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plans for dinner and drinks with a friend and then planned to stay the night with another friend, Bessie Thompson, who lived above the bar where Kitty worked. What this stranger was telling Mary Ann did not make sense. And it felt surreal, this detective telling her to get dressed and come with him to the hospital.
    Mary Ann did not scream. She did not break down. She did not believe. Not yet.
    THE RESPONSE TO Lieutenant Jacobs’s call for assistance had been swift. By 5:00 a.m. teams of detectives and patrolmen from neighboring precincts in Queens were already fanned out around the vicinity of AustinStreet. Detective John Mahoney was one of those assigned to canvass the Mowbray Apartments.
    “3:20 a.m.,” the woman said. “That’s when I first heard her scream. I know because I turned on my bedroom light and looked at the clock.” The woman spoke bluntly and with an air of certainty. Her name was Irene Frost, and she lived in a corner apartment on the second floor of the Mowbray, directly across the street from the Tudor building and the train station. Her windows faced Austin Street, giving her a view of both the storefronts along the Tudor and the side of the Tudor building adjacent to the parking lot.
    Irene Frost was blonde and in early middle age. She was not a demure woman, nor one to mince words. Detective Mahoney was glad to have found her.
    After repeating that she was certain of the time the screams woke her she said that she went to her bedroom window. Looking out across Austin Street, she saw a man and a woman standing in front of the bookstore. Nothing seemed to be happening, so she returned to her bed. But a minute later she heard a woman scream, “Please help me, God! Please help me! I’ve been stabbed!”
    This brought Irene Frost to her window once again, where she saw the man run down Austin Street and past the train station before losing sight of him. Going then to her other bedroom window, which was closer to the site of the bookstore across the street, Irene saw the woman on her knees on the pavement, between the bookstore and liquor store. The woman got up, bent over to pick something up from the sidewalk—her pocketbook, Irene thought—and she then walked down Austin Street toward the train station parking lot, the same direction the man had run. Unlike the man who had run by, it took the woman a while to make it down the street. Irene watched her turn the corner by the drugstore. Switching windows once again, to the one with a view of the parking lot, Irene watched the woman walk along the side of the Tudor building and turn the far corner by the coffee shop. Once the woman turned that corner, Irene could no longer see her.
    “What happened then?” Detective Mahoney asked.
    “I went back to bed.”
    IRENE FROST’S ACCOUNT of Kitty Genovese having first been attacked around the corner from where police found her matched what other residents were telling detectives. The forensic evidence backed it up; bloodstains were found on the pavement in front of 82-64 Austin Street, the address of the Austin Book Shop. Long before the first light of dawn on that Friday morning, detectives knew they were dealing not with a single crime scene but with an expanse that stretched from the front of Austin Street to around the block and into a rear entryway of the Tudor building. A young woman’s bloody death march.
    Detective Frank Frezza of the Queens Photo Unit was a sixteen-year veteran of the NYPD. Detective Frezza was an accomplished photographer in his own right, having learned his trade in the U.S. Navy Photo Unit during World War II. Like many of his colleagues in the detective bureau, Frezza had joined the force after his return from military service. After photographing the hallway, Detective Frezza went around to the front of Austin Street. The bloodstains on the pavement in front of the bookstore were parallel to the main entry of the Mowbray across the street. Noting the large bay window at