The Housemaid's Secret

Content Warning: The following contains discussion of sexual assault and murder.

On March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old bartender, was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death in Queens, New York. The subsequent trial of her murderer and media reporting of the event inspired the popular understanding of the “bystander effect,” which informs both Millie’s and Wendy’s actions in the novel.

Kitty Genovese had driven her car home and parked at the train station located a hundred feet from the back door of her apartment building. As she approached the building, Winston Moseley, a stranger who saw Kitty pass him on the street, began to follow her. She ran to the front door of the building, but Winston caught up to her and stabbed her twice in the back. Kitty screamed for help and a neighbor called down to Winston to leave her alone. Winston ran off. Kitty stumbled to the back of the building where she wasn’t visible to any potential witnesses. Kitty entered the building but was unable to access the main part of the building due to a locked door. She collapsed on the floor where Winston found her 20 minutes later. Winston stabbed her again, sexually assaulted her, and robbed her. A neighbor and friend, Sophia Farrar, found Kitty after Winston had gone and held her until an ambulance arrived. Several calls were made by neighbors to the police about the incident but were not given priority due to confusion as to what exactly was taking place. Kitty was transported to the hospital approximately an hour after arriving at the building and died in the ambulance.

Police initially focused on Kitty’s friend, Mary Ann Zielonko, as their prime suspect. However, six days after Kitty’s murder, Winston was arrested on suspicion of burglary when a television was found in the trunk of his car. Winston confessed not only to the murder of Kitty Genovese, but to two other murders, several sexual assaults, and multiple burglaries as well. Winston was tried with his defense claiming not guilty by reason of “insanity.” He was found guilty and originally sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison after an appeals court found he should have been able to claim “insanity” during a pretrial hearing. Winston Moseley died in prison at the age of 81 in March of 2016. He served 52 years for the murder of Kitty Genovese.

Two weeks after the death of Kitty Genovese, an article appeared in the New York Times that reported as many as 38 people had witnessed the crime and none had called the police or attempted to interfere. This story took a relatively unknown crime and made it into a sensational story, launching Kitty’s case into notoriety despite the fact that as early as 1964, several reporters at a competing newspaper recognized that the article had many facts wrong. In fact, multiple articles and books have been written about this article and its fallacies, and in 2016 the New York Times added an editor’s note to the article stating it contains misleading information. However, the outrageousness of the implied indifference in the article remained foremost in the public’s mind. This led to the case being used in psychology textbooks across the United States for 40 years as an example of bystander effect or “Genovese syndrome,” the phenomenon that when a group of people witness a crime, they are less likely to interfere or call the police than with a single individual witness.

McFadden uses the story of Kitty Genovese initially as a lesson on bystander effect in main character, Millie Calloway’s, psychology class. Later, Millie focuses on this story and the bystander effect to spur her decision to interfere with the apparent occurrence of domestic violence in the home of her employers, Douglas and Wendy Garrick. Millie’s refusal to be like the witnesses described in the New York Times article leads her to take Wendy’s circumstances at face value and to retrieve the gun when it appears Wendy’s husband is strangling her. However, just as the article was filled with fallacies, so was Wendy’s story. Millie’s moral conviction is twisted by Wendy to her own ends; the use of the hero’s upstanding morals to the antagonist’s gain is a trope of the classic “femme fatale,” a staple in mysteries, thrillers, and detective novels.