Remarks of New York Times freelance writer, Jim Rasenberger, delivered at the March 9, 2004 Kitty Genovese Forum at Fordham University

As Professor Takooshian mentioned, I wrote an article that was published in The New York Times several weeks ago. And when I began working on the article last November, there were two questions that I wanted to answer. The first was factual and fairly straightforward. What exactly occurred in those early morning hours of March 13, 1964? The second question was more philosophical. What did the events of that night mean? In other words, what lessons or morals could we draw from the death of Kitty Genovese?

The second question is in many ways the more complicated one but it's also the one that's received the most attention over the last forty years. Indeed, within days of the publication of the original New York Times article about Ms. Genovese's murder - I'm referring to the article that broke the story of the thirty-eight witnesses who watched Kitty Genovese get murdered and did nothing to intervene - within days of this, everybody in New York seemed to have an opinion about how this could have happened. Some of these were fairly ridiculous. One psychiatrist believed that television was to blame, that it had hypnotized people to the point where they no longer could distinguish between entertainment and reality. In a letter to The New York Times, a woman blamed the tragedy on male insufficiency. Modern man had become so dominated by women, she thought, that he no longer possessed masculine courage required to rescue a woman as she was being murdered.

Since then, Kitty Genovese's death has been pondered often and deeply, and with great seriousness, by clergymen, politicians, writers, and most of all by psychologists. Psychological experiments inspired by the case have shed light on why people do or do not behave compassionately toward their fellow human beings and have led to a pretty good understanding of why people behaved as they did that night forty years ago.

But before we get to that, let's go back to the first question. What exactly did happen that night? I certainly thought I knew the answer when I began looking into the story of Kitty Genovese. As I understood it, a woman had been butchered by a psychopath in front of dozens of people who watched the murder from their windows like spectators watching gladiators at a Roman Colisseum. There was a truly horrific scene of people standing there like stupefied zombies, or even worse, almost enjoying what they were seeing. It's an impression I suspect a lot of people have of that night, and for good reason. That's essentially how the story was reported, and that's more or less, as it's been passed down through the years.

Let me read you the first sentence of the original, front page, New York Times article from March 27, 1964:

"For more than half an hour thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.

Now, that sounds to me like thirty-eight people watched the murder unfold for half an hour - all thirty-eight watched all thirty-five minutes of it. It's an impression that was reinforced in other press accounts. Here's Life Magazine several weeks later:

For the most part, the witnesses, crouching in darkened windows like watchers of The Late Show looked on until the play had passed from their view.

It's no wonder the people of Kew Gardens were held in such contempt in the weeks and months after the murder. The idea of thirty-eight people watching a murder unfold for half an hour and doing nothing is horrifying and utterly shocking. It's the stuff of instant urban mythology, and in fact, the death of Kitty Genovese is arguably one of the preeminent urban myths of the latter half of the Twentieth Century.

But like most urban myths, it's not exactly true. That picture of an audience assembling, pulling up chairs to view a murder, is largely a fiction. As a simple matter of geography, it cannot be the case that thirty-eight witnesses saw all or even much of the attack on Kitty Genovese. She was stabbed in two completely different locations, and one of them was completely out of sight of thirty-seven of the thirty-eight witnesses. She was attacked initially on Austin Street in front of the infamous Mowbray Apartment House - this is the scene most people probably have in mind when they think of that night - and then she was attacked - and this is by far the more sustained attack - inside a small foyer at the back of her building, where only one witness, a man named Karl Ross, could possibly have seen her.

The great majority of the witnesses, it turns out, were not eye witnesses but ear witnesses, and what they saw, or more likely heard, was not clear and conclusive, but fragmentary and vague and puzzling. It was the middle of a cold night. Windows were closed. People were woken from deep sleep, many of them elderly. Many of them thought they were hearing a lovers' quarrel or an argument that had spilled out of the nearby bar.

Now having said that, it's certainly the case that plenty of people heard Kitty Genovese scream that night, and as Mr. Skoller has pointed out to me, there may well have been more than thirty-eight people who heard the events of that night, and certainly many of them heard enough to prompt at least a phone call to the police. So, I'm not acquitting anyone of moral responsibility here. Even if you accept, as I do, that the original Times story and many subsequent media accounts exaggerated what happened that night, it's still plenty horrifying and it's still difficult to understand or forgive.

But I think it's important to acknowledge that what happened is less shocking and less extreme and is far more complex than what is commonly supposed. Those thirty-eight witnesses became monsters in the popular imagination, almost as monstrous as the murderer, Winston Moseley. The more monstrous the behavior of those thirty-eight, the easier it was and is for the rest of us to distance ourselves from us to distance ourselves from them, to acquit ourselves from identifying in any way with them. This puts us in a comfortable position of moral superiority. Now, Abe Rosenthal, the editor of the Times story, later wrote a wonderful book in which he stressed repeatedly that all of us were very much like the thirty-eight witnesses - that everytime we passed a homeless person and did nothing to help, for instance, we essentially behaved as those witnesses did. We are all guilty of turning our backs on suffering.

But I wonder if the story he edited communicates the opposite message. Everyone in this room has probably passed a homeless person and done nothing to help, but I doubt any one of us believes we'd stand in our window for half an hour and watch a woman get slaughtered, and I doubt, with two or three exceptions which Mr. Skoller knows more about than I do, that any of the so called thirty-eight witnesses actually did that. This is a case where psychology got the scoop on journalism. What all those psychology studies have told us is that humans do not tend to behave very admirably in emergency situations. We tend to be confused, uncertain, conflicted, hesitant, often paralyzed, and we tend to look to others for cues about how to react. As Professor Takhooshian has informed me, the bulk of psychological evidence suggests that most of us would have behaved very much as the thirty-eight witnesses did, and that they behaved very much as we would have. If we admit this, I think we're less likely to villify the thirty-eight and more likely to question our own behavior and demand more of ourselves.

The irony, of course, is that if the story had not been exaggerated, it would have been a three day story, maybe a five day story, rather than a forty year story, and we would not be sitting here today talking about this.