When I read this account in New York a few years after I’d visited him in Aurora—and nearly six years after the murder—I was shocked and surprised. I thought that the Voyeur’s detached and irresponsible response to the fracas in Room 10 was similar to the behavior of New York crime witnesses when a twenty-eight-year-old bar manager named Kitty Genovese was being attacked by a man with a knife on a street in Queens shortly after 3:00 a.m. on March 13, 1964.
Although some facts in this case were later disputed—among them that the initial estimate of thirty-eight murder witnesses was an exaggerated number—there was no dispute that several people in Queens saw at least part of the brutality from their apartment windows, and that none of them rushed down into the street in time to rescue or assist the young woman who would soon bleed to death. The New York Times, which broke the story, quoted one unidentified neighbor as saying that he told another neighbor to telephone the police because “I didn’t want to get involved.”
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