For 60 years, Kitty Genovese has endured as a symbol of big-city apathy, the victim not only of a knife-wielding killer but also of her neighbors’ reluctance to get involved. Two weeks after a man named Winston Moseley stalked, raped and murdered her in Queens late at night in March 1964, a New York Times article reported that 38 of her neighbors had heard her cries for help, yet did nothing.
That account turned out to be significantly flawed. Most of those 38 people were unaware of what was actually happening; they thought they were merely hearing a fight, perhaps a lovers’ quarrel. Investigations later determined that few of them had caught even a glimpse of the attacks. Nonetheless, the death of 28-year-old Catherine Susan Genovese has long remained a paradigm of urban anonymity and indifference.
Something else was out of kilter in the reporting back then. Ms. Genovese had been living for a year with Mary Ann Zielonko. In those days they were typically referred to as roommates. In fact, they were lovers. When the police investigators became aware of that, they questioned Ms. Zielonko as a possible suspect. After a night of bowling with friends, she had been asleep in their Kew Gardens apartment while the attack took place below.
“I was very numb, I would say, from the whole thing,” she told Retro Report, a series of video documentaries exploring old news stories and their lasting effects, in 2016. “I felt, wow, she was so close, and I was sleeping, and I didn’t know what happened, and that I could have saved her. You know? That’s what I really think still.”
Ms. Zielonko died on Wednesday at her home in Rutland, Vt., where she had lived since 2000. She was 85. Rebecca Jones, her domestic partner and sole survivor, said the cause was aspiration pneumonia.
In a 2004 interview with The Rutland Herald, Ms. Zielonko said that she had once talked with a man she believed to be the last person, other than the killer, to have had contact with Ms. Genovese.
“She cried to him, and he wouldn’t open his door,” Ms. Zielonko said, adding: “I knew he was afraid of everything, even to leave his house, but that doesn’t excuse him. That’s what I’m saying. Maybe people need to open doors. When someone reaches out for help, open your door, take a chance.”
She took the name Mary Ann later in life. When born on June 22, 1938, in New York, she was Mary Katherine Zielonko. Her childhood was troubled, Ms. Jones said, with her first four years spent in an orphanage. Her parents — John Zielonko, a draftsman, and Mildred (Wood) Zielonko, a registered nurse — did not marry until she was 4. By the time she was 8, they had divorced.
Most of Ms. Zielonko’s youth was spent in Vermont and New Hampshire. She attended Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, Conn., where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1974 and a master’s degree in research statistics and management in 1977.
She met Ms. Genovese at a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, and they were working at different bars when Ms. Genovese was murdered. Ms. Zielonko later worked for years at General Dynamics Electric Boat, a designer and builder of submarines in Groton, Conn.
“We just hit it off,” she said of Ms. Genovese in a 2004 interview with The Chicago Tribune. “We meshed. I’m very quiet, and she talked a lot. We both had struggles with our sexuality, as did many people back then. We had a quick bond.” Nonetheless, she said, “We were in the closet a lot,” and Ms. Genovese’s family was long unwilling to recognize the relationship.
After the murder, she said, she resolved not to turn her back when she saw someone in distress. She told The Rutland Herald of having driven home from work one day when she saw a man and a woman arguing by the side of the road. He hit her. Ms. Zielonko pulled her car over, stepped out and asked the woman if she needed help. She responded by running into Ms. Zielonko’s car.
“I drove her home, but never saw her again,” Ms. Zielonko said. “I could have just driven by that night, but I said, ‘I’ll take a chance.’”
