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The number of people who supposedly didn't help - 38 - was repeated again and again.īut over the years, people have revisited the case to find crucial errors in The Times' account, as Nicholas Lemann writes in The New Yorker. The thought of a tiny woman getting stabbed while her neighbors watched was indeed horrifying, and the Genovese story quickly gained traction. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault one witness called after the woman was dead. From that story, which appears to be based on police sources:įor more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens. The first in-depth account of the Genovese murder came two weeks after the crime, in a front-page story in The New York Times that took a damning view of the neighbors who failed to call the police. But this wasn't 38 people watching a woman be slaughtered for 35 minutes and saying, 'Oh, I don't want to be involved.'" You can question how a few people behaved. ''Yeah, there was a murder,'' lawyer Joseph DeMay, who has poured over the case, told The New York Times on the 40th anniversary of the murder. It's not clear that 38 people actually saw the murder after all - or that nobody called the police. While psychologists went on to prove the bystander effect is a real phenomenon, the parable of Kitty Genovese that inspired much of that research is largely false, according to experts who have revisited the case.