In college I attended a bystander intervention training during our annual Sexual Assault Awareness week. Our dean of student affairs had a slide show on the stage, and one of the first slides was a photo of a lovely young woman with a halo of dark hair, heavy brows, and bright eyes, in a fit and flare white dress, against the backdrop of an urban garden. This, she said, was Kitty Genovese. She was New York native, murdered after being attacked three times by a random stranger as her neighbors looked on. I don't remember how many neighbors the dean said were watching, but according to this book it fluctuates between 37 and 38. At the time, I couldn't believe that one person, let alone close to 40 had stood by and done nothing. I felt a little haunted by the notion.

Lately I've had a bit of a growing interest in true crime. It felt inevitable, given a childhood often spent with hours on the channel Discovery ID, digesting hours of Forensic Files and Dr. G with my mom. This book is one that caught my eye at work a few times before I checked it out, wanting to get the background on one of the most infamous murders of the 20th century. I wasn't too surprised to learn that Kitty's demise was a lot more complicated than the neatly wrapped story I'd heard my sophomore year of college.

For starters, Kitty's sexual orientation, while in no way connected to her murder, is often obscured. She was a lesbian, had a partner she was coming home to that night, was out to some of her neighbors and friends. It wasn't the motivation factor behind her attack, but a detail that is repeatedly erased when discussing her life.

(CW rape, violence)

In fact, motives her murderer Winston Moseley has referred to is her whiteness. A few weeks before Kitty's murder Moseley had shot a black woman, Annie May Johnson, outside her home. Dragging inside where her family slept, he raped her as she lay dying, and then stuffed newspaper between her legs and set her home on fire. Johnson's death did not get nearly the same level of attentions as Kitty's, despite being exceptionally violent. As he told police, his motive for Kitty was he wanted to see how it felt to kill a white woman instead.

Kitty's death and the subsequent attention around it could be in part to her whiteness, no doubt. There is also no doubt, however, that the narrative given by the NYT, in a story that was so factually inaccurate from the very first paragraph only about 10% of it is actually true, is a huge reason why Kitty's brutal murder has endured and Annie's has not.

Moseley has even gone so far as to claim that the reason he attacked Genovese was that she used racial slurs against him, which is likely not true given that he'd raped and murdered other women in a pattern of catching them off guard, attacking them from behind, sneaking into their homes. Additionally, he gave police a step-by-step confession in 1964 that did not include this claim, something he'd only added to his narrative in more recent years. According to Moseley and eye witnesses, he followed Kitty home after spotting her in her tiny red Fiat, parking down the street then came up behind her to stab her in the back, fleeing only when a man in the building across the street yelled out of his window.

There are so many elements to this story that often get left out. Yes, the police interviewed 38 people. However, majority heard commotion outside and assumed it was a spat between partners, a frequent occurrence due to the bar down the block. Most witnesses heard rather than saw what was going on and without context did not realize the extent of the violence. Yes, at least two neighbors considered calling but were persuaded by others "not to get involved." But, several neighbors did call the police, at least two though possibly more. Only two were eyewitnesses that comprehended what they saw as a murder and rape, one of which being Kitty's friend and neighbor, Karl Ross, in whose stairwell Kitty was raped as she lay dying. Moseley only attacked her twice, not three times, the third attack being in Ross's stairwell, where Kitty had gone to seek refuge, out of sight of most of the neighbors who had heard the first attack. And Kitty wasn't merely stabbed, as many stories say, but that she was violently raped as she lay dying of a perforated lung.

The story isn't as simple as countless textbooks, articles, and newscasts would have us believe. We've been given a bleak account of how humanity, especially that in an urban area, is so self-interested as to not get involved in the plight of another. For generations, the last thirty minutes of Kitty's life have been pointed to again and again as evidence that people are not altruistic in nature. But that's simply not the case.

This book was heartbreaking, powerful, engaging. Kevin Cook has re-written what decades of misinformation and neglect have served Kitty and her neighbors. At times, incredibly dark, difficult to read, but so important. This is the story that should have been written in 1964.

I cried as it came to a close, the last few pages reliving the moments of Kitty's last few breaths. Her friend and across the hall neighbor, Sophie Farrar, rushed out of her apartment as soon as she'd heard of Kitty's attack. Uncaring of the danger, unknowing if the murder was still looming, she found her friend and held Kitty as she passed, arms still moving against an attack she was still fending off. The scene is a cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless.