Terror In New York: The Chilling Case of David Berkowitz "The Son of Sam"
For over a year in the late 1970s, an unknown gunman targeted and shot young women and couples seemingly at random. The senseless violence gripped New York City in fear
It was the sweltering summer of 1977.
R&B was at the top of the charts, Saturday Night Fever had just been released, and across the nation, the young and wild were thronging to clubs and discos to dance their cares away.
Perhaps more than most, New Yorkers needed the release.
Jobs were increasingly hard to come by, and crime was steadily on the rise. In July, a series of lightning strikes caused blackouts–and subsequent looting incidents–across the city.
Worse still, though, were the rumors of an indiscriminate killer with a .44-caliber revolver.
He called himself “The Son of Sam.”
David Berkowitz
David Berkowitz was born in Brooklyn in June of 1953.
His mother, Elizabeth “Betty” Broder, had one other child, the product of a previous marriage to an Italian American man. But because her Jewish family didn’t approve of her marriage to a gentile, their relationship did not last.
Soon, her husband had left her for another woman–leaving Broder to parent her daughter alone.
Over a decade later, Broder was involved in an affair with a married man named Joseph Kleinman. When she discovered that she was pregnant, Kleinman vehemently opposed paying any child support and threatened to leave her unless she gave up the baby.
By the time David was born, Broder had already arranged for his adoption. She carried on her relationship with Kleinman until he died of cancer in 1965.
Adoption and Childhood
David’s adoptive parents were Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz, a childless Jewish couple from the Bronx.
David suffered from emotional problems very early on in his childhood. He was a loner, prone to larceny and fire starting, and his neighbors and relatives described him as “difficult, spoiled, and a bully.”
Regardless, his adoptive parents were devoted to their new son and did the best they could for him.
Pearl and David, in particular, became very close. But even his relationship with his adoptive mother wasn’t without its dark side: David was so obsessive that he poisoned her pet parakeet because he felt that she paid more attention to it than to him.
Perhaps this obsession is why everything took a turn for the worse in the fall of 1967 when Pearl succumbed to a long battle with breast cancer.
David’s performance in school (which was already lacking) took a nose-dive, and he became increasingly introverted.
He never warmed up to his adoptive father’s new relationship, and when the couple married in 1971, they immediately moved to a retirement community in Florida, leaving David alone in New York.
Adulthood and Relationship Troubles
David seemed to always have trouble with relationships. In his early adulthood, he only had one relationship with a woman, and even that was little more than a fantasy–as she only considered him a friend.
In the summer of 1971, David enlisted in the United States Army and was deployed to Korea. He served until he was honorably discharged in 1974.
During his time in the army, David had two major turning points in his life: his conversion from Judaism to Baptist Christianity and his first and only sexual experience, which was with a Korean prostitute.
When he returned to the US in June of 1974, David sought to meet his birth mother. But the relationship was not what he had imagined it to be. While Broder and her daughter, Roslyn, made every attempt to bring David into their family, he was distressed to learn about his reluctant father and his mother’s adultery and eventually drifted away.
During this time, David began setting fires around New York City and documenting each one in a journal.
Increasing Paranoia and First Attacks
David made his first genuine cry for help in November 1975, when he wrote to his father of the cold and gloomy weather in New York City–and his increasing paranoia about the people around him.
“You wouldn't believe how much some people hate me,” David wrote:
“Many of them want to kill me. I don't even know these people, but still they hate me. Most of them are young. I walk down the street and they spit and kick at me. The girls call me ugly and they bother me the most. The guys just laugh. Anyhow, things will soon change for the better.”
Meanwhile, David shut himself into his apartment and began writing incoherently on the walls. In meetings with psychiatrists, he claimed that he was being tormented by demons, who were demanding that he commit unspeakable acts against women.
On Christmas Eve, David armed himself with a hunting knife and returned to Co-Op City, where he had lived with Nathan for a few years following Pearl’s death.
It was here that he went looking for his first victims.
The first victim, he claims, was a Hispanic woman, although this story was never successfully confirmed by the police.
The second was 15-year-old Michelle Forman. He stabbed her six times, and she was left hospitalized for a week.
David was not a suspect in either attack, and afterward, he treated himself to a burger and fries at a local diner.
First Murders
Following the Christmas Eve attacks, David moved from his apartment in the Bronx to Yonkers. During this time, it seems apparent that Berkowitz was struggling with his mental health.
The shock and betrayal he felt upon learning the details surrounding his birth and adoption, combined with his increasing loneliness and isolation, was a recipe for trouble.
Berkowitz would claim that his neighbor’s black lab was possessed by a bloodthirsty demon named “Sam,” and he ordered David to do terrible things. Berkowitz would later claim that the story of “Sam” was a hoax.
The first killings committed by Berkowitz were on July 29, 1976, when David matter-of-factly approached two women, Donna Lauria and Jody Valenti, who were sitting in a parked car outside of Lauria’s home discussing the events of their night out.
Before they had time to react, David produced a gun from a paper bag, crouched, and shot.
Lauria was shot in the neck and died immediately. Valenti was shot in the thigh. While David reloaded his gun, she managed to fall against the car horn, drawing attention and chasing him away.
Valenti was in too much shock to provide much more than a vague description of the killer.
In October 1976, he struck again, ambushing Carl Denaro and Rosemary Keenan as the pair sat in Keenan’s car in Flushing, Queens. They survived the shooting, though Denaro had been shot in the head and required a metal plate.
The following month, in November, he randomly attacked and shot two high school students on Long Island as they were returning home from a movie. Luckily, both victims survived. However, one of them was left paralyzed.
In January 1977, Berkowitz attacked another couple as they sat in a parked car. Christine Freund and her fiancé, John Diel, were preparing to go out for the evening when their car was suddenly struck by gunfire.
Diel quickly pulled off, having sustained minor wounds. Tragically, Christine had been shot twice and died in the attack.
In March 1977, Berkowitz shot and killed a 20-year-old University student named Virginia Voskerichian.
The shootings continued over the following year, and before long, police had figured out that there was a common element. The serial killer seemed to be targeting couples and young women, particularly brunettes.
The Son of Sam
While the police scrambled to narrow down suspects and the residents of New York were gripped by fear, David became emboldened by all the media attention.
In April of 1977, only a couple of blocks away from the Lauria and Valenti shooting, there was a new attack–a young couple, Alexander Esau and Valentina Suriani, were shot in a parked car.
Suriani died on the scene, while Esau, who had been shot twice in the head, passed away in a hospital only a few hours later.
Near their bodies, police found a letter addressed to the NYPD Captain Joseph Borrelli.
In the letter, David referred to himself as “The Son of Sam” and wrote extensively of his paranoid fantasies about the demon Sam: “I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon [sic] hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the ‘Son of Sam’... Sam loves to drink blood. ‘Go out and kill’ commands father Sam.”
David continued to contact police and media outlets over the following months.
In June 1977, Salvatore Lupo and Judy Placido were shot as they sat in Lupo’s parked car in the early morning hours after leaving a disco. Though they each sustained injuries in the attack, both victims survived the shooting.
In July 1977, Berkowitz ambushed and shot Robert Violante and Stacy Moskowitz as they sat in a parked car in Bath Beach, Brooklyn. Moskowitz was killed, and Violante lost an eye.
Investigation and Arrest
Weeks after the July shooting that resulted in the death of 20-year-old Stacy Moskowitz and the loss of her boyfriend Robert Violante’s eye, Brooklyn local Cacilia Davis was walking her dog near the scene of the crime.
She noticed a police officer ticketing cars in the area. Moments after the police had left, a man approached her, holding a shadowed object in his hands. Davis immediately fled, hearing gunshots behind her.
Four days later, she reported the event to the police, who checked every car that had been ticketed in the area. One of them was David’s yellow Ford Galaxie.
Investigators checked David’s car, where they found a rifle, a duffel bag of ammunition, maps of various crime scenes, and an unsent letter addressed to Sergeant Dowd of the Omega task force.
Without a warrant, the police decided to wait outside David’s apartment. On August 10, 1977, When he emerged, he was holding his signature .44-caliber Bulldog in a brown paper bag.
He allegedly told the police, “Well, you got me. How come it took you such a long time?”
Trial and Aftermath
Following a series of psychological examinations, defense lawyers concluded that David was a paranoid schizophrenic and begged him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. But David obstinately refused and pleaded guilty to his crimes.
During the trial, David had a number of outbursts, including verbal outbursts against his victims, “I’d kill her again! I’d kill them all again!” He also attempted to jump out of the seventh-floor courtroom’s window.
Repeated psychiatric examinations concluded that he was fit to stand trial.
On June 12, 1978, David was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for each murder, to be served consecutively–a total of 365 years in jail.
According to the terms of his plea, he would be eligible for parole in 25 years and entitled to parole hearings every two years thereafter.
Since he first became eligible for parole in 2002, David has made 12 appearances (most recently, in May 2024) before the parole board, although he refuses to ask for his release.
“To not attend a hearing can be viewed as being defiant towards authority, and that’s not me,” he explained. “Most of all, I attend in order to openly apologize for my past crimes and to express my remorse.”
Meanwhile, he has converted to Evangelical Christianity and rebranded himself as the “Son of Hope.” He is involved in prison ministry, and a local church maintains a website for him, which includes a formal apology and testimonies about his experiences with Christianity and the occult.
Sources:
Bardsley, Marilyn. “David Berkowitz: The Son of Sam.” The Crime Library, www.crimelibrary.org/serial_killers/notorious/berkowitz/letter_1.html.
Barron, James. “How a Son of Sam Detective Realized “This Has Got to Be the Guy” (Published 2017).” The New York Times, 6 Aug. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/08/06/nyregion/son-of-sam-killings-david-berkowitz.html.
“David Berkowitz.” Crime Museum, 2014, www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/serial-killers/david-berkowitz/ .
Dodd, Kendra. “Son of Sam.” History of New York City, blogs.shu.edu/nyc-history/son-of-sam/.
Wikipedia Contributors. “David Berkowitz.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 6 May 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Berkowitz.
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