The Brutal Murder That Shook New York

Kitty Genovese, was brutally murdered on a cold March night in Queens, in 1964; Genovese was attacked, stabbed, raped and murdered. It shook New York to core and it was widely reported that she could have been saved; had 38 heartless New Yorkers, not ignored her screams, as she lay dying in a pool of blood.

The New York Times sensational report forever linked her name to the sensationalized notion of a city—and by extension, a nation—filled with terminal indifference.

No one challenged the paper of record for decades as Kitty Genovese became an emblem for the phenomenon known as the bystander effect, shorthand for the deterioration of modern American society at large. Reduced to the horrifying details of her tragic death, she’s been cited for half a century in film and television, potent fodder for crime procedurals like Perry Mason and Law & Order. Not even Girls could resist devoting an entire episode to the most famous murder in the history of New York City.

But when Genovese’s youngest brother, Bill Genovese, sought the truth of what happened the night his vibrant 28-year-old sister was brutally murdered, he uncovered startling details and witnesses that pieced together a different account of that fateful evening. Tracking his amateur investigation over the course of several years, five decades after the media turned his sister into a proto-meme, the documentary The Witness takes a heartaching deep dive into a story we already thought we knew.  Read more