Winston Moseley died in prison on 4 April 2016, aged 81. As the convicted murderer of Catherine ‘Kitty’ Genovese, his initial death sentence had been replaced with life in prison by a later court — asentence ending up as 52 years. He was the longest-serving prisoner in New York state.
The death of Kitty Genovese shocked the USA. The event was described in the New York Times as 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens witnessing a killer stalking and stabbing a woman in three separate attacks. Subsequently the account of the witnesses’ behaviour has been revised, but that’s another story. This case was to forever influence an important topic in social psychology: our understanding of the bystander effect, the phenomenon which states that an individual’s likelihood of helping decreases when passive bystanders are present in a critical situation.
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