Zielonko said with Genovese at work, she and a mutual friend of the couple went bowling the night of the murder.
"I was tired that night," she said. "It was probably 11:30 [p.m when I got home]. I went to bed. And the next thing I remember is the police knocking at the door at 4 o'clock in the morning. So they took me to the emergency room, said, "You have to identify her." So I did standard identifying a person with the white sheet. And I went outside and sat on the bench.
"They said, 'We're going to take you home,' and I said, 'I'm going to wait for her.'" With that, Zielonko sobbed. [7]
"I still have a lot of anger toward people because they could have saved her life," Zielonko continued. "I mean, all those steps along the way when he attacked ... And then he sexually assaulted her too, when she was dying. I mean, you look out the window and you see this happening and you don't help? That's how do you live with yourself, knowing you didn't do anything? That's the biggest lesson to be learned from this: Really love each other. We have to on this planet." [8]
Moseley was arrested on a burglary charge in Astoria, Queens six days after the murder, and confessed not just to Genovese's killing, but also to those of two other young women, Annie May Johnson, 24, of Jamaica, whom he had murdered in February 1964, and Barbara Kralik, 15, killed in July 1963.
He had no previous record at the time of his arrest. Convicted and initially sentenced to death, Moseley's sentence was overturned by the New York State Court of Appeals on a technicality and commuted to life in prison.
In the wake of Kitty Genovese's murder, Mayor Robert F. Wagner said the city faced "an urgent need for a renewal, revival and deepening of the brotherly, the neighborly, the community spirit.''
Long after the event 25 years later to be precise Martin Gansberg told a colleague at the Times his article on the murder "awakened people to the fact that bad things were happening and they were doing nothing about it.''
Clearly, something profound was happening to the fabric of the city. During the early years of the Wagner era, the mayor could point with justifiable pride to the fact the murder rate in New York City was below the national average.
In 1963, however, the number of murders that occurred in the city 548 was more than twice the number that had occurred a decade earlier, and by the mid-1960s violent crime in general was very much on the minds of New Yorkers.
In fact, the year would later be seen as the beginning of an alarming rise in New York's murder rate that wouldn't peak until 1990, when 2,245 met an unnatural end. [9]
By the time of Genovese's murder, violent crime was beginning to pervade the nightmares of many city residents, who bemoaned what they saw as a decline in decency in the metropolis around them.
Afterwards, with accusations regarding New Yorker's callousness and apathy everywhere, the City Police Department instituted the 911 for emergency calls, to make it easier to report crime by eliminating the need to look up the number for the local precinct.
At the time of his death, Moseley had spent more than 50 years in prison and was one of the state's longest-serving inmates.
He was denied parole 18 times, most recently in 2015.
Over the years he was less than a stellar inmate. In 1968 Moseley broke out of prison taking several hostages in the process and raped a woman before he was recaptured.
He also participated in the Attica prison uprising in 1971.
But it was his apparent lack of remorse for killing Genovese that most defined his time in prison.
Moseley is reputed to have once complained to a parole board that it "only took her minutes to die, and here I am spending years in prison."
In his later years, he tried a different tact in a bid to gain his release.
"I know that I did some terrible things, and I've tried very hard to atone for those things in prison," he told a parole board in November 2013.
"I think almost 50 years of paying for those crimes is enough," he said.
Photo caption:
This undated file photo shows Kitty Genovese, whose screams could not save her the night she was stalked and killed in 1964 in the Queens neighborhood of New York. (The Daily News via AP, File) Copyright , The Associated Press.
[1] Gado, Mark. The Kitty Genovese Murder: A Cry in the Night. http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/predators/kitty_genovese/2.html
[2] Gado, Mark. The Kitty Genovese Murder: A Cry in the Night. http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/predators/kitty_genovese/2.html
[3] Gansberg, Martin. Thirty-eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police. The New York Times. March 27, 1964.
[4] Goff, Liz and Rutkoff, Aaron. Remembering Kitty Genovese. Queens Tribune. March 11, 2004
[5] Cooper, Michael. Homicides Decline below 1964 level in New York City. The New York Times. December 24, 1998.
[6] Saxon, Wolfgang. Martin Gansberg, 74, A Reporter and Editor for 43 years at Times (Obit). The New York Times. May 4, 1995.
[7] Sound Portraits: Remembering Kitty Genovese. Weekend Edition. NPR. March 13, 2004.
[8] Sound Portraits: Remembering Kitty Genovese. Weekend Edition. NPR. March 13, 2004.
[9] Lueck, Thomas J. Low Murder Rate Brings New York Back to '63. The New York Times. December 31, 2007.
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