On March 27, 1964, Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered in Queens, New York, with an alleged “38 witnesses” in the surrounding apartments doing nothing to help.
Since that fateful day, the death of Genovese has served as a metaphor in North America for the anonymity and insulation of city life. It also hit a nerve; the general consensus was that American society had become apathetic or numb to crime. Most commonly referred to as “the bystander effect,” when people are asked why they didn’t help in a certain violent or dangerous situation, they state they “didn’t want to get involved.”
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James Solomon’s The Witness, a documentary out in limited release on Friday, June 17, revisits the Genovese murder through the eyes of Kitty’s brother, Bill, a Vietnam vet and war amputee. Bill’s journey through his sister’s mysterious past runs parallel to Solomon’s quest for truth, as they both sift through evidence and witness testimony. Both men discover different things as their investigation digs deep, including the important fact that there were most definitely not “38 witnesses” to her rape and murder.
In 2004, The New York Times questioned its own account of the Genovese murder. The event as reported then in the “paper of record” has been revealed to be dubious in nearly every detail. It was the Times piece that propelled the two men into action.
The Witness, which took 11 years to complete, is an emotional film that features interviews with witnesses and people from Genovese’s life. What emerges is a colourful picture of a young, confident woman struck down in her prime. The vast majority of people only know the last 30 minutes of Genovese’s life, and The Witness seeks to rectify that while providing Bill with an accurate depiction of who his sister truly was.
Bill was the closest to his sister in the family of five, and they would often stay up late into the night when she would come visit from the city to the family’s home in Connecticut (ironically, the Genoveses’ mother moved the family out of the city after she witnessed a murder herself). Kitty had opted to stay in New York.
One especially painful scene in The Witness shows Bill with his siblings, each questioning why he needed to investigate Kitty’s death.
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“My siblings were concerned for me because they couldn’t feel what I was feeling,” says Genovese. “They were into the same mode of ‘we don’t really need to talk about it.’ My older brother explained things right on the mark when he said, ‘This happened. That happened. Why do we need to know? She’s dead.'”
After much examination, Solomon and Genovese discover that Kitty’s neighbours and the other witnesses did, in fact, try to help her. One woman, Sofia, actually held her in her arms as she lay dying in her apartment vestibule. People throughout the neighbourhood remembered her for her smile, her attitude, her brassiness. In a strange way, it has given Bill new life, too.
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“There were probably four, maybe five or six eyewitnesses, not 38,” says Genovese. “But only two of them saw all of the attacks. This went on for 30 minutes. There were probably about 10 or 12 people who heard enough to realize it was more than a couple’s argument.”
After 11 years of hard work for Solomon and a near-lifetime of questions for Genovese, The Witness vividly deconstructs and disproves one of society’s most popular, widely held beliefs: that people don’t help each other in their time of need.
‘The Witness’ opens in Toronto on June 17, 2016 at The Bloor Cinema.
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