Dave Pell:
But here’s what really happened: Kitty Genovese’s murder was not ignored by residents in the area. She did not die alone. When police arrived on the scene and found her dying of stab wounds in a stairwell, she was being cradled in the arms of a neighbor.
It took more than 50 years for the real story to emerge. “The Witness” director James Solomon spent 11 of them following the obsessive reinvestigation of the story by Kitty Genovese’s brother Bill. A Vietnam vet who lost his legs in the war, Bill suffered (and I think suffer is the word) an indefatigable compulsion to ascertain the details of his sister’s final minutes.
I sat in Philosophy 101 at Ursinus College and had the Kitty Genovese story reported by Dr. Hardman. Fascinating, if no less horrible, to learn that the bystander effect if built upon embellishment.