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

the corner. There was no one else on the street. She had no idea that a man in a fedora, headed in the opposite direction toward Lefferts Boulevard, had passed by only a moment before.
    Greta reached the door of 82-62 Austin and pushed on it, but it would only open a few inches. It seemed there was something inside blocking the door. She put pressure on it and forced the door open enough to slip inside.
    Strange, raw smells filled the air, different from the usual stagnant musty odor of the narrow stairwells. It looked like somebody was lying on the floor. Greta looked down, straining to see in the darkness. As her eyes adjusted to the dim of the hallway she saw that it was Kitty lying there. She heard a moan. Kitty’s skirt looked like it was hiked up. She must have fallen, Greta thought.
    “Kitty?”
    Instinctively she bent down to fix Kitty’s skirt—and that’s when she saw.
    Greta Schwartz could not even find her own voice to scream. The sight of the carnage in front of her would haunt the rest of her days.
    Greta scrambled up and clawed her way outside. As she fled the blood-drenched stairwell she thought, My God, she’s still alive, but the thought was tinged with more pity than relief.
    RIGHT AROUND 4:00 A.M., at an intersection near Hillside Avenue and the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens, a man had dozed off behind the wheel of his parked car. A passing motorist waiting at the traffic signal noticed the man asleep in the car and also noted that the car was idling. He pulled his own vehicle over to the curb, approached the sleeping man’s car, and tapped gently on the glass to rouse him.
    Now awake, the man rolled down his window and looked into the pleasant face of a young man wearing a fedora.
    “You shouldn’t be sleeping here like that,” the man in the fedora said in a placid, kind voice. “The carbon monoxide builds up. Or somebody could come along and do something bad to you.”
    “Yeah, you’re right,” the man replied, grateful for the stranger’s concern. “Just drifted off. You’re a good fella. Thanks.”
    The Good Samaritan in the fedora nodded and smiled, returned to his white Chevy Corvair, and drove off.

chapter 2
    SOPHIE FARRAR LIVED in the Tudor building on Austin Street with her husband and their two young children. The building, which ran the length of the block from Lefferts Boulevard to the train station parking lot, was a modest structure by neighborhood standards, smaller and shabbier than the rest. Locals referred to it simply as “the Tudor.” It had only two stories, the ground floor occupied by a string of storefront businesses and the second floor housing sixteen walk-up apartments, with entrances to all but four of the apartments located in the rear, adjacent to the tracks of the Long Island Railroad.
    The night of March 12–13, 1964, had been even quieter than usual since the Austin Bar & Grill, on the first floor of the Tudor near the corner of Austin and Lefferts, had closed earlier than normal, as had the pizza parlor around the block on Lefferts. As the pizza parlor manager later told police, he had closed early due to it being such a slow night. Patrons and employees were long gone by the wee hours, leaving Austin Street silent and lifeless.
    Until about 3:20 a.m.
    “Did you hear that?” Sophie Farrar’s husband nudged her awake. He had awoken just a moment before, jolted from sleep by a piercing noise. In the darkness of their bedroom Sophie now heard it too: screams, loud and frightening, coming from somewhere outside.
    Screams in the night—ghastly, visceral cries like these—were not the norm in this neighborhood. Not in Kew Gardens, this solidmiddle-class community of working people and retirees. Nights were usually so peaceful and subdued, which is perhaps why the screams were heard by so many people.
    Sophie had no idea who else had heard them. In the isolation of her own apartment Sophie knew only that she and her husband heard something