James Solomon (2015)
In the public mind, the name chiefly associated with a murder tends to be that of the killer rather than the victim. The Kitty Genovese case is more singular. It’s named for the twenty-eight-year-old woman raped and stabbed to death, in March 1964, close to the apartment block where she lived in Queens, New York City. Yet ‘Kitty Genovese’, in both popular culture and an academic context, connotes, rather than an individual, a syndrome – the ‘bystander effect’, of which her killing quickly became an exemplar. Six days after the murder, Winston Moseley, a local man, was arrested for another crime and, under police questioning, confessed to killing Genovese. A few days later, an article in the New York Times claimed that 38 witnesses saw or heard the attack taking place but that none came to the victim’s aid or even contacted the police. Moseley was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death; three years later, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment[1]. The NYT piece defined the case’s larger significance for decades to come.
Kitty Genovese was the eldest of five children in an Italian-American family. James Solomon’s documentary The Witness follows one of her brothers, Bill, sixteen when his sister was killed, on a mission to investigate the circumstances of the murder. What happened to Kitty had continued to attract attention in print and broadcast journalism, and inspire, as well as books on the case, fictional material: as early as 1965, a Perry Mason TV episode dealt with the assault of a young woman whose screams for help were ignored by the residents of her apartment building. Bill Genovese is exasperated by the consistent thrust of these formally various treatments: the apathy issue dominates at the expense of Kitty the person (even at the expense of her killer’s motivation). Bill and his sister, despite the age difference between them, were emotionally close. He means to address the crime and its aftermath from the perspective of someone directly and deeply affected by them. Bill is physically disabled, having lost both his legs in the war in Vietnam. He attributes his readiness to fight there to a powerful resistance to bystanding.
The first part of The Witness largely comprises Bill’s interviews with journalists involved in the seminal NYT article and the prosecuting attorney at Winston Moseley’s trial. It gradually emerges that perhaps as few as two people witnessed any part of Moseley’s (two-stage) attack on Kitty. Some of the larger number that turned a deaf ear rather than a blind eye thought they were hearing drunken lovers quarrelling. Bill also talks with Michael Farrar, whose mother was Kitty’s friend and neighbour. As a child in the early 1960s, Michael remembers several older residents of the apartment block whose arms were tattooed with what he came to realise were concentration camp numbers – whose reluctance to get involved, in other words, may have had a particular, understandable cause. Bill’s findings still provoke the question: what’s the critical mass of bystanders needed for their passivity to be shocking? He nevertheless gathers persuasive evidence that the cachet of the New York Times, reinforced by the personal authority and reputation of its then editor, allowed inaccuracies in its account of the crime to go unchallenged, It’s clear that the enduring received wisdom about the Kitty Genovese case is at best an oversimplification, at worst a travesty, of what really happened.
About halfway through, the film changes tack. It remains absorbing and you never doubt the strength of Bill Genovese’s commitment to his cause. But what exactly is that cause? The compulsion to break new ground in the case seems increasingly driven by a film-making rather than a truth-seeking imperative. With Bill continuously in the foreground, James Solomon is conspicuous by his absence from what’s seen and heard on the screen. You start to wonder, though, if Solomon isn’t exploiting the unfocused nature of Bill’s quest as a means of upping the narrative ante: ‘How about we do this – or maybe that – to keep the momentum going?’ It may not be fair to distinguish too sharply the roles of the director and the film’s front man, who is also its executive producer, in this. But regardless of who was the prime mover, two elements make the second half of The Witness uncomfortable in a different way from what’s gone before.
The first is Bill’s attempts to meet with his sister’s killer. Winston Moseley, although convicted of the murder of Kitty only, confessed to killing two other women. Less than a year after his sentence was reduced, he escaped from prison. He took refuge in an empty house for three days. When its owners, a married couple, returned Moseley held them hostage, binding and gagging the husband and raping the wife. He then stole their car and broke into another house, where he held a woman and her daughter hostage before surrendering to the police. For these crimes, he received two additional fifteen-year sentences to run concurrently with his life sentence for Kitty’s murder. In the 1970s, he studied successfully in prison for a sociology degree. His applications for parole, which he was eligible to make from 1984 onwards, repeatedly failed[2].
Despite showing little remorse for his crimes, Moseley came to see himself as both a reformed character and a victim. This makes it especially hard to see what Bill expects to get out of an interview with him. Waiting for a response to his request for one, Bill admits he’ll be partly disappointed, partly relieved if it’s declined, which it is. This viewer was entirely relieved that Bill was spared what seemed bound to be a self-inflicted ordeal. Instead, he meets Steven Moseley, one of the killer’s sons, and this is bad enough. If Bill Genovese is excessively preoccupied with the case material, Steven Moseley (a Christian minister) is breathtakingly ignorant. His father’s explanation of what happened, says Steven, is that he meant only to steal from Kitty: it was her racist abuse that caused him to snap and to stab her. When Bill points out that Annie Mae Johnson, the woman Winston Moseley killed previously, was African-American, it’s apparently news to Steven. He then wants to know if Bill belongs to the Genovese mafia family. His interlocutor shows remarkable self-control as he answers no.
The second discomfiting element, which reflects less well on Bill, supplies the dramatic climax to The Witness. It also climaxes one’s unease with the documentary’s dramatising tendencies. Bill meets a young actress called Shannon Beeby. She is to play Kitty in a partial reconstruction of the crime – to be more precise, her job is to replicate the volume and intensity of Kitty’s screams for help, in the actual location of the murder. We see Bill putting up a notice on the entrance of the apartment block, indicating that space outside the building has been booked for a defined period of time. Under cover of darkness, Shannon Beeby produces her horrifying screams. There’s no reaction from the residents of the block. What is this episode meant to show? It can hardly be that the bystander effect is flourishing half a century on from the crime. Some of the residents may well have read the notice Bill put up. In any case, if they looked out of their apartment windows on hearing the screams, their minds would likely be put at ease when they saw a film crew below.
From the late 1950s onwards, Kitty Genovese worked as a bartender and, in her final job, managed a bar in Queens. She was on her way home from work, in the early hours of the morning, when Moseley attacked her. The chief success of The Witness is in reanimating Kitty. In August 1961, she was briefly arrested on bookmaking charges (and fined $50) after taking bets on horse races from bar patrons. The well-known black-and-white photograph of Kitty turns out to be a mugshot taken during that episode. It’s eclipsed in Solomon’s film by a wealth of other family photographs, and various video footage of Kitty, including her and her friends as high-school students. She stands out as magnetically vivid. The year 1954 was a pivotal one in her short life. Her parents and siblings moved from Brooklyn, where Kitty was born and raised, to New Canaan, Connecticut. She stayed in Brooklyn with grandparents then got married. The marriage was annulled before the year was out.
Kitty was gay. Her former work colleagues with whom Bill Genovese talks have sharply differing views of whether her sexuality was common knowledge in her lifetime. One of the most poignant of Bill’s interviews is with Kitty’s flatmate and lover, Mary Ann Zielonko. The poignancy is partly to do with Mary Ann’s declining to be shown on camera: her sound-only testimony concentrates the melancholy in her voice. The saddest part of her recollections concerns a poodle called Andrew, which Kitty bought as a pet for Mary Ann by way of making up following a row. After Kitty’s death, her father turned up at the apartment his daughter had shared with Mary Ann, demanding to take possession of the animal. Bill is also upset when he hears this. He remembers a dog briefly joining the Genovese household. Its presence distressed his mother. Andrew soon disappeared.
The Netflix documentary series The Keepers (2017) – centred on the unsolved 1969 murder of Catherine Cesnik, a nun and teacher at a Catholic high school in Baltimore – had many strengths. One was in showing that, to the former pupils of hers who had reignited interest in the case through a website and social media, the death of Sister Cathy had always been unfinished business, emotionally as well as criminally. It couldn’t, however, dominate their lives while they were raising families and doing jobs. Now they were retired and with new technologies available, they were making up for lost time. Early on in The Witness, Bill Genovese tells someone he’s been working with ‘a film-maker for the last ten years’; some footage is indeed dated 2004. Despite this, James Solomon doesn’t convey as clearly as he might whether the film is the culmination of a longer campaign on Bill’s part to rescue his sister from the confines of social psychology and criminology studies. Has he, throughout his adult life, tried and failed to be heard? Or did he start trying to make a difference only when, say, his children were grown up?
According to Wikipedia, doubts about the accuracy of the original New York Times account were raised, in another piece in the newspaper, as long ago as 2004. When Winston Moseley died in early 2016, a NYT piece by Robert D McFadden included the following:
‘While there was no question that the attack occurred, and that some neighbors ignored cries for help, the portrayal of 38 witnesses as fully aware and unresponsive was erroneous. The article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed parts of it, or recognized the cries for help. … And afterward, two people did call the police. A 70-year-old woman ventured out and cradled the dying victim in her arms until they arrived. Ms Genovese died on the way to a hospital.’
Even that summary contradicts the evidence of The Witness (which first screened at the New York Film Festival in the autumn of 2015 but wasn’t released until a few weeks after McFadden’s piece appeared). The ’70-year-old woman’ must be Michael Farrar’s mother, Sophia – who was in her mid-thirties in 1964. The elderly Sophia (who died in 2020, aged ninety-two) doesn’t appear until near the end of the film – in one of two concluding sequences designed to raise the spirits. Sophia recalls Kitty’s last minutes, in her arms; Solomon also shows an almost celebratory family gathering, including three generations of the Genoveses. The latter feels like a happy ending contrivance: sibling tensions, sparked by Bill’s obsession and evident in an earlier sequence, have simply vanished. In contrast, Sophia Farrar, telling Bill she hopes the dying Kitty realised she was being held and comforted by someone who loved her, comes across as sincere. Yet the two sequences in combination resurrect one’s disquiet about the artful shaping of The Witness. The last word is had by Bill, whose voiceover tells us he thinks Kitty ‘would want me to move on now’. Once this film was in the can, perhaps he did.
19 January 2021
[1] According to Wikipedia, ‘the New York Court of Appeals found that Moseley should have been able to argue that he was medically insane at the sentencing hearing when the trial court found that he had been legally sane’.
[2] ‘Moseley was denied parole an 18th time in November 2015, and died in prison on March 28, 2016, at the age of 81’ (Wikipedia).
