The Spirit that Remembers |
Winston Moseley at first ran away when he heard a man yell "let that girl alone!" only to wait in his car until he was sure it was safe to resume his attack that early March morning in Queens. By day he was a respectable business machine operator who owned his own home in Queens. He was married, had three children and five pedigreed German shepherd dogs. By night he was a monster. He stalked the streets in his white Corvair looking "to find any girl that was unattended" to rob, kill, and rape. He variously used a single-shot .22 rifle, a pistol, a steak knife, a hunting knife, and a screwdriver in his attacks. And he was a necrophiliac. A psychiatrist at his trial testified "he told me he got no thrill with live women he raped." By his own confession, on July 20, 1963 he stabbed and killed 15-year old Barbara Kralik in her Queens home. Again on February 19, 1964 he shot then, setting her genitals afire, burned to death Ann Johnson, a housewife in Queens. Then on March 13 Kitty Genovese became the third victim of this fledgling serial killer. While few of us remember Winston Moseley, the horrible demise of Kitty Genovese has been forever emblazoned upon our memory. Why then has our recollection of the grim tale of Konerak Sinthasomphone become a fading footnote to the ghastly saga of Jeffery Dahmer and how could we simply let pass into oblivion the names, faces, and lives of those so many stolen children? What has happened to our spirit that we now so easily recall such names as Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy yet are stumped when confronted with Melanie Cooley or Rob Piest? Kitty was slain in 1964, before we had a name for her kind of killer. He became an instantly forgotten man. A. M. Rosenthal said of him in a New York Times article "in this drama ... he appeared briefly, acted his piece, exited into the wings." It was a time when the only serial killer we all could name was the fictional Norman Bates. But few knew of Ed Gein, on whose life the character had been based. In a National Review article, Stanley Milgram and Paul Hollander captured the mood of the day, "a truly extraordinary aspect of the [Genovese] case is the general readiness to forget the man who committed a very foul crime. This is typical of social reactions in present-day America." We learned a hard lesson from the death of Kitty Genovese, that we should get involved. And for that we remember her. But perhaps we didn't like what we saw of ourselves. We didn't care to learn any more. We needed a distraction. We couldn't find that in our empathy for the victims since that only brought us into confrontation with our own failures. So we focused on the killers, we thought, to learn why. But instead we have become transfixed by them, endlessly fascinated by their portrayal as monsters. We delight in being aghast at their nefarious deeds. We are thrilled and entertained by them until, in a climactic fit of ritual vengeance, we balance the scales, satisfied that justice has been served. It is the victims who now appear briefly, act their piece, then exit into the wings. But we are only fooling ourselves. There is much to be learned - from our failures as well as theirs. "There's something terribly wrong going on," Ted Bundy warned us, "it manifested itself in me." If true, then such deaths are preventable. So if we are going to give our attention to the killers, it should be in order to avoid these horrible deaths in the future. Journalist Richard Larsen lamented, "we don't learn from these people. We simply get rid of them, dispose of them, then hunch our shoulders and wait for the next one." Theirs are lessons that we ought to learn. And we ought to learn them well. Our children's lives are at stake. |