David Berkowitz

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  David Berkowitz was sitting in his parked car outside a Yonkers apartment building at about 10:00 on the night of the 10th of August 1977 when Detective John Falotico aimed a gun at him. A second detective, Sergeant William Gardella, covered the other door. Falotico would remember the smile most of all. It was big, calm and baffling. According to Lawrence D. Klausner's 1981 book Son of Sam, the detective asked the man who he had just caught. In a soft, almost sweet voice, the man answered, "You know." Falotico pressed him. The man turned his head and said, "I'm Sam." Asked "Sam who?", he replied, "Sam. David Berkowitz." Behind that smile lay a year of fear in New York City, with a killer who wrote to newspapers and police and left the city guessing. Who was this man, and who was the "Sam" he named? What was he doing in a car with a revolver beside him, and why did so many people later refuse to believe he had acted alone?

  2614197693

• 2. An Adopted Son

  ›

  On the 1st of June 1953, a baby named Richard David Falco was born in Brooklyn. Within days, his mother, Elizabeth "Betty" Broder, gave him up for adoption. She had grown up in an impoverished family and was working as a waitress. In 1936 she had married Tony Falco, an Italian American, who left her for another woman before four years had passed. The baby's real father was Joseph Kleinman, a married businessman. Like Broder, he was Jewish.

  Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz of the Bronx took the infant in. They ran a hardware store with modest earnings and had no children, though they were already middle-aged. They swapped the boy's first and middle names, gave him their surname, and raised David Richard Berkowitz as an only child. Other children bullied him for being Jewish and for being chubby.

  The journalist John Vincent Sanders called his childhood "somewhat troubled". Berkowitz was bright but lost interest in school early, and he became fascinated by petty theft and by setting fires. He also suffered head injuries as a child. Neighbors and relatives later remembered a difficult, spoiled boy who bullied others. His parents consulted at least one psychotherapist, yet his behavior never brought a legal intervention or a serious note in school records. He passed through Public School #123, Public School #77 and Christopher Columbus High School, graduating in 1971.

  When he was fourteen, his adoptive mother died of breast cancer. Home grew tense because of friction with his father's second wife. Berkowitz lived with his father in a four-and-a-half-room apartment at 170 Dreiser Loop in Co-op City. After high school he joined the United States Army and served at Fort Knox and then with an infantry division in South Korea. He received an honorable discharge in June 1974.

  He then went looking for his birth mother. After a few visits she told him how he had come into the world, and the account shook him, especially the string of reluctant father figures in his life. The forensic anthropologist Elliott Leyton later called this discovery the "primary crisis" of Berkowitz's life. His contact with his birth mother faded, though for a time he kept in touch with his adoptive sister, Roslyn.

  He spent a year at Bronx Community College from the spring of 1975. In 1976 he became a driver for the Co-Op City Taxi Company. By the time of his arrest, he was sorting letters for the United States Postal Service.

  58102957

• 3. The Shootings

  ›

  On Christmas Eve 1975, by his own later account, Berkowitz attacked two women in Co-op City with a hunting knife. Police never identified the first, a Hispanic woman. The second was fifteen-year-old Michelle Forman, a sophomore at Truman High School. He stabbed her six times on a bridge near Dreiser Loop, and she spent a week in the hospital. No one suspected him, and he soon moved to an apartment in Yonkers.

  Having botched his first attempt at killing, he switched to a handgun. He then roamed the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, looking for young women. All but one of the crime scenes held two victims, and several attacks hit couples sitting in parked cars. He often went back to the places where he had struck, and he plainly enjoyed what he had done.

  The first shooting came at about 1:10 a.m. on the 29th of July 1976, in the Pelham Bay neighborhood of the Bronx. Donna Lauria, an eighteen-year-old emergency medical technician, and Jody Valenti, a nineteen-year-old nurse, were talking in Valenti's double-parked Oldsmobile. They had just left Peachtree's, a discotheque in New Rochelle. A man carrying a paper bag hurried toward the car. Lauria said, "Now what is this..." and then he drew a gun, braced an elbow on his knee and fired. One bullet killed Lauria instantly. Another wounded Valenti in the thigh, and a third missed both women.

  Valenti described a white man in his thirties with short, dark, curly hair. Lauria's father reported seeing a similar man in a yellow compact car nearby. Neighbors said an unfamiliar yellow compact had been cruising the area for hours.

  On the 23rd of October 1976, Carl Denaro, a twenty-year-old Citibank security guard, and Rosemary Keenan, an eighteen-year-old Queens College student, sat in a parked car beside Bowne Park in Flushing. The windows suddenly shattered. "I felt the car exploded," Denaro said later. Keenan drove off for help without realizing anyone had fired at them. Denaro had a bullet wound to the head and eventually needed a metal plate to replace part of his skull. Police did not link the case to the Bronx shooting at first. The two had happened in different boroughs and were handled by different precincts.

  Just after midnight on the 27th of November 1976, two high school students, sixteen-year-old Donna DeMasi and eighteen-year-old Joanne Lomino, were chatting on Lomino's porch in Floral Park. A young man in military fatigues approached and began asking directions in a high-pitched voice. Then he pulled out a revolver and shot both girls. DeMasi was hit in the neck, but the wound was not life-threatening. Lomino was hit in the back and was left paraplegic.

  At about 12:40 a.m. on the 30th of January 1977, secretary Christine Freund, aged twenty-six, and her fiancé, bartender John Diel, aged thirty, were sitting in his car near the Forest Hills LIRR station in Queens. Three shots hit the car. Diel drove away for help with minor injuries. Freund died at the hospital several hours later.

  Police now publicly admitted that the cases might be connected. All the victims had been hit by .44 caliber bullets, and the targets seemed to be young women with long dark hair. NYPD sergeant Richard Conlon said police were "leaning towards a connection in all these cases." Composite sketches were released of a black-haired suspect and a blond one, and Conlon added that police were looking for more than one man.

  At about 7:30 p.m. on the 8th of March 1977, twenty-year-old Columbia University student Virginia Voskerichian was walking home from school, about a block from where Freund had been shot. A gunman confronted her. She raised her textbooks between herself and him, but the bullet struck her head and killed her. Two days later, NYPD officials and Mayor Abraham Beame announced that the same .44 Bulldog revolver had killed both Lauria and Voskerichian. Official documents later showed the evidence linking the weapon to every shooting was actually inconclusive.

  At about 3:00 a.m. on the 17th of April 1977, Alexander Esau, a twenty-year-old tow truck operator, and Valentina Suriani, an eighteen-year-old Lehman College student and aspiring actress and model, sat in a car on the Hutchinson River Parkway service road in the Bronx. They were a block from Suriani's home. A resident heard four shots and called police. Suriani died at the scene, and Esau died at the hospital hours later. On the 26th of June 1977, Salvatore Lupo, a twenty-year-old mechanic's helper, and seventeen-year-old Judy Placido were shot in Lupo's parked car in Bayside, Queens. Both survived.

  Then came Brooklyn, in the early hours of the 31st of July 1977. Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante, both twenty, were on their first date and kissing in his car near a park in Bath Beach. A man walked up to within three feet of the passenger side and fired four rounds. Both were hit in the head. Violante lost his left eye, and Moskowitz, the only blonde victim, died. In total, the stabbing and shootings killed six people and wounded eleven. The Bath Beach attack would be the last of the .44 shootings.

  2634434752

• 4. Letters to the City

  ›

  A handwritten letter addressed to NYPD Captain Joseph Borrelli lay near the bodies of Alexander Esau and Valentina Suriani. It was written mostly in block capitals, and it was the first time the killer called himself "Son of Sam". Until then the press had called him the ".44 Caliber Killer". Police held the letter back at first, but pieces leaked, and the new name stuck.

  Its opening line complained, "I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon hater." The writer described a violent father figure named Sam who craved blood and commanded him to go out and kill. He promised to keep going and mocked police for failing to catch him. Detectives studied one phrase, "me hoot it urts sonny boy", and guessed that the writer knew Scottish English. They also read the words "too many heart attacks" as a sign that he blamed a dark-haired nurse for his father's death. They noticed that Lauria had worked in emergency medicine and that Valenti was studying nursing.

  Psychologists were struck by the killer's attitude toward the police and the press. Many serial killers, they observed, take satisfaction in outwitting those who hunt them, and control over the media and a whole city gives them a feeling of power. On the 26th of May 1977, after consulting several psychiatrists, police released a profile. It called the suspect a "neurotic" who probably had paranoid schizophrenia and believed he was possessed by a demon.

  Four days later, on the 30th of May 1977, the Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin received a second letter, postmarked that morning in Englewood, New Jersey. On the back of the envelope, in four neatly centered lines, were the words: Blood and Family, Darkness and Death, Absolute Depravity, .44. The letter began, "Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C." Its writer asked Breslin what he would have for the 29th of July, which was the anniversary of the Lauria and Valenti shooting.

  Police were struck by how polished this letter looked next to the crude first one. They suspected it had been produced in an art studio by someone skilled in printing, calligraphy or graphic design. The unusual all-capitals lettering made them wonder whether the writer was a comic-book letterer, so they asked staff at DC Comics whether they recognized the hand. A reference to the "Wicked King Wicker" led police to arrange a private screening of the horror film The Wicker Man, released in 1973.

  The Daily News published the letter a week later, holding back some of the text at police request, and Breslin urged the killer to give himself up. That issue sold more than 1.1 million copies, the best-selling edition in the paper's history up to then. Police received thousands of tips drawn from phrases in the printed portions, and every one proved useless. The New York Post and the Daily News, both tabloids known for graphic crime coverage, saw circulation climb steeply. The story ran on the front pages of papers abroad, including the Vatican's L'Osservatore Romano, the Israeli paper Maariv and the Soviet Izvestia.

  Because every shooting victim so far had long dark hair, thousands of women in New York cut it short or dyed it bright colors. Beauty supply stores struggled to keep wigs in stock.

  266461575

• 5. Capture and Confession

  ›

  Cacilia Davis was walking her dog near the Bath Beach shooting scene when she saw patrol officer Michael Cataneo writing a ticket for a car parked by a fire hydrant. Soon after the traffic police left, a young man walked past her from the direction of that car and seemed to study her. He was holding something she described as a "dark object". Frightened, she ran home and heard shots behind her in the street. She said nothing for four days. When she contacted police, they checked every car that had been ticketed in the area that night. One of them was a yellow 1970 Ford Galaxie belonging to Berkowitz.

  Meanwhile, Detective John Falotico had been woken at home on the night of the shooting and told to report to the 60th Precinct station house in Coney Island. He was given two weeks to treat the Moskowitz and Violante case as an ordinary murder. If it was unsolved by then, it would go to the Son of Sam task force.

  On the 9th of August 1977, NYPD detective James Justis phoned the Yonkers Police Department to ask for an interview with Berkowitz. The dispatcher who took the call was Wheat Carr, and she knew the name. "Let me tell you about him," she said. "He lives right behind me." She explained that Berkowitz had shot and wounded a black Labrador Retriever that belonged to her father, Sam Carr. When Justis heard the name Sam, he sensed they had found their man. A Yonkers police sergeant, Mike Novotny, said his own department had already suspected Berkowitz in connection with strange local crimes mentioned in one of the letters.

  On the 10th of August 1977, officers examined Berkowitz's car outside his building at 35 Pine Street. They spotted a handgun on the back seat. Owning one was legal in New York and needed no special permit, but it justified a search of the car. Inside they found a duffel bag of ammunition, maps of the crime scenes and a threatening letter addressed to Inspector Timothy Dowd of the Son of Sam task force. Police chose to wait for Berkowitz to come out rather than risk a fight in the building's narrow hallway. They were also still waiting for a search warrant, which they wanted so that a court could not later throw out what they found.

  Beside him in the car sat a paper bag holding a .44 caliber Bulldog revolver, the type identified in ballistics tests. One version of the encounter has Berkowitz adding a question to his first words, asking why it had taken police so long. The NYPD officially credited Falotico with the arrest. In Berkowitz's apartment, detectives found chaos and Satanic graffiti on the walls. They also found three stenographer's notebooks, nearly full, in which he had recorded hundreds of fires across the city since the age of twenty-one. Berkowitz admitted he was also the "Phantom of the Bronx", the name given to whoever lit more than 2,000 arsons around the city during the 1970s.

  The building's address was soon changed from 35 Pine Street to 42 Pine Street in an effort to end its notoriety. At about 1:00 a.m., Mayor Beame came to the 60th Precinct to see the prisoner for himself. After a short, silent encounter, he told reporters that New Yorkers could "rest easy" because police had caught a man they believed to be the Son of Sam.

  Berkowitz was questioned for about thirty minutes in the early morning of the 11th of August 1977. John Keenan led the investigation and took the confession. Berkowitz quickly admitted the shootings and said he wanted to plead guilty. He told interrogators that his neighbor's dog had demanded the blood of pretty young girls. He said the "Sam" in the first letter was Sam Carr, and that Carr's black Labrador was possessed by an ancient demon that gave him orders he could not resist.

  Weeks later, in a letter to the Post dated the 19th of September 1977, he repeated the story of demonic possession. He ended with a line some investigators read as a hint of accomplices: "There are other Sons out there, God help the world." In February 1979, at a press conference, he declared the demon story a hoax. He told a court-appointed psychiatrist, David Abrahamsen, that he had long thought about killing to take revenge on a world that he felt had rejected and hurt him. He also said he had planned to end his spree by going down in a "blaze of glory" at a nightclub in the Hamptons.

  7687889326

• 6. Sentence and Faith

  ›

  Three mental health examinations found Berkowitz fit to stand trial. His lawyers urged him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but he refused. On the 8th of May 1978, he stood calmly in court and pleaded guilty to all of the shootings. Two weeks later, at his sentencing, he lunged toward a window of the seventh-floor courtroom in an attempt to jump out. Once he was restrained, he shouted and chanted about his last victim, and the court ordered yet another psychiatric examination. During that evaluation he drew a jailed man hemmed in by many walls and wrote, "I am not well. Not well at all." Doctors again judged him competent.

  On the 12th of June 1978, he was sentenced to twenty-five years to life for each murder. He was sent to Attica Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in upstate New York. Prosecutors objected, but the terms of his plea still made him eligible for parole after twenty-five years.

  Before Attica, Berkowitz was held in a psychiatric ward at Kings County Hospital, where staff found him strikingly untroubled. The day after his sentencing he was taken to Sing Sing, then to Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora for examinations. He spent two more months at the Central New York Psychiatric Center in Marcy. At Attica in 1979, someone slashed the left side of his neck from front to back, and the wound took more than fifty stitches to close. He would not name his attacker and said he was grateful, since it felt like "the punishment I deserve". Yet he later called life at Attica a "nightmare". For his own safety he was held in solitary confinement afterward. In 1981 he moved to a special unit at Clinton for inmates who cannot live among the general population. In 1987 he joined the general population at Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, and later he was transferred to Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County.

  In 1987, Berkowitz announced that he had become an evangelical Christian. He said his conversion came after he read Psalm 34:6 in a Bible given to him by another inmate. He asked to be called the "Son of Hope" rather than the "Son of Sam". Earlier, he had invited an exorcist, Malachi Martin, to help write his autobiography, but the offer was not accepted. In later years he worked on his memoirs with other evangelicals. They appeared as a 1998 interview video called Son of Hope and as a book, Son of Hope: The Prison Journals of David Berkowitz, in 2006. He receives no royalties or profit from these works.

  A church group maintains a website on his behalf, since he cannot use a computer. He takes part in prison ministry and regularly counsels troubled inmates. At Sullivan he earned a degree from Sullivan Community College and graduated with honors.

  State law entitles Berkowitz to a parole hearing every two years, but he has consistently refused to request release and has sometimes skipped the hearings altogether. Before his first hearing, in 2002, he wrote to Governor George Pataki asking that it be canceled. "In all honesty, I believe that I deserve to be in prison for the rest of my life," he wrote. Officials at Sullivan rejected his request. At his 2016 hearing at Shawangunk he said parole was "unrealistic" but added, "I feel I am no risk, whatsoever." His lawyer, Mark Heller, said prison staff considered him a model prisoner. Commissioners denied parole anyway. They did so again at a twelfth hearing in May 2024. He told the Post he knew he had no chance, but that skipping a hearing could look defiant. "Most of all, I attend in order to openly apologize for my past crimes and to express my remorse," he said. A further hearing was scheduled for May 2026.

  97859698100

• 7. The Cult Theory

  ›

  In 1979, Berkowitz mailed a book about witchcraft to police in North Dakota. He had underlined passages and scribbled notes, including the words "Arliss Perry, Hunted, Stalked and Slain. Followed to Calif. Stanford University." The name referred to Arlis Perry, a nineteen-year-old North Dakota newlywed murdered at Stanford on the 12th of October 1974. Her killer had abused her body in a campus chapel, and the case drew wide coverage. Berkowitz mentioned it in other letters, which suggested he knew details from the killer himself. Local investigators interviewed him but concluded by 2004 that he had "nothing of value to offer." The case was solved in 2018, and the killer proved to be Stanford security guard Stephen Blake Crawford, who had no known connection to Berkowitz.

  After he arrived at Sullivan prison, Berkowitz began to say he had joined a Satanic cult in the spring of 1975. In 1993 he told the press he had killed only three of the Son of Sam victims: Lauria, Esau and Suriani. He said he had been the gunman only in the Lauria and Valenti attack and the Esau and Suriani attack. According to his new account, cult members took part in every incident by planning, scouting the victims and serving as lookouts and getaway drivers. He said he could not name most of them without endangering his family.

  He described a female member who fired at Denaro and Keenan and who, he said, did not know the heavy recoil of a Bulldog revolver, which explained why they survived. He claimed "at least five" cult members were at the Freund and Diel shooting, and that the actual gunman was an outsider he knew only as "Manson II". He said the Moskowitz and Violante shooter was a man who had come from North Dakota.

  Berkowitz did name two alleged members, John and Michael Carr, sons of the dog-owner Sam Carr, who lived nearby on Warburton Avenue. Both were already dead. John had died in North Dakota in 1978 in a shooting judged a suicide, and Michael had died in a car accident in 1979. Berkowitz said John was the DeMasi and Lomino gunman, with a Yonkers police officer, also a cult member, involved in that attack. He said Michael fired the shots at Lupo and Placido. Author Maury Terry wrote that Michael was an active member of the Church of Scientology. Terry also noted that when Berkowitz was arrested he carried a list of phone numbers that included the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida, the church's spiritual headquarters. In a video interview posted in 2016, Berkowitz said he had been influenced by writings from the Process Church of the Final Judgement.

  The journalist John Hockenberry wrote, "What most don't know about the Son of Sam case is that from the beginning, not everyone bought the idea that Berkowitz acted alone." John Santucci, the Queens district attorney at the time, and the investigator Mike Novotny both believed he had accomplices. NYPD officer Richard Johnson, who worked the original case, asked, "Why are there three suspect cars, five different suspect descriptions, different heights, different shapes, different sizes of the perpetrator? Somebody else was there." Donna Lauria's father believed the cult story. Survivor Carl Denaro said "more than one person was involved," though he admitted he could not prove a cult, and he called Berkowitz's statement to police "totally false."

  John Diel recalled bumping into Berkowitz outside the Wine Gallery restaurant as he and Freund left. Berkowitz told police he had merely passed within a few feet of them shortly before they got into the car. Diel said they passed no one on the walk to the car. He argued that, given how the car was parked at the curb, Berkowitz could not have crept up on them in the few minutes before the shooting. Diel concluded someone else shot him.

  In 1979, Maury Terry published a series of investigative articles for Gannett newspapers that challenged the finding of a lone gunman. Yonkers police reopened the case in 1996, but no new charges followed. The investigation was suspended for lack of findings, though it remains open.

  Most people dismissed the cult story. Breslin rejected it, noting that on the night of his arrest Berkowitz "recalled everything step by step by step." He said the man had "1,000 percent recall" and was simply the guy. Former FBI profiler John Edward Douglas spent hours with Berkowitz and judged him an "introverted loner, not capable of being involved in group activity." NYPD psychologist Dr. Harvey Schlossberg called the cult claims a fantasy Berkowitz invented to ease his guilt. In his 2001 book Hunting Humans, Elliott Leyton wrote that recent journalistic attempts to shrink or deny Berkowitz's guilt had "lacked all credibility."

  7969925126

• 8. Legacy

  ›

  Less than a year after the arrest, Jimmy Breslin and the writer Dick Schaap published .44, a heavily fictionalized novel about the murders, in 1978. Its Berkowitz stand-in was named "Bernard Rosenfeld", and outside North America it was retitled Son of Sam. Spike Lee's 1999 drama Summer of Sam cast Michael Badalucco as Berkowitz, though he is a minor figure there. One critic said the film uses him mostly as a metaphor for Lee's view of the seventies as an era of amoral excess. Berkowitz reportedly disliked its exploitation of "the ugliness of the past". Other screen portrayals include the 1985 CBS television movie Out of the Darkness, the 2007 miniseries The Bronx Is Burning and Oliver Cooper's turn in the 2019 series Mindhunter. In 2021, Netflix released The Sons of Sam: A Descent Into Darkness, which revisits the cult theory and Maury Terry's investigations.

  Seinfeld borrowed from the case several times. In one episode Newman says "What took you so long?" as police come to arrest him, echoing the words attributed to Berkowitz. Musicians also took up the name. The Dead Boys released a song called "Son of Sam" in 1978, and the Beastie Boys recorded "Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun" in 1989. Billy Joel opens "Close to the Borderline" with a reference to the events, on his 1980 album Glass Houses. Talking Heads' 1977 song "Psycho Killer" is often wrongly tied to the case. In 2016, the rapper Lucki released an EP called Son of Sam, with a cover taken from the final page of Berkowitz's first letter.

  New York lawmakers also reacted fast. After rampant talk of publishers offering Berkowitz large sums for his story, the state legislature passed a law barring convicted criminals and their relatives from profiting from books, films or other ventures about their crimes. In 1991, in Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Crime Victims Board, the United States Supreme Court struck down the original "Son of Sam law" as a violation of the First Amendment right to free expression. New York passed a revised version in 1992. Forty-one states and the federal government have since adopted similar laws.

  Berkowitz's own later actions drew attention too. In 2002, during the D.C. sniper attacks, he sent Fox News personality Rita Cosby a three-page letter telling the sniper to "stop hurting innocent people." In 2005 he sued a former lawyer, Hugo Harmatz, over letters, photographs and other possessions. Harmatz had used them in a self-published book, Dear David. They settled in October 2006, with Harmatz returning the items and donating part of his profits to the New York State Crime Victims Board. Berkowitz still voices remorse on Christian websites and in mainstream interviews, and he speaks against gun violence, urging people to "take the glory out of guns".

  Neysa Moskowitz, mother of Stacy, had made no secret of her hatred for him. Shortly before she died in 2006, she wrote Berkowitz a letter forgiving him. She had lost all her children young: Jody at nine in a possible suicide in 1968, Stacy in 1977, and Ricky at thirty-seven of scleroderma in 1999.

  152180645