several tried to help Kitty. Unfortunately, she died en route to a hospital. Three years later, Kitty’s slaying and its aftermath inspired the creation of the 911 emergency calling system, according to PBS’ Independent Lens. The number went into use nationally in February 1968.

While Kitty’s murder became front-page news, her brother, Bill Genovese, told PEOPLE that he and his family members avoided finding out how the tragic event unfolded. When Winston Moseley was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in July 1964, Kitty’s family “couldn’t bear to go to the trial,” Bill said in the 2016 documentary The Witness.

It wasn’t until their mother died in 1992 that he began to research his late sister to learn more about her life and death. In the process, Bill found consolation when he learned that Kitty hadn’t been alone when she died.

“I wish my parents knew that,” he told PEOPLE in January 2017. “I would have hoped it would have been a comfort for them.”

So what happened to Kitty Genovese? Here’s everything to know about her murder 61 years later and how her family has kept her memory alive.

Who was Kitty Genovese?

Catherine “Kitty” Susan Genovese was born on July 7, 1935, and she led a colorful life. “She was pretty extraordinary … a real pistol,” her brother Bill told PEOPLE.

In The Witness, Kitty’s classmate Ilse Hirsch Metchek described her as witty, funny and a “cutup.” Though she wasn’t particularly dedicated to her studies — sometimes skipping school — she was smart.

After her family moved to Connecticut, she stayed in New York, where she eventually moved in with her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko. Speaking in the 2016 documentary Witness, Mary Ann recalled Kitty pursuing her after they crossed paths at a bar.

“I fell very much in love with her,” Mary Ann said, adding that Kitty was still getting to know herself. “I think she had conflicts about being gay, because we would have arguments about this. I think in time she would have worked it out, but she didn’t have the chance.”

The couple lived in the Queens neighborhood of Kew Gardens, where Kitty worked at a bar nearby.

Walter Brosnan, a frequent bar customer, and Victor Horan, her coworker, recounted that Kitty was sweet and liked to goof around.

What happened to Kitty Genovese?

The original New York Times front page story about her murder claimed that there were 38 witnesses to her slaying, that she was attacked three separate times and that no one called the police.

What really happened was starkly different: At around 3:15 a.m. on March 13, 1964, Winston Moseley followed Kitty as she drove from her job as a bar manager in Hollis, Queens, to her home in Kew Gardens.

When she exited her red Fiat, he followed her on foot, at which point she noticed him and began running, The New York Times later reported. He caught up with her and stabbed her in the back two times with a hunting knife on a sidewalk.

During Moseley’s first attack, witness Robert Mozer heard Kitty crying for help. Mozer yelled out of his apartment window, scaring Moseley off. He testified that he saw Moseley run away “like a scared rabbit” and watched Kitty walk away around a corner out of sight, after which Mozer returned to bed, assuming the incident was over.

Moseley, however, didn’t leave for long. He later recalled changing his hat from a stocking cap to a wide-brim to hide his face and moving his car out of sight of Mozer’s building before returning to the scene.

He found Kitty lying down in a hallway at the rear of her apartment building, writhing in pain and crying for help. He stabbed her 12 times and raped her before fleeing.

It was revealed in the 2016 documentary The Witness that at least two people called the police for help, and a friend of Kitty’s who lived in her building, Sophia Farrar, ran downstairs to the hallway and found Kitty in a pool of blood, barely conscious.

She held Kitty and told her help was on the way, cradling her until an ambulance arrived. Kitty died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

How many times was Kitty Genovese stabbed?

Kitty was stabbed a total of 14 times. Moseley stabbed her twice in the first attack before Mozer scared him off, then a dozen times when he returned to the crime scene.

How many witnesses to Kitty Genovese’s murder were there?

It’s likely there weren’t actually 38 witnesses, The New York Times reported in February 2004. According to Charles Skoller — the former assistant district attorney who prosecuted Moseley — only “half a dozen” people saw anything to which they could testify in court.

This is partly because the second attack, which took longer than the first, happened indoors, facing the Long Island Railroad, not the street. However, Skoller stated that it was possible as many as 38 people heard screams but couldn’t see or decipher where they came from.

More recently, in September 2020, The New York Times stated that no witnesses saw the crime happen in full and that some who heard it happen thought it was just a “drunken brawl or a lovers’ quarrel.”

Historian, attorney and Kew Gardens resident Joseph De May, Jr. told On the Media in July 2009 that the only man who could’ve seen Kitty bleeding in the vestibule was inebriated.

After reportedly not wanting to get involved, the witness allegedly called a woman who lived in the building, who then called the police. According to The New Yorker, this man was Karl Ross, a friend of Kitty.

Another man, Michael Hoffman, was a teenager living in a building across the street at the time of the murder and said his father called the police and was ignored, Kevin Cook, author of Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America, explained to NPR in March 2014.

In 2016’s The Witness, Hattie Grund recounted that she also called the police and told them that she heard a woman scream for help. Grund told Kitty’s brother Bill that the police told her at the time that they had already been alerted about the incident.

“It wasn’t that people didn’t call,” she said. “There might have been other people that called because once you got the police station [on the phone] before you could finish, they said, ‘We’ve gotten the calls.’ ”

Grund added that Kew Gardens residents were upset by allegations that they were “apathetic,” telling Bill, “We were not. There are always a few people that call.”

Only one witness allegedly saw Kitty being harmed and didn’t try to help. Joseph Fink, a man who lived across the street from Kitty’s building, reportedly saw the first attack from outside his window and did nothing, The New Yorker reported. During the second attack, Fink went to sleep in his basement and didn’t intervene.

Differing accounts aside, Kitty’s murder spurred psychological and sociological studies about “the bystander effect.”

According to the American Psychological Association, it’s a phenomenon that happens when responsibility falls onto a group of people instead of only one individual. The theory states that it’s less likely for help or a resolution to be offered because the people in the group may assume the problem has already been handled by one of them, even if that’s not true.

Who killed Kitty Genovese?

Kitty’s murderer was serial killer and rapist Winston Moseley.

He was caught five days after Kitty’s death while burglarizing another property, and he confessed to the crime. In addition to admitting he killed Kitty, Moseley revealed that he murdered and raped 15-year-old Barbara Kralik and 24-year-old Annie Mae Johnson.

He was never tried for Kralik and Johnson’s murders but reportedly knew details only their killers could have known about the cases.

Despite his confession, Moseley pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity at the trial for Kitty’s slaying. Still, he was found guilty of first-degree murder and initially sentenced to death, but his sentence was later amended to life in prison upon a 1967 appeal.

In 1968, Moseley was hospitalized in Buffalo, N.Y., for a self-inflicted injury, The New Times reported. He escaped from the hospital after stealing a security guard’s gun, took five people hostage and raped a woman before the FBI apprehended him. He received two 15-year prison sentences to be served concurrently with his life sentence.

Moseley, who earned a sociology degree while in prison, wrote an essay in The New York Times in 1977, in which he expressed regret for killing Kitty.

“More than a decade ago, I committed a crime I genuinely regret. No one should murder or can justify it,” he wrote. “I’ve been imprisoned many years now, and I’ve wished so many times that [I] could bring Kitty Genovese back to life, back to her family and friends.”

Moseley died at age 81 on April 4, 2016. He served nearly 52 years before his death at the maximum security Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y.

What did Kitty Genovese’s brother Bill do?

Bill Genovese enlisted in the military at age 19, partially inspired by the duty he felt to help others because he believed no one helped his sister. He lost both of his legs in combat.

He and the rest of the Genovese family didn’t attend Moseley’s trial, and their mother had a stroke a year after the murder.

“In our family we basically stayed away from all publicity, all inquiries, because my mom was so affected by this,” Bill told PEOPLE in January 2017. “We were always about trying to shield information coming in to her.”

After their mother died in 1992, Bill began investigating further into his sister’s murder, as well as into her life.

He chronicled his efforts in the documentary The Witness, in which he interviewed several surviving witnesses to Kitty’s murder and found solace in knowing she wasn’t alone when she died, as Farrar was holding his sister while they awaited help.

What happened to Kitty Genovese’s girlfriend?

Over the years, Zielonko reflected on how well she and Kitty “meshed,” leading to a “quick bond,” she told The Chicago Tribune in March 2003.

The night of the murder, Zielonko was asleep in her and Kitty’s apartment after bowling with friends. Following Kitty’s death, Zielonko had to identify her body at the morgue.

Zielonko later said she didn’t remember much else about the night of the slaying because she blocked a lot of it out of her mind.

“I was very numb, I would say, from the whole thing,” she told The New York Times in April 2016. “I felt, wow, she was so close, and I was sleeping, and I didn’t know what happened, and that I could have saved her. You know? That’s what I really think still.”

Speaking to the Rutland Herald in March 2004, Zielonko revealed that she felt “helpless” after Kitty’s death, wondering if she could have done something to prevent the incident. She vowed not to turn her back the next time she saw someone in danger.

Zielonko recalled stepping in to help a woman on the side of the road who was in the middle of a domestic violence situation. “I drove her home, but never saw her again,” she told the outlet. “I could have just driven by that night, but I said ‘I’ll take a chance.'”

Zielonko died at age 85 on April 3, 2020, in Rutland, Vt., per The New York Times.