David Shribman: The confounding story of Kitty Genovese

It began with a lunch at a place called Emil’s, not far from police headquarters in New York, and the trigger was a six-word sentence. “That Queens story,” the police commissioner said to A.M. Rosenthal, then the metropolitan editor of The New York Times, “is something else.”

It was something else, though in the Times it was something very small — a four-paragraph story about the death 55 years ago this month of a woman identified as Miss Catherine Genovese of 82-70 Austin St. in Kew Gardens. Stories like that appeared in the newspaper every day, terrible murders that did not rate terribly much space, or terribly much attention. New York was a big, crowded city, and people got murdered there with sad and senseless regularity. Four paragraphs. Just one murder in a city in which 636 were committed that very year.