Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences by Catherine Pelonero Page A

years and still owned a home, there could be peace. It seemed there were as many maybes in their life as there were empty beer cans, with the maybes holding about as much promise as the hollow cans. Where was the hope for Fannie and Alphonso settling their differences or moving on? If the past were any indication, their battle could rage on for another three decades.
    Unknown to any of the Moseleys at the moment, the war between Fannie and Alphonso would soon come to a permanent end. But neither they nor their son or his family would have peace.

    Fannie Burks was twenty years old when she met Alphonso Moseley, also twenty, in New York in early 1935. She was pretty, gregarious, and pregnant by another man. Just the same, Alphonso was smitten with Fannie, perhaps also feeling protective of her, a young woman who had come to New York City from Michigan, pregnant and alone in the big city. Whatever her other problems, Fannie was a very bright and engaging girl, quite charming when she chose to be.
    Alphonso had a more serious, reserved personality than his future wife, and that could have been part of the attraction for both of them. He seemed to find her enthusiasm intoxicating. As for Fannie, she may have been drawn to Al’s sober and responsible nature, not to mention his obvious interest in her. Al was a hard-working civil servantemployed by the New York City public transportation system. He manned a ticket booth at one of the city’s subway stations.
    Fannie moved in with Al, and when she gave birth to a baby boy in Harlem Hospital on March 2, 1935, they decided to raise the boy as their son. They did not marry, however, until 1940. Nevertheless, they maintained a home together from before Winston’s birth until 1944, when he was nine years old. Those nine years would be remembered by their son forever after with great longing as the only happy time in his childhood, indeed the happiest time in his whole life.
    His earliest memory was of an apartment on 145th Street and later, right before the end, on 124th Street. These were the years of an intact and reasonably happy family, at least from the young son’s point of view. Though Fannie and Al would both later claim their marriage was fraught with arguments from the beginning, the family lived together during these years. Both also recalled Winston Moseley as a quiet soul even then, a shy boy who did not misbehave or cause any fuss, a rather easy child to raise, with a calm demeanor and interests tending toward things of a more subdued nature. He did not make friends easily, always tending to be rather introverted and bashful, and was not someone who enjoyed groups of people. If he made a friend at all, he tended to prefer having just one rather than many.
    Never a terribly active or athletic boy, his main interest in childhood was animals. He liked watching them, learning about them, caring for them. Early on he begged his parents not for a go-cart or a catcher’s mitt, but for pets. He would grow to love animals of all kinds, including mice, rabbits, insects, and especially dogs.
    Though in adulthood he would claim no fondness for cats—capricious creatures prone to wander off, and they might suddenly scratch you no matter how well you treated them—one of his first pets was a kitten named Princess. Winston and his mother both doted on the fluffy little cat. When Princess disappeared from their apartment one day and could not be found, Fannie and Winston wept. Princess the kitten was the first female to suddenly walk out of Winston’s life, but she would hardly be the last.
    Al and Fannie’s problems came to a head in early 1944. While there were a myriad of complaints, all of them basically stemmed from the same source: Fannie had never taken to monogamy, nor to the duties of motherhood really, at least not in a traditional sense. This caused a great strain on the marriage, Al being a conventional man who expected his wife to remain faithful to him and put their