laurenleyendolibros 's review for:

Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences by Catherine Pelonero

3.5

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

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You’ve probably heard the story of the woman who was murdered on a New York street, screaming for help, while numerous witnesses did nothing, leading to discussion of ‘the Bystander Effect’. You might have heard it was exaggerated or even that it was an urban legend. However, the woman was Kitty Genovese and the story is even worse than it sounds. 

Possible spoilers ahead! 

The first section of this book is really compelling: it explains exactly what took place on March 13, 1964. Kitty was arriving home when a man who had followed her from the bar where she worked stabbed her on the street, around the corner from her apartment. She screamed for help – she was heard shouting that she’d ‘been stabbed’ and was ‘dying’. This was a quiet neighbourhood in Queens, not one where people expected to hear screaming and shouting at 2.30am and neighbours reacted. Some looked out and shouted: ‘Shut the fuck up!’ ‘Leave that girl alone!’ The attacker ran away. But the attack wasn’t over. Kitty tried to get home. She made it not to the entrance of her apartment, but to that of a friend. She went in, maybe just to get off the street, and called up the stairs to her friend. Instead of helping he called another friend and got other neighbours to come down to check if it was really Kitty. But it was all too late because by the time anyone came to Kitty’s aid, the killer had returned to finish the job. 

At the time it was reported that there were 38 witnesses (the police reports back this up) and none of them helped. This is the biggest point of contention in this case. Of course, it sounds incredible, but we have to understand that 38 means the total number of people who saw or heard something – and that could’ve been a shout, or a man standing too close to a woman. No one saw the whole thing from start to finish, and not everyone could have realised that it was serious enough to call the police (if I called the police every time I heard shouts, I’d be the one getting arrested). Also, it was 1964; for some people, summoning help may have meant going down to the police call box in the street where potential danger lay – and witnesses included 14-year-olds and pensioners. And most importantly – at least two claim to have tried to call, or called and not been given priority. Today, over 50 years later there are claims that reports were wildly exaggerated. Based on what I read in this book (in particular the author’s afterword) and just common sense (time changes everything, even memories) I don’t agree. I do think it was unrealistic to expect all 38 people to react, but there were some key people whose actions were shameful. You’ll know who if you read. 

There’s more to the book: we get background on the killer, information on the trial and what happened after – there are plenty of twists and turns, the tragedy of those Kitty left behind – her partner Mary-Ann, who to everyone else was only her roommate; and her brother who committed himself to helping everyone leading him to Vietnam. 

The book is well- written and very well-researched. As I said, the first part was compelling. What happened? Who was Kitty? What’s the truth behind ‘no one helped’? However, what brought my rating down was that the story got very repetitive and kept coming back to that last question. Sadly, the case stopped being about a young woman who was tragically murdered outside her own home and became about a community who got tired of being bad-mouthed.