Catherine Pelonero | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Edna Catherine Pelonero November 7, 1967 Alexandria, Virginia, U.S. |
| Occupation | Author, playwright, TV commentator |
| Genre | Non-fiction, fiction |
| Subject | True crime, biography |
| Notable works | Kitty Genovese Absolute Madness |
| Website | |
| www | |
Catherine Pelonero (born November 7, 1967) is a New York Times bestselling true crime author, best known for her 2014 book Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences.
Catherine Pelonero was born on November 7, 1967, in Alexandria, Virginia, the oldest child of Salvatore J. Pelonero and Trieva (née Peay) Pelonero. Her parents soon after moved to her father's hometown of Buffalo, New York, where her father became a police officer. Pelonero grew up in Buffalo and the surrounding Western New York area. [1] Her nonfiction articles and books often deal with crimes that occurred in Buffalo and New York City.
Pelonero began her career as a playwright, studying with Emanuel Fried and working in local theatre in Buffalo. Her early works were comedies. [2] She attended Buffalo State College. Her first notable success as a playwright came in 1994 with Family Names, a ten-minute play that premiered in a festival at the Nat Horne Theatre in New York City and went on to win the Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival. Family Names was published by Samuel French, Inc. and was subsequently produced at theatres throughout the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. [3] In 2013, Pelonero developed a full-length version of Family Names that received a reading in Hollywood with a cast that included Paul Sorvino, Joseph Bologna, and Renée Taylor.
Pelonero moved to Los Angeles, in 1995. She continued writing for the theatre and also wrote teleplays and the short screenplay, Preservation Society, which won a screenwriting competition at Yale University and was filmed as a student production under the direction of filmmaker Sandra Luckow.
In 2007, Pelonero became a playwright member of the Actors Studio. Some of her plays were developed in the Studio's west coast Playwrights & Directors Unit. Her absurdist comedy, Another Effing Family Drama, premiered at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2011 and was chosen for Best of the Fringe. [4]
Pelonero's debut book, Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences, was published in 2014. [5] The book is a detailed nonfiction account of the infamous 1964 murder of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese, a young woman stalked and stabbed on the street where she lived in Queens, New York. [6] The book became a best seller, twice making the New York Times Best Sellers List. [7] [8]
Pelonero wrote several subsequent articles about the Kitty Genovese case and her extensive interviews with murderer Winston Moseley. [9] [10]
The success of Kitty Genovese led to offers from various news and television programs for Pelonero as an on-air true crime commentator. [11] At Investigation Discovery's CrimeFeed, she became a contributing writer.
Her second book, Absolute Madness: A True Story of a Serial Killer, Race, and a City Divided, is a nonfiction account of the life and crimes of Joseph Christopher, a white serial killer who targeted black males during a spree across New York in 1980–81. Absolute Madness was published November 7, 2017.<r Excerpts from the book appeared in Salon magazine. [12]
Pelonero appears in numerous true crime television programs and films, including A Crime to Remember , Fox Files, Witness , Murderous Affairs, and It Takes a Killer. [13]
True crime
• Kitty Genovese (2014)
• Absolute Madness (2017)
Plays
• Family Names (1994, play)
• Awesome Ghosts of Ontario (2010, play)
In the early hours of March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old bartender, was raped and stabbed outside the apartment building where she lived in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens, New York, United States. Two weeks after the murder, The New York Times published an article erroneously claiming that thirty-eight witnesses saw or heard the attack, and that none of them called the police or came to her aid. The incident prompted inquiries into what became known as the bystander effect, or "Genovese syndrome", and the murder became a staple of U.S. psychology textbooks for the next four decades.
Harold Schechter is an American true crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He is a Professor Emeritus at Queens College, City University of New York where he taught classes in American literature and myth criticism for forty-two years. Schechter's essays have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and the International Herald Tribune. He is the editor of the Library of America volume, True Crime: An American Anthology. His newest book, published in September 2023, is Murderabilia: A History of Crime in 100 Objects.
The Servant Girl Annihilator, also known as the Midnight Assassin, was an unidentified American serial killer who preyed upon the city of Austin, Texas, in 1884 and 1885. The sobriquet originated with the writer O. Henry. The series of eight axe murders were referred to by contemporary sources as the Servant Girl Murders.
Dead by Sunset is a 1995 true crime nonfiction book by author Ann Rule. It is based on the 1986 Oregon case of the murder of Cheryl Keeton, who was found beaten to death inside her van on the Sunset Highway and the later conviction of her estranged husband, Brad Cunningham. The book made The New York Times Best Seller list in 1996.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America is a 2003 historical non-fiction book by Erik Larson presented in a novelistic style. Set in Chicago during the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, it tells the story of World’s Fair architect Daniel Burnham and of H. H. Holmes, a criminal figure widely considered the first serial killer in the United States. Leonardo DiCaprio purchased the film rights in 2010. The concept has since been in development hell.
Gregg Olsen is a New York Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal bestselling author of nonfiction books and novels, most of which are crime-related. The subjects of his true crime books include convicted child rapist and school teacher Mary Kay Letourneau, product tampering killer Stella Nickell, fasting specialist Linda Burfield Hazzard, and former Amishman and convicted murderer Eli Stutzman.
Silence! The Musical is a 2005 musical created by Jon Kaplan and Al Kaplan as a parody of the 1991 Academy Award-winning film The Silence of the Lambs, which is in turn based on 1988 novel of the same name by Thomas Harris. The musical is itself based on a parody screenplay of the same name written by Jon Kaplan and Al Kaplan.
David Elliot Grann is an American journalist, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and author.
Mikita Brottman, née Mikita Hoy, is a British American non-fiction author, scholar, and psychologist known for her interest in true crime. Her writing blends a number of genres, often incorporating elements of autobiography, psychoanalysis, forensic psychology, and literary history.
Suzy Spencer is an American author and journalist who made the New York Times Best Seller list in 1998 with her first true crime book Wasted.
Mathew William Phelps is an American crime writer and investigative journalist, podcaster, and TV presenter.
The Millionaire's Wife: The True Story of a Real Estate Tycoon, his Beautiful Young Mistress, and a Marriage that Ended in Murder, by the author and journalist Cathy Scott, is a true crime account of the 1990 contract murder of George Kogan on an Upper East Side Manhattan street in broad daylight. The book was published for mass-market release by St. Martin's Press True Crime Library in March 2012.
Robert Scott was a New York Times best-selling American non-fiction author who wrote 20 true crime books.
Practice to Deceive is a 2013 true crime nonfiction book by the American author Ann Rule that details the murder of Russel Douglas, found shot between the eyes in his car on Whidbey Island, north of Seattle, Washington, the day after Christmas 2003. The book was released in October 2013 by Simon & Schuster's Gallery Books imprint.
Shanna Hogan was an American non-fiction author and journalist. She was best known for writing the book Picture Perfect about convicted murderer Jodi Arias.
Michelle Eileen McNamara was an American true crime author. She was the author of the true crime book I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, and helped coin the moniker "Golden State Killer" of the serial killer who was identified after her death as Joseph James DeAngelo. The book was released posthumously in February 2018 and later adapted into the 2020 HBO documentary series I'll Be Gone in the Dark.
The Witness is a 2015 American documentary film directed and produced by James D. Solomon. It follows William "Bill" Genovese as, decades after her death, he investigates the March 13, 1964, murder of his sister, Catherine Susan "Kitty" Genovese by Winston Moseley in Kew Gardens, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. Bill Genovese executive produced and narrated the film.
Rebecca Morris is a New York Times bestselling true-crime author and a TV, radio and print journalist who lives in Seattle, Washington.
I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer is a true crime book by the American writer Michelle McNamara about the investigation of the Golden State Killer. The book was released on February 27, 2018, nearly two years after McNamara's death and two months before an arrest would be made in the case.
Casey Cep is an American author and journalist. Cep is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and other publications. Cep's debut non-fiction book, published by Knopf, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (2019), tells the story of how Harper Lee worked on, but ultimately failed to publish, an account of a murder trial that happened in Alabama in 1977.