At 3:20 am on March 13, 1964, Catherine "Kitty" Genovese, a 28-year old Italian-American and lesbian woman was assaulted by knife on two separate occasions, raped and then killed by Winston Moseley, a 29-year old African-American homeowner and family man. It is famous, however, as the case in which 38 neighbors were said to have witnessed the assault and did not call the police, a number that later was revealed to be unsubstantiated. In the milieu of 1964, the Genovese case provided a politically expedient allegory about social apathy, white crime fear and what psychologists term "the diffusion of responsibility" in the midst of a growing federal panic about black civil dissidence and urban unrest. The story of Genovese's neighbors fit neatly into the racialized social order of the United States and the moralizing and racist media portrayals of innocent white female victims and black male predators.

This book project looks at the network of public discourse that came to define this case, focusing in particular on key cultural intermediaries' means of accounting for the phantom 38 witnesses. Through their work, newsmen, psychological researchers, TV producers, script writers, filmmakers and book authors stood in for the witnesses who could-have-been. Through their cultural intermediation, the Genovese story not only became one of the most internationally known crime stories of the mid-20th century, it also became a paradigm for the dangers of broken national community, the atomized conditions of urban life, and the neoliberal social conditions of individual self-reliance and weakened social supports.

This book project seeks to explain how this paradigm developed, not because of the 38 witnesses, but in spite of them. Drawing on archival research, on-site analysis of the place of the murder, performance studies of major and minor stage productions, media analysis of TV and film productions and extensive documentary research, Witness Failed examines how a New York murder story became an international paradigm of witnessing and humanitarian non-intervention.