Timeline of Events
Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was a bar manager at a bar in Queens, New York City, called Ev's Eleventh Hour Club. She drove a red Fiat to work and back. On March 13, 1964, Kitty parked her car by the Long Island Railroad parking lot (Kew Gardens stop) and was walking home when Winston Mosley caught up with her and began stabbing her.
Kitty, injured, started screaming, "Oh my God! He stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!" Winston fled when the lights went on and a man shouted to leave Kitty alone, but later returned when there seemed to be no help forthcoming.
By this time, Kitty had made it to a locked doorstep. He stabbed her again and fled again when her cries ("I'm dying! I'm dying!") caused lights to turn on again in the neighborhood.
At 3:25 AM, Kitty managed to make it to the rear of her apartment building and entered through a unlocked door that was a hallway that led to the 2nd floor of a building, falling to the floor. By this time, Winston had returned again, and after methodically testing all the doors, found Kitty and raped her, taking her money with him before stabbing her one final time.
At 3:50 the first call was received by the police from one of the witnesses to the murder, Karl Ross. By the time police reached Kitty, it was too late; she was already dead. When asked why he didn't call earlier, Karl Ross' response was, "I didn't want to get involved."
In total, there were 38 witnesses to the murder (note: several articles mention 37 witnesses; later articles mention 38; it is unclear who is right).
During the trial, Winston Mosley pled "not guilty," though his lawyer changed it afterward to "not guilty by reason of insanity." However, the psychiatrist judged Mosley to be sane. On June 11, 1964, Winston Mosley was found guilty of murder in the first degree. Though initially given the death sentence, the sentence was reduced to life imprisonment after the trial went to appeal with New York's Court of Appeals (who found that evidence of Mosley's mental state should have been admitted in trial).
Over the years in prison, Mosley became the first prisoner to obtain his bachelors while in prison, and began to believe that his crimes were his "service" to society, to wake them up. On November 13, 1995, Judge Fredric Block of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn denied a motion for a new trial for Winston Mosley. Winston was over 60 at the time.
A Killer's Point of View - Winston Mosley's Confession
Note: Winston wasn't too keen on this whole paragraph thing. I broke it up to make it more readable.
"I got in the car and drove to Queens Boulevard and Yellowstone Avenue and I started cruising the neighborhood looking for a woman alone in a car. About three o’clock I did manage to find one on the street, I don’t know, say about ten blocks from her house and I followed her. She drove to a parking lot and stopped her car. As soon as she stopped hers, I was following her and I stopped mine. While she was getting out of her car, I had already gotten out of mine and I ran into the parking lot before she really got out of the car. She got out of the car and she saw me and she was frightened right away and she started to run.
"I ran after her and stabbed her twice in the back. Somebody yelled and I was frightened. So I jumped back into the car, backed the car to the nearest cross street and backed down this street about half a block. I decided that even though the person had yelled, they weren’t going to come down the street to see what happened to her and I noticed as I was backing the car back that the woman had gotten up and appeared to be going around the corner. So I came back thinking that I would find her.
"I came back into the parking lot and thought maybe she had gone to the train station. She wasn’t in the train station. It was locked. So I said, “Well,” to myself, “Well, perhaps she is in one of these hallways.” I tried the first door in this row of houses and the door was locked. The second door I tried opened, I opened, and there she was laying on the floor. When she saw me, she started screaming again. So I stabbed her a few more times. She seemed to quite down (sic) a little bit. So she wasn’t really struggling that hard with me now. So I lifted up her skirt and I cut off her girdle. I even cut or pulled her panties off and she had a sanitary pad and I picked that out and threw it away and I stabbed her again in the stomach. I cut off her brassiere and I don’t remember whether I cut her blouse or not and I took one of the false pads that she had in the brassiere because it had blood on it and I touched it with my finger and I didn’t want to leave it. I attempted to have sexual intercourse with her, but I was unable to as I was impotent. I did have an orgasm, however. I looked through her pockets and I took everything she had in her pockets, which were some keys, some make-up, a bottle of pills and $49 she had in cash.
"While this was going on, as I mentioned, I thought that I heard somebody opening a door upstairs and, as a matter of fact, I could hear a mumbled voice upstairs, but when I looked up the stairs, I didn’t see anybody, and as I thought nobody actually comes down the stairs, so I looked up there one more time before I went out the door and I still didn’t see anybody and I came out the door and instead of going back through the parking lot, I walked around the block and came back on the opposite side of the street.
"The only thing I saw was a milk truck with a deliveryman in it and I walked around to the car and back to the street, parallel to the street that I first followed her on, and I started driving home. As I drove home, I threw out the keys, the bottle of make-up and the pills that I had I had thrown out right by the parking lot and the case that the pills were in I threw out on the street as I was driving along. I go to Hillside Avenue and Van Wyck Expressway and stopped and threw out this rubber false pad from the brassiere that I picked up.
"From there I went straight home."