THE MURDER OF KITTY GENOVESE

Episode 207 | Historical Events — Mysterious Events

In this Mystery episode we focus on the murder of Kitty Genovese — and the New York Times story that manufactured one of the most influential and most inaccurate narratives in American journalism. On March 13th, 1964, Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death outside her Queens apartment. Two weeks later, the Times published a front-page story claiming 38 witnesses watched her die and no one called the police. The story was largely fabricated.

We examine what actually happened: a neighbor named Sofia Farrar who held Genovese in her arms as she died and was never mentioned in the Times piece; the calls to police that were made; and the conversion of a metropolitan editor's conversation with a police commissioner into a landmark social psychology case study. The bystander effect is real — but the foundational case used to illustrate it was not. We also follow Kitty's brother Bill, who volunteered for Vietnam partly because of the story's false account of his sister's death, and who lost both legs in combat before making the 2015 documentary that finally told the truth.

This podcast features narration with a synthetic AI voice.

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