Talking to Strangers: True Crime and Its Aftermaths // Eve Deshane
Eve Deshane speaks on finding the truth in true crime as she wraps up her month as guest editor at The Town Crier.
Growing up, my mother told me the story of Kitty Genovese. She was murdered outside her apartment building by a man--her boyfriend, my mother insisted--and even though she yelled for help, no one came to her aide. "This is why if you're ever attacked, you yell 'fire.'People care about their stuff, but they do not care about strangers."
I slotted away the advice from my mother next to the other tidbits of life she gave me.
The world was a scary place to my mother. From what I saw on television and in movies, and after what had happened with my father, she seemed right. After my father had threatened to kill her, we lived with a friend of hers for two weeks. When we went back to my childhood home, my father's car was not there. "But we should look up the block and around the street,” my mother told me. “He could have parked and walked back to trick us."
I understood the instructions and followed them without question. I also understood the clear tone in her voice: Your father is now a stranger. And if I didn’t want to end up like Kitty Genovese,I'd better yell 'fire' if I were to see my father on a busy street corner, or else no one would help me.
The real story of Kitty Genovese is more complicated, like all real life stories. Yet her image lingers. The story lingers. Kitty Genovese was a woman who was murdered in the middle of a gigantic city like NewYork and no one did a thing. Stanley Milgram wrote about her in his academic article on consequences of living in cities. She is the basis for The Bystander Effect, a theory that basically claims what my mother claimed to me when I was young: People don't help, especially when there are others around. The responsibility is always shirked, passed off, unless it's about something they own for themselves.
Outside of academic articles and psychological case studies, Kitty's name appears in popular fiction and media: she is a warning story in The Boondocks Saints and her bloody dress is part of the comic book character Rorschach's mask. Her death is popular. Her death is a warning. Her death is fodder for childhood nightmares.
Her story isn't quite true.
The thirty-eight people who heard her screams and did nothing actually did do something. Several called the police; some shouted from their windows; many made noise enough for Winston Moseley, the man who murdered Kitty and who was not her boyfriend no matter what my mother insisted, to flee the scene once. He came back, though, and Kitty was ultimately attacked a second time before he left her again.Each escape and each cry for help brought her a little closer to her apartment building's front hallway. She was mortally injured by the time her neighbour came to her aide, but someone did come to her aide. Her death was brutal and horrific—but she didn't die alone.
She also didn't live alone, either. Kitty Genovese's girlfriend,Mary-Ann, would come out and correct the record about forty years later. Kitty Genovese, the woman who became everyone's damsel in distress in some form or another, was a lesbian. She lived with her girlfriend. She participated in some sort of queer community, though it was small and the Stonewall Riots had not yet occurred. Mary-Ann had moved to New York City for that queer community, though, especially as it was depicted in the lesbian pulp novels of the time.
Kitty Genovese was not who everyone thought she was.
When I was in my twenties, I would learn this new information about Kitty Genovese, mostly from the book named after her by Kevin Cook. The documentary film The Witness also goes into this story, and the details of that night that so many have misinterpreted. Kitty had not been killed by a boyfriend, or even anyone she knew. The strangers she'd called to for assistance had come to her aide. She was in love with a woman when she died.
In so many more ways than I anticipated, Kitty Genovese was just like me.
When I went to graduate school, I was dating a woman. The place where I was staying was robbed almost right away, most of my valuables gone. I was shaken to my core by the crime, yet I was also confronted with my own past and the stories that my mother had told me about the city, strangers, and love. I realized I could run away scared from the new city where I'd moved, leave the woman I was with behind, and move back in with my mother. It was with her, after all, that I'd learned the best lessons about safety. She seemed to be the only person who could keep me safe, because for a long time, she seemed like the only person who told me the truth.
I decided to stay in the city.
I moved in with that girlfriend in complete U-Haul fashion, emulating those lesbian pulp novels we both loved. I got an education. I learned the real story of Kitty Genovese. Even though that relationship with a woman would turn out to be the last one I'd have with a woman--since I would meet my husband in graduate school--in many ways, it has been my relationship with women that has fuelled the rest of my written career.
True crime is a very women-centred genre. This fact (especially for a show like My Favorite Murder) seems to be a shock, but to me, it has always made perfect sense, thanks to my mother's illuminations. Women are the victims. Women are attacked by strangers. Reading true crime, then, is the best way to protect yourself.
I believed in this idea for years. If my father was the crime part of my obsession with this genre, then my mother was the truth. I followed all of her precautions. Even when I decided I wanted to stay in the city, and get an education outside of her lessons, I still tried to find her prophecy in the true crime books from the past. I read all the books--and I mean all the books. Helter Skelter, check. Mind hunter, check. In Cold Blood, The Stranger Beside Me, My Dark Places, The Executioner's Song, DarkDreams, Those Who Fight Monsters, all checked off.
Then there was Cook's book.
Cook delves into the details of Kitty's life and death, but his work never felt like a true crime tale. It's a nonfiction title about a real life crime. How could it not be true crime, then? I struggled with this. Kevin Cook's book is not true crime, in spite of being about a true crime.
Then I realized that Cook’s truth was not my mother’s truth.
Which meant that, maybe, just maybe, like everyone else had been wrong about Kitty’s death, my mother could have been wrong about the world. About strangers. About my father?
I was still struggling with this question when my father died.
All the fear I'd felt the night we ran out of the house came back, then disappeared. All the hyper-vigilance I'd experienced over the years suddenly melted away. The person I had been running from was now dead.I was safe. Nothing bad had ever happened, and now, if it did, my father would not be the cause of it.
I should have felt relief, but I only felt a profound sense of grief that didn’t go away. Maybe my father hadn’t been a stranger. Maybe my mother was wrong.
In the months following my father's death, I realized that I'd never wanted to be afraid of him. He'd done bad things, some of which I witnessed, some of which I could not ignore or write off. But the older I got, the more books I read instead of relying on my mother's words, only worked to confirm my own suspicions about that night we ran away. My father wasn't a boogeyman. He was an addict, a drunk, and unpredictable and unstable, and my parents should not have been together. I did not doubt or blame my mother for leaving. But I now Isaw through the story she'd told me about his motivations, his actions, and his strangeness.
They were simply not true at all.
Which meant that his crime was not a crime anymore. It was just sadness. It was just grief. It was just a family being torn apart, calling one another strangers, and then writing a grand narrative about that life in order to find some meaning in it.
The stories we tell about crimes are often far more complicated than we first glimpse. I think we tell these stories, in our best moments, to protect ourselves from violence, yes, but I also know now that the absolute worst kinds of violence stems from our treating one another like we're strangers. In the end, I can’t see myself as Kitty Genovese—or Adam Walsh—anymore. I can’t see my father as Winston Moseley, or John List, and I can’t view my mother as Ann Rule or even Stanley Milgram misreporting the facts with good intentions.
Instead, I simply see Sophia Farrar. She was Kitty's neighbour who came to her aide, and whom Kevin Cook ends his true crime story with, along with the film The Witness. Sophia was too late, but she came. She waited. She demonstrated mercy, not fear, and I like that story most of all.