Ep. 129 | The Son of Sam Serial Killer

NOBL gives you real travel peace of mind — security, design, and convenience all in one. Head to https://NOBLTravel.com for 46% off your entire order! #NOBL #ad Free trial at https://shopify.com/cccm Ready to be seen? Check that appointment off your to-do list with Zocdoc: https://zocdoc.com/cccm#sponsored For more than a year, New Yorkers lived in fear of a killer who seemed to strike at random. Then one small clue finally led police to the man who called himself the Son of Sam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Insurance isn't a one size fits all. And shopping for it shouldn't feel like squeezing into something that just doesn't fit. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price Tool for years. With the Name Your Price Tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they show you options that fit your budget. Enough hunting for discounts, trying to calculate rates, and tinkering with coverages. Maybe you're picking out your very first policy. Or maybe you're just looking for something that works better for you and your family. Either way, they make it simple for you to see your options. No guesswork, no surprises. Ready to see how easy and fun shopping for car insurance can be?

• 0:41Speaker 00

  Visit progressive.com and give the Name Your Price Tool a try. Take the stress out of shopping and find coverage that fits your life. On your terms. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Shaq here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana 100% online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you. Your car is here, Mr. Shaq. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shaq. Hey, have you always been so big, tall, and handsome? Not always. I was 6'10" once. Seven days to love it or return it, Mr. Shaq. Not that I would. You never do. No, I never do. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. See our seven-day return policy at carvana.com.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Now, most killers are named by others for their crimes. But this one named himself. He was quiet, he held down a steady job, and he kept to himself. Nobody who passed him by had any idea what he did after dark. Yet, New York in 1977 was terrorized by a man it couldn't seem to make sense of. This is the story of Son of Sam. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder, all things that I love to consume, and I know you do too, you sick, twisted, beautiful, intellectually-minded freak! And today, we are talking about a heavy hitter in the serial killer world. A lot of you guys have requested it, so I dove deep into it,

• 2:10Speaker 02

  and we are gonna wade through the waters together. So without further ado, let's unbuckle our seatbelts, go Mach 5 down the highway, slam the brakes, and bust through the windshield into this infamous serial killer together.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  I wanna take a quick pause to talk about something that happened recently. I was on my last trip, and I'm at TSA with my coffee in one hand and my water bottle in the other. My phone's at 2%, and I'm tearing through my bag for my laptop, and then the zipper on my frickin' suitcase jams, so everybody in line is just staring at me, just wondering when I'm gonna move. It is just very stressful. It's very stressful. The airports are very stressful. But it's a lot less stressful ever since I got my Noble suitcase. And it is my all-in-one carry-on. It has a flip-out cup holder, which is so nice, so I don't have to be grappling with my water bottle and trying to hold on to it while I have my purse and all my other crap.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  A built-in charging port, which is also so helpful. Like, you'd think there'd be plugs available in an airport, but there never is. Like, most airports I go to, if there are any plugs, they're taken, or they just don't work. So the charging port has become one of my favorite features. And it has a front laptop pocket that makes TSA a breeze. You can just click it open and take out your laptop. It's so easy. Not to mention that the suitcases have 360 wheels that glide right beside you, or behind you if you want. And there's no flippin' zipper. I am so done with zippers in suitcases, dude. And also, they're so easy to break into. Somebody can break into those with like a ballpoint pen. It's happened. And it locks shut with a latch.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  So nobody will be breaking into your bag. And mine is forest green, but they have so many really cool colors. And Noble is the number-one top-rated luggage on TrustPilot with a 100-day money-back guarantee and free 3-shay express shipping, and a lifetime warranty, just a full cherry on top. So upgrade to luggage that looks better, and more importantly, that actually lasts longer, because nobody wants to be buying a suitcase like once a year or once every couple of years. You might as well get a nice suitcase that you can have for the rest of your life. And not to mention, it'll help you travel smarter. So head to nobltravel.com for up to 46% off your entire order.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  That's N-O-B-L-travel.com for up to 46% off. And after you purchase, they'll ask where you heard about them, and just let them know that I sent you. Thank you so much to Noble for sponsoring this video and supporting the channel, and let's get back to it. So on June 1st, 1953, a boy was born in Brooklyn. And the name on his birth certificate was Richard David Falco. And his mother was a waitress named Betty Broder. Now Betty had come up poor in a Jewish family, and she married an Italian-American named Tony Falco in 1936. And the two of them ran a fish market together. And they split up before their fourth year of marriage, as Falco left her for another woman.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  However, Betty stayed married to him on paper long after he was gone. Now, the boy's father was not actually Falco, but rather a man named Joseph Kleinman. Now Kleinman was Jewish, just like Betty, and he was a businessman, and he had a wife at home. Ugh, this is getting messy very quickly. And whatever the two of them had, it went on for a really long time. And then Betty got pregnant, and Kleinman gave her his terms. He wanted no part in the child's life, and if she kept it, he would walk. So within a few days of birth, she gave the boy up for adoption. On their certificate, she put down Falco as the father,

• 6:05Speaker 02

  the husband who had walked out several years earlier and wasn't even the real father. So though his birth parents wouldn't keep him, others were waiting. And those people were Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz, who were middle-aged at the time, Jewish, and childless. And they got by on a hardware store they ran in the Bronx. And the baby went home with them. And they decided to keep the original names the boy was born with and simply switch them around, along with giving him their last name. So Richard David Falco became David Richard Berkowitz, or just David Berkowitz. And he grew up in the Bronx as their only child. Now, home was a place called Soundview, a corner of the borough where most of the families were Jewish or Italian.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Now, growing up, David was a bright kid on paper and a poor one in the classroom, though. And an IQ test at age 7 put him at 118. But he lost interest in school pretty early on, and in 4th grade, he missed 28 days. And he was an easy target for teasing as well, because he outgrew and outweighed the kids around him. And now, he had no brothers or sisters, and he never really worked out how to be around kids his own age. And he said he felt different and less attractive than everyone else. So he responded by doing as angry kids sometimes do, and they looked for someone smaller, someone more vulnerable than him. So he picked younger, smaller playmates on purpose so he could push them around.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  And neighbors on the block called him assaultive with other kids. And one of his teachers wrote him up at the time as a moody boy who could do good work when he wanted to and who was very easily upset. And something that didn't help at all is that his head took some beatings in those same years. At 7, a car actually hit him, and a few months later, he ran straight into a wall. And at 8, somebody caught him with a pipe and opened a 4-inch gash across his forehead. Pearl and Nathan could see something was wrong, and they went looking for help. And they took him to a psychologist, and when that wasn't enough, they consulted a rabbi. And at 11, he started telling them that monsters were bothering him.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  So he slept with the lights on or in his parents' bed, and it wore on them both. And at 12 years old, he started setting fires, hundreds of them. And then he turned on the animals. He burned bugs and glued them with rubber cement by the thousands. And his mother's birds weren't safe either. Pearl had a parakeet named Pudgy, and over three weeks, David gave the bird small amounts of cleaning fluid until it died. Kid was a fucking monster. And in 1966, he had his bar mitzvah at Temple Adath Israel. Nobody his own age actually came, and his parents didn't have many friends of their own to bring either. So it was a small party, to say the least.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  And almost none of the troubling behavior was written down by anyone at the time. And he was never arrested as a boy, and nothing serious ever reached his school file. And the fires that he set were actually from his own account. And every teacher and neighbor who called him troubled was remembering him later, just looking back. So all the paperwork shows from those years is just a moody, teased, lonely child. Because we're talking about a much different time than today. People just brush it off as like, "Ah, he's just a boy." No, he was literally a monster in the making. So David was just a young boy when his parents told him he was adopted. And they said his real mother had died giving birth to him, and that his real father had not wanted him.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  And as we know, the second part was true, but the first part was not. So convinced he had killed his own mother by being born, he was full of guilt. And this is what led to his fear of the dark. Certain that his father blamed him for her death and would get him for it. And he later put it this way, quote, "I thought there was a man out there that hated me and was possibly going to try to kill me for causing the death of his wife." And the only answer he was able to work out for why that man had given him away was hatred. And the person who absorbed the effects of this just inner turmoil was Pearl. And besides murdering her bird, he would physically assault her, he would tear her

• 10:29Speaker 02

  blouses, and he would destroy her stuff, like rip her lipsticks out of her container. But still, the two of them maintained a close relationship regardless. But in October of 1967, Pearl would die of breast cancer. And at this point, David was 14 years old. Now Nathan had known the diagnosis and kept it from David. So these people just love lying to their kid. And I like, I understand why, you know, but like at a 14 years old, feel like you can do that, you know, you already lied to him about his mother dying. This guy's a piece of shit, though. I don't really feel bad for him. But and now, and now his actual mother, you know, there is, his new mother is dying and he doesn't even have a chance to mourn her until it actually happens. It's gonna screw a kid up, probably, a little bit, you know, on top of the head injuries

• 11:14Speaker 02

  and burning stuff and killing birds and whatnot. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a recipe for disaster. But to mourn his wife's death, Nathan sat shiva, the seven-day Jewish mourning period. And David would still go to school. And at home, there was no television during the morning. So school is where the damage that had been done to him really shone through. His grades had originally averaged a B minus, but now they fell to failures and low Cs. And his teachers claimed that the trouble came down to something emotional rather than anything he couldn't grasp. As he demonstrated strong understanding, he just didn't do the work. And the next year, he was absent for 36 days and failed most of 10th grade.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  And some accounts of his life start the whole unraveling right here with Pearl's death. That was the catalyst, really. Though regardless of when it began, the effect would be the same. Now Nathan was hardly at the apartment because at the hardware store, it took like 60 hours a week to manage. And Pearl was no longer there to close the gap. So in 1970, the two of them moved up to Co-op City to a place on Trizer Loop with four and a half rooms in it. And the following year, Nathan married a woman named Mary. And David could not stand the arrangement. Kid did not like his stepmom. And that same year, he graduated from Christopher Columbus High School. Now Nathan and Mary had taken all they could of him by then.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  So just completely drained from his behavioral problems, they packed up and moved to Florida, leaving David behind. So almost as soon as he had his high school diploma, David enlisted. And on June 23rd, 1971, he walked into the Army Induction Center on Whitehall Street in Manhattan and signed up at the age of 18. Nathan had pushed him toward college and David just wasn't interested, saying, quote, "I wanted some adventure. I wanted to experience life, something different, you know? I had no idea what to do in college, what to major in. I wanted to serve the country and get an education through the army," unquote. So he said the uniform felt like a special mission. And for the first time, he had something to be proud of.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  So he passed the physical and the psychological screening that July. And the screeners marked him down as a normal recruit, well-suited to the infantry. And Fort Knox trained him as an infantryman with rifleman down as his primary skill. And he qualified as a sharpshooter with the M16 and made Specialist E4. And what he wanted was Vietnam, but what he got was the demilitarized zone in Korea. And he called it a boring time. And the men in his barracks called him Wolf because of how much hair he had on his body. And Korea is also reportedly where he lost his virginity with a prostitute. And it left him with an STI. And his record picked up two write-ups in Korea.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  There was a truck convoy he was supposed to be on and he wasn't. And another time, he vanished for a whole night after failing to catch his bus back to the unit. And it cost him $50 and his rank, knocking him down to E3. But back at Fort Knox, he steadied and his reports improved gradually. And the army gave him his E4 rank back. And his honorable discharge came in June of 1974, after three years. And at this point, he had actually been baptized a Christian while he served. But once he was out, he stopped going to church altogether. So all in all, he joined up looking for a purpose and he came home emptier than he left, also with an STI. Not ideal.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  So he tried Bronx Community College, but that didn't really work out either. So he ended up getting a job as a cab driver and a security guard. And in January of 1975, he took an apartment of his own on Barnes Avenue. And that's when he would start looking for where he actually came from. Because his return from the army left him with his focus to discover his roots. So he worked through public records until he had an answer. And as we know, his mother was still alive. And he would find that out. And he actually had a sister. So in 1975, he found Betty and he and his half-sister Rosalyn began to build a relationship. But Betty did not greet him the way he had pictured it, however.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  And after a handful of visits, she told him the rest of the story, that he had been born out of wedlock and that the father who had not wanted him was recently dead. And then he stopped going and no longer kept in touch with her. And at the time, he was 21 years old. And it was at the same time that Satan really started to interest him. So through 1975, he felt severe isolation and whatever was left of him started to come apart. So Satan stopped being a passing interest somewhere in that time and the occult took him over completely. And the fires never stopped. And he was now setting them all over the city, but nobody ever came for him.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  And not once was he arrested for it. And that June, he took a job guarding a gate at JFK. And dogs worked the shifts alongside him. And he said that the dogs talked to him. And by the fall, he had quit and gone to work fitting ductwork for an air conditioning company. And in November, he wrote to Nathan in Florida and told him how deeply seated his depression had become. And in January of 1976, he rented half of a two-family house in New Rochelle from a couple named Jack and Nan Casara. And the lease ran two years and his deposit was $200. And there was actually a German shepherd in that house. And he believed that the dog was demonically possessed and that it was telling him to

• 17:03Speaker 02

  kill young women. And then it was every dog in the neighborhood saying it. And then it was the neighbors themselves who he decided were demons as well. And that March, he started sorting mail for the post office, earning $13,000 a year. And in April, he walked out on the Casaras to escape the calling of the demons. And he left the lease and the $200 behind and took an apartment in Yonkers. And there were dogs there as well. There's dogs everywhere in New York. And down the hill from his building stood a white shingled house belonging to a retired man named Sam Carr. Now Carr had a black Labrador called Harvey.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  And David again became certain the animal was begging him to kill for it. And he came to believe that a 6,000-year-old man, also called Sam, was speaking to him through that dog. And he also saw Carr himself as a demon. So in May, he built a Molotov cocktail meant for Harvey, but it failed. Now inside his own apartment, things were falling apart. He would put his fists through the walls and then he wrote strange messages next to the holes he had made. And in June, he flew to Houston to see a friend from the army. And he came home with a 44 caliber Charter Arms Bulldog revolver. But before the revolver even, there was a hunting knife. And before that, there was the notebooks.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  He had been keeping a log of the fires, three notebooks worth of them. The last entry went on December 23rd, 1975. And by then, the count stood at approximately 1,500 fires. And the following night was Christmas Eve and he went out into the Bronx to kill somebody. And the first woman he picked fought him off and got away, thankfully. And nobody knows who she was because she never went to the police and no hospital ever wrote her down. And minutes after that attack, he would find Michelle Foreman. Now Michelle was 15 years old in her sophomore year at Truman High School. And he caught her on a bridge by Trizer Loop, a short walk from the apartment he used to

• 19:13Speaker 02

  share with Nathan. And he would stab her six times in the head and in the body. And she was in the hospital for a week, but luckily she lived. So using the knife had not gone the way that he intended because his intention was to kill her. He would say, quote, "I never heard anyone scream like that. The way she screamed constantly, I kept stabbing and nothing would happen," unquote. And nobody would come looking for him after the attack either. So he was not a suspect. And as we know, the army had trained him to shoot. And on the first night he went hunting, he had picked up a knife instead. But after that one attempt, he would not attempt to use a knife again.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  So in April of 1976, a woman Named Wendy Savino was sitting in her car in the Bronx when a man fired at her five times. And again, luckily, she survived it and would actually be able to give a description to police. He had blue eyes and he had smiled and laughed while he shot her. And he took no money from her and no jewelry and he left the car after he was done. But it would be a long time before anybody put that shooting next to his name. So Donna Loria was 18 years old, the only daughter and the middle child of Rose and Michael Loria. She had just finished high school and was training to be an emergency medical technician.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  And Jody Valenti was 19 years old and a nursing student and she lived on the same block. Now, two days earlier, Donna's uncle Ralph had died and the family was still suffering from the grief. And Donna wanted an uplifting evening to distract her, so the two of them got dressed up and drove out to Peach Trees, which was a discotheque in New Rochelle. And they came back at about 1:10 on the morning of July 29th, 1976. Now, Jody double parked her Oldsmobile outside Donna's building in Pelham Bay and they sat there talking about their night. And a yellow compact nobody recognized had been up and down that street for hours. And Donna pushed her door open to go inside and then saw a man coming at the car with

• 21:25Speaker 02

  a paper bag. And startled, she said out loud, "Now what is this?" And he took the gun out of the bag, crouched, braced an elbow on his knee, held it in both hands, and fired. And one bullet would kill her where she was sitting. Then the second bullet went into Jody's thigh and the third missed them both. And the horn jammed on and stayed on, bringing the neighbors to their windows. So the man turned away and walked off quickly. Now luckily, Jody lived and she said she had never seen that man before. And she told police he was white and in his 30s, he had a fair complexion and about five foot eight and 200 pounds with short, dark curly hair.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  And Donna's father said he had seen a man like that sitting in a yellow compact. So the Loria's buried Ralph and then they buried Donna. And as far as leads went, nothing about that night pointed anywhere. Now Wendy Savino had been shot three months before and nobody had put the two side by side. So there was no pattern yet and no name for him, just one more shooting and a bad year for the city. And then came Carl De Naro. Now Carl De Naro was 20 years old, working security at City Bank. And he had just signed up for the Air Force, actually. And Rosemary Keenan was 18 and studied at Queens College. So on the night of October 23rd, 1976, the two of them met at a bar.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  And Carl was out enjoying himself before he left for the service. And afterwards, they drove to a quiet spot by Bone Park in Flushing and sat in the car. Now, they had been parked for about four minutes when the windows blew in. And Carl would recall, quote, "It felt like the car exploded. All the glass had broken. There was little pieces embedded in my hands," unquote. And neither of them realized somebody was actually shooting at them. And Rosemary started the engine and desperately drove back to the bar for help. And inside, Carl said he did not feel well and put his head on the table and then blood ran out from under his hair because a 44 round had gone right into his skull.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Now surgeons were able to replace the piece it took with a metal plate. And Rosemary luckily only had cuts from the glass and nothing worse. And neither of them never actually saw the man who fired at them. And at four in the morning at Flushing Hospital, an officer asked Carl if he should call his parents. Quote, "As long as I'm home by seven, my mother will never know." And the cop would say, "Son, you've been shot in the head. You're not going anywhere," unquote. Now, the bullets they dug out of the car were 44s, too battered to match to any gun. But despite the similarities, still, nobody connected this shooting alongside Donna Loria's. And Rosemary's father, being a detective, meant the case got worked hard and it still didn't seem to go anywhere.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Now, the two shootings had happened in different boroughs and different precincts were working them. So for a while, the detectives even wondered about Carl himself and months went by before the suspicion was dropped. And later, when the police finally had a run of shootings to set side by side, some of them believed the gunman had taken Carl's shoulder-length hair for a woman's. Now, just after midnight on November 27th, 1976, two girls sat on a front porch in Floral Park talking. And they had walked back from the movies at this point. And the house was Joanne Laminos'. She was 18 years old and recently graduated from Martin Van Burn High. And she was looking for work as a secretary.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  And Donna Damasi was 16 years old and still a student at the same school. Now, while they talked, a young man came across the lawn toward them in military fatigues. And Joanne had her back to him and turned her head. And he asked for directions in a high, thin voice, quote, unquote, "Can you tell me how to get?" But he never finished the thought. And instead, he took out a revolver and shot each of them once. And they went down on the porch and he kept firing, putting rounds into the house before he ran. And a neighbor heard the shots and got outside in time to see a blond man going past with a pistol in his left hand. And Donna had been hit in the neck, but it was not going to kill her.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  And Joanne had been hit in the back and the bullet had gone into her spine. And her family heard the gunfire from inside the house. And they came out, put both the girls in a car and drove them to the hospital themselves. Now Donna spent about three weeks in Long Island Jewish Medical Center and wore a brace after that until she fully recovered. Joanne would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. And this time, the police had people who had seen him. And both girls sat with them and worked up a sketch. And so did the neighbors from the street. And Donna described a white man about 25 or 30 in a three-quarter length coat, brown or green. And the bullets were 44s from a gun nobody could put a name to.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  Now, the trouble was that no one detective was looking at all the information. Three attacks so far across two boroughs, and remember, each one belonged to a different precinct. Now, every one of them involved a 44 and that fact sat in separate precinct files on opposite sides of the city. Wendy Savino's shooting was not among them at the time because nobody would actually connect that one for decades. And then, a young woman was shot dead in Queens on January 30th. And Captain Joseph Borelli remembered what happened next. Quote, "One of the detectives came over to me and he says, 'You know, that's a big bullet,' he says. And we had a shooting in the 105 with a big bullet and they also had one in Queens.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  So that stirred me up a little bit," unquote. And at this point, police suspected one man. But suspecting was not the same as proving it, as we know. And as mentioned, most of the recovered bullets came out too battered to match any particular weapon. So on March 8th, another woman was killed a block away and this time, a bullet came out of the scene whole. And it matched the round that had killed Donna Loria in the Bronx eight months earlier. And the same gun had fired both, a 44 Charter Arms Bulldog. So now they knew for sure they had a serial shooter on their hands. So in March, the department pulled a task force together and named it Operation Omega with 50 detectives to start.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  And Deputy Inspector Timothy Dowd was put in charge of it in April. And before it was finished, Omega would number 300. And Omega went after the gun itself. And they set out to trace every Bulldog ever manufactured, roughly 28,000 of them. And they found every registered owner in New York City and interviewed them and test-fired their weapons. So they were doing their due diligence, but not one of them was the gun. So Christine Freund was a 26-year-old secretary, born and raised in Salzburg, Austria, and now living in Ridgewood. And John Deal was a 30-year-old bartender and the two of them had been together for about seven years.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Now Christine had been encouraging John to settle into a career, both for himself and for their eventual family, because they were going to be married. So on the night of January 29th, 1977, they went to the movies to see Rocky. And afterwards, they had a drink at a wine gallery nearby. And the plan for the rest of the evening was dancing. But just after midnight, they were sitting in John's car in Station Square in the Forest Hills, waiting for it to heat up. And a man would walk up to the car and fire into it, without so much as a single word. Three rounds came through the glass and two of them would hit Christine directly in the head. And that's when John got the car moving as best he could and drove for help.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Now, he had only suffered minor injuries, but he had not seen the man at all. And Christine would unfortunately die in the hospital only a few hours later. And she is now buried at Linden Hill Cemetery out in Queens. And she and John never got the chance to have their wedding. And the round that police recovered had come out of a 44 Charter Arms Bulldog. And what bothered one of the detectives on the task force was the way the shots had been fired. Now Detective James Justice said afterwards, quote, "My fear was that the guy doing the shooting was a cop." "He used a cop stance to shoot." So as the connections became clearer, the papers finally had something to call him.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  And they would call him "The 44 Caliber Killer." So on the evening of March 8th, 1977, a young woman came up out of the subway at Continental Avenue with her books in her arms. Virginia Vasca-Rochian was 20 at the time and in her sophomore year at Bernard College over in Manhattan. And on top of her classes, she worked at a duty-free shop in the JFK Airport. And her family were Armenians who had been living in Bulgaria and they had come to America in 1968 in pursuit of the American dream. And her brother, Deek, said it had taken them more than 10 years to get permission to come. Quote, "It was a big deal for us, what a country this was, and then such a sad thing. This blew everyone's dreams away."

• 30:55Speaker 02

  So from the station, it was a few minutes on foot to the family's house on Exeter Street. And there was a man waiting out in the area and had been for about an hour, walking the streets and looking for a victim. And that's when he would come at her on Dartmouth Street at about 7:30 PM and raised his gun. Sensing what was about to happen, she raised her books to shield her face and the bullet would go right through them. And a neighbor who heard the shot came out and saw a short husky teenage boy running from the scene. And other people on the street had seen him too. And the early papers pointed at the boy and it took the police a while to work out that he was not a suspect and had only witnessed it.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  He was just running away from the gunshots. And a neighbor would come for her brother before the police got there and Deek went down to identify her. Quote, "She was murdered just a couple of blocks away from our house and I knew it was my sister, but I was in shock and I couldn't tell if it was Virginia or my older sister." End quote. But nothing about this attack matched the others. She was alone, on foot, on a residential street in the early evening. And David would say afterwards that he had done it that way deliberately to throw the police off his own pattern. However, it worked the other way entirely because the bullet would come out of her hole had it matched the one that had killed Donna Loria.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Now Virginia spoke five languages and her brother said she could have been a translator, saying, quote unquote, "She loved music, reading, art, and fashion." So two days after Virginia died, the police called a press conference. And Commissioner Michael Codd told the room the shootings were connected and that the gun was a 44 Charter Arms Bulldog. So New York had a serial killer. And the man they were looking for was white, in his twenties, black-haired, ordinary in height and build. And he seemed to be going after young women with long, dark hair. Now, papers released years afterwards showed the ballistics were thinner than the announcement made them sound. And the police strongly suspected one gun across all shootings, but on the evidence

• 33:04Speaker 02

  they had, that had yet to be officially confirmed. Either way, the city had been told there was a man out there just hunting on the streets. So the Daily News and the Post ran it every day from then on. And Sam Roberts was the city editor at the Daily News that year. Quote, "It had absolutely everything going for it as a tabloid-perfect storm. It was an ongoing unfolding crime story that New Yorkers were genuinely terrified about." End quote. And circulation climbed for both of the outlets and the story went out past the city, onto front pages at the Vatican's paper in Israel and in the Soviet Union even. And New Yorkers started living differently due to the reports.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Because the victims had long, dark hair, thousands of young women cut theirs short or went blonde and others just bought wigs. And thousands more just stopped going out after dark altogether. And nightclubs and restaurants watched their businesses fall away. And none of this was landing on a city in good health. Because New York was deep in a fiscal crisis. The state had taken over its finances and the mayor was wearing the blame. And unemployment stood at 8.9% and that was the lowest it had been in three years. And nobody inside the department or outside it knew where the killer would turn up next. But in April, he went back to the Bronx, to a street a few blocks from where he had killed Donna Loria nine months before.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Now, Valentina Soriany was 18 and still living at her parents' house. She was at Lehman College studying acting and she was planning to take time out to go study at FIT in Manhattan. And those who knew her saw her as lively, friendly, and focused on her studies. She played the piano and cared for any stray cat that turned up nearby. And Alexander Assau was a 19-year-old Brooklyn Technical High School graduate who had studied architecture there. And he also drove a tow truck. So on the evening of April 16th, he picked Valentina up at about 9:00 to take her to a movie. Now, she had to be home by 3:00 AM for her curfew. And just before 3:00 in the morning, they were parked on the Hutchinson River Parkway

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Service Road in a car belonging to Alexander's brother. And they were about a block away from Valentina's front door. And that's when shots were fired. And someone living in a nearby building heard them and called the police immediately. And Valentina was in the driver's seat and was hit once. And Alexander was hit twice. And both of them were hit in the head. Valentina would die only a block away from her home and Alexander would die in the hospital a few hours later, unable to tell anybody what he had seen. So so far, they were the only couple he managed to kill together. And back at the scene, the police found an envelope on the ground beside the car, left where it was sure to be found.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  And Borelli said later that it was this night, rather than the ballistics in March, that made the department work the case as the work of a serial killer. Valentina's funeral service was held at St. Teresa's Church in the Bronx on April 21st. And she was buried in Old St. Raymond Cemetery with her grandparents. And Alexander was buried across the river in New Jersey. And he had intended to ask Valentina to actually marry him. But now they rested in two graves in two separate states. Let's take a quick pause to talk about something that's very important to me, and that is our candy company. Now, when we decided to launch our candy store, Sour Boys, I'll be honest, we didn't really know anything about running an online store.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  But Shopify made it way less scary. We were able to make it look like us and they even had design templates you could choose from if you needed them. And it had the store live way faster than we expected with no coding and no panic. And if you get stuck, they have Sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant, which can help walk you through everything. So now, when we drop something new, like our monthly new flavors, Shopify keeps things running even when we're buried in other work. And with Shop Pay, checkout is so much quicker. So if you've been sitting on a business idea and you want to get started with it, you don't need to have it all figured out. We definitely didn't. And if you're ready to hear the "ding" of your first sale, head over to Shopify.com/CCCM

• 37:24Speaker 02

  to start your free trial. That's right, you can start your free trial at Shopify.com/CCCM. That's Shopify.com/CCCM. Thank you so much to Shopify for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel, and let's get back to it. Now, the envelope found at the scene was addressed to Captain Joseph Borelli. And Borelli was on the task force and his name had been turning up in the papers all through the 44 coverage. And inside was a handwritten letter featuring mostly capitals and littered with spelling errors. And it began by taking offense. Quote, "I am deeply hurt by your calling me a 'women-hater.' I am not, but I am a monster. I am the son of Sam. When Father Sam gets drunk, he gets mean.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  He beats his family. 'Go out and kill,' commands Father Sam." End quote. And he wrote that there were bodies behind the house, young women, drained of blood and down to bones. And he wrote about himself as well, saying, quote, "I feel like an outsider. I am on a different wavelength than everybody else, programmed to kill." End quote. And he told police to shoot him on sight and said he would be back and signed off. Quote unquote. "Yours in murder, Mr. Monster." Now, Sam was a real name. A neighbor of the letter writers over in Yonkers, Sam Carr, owned the Black Labrador and the man writing the letter believed the orders were coming through it.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  So on May 30th, a second letter arrived, and this one at the Daily News for a columnist named Jimmy Breslin. Now, Breslin wrote about and for ordinary New Yorkers. And he would eventually win a Pulitzer for it. And the letter opened with the city itself. Quote, "Hello from the gutters of NYC, which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood." End quote. Then it flattered Breslin, saying, quote, "I read your column daily and I find it quite informative." End quote. And then it named the first girl the killer had killed. End quote. However, you must not forget Donna Loria and you cannot let the people forget her either." End quote.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  And on the back of the envelope, he had written, quote, "Blood and family, darkness and death, absolute depravity, 44." End quote. And he asked Breslin a question, saying, quote unquote, "What will you have for July 29th?" Now, July 29th was the anniversary of Donna Loria's death. And the police read it as a promise. And the letter also offered other names he might be called. And among them was the Duke of Death, the Wicked King Wicker, the 22 disciples of hell, and John Wheaties. Breslin took it to the police and 10 days later, the paper ran it with parts of it cut out. And he used the column to talk to the man directly, pleading, quote, "The only way for

• 40:16Speaker 02

  the killer to leave this special torment is to give himself up to me if he trusts me or to the police," unquote. And that issue sold more than a million copies, one of the biggest the newspaper ever had. Some people said he should have not run it, that he was feeding the thing he was covering. Breslin's answer was that his readers were entitled to know. And years afterwards, he said of the man who wrote to him, quote, "He's the only killer I ever knew who knew how to use..." unquote. Now, New York Magazine had a handwriting expert look at the letter, saying, quote, "The specimen is terrifying. In all my years of work, I have never encountered so dangerous a character," unquote.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  And the expert asked not to be named on the grounds of becoming a target. But still, between the letters, the handwriting men, and the profiles and the hundreds of calls coming in, none of it brought the police any closer to the man they were looking for. So by that summer, Operation Omega was 75 detectives and over 200 uniformed officers pulled in from precincts across the city. And Timothy Dowd, the head of the force, had come over from Cary as a young man. Now, he was 61, gray-haired, and the other cops thought him bookish, despite his major homicide experience. And he studied literature and Latin while at City College, and he was well-known for sending arrest reports back to his own detectives when the grammar was wrong.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  So they called him Captain, sue a guy for having good grammar. Now Dowd described the job as a "search for, quote-unquote, 'a needle in a haystack.'" And Barelli described the difficulty in a different way, quote, "The hardest cases in the world for a homicide detective are strangers. Stranger on stranger. You have very little to go with because you don't have a motive, you may not have any witnesses, right? So you're at a dead standstill," unquote. So they went out and waited for him. Unmarked cars worked the Bronx and Queens at night, and policewomen with long, dark hair sat in parked cars outside the discos and the bars. And other officers sat in pairs and pretended to be couples.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Now, the chief of detectives, John Keenan, used televised press conferences to talk to the man directly, quote, "Son of Sam, we now know you are not a woman hater and know how you have suffered. We wish to help you, and it is not too late. Please let us help you," unquote. And the tips came in by the thousands, just every neighbor who kept odd hours, every brother-in-law who liked guns, every man in a bar who had said something ugly about a pretty girl. And Dr. Martin Lubin of Bellevue and some 45 other psychiatrists had sat down together to build a psychological profile of the killer. And by May, they had him as a paranoid schizophrenic who might believe himself possessed, a loner

• 43:07Speaker 02

  who could not manage relationships, and who performed particularly poorly with women. And what the police had told the public was accurate, but was essentially of no use whatsoever. A white man in his 20s, dark hair, ordinary height, ordinary build, that matched, you know, tens of thousands of men in New York. And the sketches were honestly kind of worse, because they came from witnesses who had barely seen him, and they had the city on watch for a face that was really just not his. And then July arrived, and the temperature reached 104 degrees, and a blackout put New York in the dark for 25 hours. And there was looting and burning, 4,000 arrests, $300 million worth of damage as well.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  And people were still concerned that the anniversary of the first killing, the date the killer had named, was coming around at the end of the month. Yet, what nobody in Omega knew was that the answer was already sitting in the pile. Now, up in Yonkers, his neighbors and his old landlords were concerned that the Son of Sam was the young man who lived near them, and they had actually told the police so, but it just went in with the thousands of other tips. So the Elifos was a discotheque out of Northern Boulevard in Bayside, and it had been a place called Humperdinck's Supper Club until the year before, and since then, it had become where the young people of that part of Queens just went. So on the night of June 25th, Judy Placido was there with her friends, and Sal Lupo was there with his.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Judy was 17 and had finished high school recently. She had a partial scholarship to Pace in the fall, and she intended to go into law. And Sal was 20 and a mechanic's assistant out of Masbeth, and one of seven children. And some men started bothering Judy while she was dancing, so she went to a stranger for help, and that stranger was Sal. And as the evening wound down, at around 3:00 in the morning, the two of them were outside in his parked car. And that was when the conversation turned to the Son of Sam killings. And that is also when somebody shot them both. Sal was hit in the right forearm, and Judy was hit in the right temple, and also in the shoulder, and also in the back of her neck.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  And Sal would get out and run into the club for help, and Judy made it a few steps from the car before she went down to the middle of the street. Now, both of them actually lived, and the local paper described their wounds as fairly minor. But unfortunately, neither of them had seen the attacker who fired. But two people on the street had. And they described someone tall and dark-haired in a leisure suit going away from the scene. And one of them had watched him leave in a car and took down part of the plate to give to police. So Sal and Judy luckily made it through, but after that night, the crowds at the Elifos stopped coming as they once did. So on July 31st, 1977, Robert Vialanti and Stacy Moskowitz went out together for their

• 46:06Speaker 02

  first date. Now, Robert was 20, 6'1", and four days earlier, he had ridden the subway an hour into Manhattan to the Wilhelmina Modeling Agency, because he looked like John Travolta, and they signed him to start on that Monday. And the next night, he went out to celebrate to a gong show night at the Beefsteak Charlie's. And it was, quote-unquote, "wall-to-wall people in there." And Stacy Moskowitz ended up right in front of him. And he said of her, quote, "She was a beautiful, beautiful girl, and what a pleasant, pleasant girl, a very bubbly, full-of-life young lady." So they talked for hours and made a plan then for the first date that Saturday. And Stacy was 20 as well, and a Brooklyn girl, and the daughter of Nasa and Jerry Moskowitz.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  And her younger sister, Jody Lynn, had died when Stacy was only 10 years old. And Stacy had gone to Lafayette High School and then on to Kingsborough Community College. And she was outgoing and well-liked, and by that summer, she was working up in the Empire State Building as a secretary at a shoe company. And the Son of Sam, just like everybody else, was on their minds. Five people were dead, and six more had been shot, and none of it in Brooklyn. The police were expecting the killer in the same places. With the first of the shootings coming up on a year old, the department put a large dragnet over the killer's previous hunting grounds in Queens and the Bronx. And on his way out the door, Robert told his mother she had nothing to worry about,

• 47:34Speaker 02

  quote-unquote, "Stacy's a blonde," he said. Now, the date began at the movies with New York, New York, and afterwards, they parked on Shore Parkway in Bath Beach, under a streetlight beside a city park. And they walked down by the water and wound up on a set of swings, quote-unquote, "We were like two little kids," Robert would say. And then Stacy noticed a man standing back in the shadows with his arms folded, and he frightened her, so she said she wanted to go. So they got into his car, but Robert said, quote-unquote, "Let's stay five minutes." So it was around 2:35 in the morning, and there was a full moon out over Gravesend Bay. And two minutes later, the windows would shatter around them.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  Somebody had come right up to the passenger side of the vehicle, firing four rounds into their heads, and went off into the park. Everything went black for Robert, and he was certain he was dead, saying, quote, "I was shot in the head, totally blind and full of blood. Oh my God, oh my God, he killed us," unquote. And then he heard Stacy moaning beside him and realized that he was still alive. The bullet had gone across his skull, taking his left eye and leaving the other one damaged. Though blinded and extremely hurt, he got the car door open and found a light pole to hold on to, and he screamed, quote, "We've been shot, we've been shot," unquote, and put his free hand on the horn.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  He held it down until a battery gave out, and then went down on the pavement. Now, the first officers to arrive found Stacy still conscious, and she actually talked to them. And nearby neighbors came out to the scene with towels and stayed with them until the ambulance came. And at the hospital, he was told to expect the worst, quote, "The doctor said I was not going to make it, and that Stacy would," unquote, he would say. However, Stacy would actually pass away the following day on the 1st of August. And she was the only blonde woman the Son of Sam had ever shot. And they would bury her two days after that at King Solomon Cemetery in Clifton, New Jersey. And days went by before anybody told Robert the truth of what he had lost.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  His father, the man he called his best pal, told him his sight was completely gone. And weeks after that, his father would tell him that Stacy had actually passed away, and Robert would say that he, quote-unquote, "cried like a baby." So Cecilia Davis lived on Bay 17th Street, a block from the park. And she got home in the early hours of the morning and took her dog Snowball out. Now, out on the street, she passed a police officer putting a ticket on a car somebody had left beside, a hydrant. And a few moments after the officers drove off, a young man came along the sidewalk from the direction of that car. And he looked her over as he went by, and he had some sort of dark object in his hand. And she went home fast after

• 50:25Speaker 02

  that, and behind her, she heard the shots. Three car lengths ahead of Robert's car, and a nineteen-year-old named Tommy Zano was parked with his own date. And he caught a glimpse of a man coming up on the passenger side, and then he looked in his rearview mirror. And between the streetlight and the full moon, he had a very clear view of him for a few seconds. And he put him at twenty-five to thirty years old, average height, with shaggy hair, somewhere between dark blonde and light brown. Quote-unquote, "It looked like a wig," Zano would say. And on the far side of the park, a woman sitting in a car with her boyfriend watched a man run out of the trees and get into a small, light-colored

• 51:06Speaker 02

  car. And she said he was wearing a light-colored, cheap nylon wig. He got clocked. Quote, "He looks like he just robbed a bank," unquote, she would say. And other people on those streets described something else again, which was a yellow Volkswagen speeding away with its headlights off. So the sightings piled up until the police came to believe the killer drove one, and there were more than nine hundred Volkswagens to find in New York and New Jersey. And later that morning, there were crowds down on Shore Road, and Cecilia now understood what she had walked past. And still, she said nothing for four days. Quote-unquote, "I panicked, and I couldn't say anything." But when she did go to the

• 51:47Speaker 02

  police, they pulled every car that had been ticketed around there that night. And Detective James Justice went through the summonses that had been filed, and one of them was a twenty-five-dollar ticket written at that hydrant, and the registration on it came back to Yonkers. And it was a yellow nineteen-seventy Ford Galaxy in David Berkowitz's own name, at an address twenty-five miles from Brooklyn. And the ticket had been written before the shooting had actually happened. So on August ninth, Justice rang the Yonkers police to have somebody set up an interview with the owner of the car. And the dispatcher who took the call was a woman named Wade Carr, and she knew the name Berkowitz straight

• 52:28Speaker 02

  away, saying, quote, "Let me tell you about him. I know him. He lives right behind me," unquote. And she told him this man had shot her father's black Labrador, and her father's name was Sam Carr. Now, Justice heard the name Sam and had a strong feeling that there was something to this. And the Yonkers police had their own file on Berkowitz. So a deputy sheriff named Craig Glassman lived one floor below him and had reported him for harassment, actually. And Glassman went in and out of the building in uniform, and Berkowitz had come to hate him for it. And somebody had set a fire outside Glassman's door with twenty-two rounds sitting inside of it. And we all know who loves to light fucking fires. And they

• 53:11Speaker 02

  told Justice they thought Berkowitz was the man everybody was looking for. And the next day, they went up to Thirty-Five Pine Street, and the Galaxy was parked right outside. And there was a handgun sitting on the backseat, where anyone could see it, and that allowed them to open the car, because they had probable cause. And inside, they found a duffel bag of ammunition, maps of the places he had shot people, and a letter addressed to Dowd. Now, nobody went up to the apartment to confront Berkowitz, because the hallway up there was narrow, and they didn't want to take the chance of a violent situation in cramped corridors. And they were also waiting on a warrant that would ensure their search held up in court. And the warrant still had not come when he walked out at about ten

• 53:55Speaker 02

  o'clock that night and got into his car. Now Detective John Folatiko came up to the driver's side and put his gun near Berkowitz's temple. And Detective Sergeant William Gardella took the passenger side. And on the seat beside him was a paper bag with a forty-four in it. Quote-unquote, "Well, you got me," Berkowitz would say. And Officer Folatiko asked him a question, saying, quote-unquote, "Now that I've got you, who have I got?" "You know," Berkowitz would say back. And Folatiko remembered the voice as soft, almost sweet. Quote-unquote, "No, I don't. You tell me." And Berkowitz would say, "I'm Sam."

• 54:35Speaker 02

  And Folatiko would say, "You're Sam? Sam who?" And Berkowitz would say, "Sam. David Berkowitz." Now Folatiko remembered the big smile on his face, and he could never quite explain it. Berkowitz told them he had been on his way out to kill again. Now, the warrant came, and they went up to apartment seven E. And the place was a mess, to say the least. The holes he had punched in the walls were still there, and so was the writing beside them. One message read, quote, "Hi, my name is Mr. Williams, and I live in this hole," unquote. And there were three stenographer notebooks, almost completely full, diaries he had been keeping since he was twenty-one. And he had written down hundreds of fires he had set

• 55:20Speaker 02

  around New York, as we know. And by the mattresses, which had no sheets on it, he had written four more words, quote, "Sam Carr, my master," unquote.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  David Berkowitz, twenty-four years old, a postal worker, walked out of his Yonkers apartment last night, turned the ignition key in his car, and found himself surrounded by police. "Well," he said, "you got me."

• 55:41Speaker 02

  So they held him in Yonkers for a little while, and then drove him down to the police headquarters in Lower Manhattan. And Mayor Bean got there around one in the morning, looked at him without saying anything, and went back out to the reporters, quote, "The people of the city of New York can rest easy because of the fact that police have captured a man whom they believe to be the son of Sam," unquote. And the questioning itself took about a half an hour, early on the morning of August eleventh. And Joe Coffey, a sergeant on the task force, had been waiting upstairs to question him, and he said he had wanted to take hold of him and put him out the window. But then he said, quote, "As I listened to him, my anger began to disappear, and I almost started to feel sorry

• 56:23Speaker 02

  for him," unquote. John Keenan was the one who took the confession. Berkowitz gave his confession up quickly and told them he wanted to plead guilty. And he went through the shootings, and he knew things about the letter that had never been printed anywhere. And he confessed to all eight of them, every shooting they would charge him with. And there was no longer any question about who they had. And then he told them why he had done it, and it was the same thing he had believed up in Yonkers. "The dog wanted the blood from attractive Yonkers girls," he said, "and the orders were passed down from Sam." Quote-unquote, "He told me to kill Sam as the devil." And he also gave them

• 57:04Speaker 02

  the plans for a night that hadn't yet happened. He had wanted to finish his spree at a nightclub out in the Hamptons, shooting into the crowd on the dance floor. And he said he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, and he admitted to the fires as well. And while all of that settled who he was, it did not settle what to do with him. Because a psychiatric report went to the state Supreme Court justices on the thirteenth of August, and the finding was that he was not fit to stand trial. Daniel Schwartz and Richard Wydenbaker found him well aware of the six murder charges and able to follow the legal process that was forming against him. But they judged that paranoid psychosis had left him so emotionally

• 57:46Speaker 02

  dead that he could not help his own lawyers, nor did he want to. And Eugene Gold, the district attorney in Brooklyn, would not accept the report, and he got a court order to have his own man examine him. And David Abramson spent a month interviewing him, and he came out that time saying the demons were something Berkowitz could switch on and off. So he said they were a conscious invention. Let's take a quick pause to talk about something quite embarrassing. I will happily spend four hours researching a cult, but asked me to call a doctor's office, and I am suddenly very busy. I've been known to put off checkups for years. I was gonna say months, but honestly, years. Because

• 58:28Speaker 02

  of phone anxiety, old music, voicemails, and then eventually finding out that they're not even, like, in your network, or that they can't do a virtual visit, or that it'll take, like, seventy-four business days to actually see a doctor. It's just, it's just not for me. But don't be like me. Well, be like me now, because I use Zocdoc now. And this episode is sponsored by Zocdoc, and it's how I finally stopped stalling. Now, Zocdoc lets you search and compare high-quality in-network doctors, and you can see actual appointment openings and click to instantly book a visit with no phone call required. Thank God. And Zocdoc is free to use. F-R-E-E, it's free. And I chose a doctor based on

• 59:09Speaker 02

  what mattered to me and booked it in about, like, two, three minutes? But your health matters, and taking care of yourself shouldn't be complicated. So head to zocdoc.com slash CCCM to get started and check that appointment off your to-do list, for the love of God. That's z-o-c-d-o-c dot com slash CCCM. Thank you so much to Zocdoc for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel, and let's get back to it.

• 59:37Speaker 02

  So Berkowitz was arraigned on August 11th, the day after the arrest. And Brooklyn was chosen only hours beforehand because Brooklyn was where the final attack had occurred. Now, the court used its biggest room and it filled up with reporters, with families, and with people who just wanted to see him. And more of them were lined up outside. Anisa Moskowitz, Stacy's mother, was in the courtroom crying. And when word went round that Berkowitz was about to be brought in, she started screaming. And then a side door opened and the room went quiet. And Judge Richard Brown said afterwards, quote, "You could cut the tension with a knife," unquote. And six detectives sat around him and two dozen court officers stood in a line across

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  the front of the room to separate him from the people watching. And the bailiff called out the docket number and his name, and Brown said, quote, "You could literally hear a pin drop," unquote. And Brown asked him one question, quote unquote, "You, sir, are David R. Berkowitz?" And Berkowitz would say, "Yes, sir." And that was the only time Berkowitz would speak. Now, the charges were read out on an affidavit sworn by Detective John Folletico. And Berkowitz was held without bail and sent to Kings County Hospital for psychiatric evaluation and to be kept away from every other patient there in protective custody. And his father heard about the arrest in a retirement home down in Florida, and he would

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  say, quote, "If David did these things, I don't expect you to forgive him, as this would be too much to ask of you. I will live with this heartache for the rest of my life," unquote. And Berkowitz spent the next eight months in the prison ward at Kings County with people outside the building holding protest signs of hatred about him. And the staff said he seemed remarkably untroubled by the place. And in October, Justice John Starkey heard the question of Berkowitz's competency and agreed with Abramson. But a week later, Starkey was off the case over controversial things he had said to the press about Berkowitz meaning to blame the demons. And a new hearing was set again for the spring in front of a different judge.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  By the time it came round, Schwartz and Widenbacher had changed their minds, and they said the treatment was working and that he could take part in his own defense now. However, they did not say he had been sane on the nights of the shootings. So their change of opinion helped Judge Joseph Corso rule that he was fit to stand trial. Now, Abramson's prior findings on the demons had already taken much of the ground out from under the insanity defense. But still, Berkowitz's own lawyers wanted to argue that he was not guilty by reason of insanity, but Berkowitz wouldn't let them. And he told them the decision was his to make. So on May 8th, 1978, the whole case was brought into the Brooklyn courtroom, and

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  everybody expected him to plead guilty, so the three boroughs proceedings had been combined for security and to save cost of running three trials. So three judges took the bench in turn: Joseph Corso for Brooklyn, William Kapman for the Bronx, and Nicholas Sukalos for Queens. Now, one after another, he pleaded guilty to all of it: seven counts of attempted murder in the second degree and six counts of murder in the second degree. And Walter Cronkite reported it that evening, saying, quote, "There was no outward sign of emotion, no expressed remorse today, as David Berkowitz pleaded guilty in a Brooklyn, New York court to six random Son of Sam murders," unquote.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  And Sukalos asked him about the two young women he had wounded out in Queens and whether he had meant to do them serious injury. And he replied, "Oh, no, sir. I wanted to kill them. Just chills up my spine." But because Berkowitz pleaded guilty, no jury ever sat and decided whether he was sane on the nights he did the shootings. So that question was left unresolved. So the judges came back on May 22nd to sentence him, but the hearing didn't quite get that far, as he started chanting in something like a nursery rhyme that, quote unquote, "Stacy was a whore." And Anisa Moskowitz came up out of her seat, saying, quote unquote, "You animal."

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  And Robert Vialanti got to his feet as well and said, quote unquote, "You should die, you should rot in hell." And he said afterwards that it was total anger and that he couldn't control himself. And then Berkowitz blew up, shouting, quote unquote, "I'd kill them all again." And Dr. Martin Lubin said his actions weren't just for show, and they were meant in hopes, quote, "That someone might shoot him, but in particular, he wanted to dive out of the window," unquote. So the guards dragged him out of the room, and the sentencing was put off. And the next morning, the Daily News ran Joseph Pappin's drawings of the scene across its front page. And on June 12th, he came back quiet and the sentence was handed down.

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  Each of the six killings carried 25 years to life, the most the law allowed, with further time on top for the people who had lived. And the six terms were set to run one after another. But New York merged sentences like that when it came to parole and treated the man as though he had killed only once. So the number that mattered was just 25 years, and it ran out in 2002. So before he was even sentenced, Berkowitz had sold the rights to his story. And in response, the state legislature passed a law in 1977 written to stop him earning a dollar out of what he had done, which, thank God, money from any book or film about

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  the crime went into an escrow account held by the state, and any victim who won a judgment against him could claim it. So the law took his name, and it was called the Son of Sam Law. And the federal government ended up writing its own version, along with 42 states. And in Berkowitz's own case, it took eight years of legal fighting before the board could hand any money to the families. And the law itself actually did not survive. And Simon & Schuster took the New York Board to court over Nicholas Pileggi's book about a mafia man named Henry Hill, the one that became Goodfellas. And in 1991, the Supreme Court struck the statute down, and not one justice dissented.

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  And Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, quote, "A statute is presumptively inconsistent with the First Amendment if it imposes financial burden on speakers because of the content of their speech," unquote. So the trouble was that the law reached any book in which a writer owned up to a crime, whether or not anybody had ever charged him with it. And by that standard, the court said, it would have taken the money from St. Augustine, Henry David Thoreau, and Malcolm X. And New York then amended the law to cover any money a criminal made out of a crime, rather than money made from telling about it, if that makes sense. And other states followed, and several courts have gone on striking down the new versions as well.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  And the case caused a change in police work as well. And James Justice said afterwards that information moved better between the precincts and the boroughs than it ever had prior. And the case is part of why American police forces went on to take up criminal profiling altogether. If you guys have seen Mindhunter, you'd know Son of Sam is in it. Not actually the Son of Sam, but a guy who looks exactly like him acted as him in it, and he was actually part of that profiling process, which is really interesting. I highly recommend going to watch Mindhunter. I want them to make a second season so bad. Netflix, please. And the newspapers were not the same afterwards either. And a man named Rupert Murdoch had bought The Post at the end of 1976. Beaten to the Brestland letter by The Daily News, he put a reporter named Steve Dunlevy

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  on it and told him to dig up whatever he could. And after the last shooting, Dunlevy got himself to the hospital alongside the victim's parents, and The Post had the exclusive the next morning. And then he wrote a front page appealing to the Son of Sam to give himself up, preferably to The Post rather than the police. And when Berkowitz's name got out, four reporters were arrested trying to break into the Yonkers apartment from The Post, The Daily News, Time, and The Washington Post. Just scum. And the day after the arrest, the paper ran "Caught" across the front, and 16 more stories inside in the first chapter of a novel, it said, may have inspired the Son of Sam himself.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  Now, Dunlevy turned up old love letters Berkowitz had sent a girlfriend, and The Post ran them as "How I Became a Mass Killer." And even Murdoch admitted later that they had gone too far with that one. Yeah, no fucking shit. So after the sentence, Berkowitz went into the hands of the State's Department of Mental Hygiene and into State's prison a few months after that. And by the end of the 70s, he was at Attica. And in 1979, another prisoner opened his throat with a razor, and it took more than 50 stitches to repair, and the cut ran down the left side of his neck, giving him a scar. And James Conway, a corrections officer on the staff then, later named the man as William Hauser, who did it, who was inside for beating somebody to death with a rolling pin.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  So, seems like Berkowitz got off easy with the one razor blade cut. But the razor was never found, and Berkowitz was too frightened to name anyone, so Hauser was never charged. And Conway said, quote, "It was a pretty gaping wound. I think it would not have bothered Hauser if he had killed Berkowitz. Hey, I'm the guy who took out the Son of Sam," unquote. And he's speaking as if he was Hauser. And New York Correctional Services moved him around the prison system over the years, the way they deal with security for a man that well-known. And he spent years at Sullivan, a correctional facility upstate, and is at Shondum Correctional now, 60 miles north of the city and behind maximum security. And in 1987, 10 years in, he says he found-

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  And he told a criminologist named Scott Bond that he had stopped believing he would get through his time in prison and that he often thought about dying. And one night, he went down on his knees for half an hour and asked to be forgiven. And he said his prayers were answered and his fear and pain were removed from him. And he took a new name for himself, the Son of Hope. And at Sullivan, he was the only prisoner allowed to work as a mentor and spiritual advisor to impaired men there. And the others called him Brother Dave. Don't give this guy a role to have an ego. What is, what? And his account of why he committed his crimes has changed over the years. Bit of

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  a pathological liar, Berkowitz is. And he eventually recanted the demon story altogether, and then said for years that a satanic cult had been in it with him. And then said in 2013 that he had acted alone and that the dog had never told him anything, believe it or not. Quote, "I was once an evil man and I truly believed that Satan would come and release me." Unquote. Berkowitz's adopted father Nathan died in 2012 at 101 years old, after sticking by his son's side despite his actions. And Berkowitz cried while talking about what he had put the old man through. And in 2017, he was asked what he would

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  say to the families. Quote, "Well, I've apologized many times. I wish I could go back and change things. People that were hurt, people that are still in pain, suffering the loss because of my criminal actions. And I never forget that. Sometimes that weighs very heavy on me." Unquote. And he became eligible for parole in 2002, and he wrote to the governor asking not to be let out. Quote, "I can give you no good reason why I should be considered for parole. In all honesty, I believe I deserve to be in prison for the rest of my life." Unquote. Smartest thing he's literally ever said. And the board has heard him every two years since and turned him down every time he appeared. 12 times, to be exact.

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  And the last was in May of 2024. And in May of 2026, he did not turn up at all. And he wrote to a newspaper to say that he was not asking to be released, that he expected to go to heaven, and that he keeps a small congregation in the unit where he lives. But though Berkowitz was behind bars, a reporter named Maury Terry never accepted that the case was finished. Now Terry worked at finding the others he believed had worked with Berkowitz for decades, and put all of the effort into a 1987 book called The Ultimate Evil. Now, he died in 2015, and nobody else was ever charged. And he argued that Berkowitz

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  belonged to a satanic cult that met in Uttermire Park in Yonkers, and that its members had helped with the shootings. And there was a path that ran up to the park from behind Berkowitz's building and the car house leading to a spot with a satanic graffiti and an old pump house with blood on the floor. And his evidence came from the letters. The one in Breslin listed names the writer said he could be called, and one of them was John Wheaties. John Carr's middle name was Wheat, and boys at school had called him Wheaties. And he was Sam Carr's son and Wheat Carr's brother. And the first letter had Papa Sam keeping the writer locked in the attic and getting mean when he drank. And a retired

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  Yonkers detective said that was close to what people said about Sam Carr and his own boys, that he would beat them and shut them at the attic. And the eyewitnesses had never agreed either, because the man Tommy Zano watched in his mirror did not look like Berkowitz, apparently. Zano said, "The man had blond straw-like hair, while Berkowitz had curly dark hair." But I mean, there was plenty of witnesses that said he was just wearing a cheap wig. And I feel like a man might not be able to tell if it's a cheap wig or if he actually looked blond. So I don't know how well that holds up. And the car people kept describing was not the car Berkowitz drove, apparently. And in 1997, Berkowitz gave Terry a new account. And he said he had been at all eight shootings, but had

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  killed only three of the six: Donna, Valentina, and Alexander. And the rest of the time, he said, "He was the lookout while somebody else fired." And he named John Carr as the gunman at one of the Queen's shootings and Michael Carr at the disco. But he would not name anyone else, and said his family would be at the mercy of the others if he did. But he has never been cross-examined on any of this since his confession. And by then, the story had already turned over twice, from a dog giving orders to no dog at all to a satanic cult. And each version left him holding less of the blame. And both Carr brothers were dead before any of this could be tested at all. John was found shot at

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  My Not in Dorton, Dakota in February 1978, about six months after the arrest. And the death was put down as suicide and later reopened as a possible murder. And a counselor from the area said that John had come to him weeks earlier, quote, "agitated and upset", saying he had gotten into witchcraft and that somebody was trying to kill him. And Michael died at 27 in a one-car crash on the West Side Highway in 1979. Now, Yonkers Police reopened the Son of Sam case in 1996, and the Queen's District Attorney reopened his own. But no new charges came out of either, and both were eventually closed. And despite the lack of other people charged, Johnson Tucci, the Queen's District Attorney, said

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  of the situation, quote, "I believe David Berkowitz did not act alone, that in fact others did cooperate, aid, and abet him." Unquote. And Carl DeNaro has said the same for years, saying, quote, "There's no way that David Berkowitz did all the shootings. I personally think it was a cult. I don't know that for a fact, but I am convinced that, and no one can unconvince me, that more than one person was involved." Unquote. And the detectives who worked the case haven't changed their minds either, though on the other side of the argument. Joe Coffey says, quote, "As far as I am concerned, and I'll go to my grave with this, he acted alone." Unquote. And John Douglas, the FBI profiler,

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  called him, end quote, "introverted loner, not capable of being involved in group activity." Unquote. And people who have gone back over the case since have mostly landed in the same place. But I'm curious what you guys think, so let me know down below. But all in all, Berkowitz has stopped talking to reporters, and he turned down an interview in 2026, noting in a letter, quote, "I don't trust the media. They will twist and distort whatever I say." Unquote. And he publishes himself now on a website, he says, holds more than 1,000 pages of his prison writings. And some things about this case were never quite settled, including Carl DeNaro's belief that someone other than Berkowitz shot him,

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  and a legal determination of whether Berkowitz was sane on the nights he committed the crimes. But regardless of the unknowns, Berkowitz will likely spend the rest of his days in prison. And whether sincere or not, Berkowitz wrote in his letter to Breslin that people could forget about him, but they'd better not forget Donna Loria. And I personally am going to choose to remember the six victims that passed. But that is that for the Son of Sam case. A lot of you guys requested this one, so please request any other cases you would like me to deep dive into. And until next time, I will see your beautiful face, and please, please stay safe out there. Okay? Bye.