Kitty Genovese ─ The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America

What happened to Catherine “Kitty” Genovese? Slain on her front stoop in New York City just before the 1964 World’s Fair—a murder the New York Times called “a frozen moment of dramatic, disturbing societal change”—Kitty became an urban martyr, butchered in plain sight of thirty-eight witnesses who “didn’t want to get involved.” Her killing crystallized a new psychological concept: the “Bystander Effect.”

That’s the story told by the Times’s legendary A. M. Rosenthal, Malcolm Gladwell, the authors of Freakonomics, and countless psychology textbooks. But it isn’t true. As Kevin Cook demonstrates, the tale of “thirty-eight witnesses” is a myth. The truth is more compelling—and so is the crime’s young victim. Now, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Genovese murder, Cook offers a riveting, suspenseful account of what really happened that night in Kew Gardens, Queens. Drawn from newly discovered documents and revelatory interviews with Kitty’s lover and other key figures, Kitty Genovese redefines a story America thought it already knew.