The Kitty Genovese Murder After 50 Years
31st October 2014
Steve Sailer reflects.
First, I had never heard until very recently that the murderer, Winston Moseley, was black. A historic black crime wave was washing over New York City in 1964, but the race of the confessed killer wasn’t mentioned in the famous NYT article. In fact, I don’t recall the killer’s race ever being mentioned in the 1960s/1970s. As a child, I just assumed he looked like all the muggers in cartoons then. I can see now that mentioning that the killer was black would have been distracting from the political lessons White America was supposed to be draw at the climax of the Civil Rights era.
As feminist Susan Brownmiller pointed out in the 1970s, sex crimes tended to have political connotations. The big increase in black-on-white sex crimes in New York City, Brownmiller suggested, wasn’t unrelated to black liberation. But that’s complicated and distasteful, so let talk about Apathy.
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Second, Moseley was a serial killer, a sex maniac who confessed to murdering two other women. He wasn’t just some complete loser: he had a white collar job, a wife, two kids, a mortgage, and a 3 digit IQ. He was just evil. The jury gave him the death penalty, but an appeals court let him off with life, at which point he escaped from prison and kidnapped and raped another woman before being recaptured.