In the early hours of March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old bartender, was raped and stabbed outside the apartment building where she lived in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens, New York, United States.

[2][3][4] Two weeks after the murder, The New York Times published an article erroneously claiming that thirty-seven witnesses saw or heard the attack, and that none of them called the police or came to her aid.

[12][13] Genovese was raised Catholic, living in a brownstone residence at 29 St. John's Place in Park Slope, a western Brooklyn neighborhood populated mainly by families of Italian and Irish heritage.

[22] At approximately 2:30 a.m. on March 13, 1964, Genovese left Ev's Eleventh Hour Bar and began driving home in her red Fiat.

While waiting for a traffic light to change on Hoover Avenue, she was spotted by Winston Moseley, who was sitting in his parked Chevrolet Corvair.

Shadowing his face with a wide-brimmed hat, he systematically searched the parking lot, the train station and an apartment complex, eventually finding Genovese, who was barely conscious and lying in a hallway at the back of the building, where a locked door had prevented her from going inside.

[11] Out of view of the street and of those who may have heard or seen any sign of the initial attack, Moseley stabbed Genovese several more times before raping her, stealing $49 from her and running away again.

Her neighbor and close friend, Sophia Farrar, found Genovese shortly after the second attack and held her in her arms, whispering, "Help is on the way" until an ambulance arrived.

[30] On March 19, 1964, six days after the stabbing,[5] Moseley was arrested for suspected robbery in Ozone Park after a television set was discovered in the trunk of his car.

During questioning, Moseley admitted to the murders of Genovese and two other women – Annie Mae Johnson, who had been shot and burned to death in her apartment in South Ozone Park a few weeks earlier; and 15-year-old Barbara Kralik, who had been killed in her parents' Springfield Gardens home the previous July.

He was from Ozone Park, Queens, and worked at Remington Rand as a tab operator, preparing the punched cards used at that time mainly for data input for digital computers.

[42] On March 18, 1968, Moseley escaped from prison while being transported back from Meyer Memorial Hospital in Buffalo, where he had undergone minor surgery for a self-inflicted injury.

[43][44] He hit the transporting correctional officer, stole his weapon and fled to a nearby vacant house owned by a Grand Island couple, Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Kulaga, where he stayed undetected for three days.

[43][45] Moseley traveled to Grand Island where, on March 22, he broke into another house and held a woman and her daughter hostage for two hours before releasing them unharmed.

[55] Science-fiction author and cultural provocateur Harlan Ellison stated that "thirty-eight people watched" Genovese "get knifed to death in a New York street".

[56] His June 1988 article in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (later reprinted in his book Harlan Ellison's Watching) referred to the murder as "witnessed by thirty-eight neighbors, not one of whom made the slightest effort to save her, to scream at the killer, or even to call the police".

He cited reports he claimed to have read that one man, "viewing the murder from his third-floor apartment window, stated later that he rushed to turn up his radio so he wouldn't hear the woman's screams".

[57] In an interview on NPR on March 3, 2014, Kevin Cook, author of Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America, said: Thirty-eight witnesses – that was the story that came from the police.

[58] Two decades after the murder, the Chicago Tribune began an article titled "Justice in the wrong hands"[59] by saying: Twenty years later, in the same city, a man known in headlines as the "subway vigilante" and the "Death Wish gunman" shoots four teenage boys on a subway and a disturbing number of voices express delight... Miss Genovese screamed for more than a half-hour ... the public reaction is ... disbelief that law enforcement authorities will protect people against street crime, and in its display of belief that the rule of force is all that is left.

"Harold Takooshian, writing in Psychology Today, stated that: In his book, Rosenthal asked a series of behavioral scientists to explain why people do or do not help a victim and, sadly, he found none could offer an evidence-based answer.

When the killer was apprehended, and Chief of Detectives Albert Seedman asked him how he dared to attack a woman in front of so many witnesses, the psychopath calmly replied, 'I knew they wouldn't do anything, people never do' Psychologist Frances Cherry has suggested the interpretation of the murder as an issue of bystander intervention is incomplete.

[61] She has pointed to additional research such as that of Borofsky[62] and Shotland[63] demonstrating that people, especially at that time, were unlikely to intervene if they believed a man was attacking his wife or girlfriend.

[61] The apparent lack of reaction by numerous neighbors purported to have watched the scene or to have heard Genovese's cries for help, although erroneously reported, prompted research into diffusion of responsibility and the bystander effect.

Social psychologists John M. Darley and Bibb Latané started this line of research, showing that contrary to common expectations, larger numbers of bystanders decrease the likelihood that someone will step forward and help a victim.

[7] After Moseley's death in March 2016, the Times called their second story "flawed", stating:[8] While there was no question that the attack occurred, and that some neighbors ignored cries for help, the portrayal of 38 witnesses as fully aware and unresponsive was erroneous.

Ms. Genovese died on the way to a hospital.Because of the layout of the apartment building and the fact that the attacks took place in different locations, no witness saw the entire sequence of events.

Many were entirely unaware that an assault or homicide had taken place; some thought what they saw or heard was a domestic quarrel, a drunken brawl or a group of friends leaving the bar when Moseley first approached Genovese.

Not wishing to jeopardize his career by attacking a powerful figure like Rosenthal, Meehan kept his findings secret and passed his notes to fellow WNBC reporter Gabe Pressman.

"[74] The story of the witnesses who did nothing "is taught in every introduction-to-psychology textbook in the United States and Britain, and in many other countries and has been made popularly known through television programs and books,"[65] and songs.

[75] WNYC,[71] PBS[74] and the New York Times[4] lookback articles referenced in particular one film (The Witness) and have noted the cumulative impact of the murder to the development of the 911 system.