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

inward with her remaining strength. The man and his wife up on the sixth floor across the parking lot watched her disappear inside, watched the door close behind her.
    It was right after this that the man with the hunting knife returned.
    He no longer wore a stocking cap. He now wore a dark fedora on his head, but it was him—the same slender young man who had pursued the woman down Austin Street some ten minutes before.
    He sauntered past the parking lot. His hands were in his pockets as he walked down Austin, the ten-story apartment building on his left, looking this way and that, searching. He came to the front of thebookstore where he had first stabbed the woman. He looked in the empty doorways and glanced up and down the street. Finding nothing, he turned and strolled back toward the parking lot, scanning the area with his eyes. People watching from the ten-story building strained to keep him in view as he moved in the direction of the train depot. Others in private homes on the block and the seven-story apartment building had a more clear view of his movements.
    About the time the man reached the locked train depot, looked around, and then headed for the rear walkway, the man on the sixth floor reached for his phone. “I’m calling the police,” he whispered to his wife. “Don’t!” she insisted. “Thirty people must have called by now.”
    The injured woman had entered a small foyer, a narrow and dingy entryway with peeling paint on the walls. There were no inner doors on the ground floor. Instead there was a set of stairs in front of her leading up to two apartment doors at the top. Neither of these was her own apartment; hers was farther down the walkway, only a few doors down, but she knew she could not make it that far. She needed help right away. Certainly it was fortunate that she had made it here, because one of the people who lived upstairs was a friend of hers.
    She may have tried to make it up the stairs or she may have fallen to the floor soon after the outer door closed behind her. Either way, she came to rest at the base of the narrow hallway and shouted up the stairs.
    “Karl! Karl, help me. I’m stabbed!”
    It is unknown whether Karl opened his door at this point. What is certain is that he reached for his phone—and called a friend of his in Nassau County.
    In a strange and brief conversation, Karl told his friend about the woman calling for help at the bottom of the stairs. He asked his friend what she thought he should do. She told him to call the police. He hung up the phone.
    “Karl! It’s Kitty. I’ve been stabbed. Help me!”
    Spurred to action, Karl climbed out his window and stepped out onto the flat inner roof of the building. Hurrying through the frosted darkness on the roof, he came to the window of an adjoining apartmentand knocked heavily on the pane. The woman inside this apartment was startled by his banging, though she was already wide awake. Frightened—especially with all the screaming and strange activity that had been going on outside—the woman hesitated before going to the window. It was only after the man insistently knocked again and called, “It’s your neighbor! I’m on the roof!” that she finally drew the shade and opened her window. She and her neighbor faced each other through the open window. They heard moaning from the hallway below.
    “I heard screams . . .” the woman began. Her neighbor interrupted and quickly said he didn’t hear screams, since he was sleeping. Before he could say more, another call came from below.
    “Help me! It’s Kitty.”
    They looked at one another. “Call Sophie!” he said. “She lives next to Kitty. Tell her to come over and see if it’s really Kitty.”
    She replied that she did not have a phone and she didn’t know Sophie’s number anyway.
    The moaning continued.
    “I don’t want to get involved,” Karl said. “I want somebody else to come over and see if it really is Kitty.” He added, “I think she’s