Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences Read Free

she tried to get up and away; but, as one onlooker later described it, she was not having an easytime of it. Her legs moved as if in slow motion as she tried to regain her bearings and stand. She rolled to her side, propping herself on an elbow, and gradually climbed to her feet. A few faltering steps got her to a nearby parked car, which she leaned on for support. From there she lurched to a tall tree by the curb, resting for a moment against its trunk. Pushing off from the tree, she bent unsteadily and grabbed something—her wallet?—from where it had fallen on the sidewalk. Slowly she started down Austin Street the way she had come, back toward the corner drugstore at the edge of the train station parking lot.
    Accounts of how she moved would vary. Some would describe her as staggering, others as walking “dreamlike.” One woman watching from a second-floor apartment above the bookstore described her as zigzagging down the street. However she moved, it was a labored journey. Her winter jacket had tempered some of the hunting knife’s thrust; her wounds were not very deep nor imminently fatal, but two had reached far enough to put small punctures in each of the lobes of her lungs. Air slowly leaked into her chest cavity. The incisions were sharp, and the shock and fear that surely coursed through her could have overshadowed the physical pain, might have pushed it into the background as a lesser and perhaps almost minor cog in this solitary nightmare. What she certainly felt other than a need to find help was a mounting pressure in her chest, a gradual tightening that slowly but steadily gained in intensity with every step and breath, as if a python had coiled around her, making each inhalation a little more difficult than the last. The constriction added to her fear and desperation but also drove her forward toward the promise of salvation; her attacker had fled and she had only to make it to the safety of home, not terribly far away. Less than a minute’s walk from here, normally. She kept moving down Austin Street, accompanied by the sound of her own crying and mumbled pleas and eyes that peered at her through windows up and down the block.
    Midway to the corner she retreated to the building for support, groping along the walls of the storefronts. She passed the darkened windows of the dry cleaner, the grocery, the drugstore—businesses she patronized during the day. The building she now clung to housedsixteen apartments, all on the second floor, one of which was her own. The entrances to most of the apartments, including hers, were in the rear along the wide walkway next to the train tracks.
    She rounded the corner and continued inching along the side of the building. The train station parking lot was now to her right. Directly beyond the lot stood a seven-story apartment building where a man and his wife on the sixth floor watched the young woman make her way toward the rear walkway. They would both later say that the woman definitely staggered at this point and that her movement had slowed from what it had been on the opposite side of Austin Street. Others who still had her in view would agree.
    Partway along the side of the building—and now several minutes into her ordeal—panic overcame her. She cried out, “I’m dying! I’m dying!”
    This outburst, coupled with the fresh horror about to come, caused at least two people listening to think the woman had been attacked again, here next to the parking lot. That was not the case, however. The woman’s cries were yet another reaction to her deepening mortal distress, and perhaps the certainty that she would not be able to go much farther.
    She made it to the next turn at the far edge of the building, where a darkened coffee shop with large glass windows overlooking the walkway occupied the ground floor corner lot. Laboring past the locked door of the coffee shop she came finally to an unlocked door—an apartment entrance. Clutching the door knob, she pushed