Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [58]
The legend held that thirty-eight people “remained at their windows in fascination” and “watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks” but “not one person telephoned the police during the assault.”
The real story, according to De May, went more like this:
The first attack occurred at about 3:20 A.M., when most people were asleep. Genovese cried out for help when Moseley stabbed her in the back. This awoke some Mowbray tenants, who rushed to their windows.
The sidewalk was not well lit, so it may have been hard to make sense of what was happening. As Moseley later testified, “[I]t was late at night and I was pretty sure that nobody could see that well out of the window.” What someone likely would have seen at that point was a man standing over a woman on the ground.
At least one Mowbray tenant, a man, shouted out the window: “Leave that girl alone!” This prompted Moseley to run back to his car, which was parked less than a block away. “I could see that she had gotten up and wasn’t dead,” Moseley testified. He backed his car down the street, he said, to obscure his license plate.
Genovese struggled to her feet and slowly made her way around to the back of the building, toward her apartment’s entrance. But she didn’t make it all the way, collapsing inside the vestibule of a neighboring apartment.
Roughly ten minutes after the first attack, Moseley returned. It is unclear how he tracked her in the dark; he may have followed a trail of blood. He attacked her again inside the vestibule, then fled for good.
The Times article, as with most crime articles, especially of that era, relied heavily on information given by the police. At first the police said Moseley attacked Genovese three separate times, so that is what the newspaper published. But only two attacks occurred. (The police eventually corrected this but, as in a game of Telephone, the error took on a life of its own.)
So the first attack, which was brief, occurred in the middle of the night on a darkened sidewalk. And the second attack occurred some time later, in an enclosed vestibule, out of view of anyone who might have seen the first attack.
Who, then, were “the thirty-eight witnesses”?
That number, also supplied by the police, was apparently a whopping overstatement. “We only found half a dozen that saw what was going on, that we could use,” one of the prosecutors later recalled. This included one neighbor who, according to De May, may have witnessed part of the second attack, but was apparently so drunk that he was reluctant to phone the police.
But still: even if the murder was not a bloody and prolonged spectacle that took place in full view of dozens of neighbors, why didn’t anyone call the police for help?
Even that part of the legend may be false. When De May’s website went live, one reader who found it was named Mike Hoffman. He was just shy of fifteen years old when Genovese was murdered, and he lived on the Mowbray’s second floor.
As Hoffman recalls, he was awakened by a commotion on the street. He opened his bedroom window but still couldn’t make out what was being said. He thought perhaps it was a lovers’ quarrel and, more angry than concerned, he “yelled for them to ‘Shut the fuck up!’”
Hoffman says he heard other people shouting, and when he looked out the window, he saw a man run away. To keep the man in view, Hoffman went to the other window in his room, but the figure faded into the darkness. Hoffman returned to the first window and saw a woman on the sidewalk stagger to her feet. “That’s when my dad came in my room and yelled at me for yelling and waking him up.”
Hoffman told his father what happened. “This guy just beat up a