And there was Mrs. Farrar.
According to police accounts, testimony at trial and interviews for “The Witness,” a 2016 documentary on the case, Ms Farrar, her husband and son were woken up by, in the words of Michael Farrar, “A loud, blood-curdling cry”.
“The whole neighborhood had to hear it,” he says. The Farrars looked out the window, saw nothing and went back to sleep.
Ms Farrar said a frantic neighbor called her after 3 a.m. and reported Ms Genovese was in distress in a hallway at the back of the two-story building where she and her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko, lived on the second floor, opposite the Salle des Farrars.
Without hesitation, Ms Farrar got dressed, ran down a side street, and reached the hall moments after the killer left.
The door was blocked; Ms. Genovese’s body was stuck against him from the inside. Ms Farrar finally opened the door and found Ms Genovese in a pool of blood, moaning and gurgling and barely conscious, Mr Farrar says in the film. Ms Farrar rocked her, offered words of comfort, promised help on the way and yelled at another neighbor to call the police.
It was too late. Ms Genovese died in the ambulance before arriving at the hospital.
“I just hope she knew it was me, that she wasn’t alone,” Ms. Farrar says in “The Witness”.
This film, produced and directed by James Solomon, traces an investigation by Mrs Genovese’s younger brother, Bill, into the murder and spirit of Winston Moseley, the psychopathic killer who tracked down his victim and died in prison in 2016 while ‘he was serving a life sentence. .
