Free Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences by Catherine Pelonero Page A

an affectionate ritual between the couple, allowing them to say good morning and wish one another a pleasant day, chatting for a moment or two, as they had little enough time to talk. Winston worked the day shift at Raygram, 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., after which he dutifully went to his father’s television repair shop in Corona and put in three or four hours every evening helping with work around the shop or more often with deliveries and house calls. Bettye Moseley, twenty-four years old, worked as a registered nurse at Elmhurst General Hospital in Queens. For the past two years, almost the entirety of their married life, Bettye had worked the night shift at Elmhurst General, leaving home at 11:30 p.m. and returning around 8:30 in the morning, just in time to kiss her husband goodbye before he drove off on his commute to Mount Vernon. While the arrangement left them little time together, it did afford them a comfortable living. Bettye earned $92 per week; Winston, who had just been given another raise in January, brought home $100 per week, of which he gave his former wife $32 per week in child support. With a mortgage of $120 per month and tastes strictly befitting those of a pragmatic middle-class couple, Winston and Bettye had no financial worries.
    In addition to Winston’s 1960 Corvair, a car they had bought used, they owned a 1962 Ford Fairlane for Bettye, purchased new. Winston wanted his wife to have the reliability of a new car. Their white and green frame house at 133-19 Sutter Avenue was a single family home with two stories, six rooms, and a partially finished basement. A spacious attic room made it in effect a three-story house with four bedrooms, including one adjacent to the living room that had been an enclosed porch but which Winston had converted into a bedroom for his mother, Fannie. His mother lived with them intermittently, coming and going as she pleased, as she had done throughout her son’s life.
    Winston and Bettye’s marriage, as they would both one day tell a jury, had been a happy one from the start, as harmonious—at leastin regard to their relationship with one another—as Winston’s first marriage had been troubled. They were both quiet individuals of mild temperament, modest and reserved, he somewhat more modest and retiring than she. The only dark cloud hovering over their lives concerned not their own relationship but that of Winston’s parents, Alphonso and Fannie Moseley. To call his parents’ marriage stormy would be an understatement, unless said storm were a series of massive tornados touching down frequently and without warning, twisting violently along a frenzied though familiar course that uprooted all in their path, leaving a wake of bruised feelings, the occasional black eye, and old wounds so constantly reopened that they never had the opportunity to begin healing much less fade.
    For reasons only they themselves could perhaps fathom, Fannie and Alphonso had never divorced despite the fact they had effectively separated twenty years ago, living together only for short and sporadic periods of time since. A number of reconciliations had been attempted—six, according to Alphonso, the one who kept track, always hoping in spite of all past experience that “this time it will work.” It never did. Even during their reunions the tumult continued, culminating always in a fiery breakup in which no one in their orbit was spared a scorching.
    The elder Moseleys were not ones to battle in silence or in private, nor were they above attempts to solicit allies in their marital war. The chief ally whose allegiance both repeatedly and insistently sought was that of their son Winston, their only child and chief pawn in their ongoing twenty-nine year conflict. Each would run to him with fresh accusations against the other, tales of the latest indiscretion or outrage, imploring him to take their side and sometimes to intervene. Winston listened, having little choice. His plea to be left