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Queens General Morgue.
    2.Reply received—Vincent Genovese notified and is en route to Queens General Hospital.
    It was 6:00 a.m., still dark out as the policeman walked to the front door of a suburban home. He was neither a detective nor a member of the NYPD. He was an officer in the leafy, tranquil town of New Canaan, Connecticut, approaching the home of a local family on an errand all policemen dread.
    Rachel Genovese, mother of five children ranging in age from twenty-eight to thirteen, was a slight, dark-haired woman who looked younger than her fifty-one years. Rachel and Vincent, her husband of thirty years, had both grown up in Brooklyn, New York, where they had remained for the first twenty years of their marriage, raising their family in the Park Slope section until ten years ago, in 1954, when they had moved across the state line to Connecticut. Four of their five children had moved with them. Catherine, their oldest, nineteen at the time, had stayed behind in Brooklyn.
    Catherine, whose friends all called her Kitty, loved living in the city. She had tried New Canaan but found it too small a town for her tastes, far too sedate and much less inspiring than the rapid pace of New York.
    Despite the fact that she had grown up in the city, her parents worried about her living there. As smart and capable as Catherine was, New York could be a dangerous place for a young woman on her own. The city had changed a great deal in the past decade, and not for the better. The family’s move to suburban Connecticut had been prompted by Rachel witnessing a street shooting in their old neighborhood, a place that had once felt so secure.
    Catherine had moved from Brooklyn some years ago. She now shared an apartment with another girl in what appeared to be a nice neighborhood in Queens. It certainly wasn’t New Canaan, where Rachel and Vincent wished their daughter lived, but at least she wasn’t living alone.
    Still, danger lurked in the city. Her parents could not help harboring fears for their daughter’s safety.
    Rachel Genovese answered her front door on the morning of Friday, March 13, 1964, to face her worst fear realized. Her husband and four children awoke to the sound of her shriek.
    Bill Genovese, sixteen years old at the time, recalled the scene this way: “The officer said, ‘You have a daughter named Catherine who lives in New York City? She was hurt in the city. She’s been injured.’ He was trying to delay the inevitable. Finally he said, ‘We believe this is your daughter, and we believe she is dead.’ ”
    There was more, of course—the name and phone number of a detective in New York for them to contact, a request for someone from the family to go to Queens General Hospital as soon as possible. But the words that mattered most, the ones that hung in the air like a great unmovable black cloud, were the officer’s somber declaration: We believe this is your daughter, and we believe she is dead.
    Rachel had always been very close to her eldest child. Now she was inconsolable. Later that day she would be sedated in an attempt to give her some small measure of relief. Vincent Genovese, unable to bear the thought of identifying his daughter’s body, called his brother to accompany him on the grim ride to Queens. The four siblings of Catherine Genovese—brothers Vincent, Bill, Frank, and sister Susan—sat staring at one another in a state of shock. Stunned by the news, numb with grief, there were no words to express the loss they were feeling. The death of their vivacious older sister seemed more than the close-knit Genovese family could fathom.
    Catherine had always seemed the very quintessence of life—bubbly, dynamic, constantly on the go, and full of plans for the future, but never too busy for them. Catherine drove to Connecticut every weekend, hopping out of her sporty new Fiat to greet them, telling them all about her life in the city, inquiring about their lives, and interested in whatever was