Last night's Girls episode was cheekily named after an iconic New York City murder. But, while the reference might have been a tad lighthearted, the story behind it is as tragic as they come.Here's how it goes: Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was coming home from her work as a bar manager, early on the morning of March 13, 1964, on the day she was murdered. She parked her car about 30 yards from the front door of her Kew Gardens apartment. But before she got inside, she realized a man was following her. Instead of heading to her front door, she changed course, making her way to the front of the building, where people might be more likely to hear her yell for help.Winston Moseley — who would later confess that his only motivation was to "kill a woman" that night — followed Genovese. He stabbed her. She screamed. No one came to her aid. She stumbled to the back of the building, still locked outside. Moseley returned. He stabbed her again. He took her money. He raped her. He left her in the hallway. A neighbor named Sophia Farrar finally went to help Genovese, who lay bleeding and barely conscious on the floor.By then, the police had been called. But it was too late. Kitty Genovese died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, a little over an hour after arriving home in Queens.Genovese was 28 at the time of her murder, and her public legacy has since become synonymous with the circumstances of her death, which spawned the concept of a social phenomenon commonly referred to as the "bystander effect." It's a sad commentary of the presumed state of the human psyche, and basically boils down to the idea that: If there is a woman screaming for her life outside an apartment building where dozens of people can hear what's happening, the likelihood of an intervention decreases as the number of witnesses goes up.But, while the circumstances of Genovese's death are well known by nearly anyone who has ever taken a Psych 100 class, the facts still remain a little fuzzy.Take, for example, the original 1964 New York Times story that elevated Genovese's death from a four-paragraph crime report to a shocking tale about 38 bystanders who did nothing to help until it was too late. Journalist Martin Gansberg reported that no one called the police until after Genovese was already gone; he also spoke to multiple witnesses who said they weren't quite sure what was going on outside their windows.