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In March 1964, late on a cold and damp Thursday night, something terrible happened in New York City, something suggesting that human beings are the most brutally selfish animals to ever roam the planet.

A twenty-eight-year-old woman named Kitty Genovese drove home from work and parked, as usual, in the lot at the Long Island Rail Road station. She lived in Kew Gardens, Queens, roughly twenty minutes by train from Manhattan. It was a nice neighborhood, with tidy homes on shaded lots, a handful of apartment buildings, and a small commercial district.

Genovese lived above a row of shops that fronted Austin Street. The entrance to her apartment was around the rear. She got out of her car and locked it; almost immediately, a man started chasing her and stabbed her in the back. Genovese screamed. The assault took place on the sidewalk in front of the Austin Street shops and across the street from a ten-story apartment building called the Mowbray.

The assailant, whose name was Winston Moseley, retreated to his car, a white Corvair parked at the curb some sixty yards away. He put the car in reverse and backed it down the block, passing out of view.

Genovese, meanwhile, staggered to her feet and made her way around to the back of her building. But in a short time Moseley returned. He sexually assaulted her and stabbed her again, leaving Genovese to die. Then he got back in his car and drove home. Like Genovese, he was young, twenty-nine years old, and he too lived in Queens. His wife was a registered nurse; they had two children. On the drive home, Moseley noticed another car stopped at a red light, its driver asleep at the wheel. Moseley got out and woke the man. He didn’t hurt or rob him. The next morning, Moseley went to work as usual.

The crime soon became infamous. But not because Moseley was a psychopath—a seemingly normal family man who, although he had no criminal record, turned out to have a history of grotesque sexual violence. And it wasn’t because Genovese was a colorful character herself, a tavern manager who happened to be a lesbian and had a prior gambling arrest. Nor was it because Genovese was white and Moseley was black.

The Kitty Genovese murder became infamous because of an article published on the front page of The New York Times. It began like this:

For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens…. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.

The murder took about thirty-five minutes from start to finish. “If we had been called when he first attacked,” said a police inspector, “the woman might not be dead now.”

The police had interviewed Genovese’s neighbors the morning after the murder, and the Times’s reporter reinterviewed some of them. When asked why they hadn’t intervened or at least called the police, they offered a variety of excuses:

“We thought it was a lovers’ quarrel.”

“We went to the window to see what was happening but the light from our bedroom made it difficult to see the street.”

“I was tired. I went back to bed.”

The article wasn’t very long—barely fourteen hundred words—but its impact was immediate and explosive. There seemed to be general agreement that the thirty-eight witnesses in Kew Gardens represented a new low in human civilization. Politicians, theologians, and editorial writers lambasted the neighbors for their apathy. Some even called for the neighbors’ addresses to be published so justice could be done.

The incident so deeply shook the nation that over the next twenty years, it inspired more academic research on bystander apathy than the Holocaust.

To mark the thirtieth anniversary, President Bill Clinton visited New York City and spoke about the crime: “It sent a chilling message about what had happened at that time in a society, suggesting that we were each of us not simply in danger but fundamentally alone.”

More than thirty-five years later, the horror lived on in