So Bill wonders: why did the original, flawed reports remain unchallenged?Īmong the journalists with whom Bill speaks are Mike Wallace, who did a CBS radio broadcast about the case in August, 1964, and who explains that it became a worldwide phenomenon because of the Times reports, and Gabe Pressman, who looked at the case critically in his journalism class at Columbia. And, in complete contradiction to published reports, several called the police. Another ran after Kitty and held her, trying vainly to help, as Kitty died in her arms. At least one witness yelled out the window to frighten off the attacker. In the course of his research, Bill discovers that-despite well-documented individual cases of brazen indifference on the part of some witnesses-others indeed took action of many sorts.
Kitty genovese trial#
Along the way, he does extraordinary documentary research in the literal sense, consulting the trial transcripts and police records, as well as meta-journalistic research that involves reporters, editors, and producers involved with the creation and transmission of the original accounts of the events, as well as with later efforts to deepen or revise that story. He enters apartments and calculates sight lines, trying with the help of residents and former residents to figure out how many people could have seen the attacks or heard Kitty’s cries and screams. Bill’s on-camera investigation brings him back to the Kew Gardens station of the Long Island Rail Road, and to the apartment building where Kitty lived. The nominal director of the film is James Solomon, but Bill Genovese is its main author, and its prime virtues arise from his quest. It took forty years for Bill-and he alone, among the members of Kitty’s family-to look behind the headlines and try to find out for himself how so many of her neighbors managed to hide their heads and ignore her agony. (Nicholas Lemann detailed the journalistic genesis of the case in The New Yorker earlier this year.) As Bill says in the documentary, “My sister has been the symbol of bystander apathy for decades.” Rosenthal (later the paper’s executive editor), who assigned the story to Gansberg and oversaw his reporting, reinforced this narrative in his own book about the case, published later that year. As reported by Martin Gansberg in the Times, Kitty’s screams were heard by dozens of neighbors, who did nothing. Genovese was stabbed to death between three and four in the morning, on Mashe was attacked twice by the same man, first near the Kew Gardens railroad station and then in front of her apartment. The murder of Kitty Genovese-as Bill details in the film, both in voiceover and on camera-became major news less for the specifics of the attack itself than for the circumstances surrounding it.
Its main character-its virtual auteur-is Bill Genovese, one of Kitty’s three younger brothers, who was sixteen at the time of her murder he was her favorite brother, and the two were very close. The film does so through the focus of another genre, the personal documentary. “The Witness,” which screens tonight and tomorrow at the New York Film Festival, looks at one of the most infamous of all modern crime stories, the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese. It’s a familiar genre, the true-crime documentary that overturns received ideas about a notorious case. The 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, who is pictured here at her grandparents’ home in Brooklyn, is the subject of James Solomon and Bill Genovese’s documentary “The Witness.” PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY THE GENOVESE FAMILY / FIVE MORE MINUTES PRODUCTIONS
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