William Safire, the noted wordsmith for the New York Times, traced the oldest form of the word Bogeyman to thirteenth-century France. The word they used was Bugibu. In the later Middle Ages, Satan became known as Old Bogey. Safire suggests that there is a link between Satan and the Bogeyman. And some people — including Berkowitz himself — believe that Satan and the Son of Sam are also connected.
Safire explains how in Iceland the Bogeyman is puki, in Scotland he is called boggart, and in Germany he is Boggelmann. He also has theorized that the scarifier Boo comes from Bogeyman.
Writer Sharon K. West once did an essay on the fiend. “Bogeymen have no distinct habitat and can appear out of nowhere,” she concluded.
Well, New York had its own Bogeyman. No one knew where he lived and he did appear out of nowhere.
It was on April 17, 1977, that the Son of Sam came out of his lonely and twisted closet to show all of New York City just who they were going to have to deal with.
On that early Sunday morning at 3 a.m., a young couple, Alex Esau and Valentina Suriani, coming home from a date in Manhattan, were parked in a Mercury Montego along the lonely service road of the Hutchinson River Parkway in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx. As the couple hugged and kissed, David Berkowitz sneaked up to the car and shot them through the passenger-side window, killing them both.
He walked away and dropped a note addressed to NYPD Captain Joe Borrelli. In simple block letters, the message read:
I am the “Son of Sam”... I am the “monster” — “Beelzebub” — the “chubby behemoth”... I am on a different wavelength then [sic] everybody else — programmed to kill... to stop me you must kill me... I’ll be back! I’ll be back!
After thirty years he has never really gone away.
In the summer of 1976, I started hearing some disturbing rumors about Satanic cults operating in the wooded sections of Orchard Beach in the Bronx and up in Untermyer Park in Yonkers. After Son of Sam’s arrest, it was revealed that his home address was a short walk from Untermyer Park.
I was employed that summer as a parkie at Orchard Beach, and one day as I was raking sand, a fellow worker said, “Yo, man, stay out of those backwoods here, they’re dangerous! Especially at night. There’s some sick shit going on out there with these devil-worshipping dudes. I think they kill dogs and drink the blood.”
I had been going to Orchard Beach since I was a kid and I couldn’t see devil-worshipping going down there. It was a place my father called the Bronx’s Riviera. The beach had seen racial wars, when whites would wander into what the Puerto Ricans had claimed as their section, or vice versa. But it is a big leap from stupid territorial brawls to Satanism.
Even so, I could believe it was happening up in Untermyer Park. That was in the suburbs and home to most of the heavy metal heads in the metropolitan area, including many who were interested in the occult. Back then I thought New York City kids were just too jaded to be into Satan. God has trouble drawing an audience in New York, never mind a second-rate deity like Old Scratch.
Untermyer was a weird park, though, and a lot of Bronx kids would go up there to cop marijuana or acid. The park was a former rich man’s sprawling estate located above the Hudson River. There were old, creepy Gothic towers with gargoyles on top and abandoned stone buildings throughout the grounds. It was thick with overgrown brambles, gardens, and woods. I could imagine, in the more secluded sections of the park, a band of hooded Satanists sacrificing dogs on nights when the moon was full.
Satanism did seem to be in back in those days. The movie The Exorcist was in rerelease (this was before video) and one of the most popular films of the summer in 1976 was The Omen.
I was having a hard enough time just getting by in 1976. Teenage years are tough everywhere, but in New York they can be particularly brutal. And one of the things I had never seen in New York was devil worship, so I was a bit intrigued. Every morning before work I would think about my Orchard Beach coworker’s warning, “Stay out of those woods, man.”
I would look into those foreboding trees on the other end of the beach and wonder. Then I would forget about it. Until one July 1976 morning when the night watchman at Orchard Beach was getting off duty and called me over to his car. He told me that at midnight he had seen a bunch of people on the beach wearing hooded black robes standing in a circle. He moved closer and heard them chanting and staring up at the full moon. He ran back to the parkie house, locked himself in, and called the cops. The figures were gone by the time the police arrived. We both shook our heads and I swore I’d never let the sun set on my ass at Orchard Beach.
On July 30, 1976, I was on a break from my parkie job. I sat in the shade of a locker room sipping a coffee and reading the New York Post.
One story on the front page caught my eye. A mile from Orchard Beach, in a neighborhood known as Pelham Bay, two young girls, Jody Valenti and Donna Lauria, had been shot the night before while sitting in a 1974 Oldsmobile Cutlass. They were talking about their night at a New Rochelle disco when a lone gunman sneaked up on them and started shooting. He killed Lauria and badly wounded Valenti. She later recovered.
Wild story, I remember thinking. I finished the article and cynically thought it was a mistaken mob hit. The Pelham Bay neighborhood was no stranger to Mafia shootings. I figured the long-haired girls had been mistaken for some hippy drug dealers working the forbidden zone of a good Italian neighborhood.
The only problem with that theory was that when the mob boys hit, everyone dies. There are no witnesses left. In this shooting, only one girl died. Jody Valenti was able to give the police a good eyewitness sketch of the gunman.
After a day or two all the local dailies dropped the story. There were nearly twenty thousand murders in America in 1976. Poor and dead Donna Lauria was forgotten. (Though not by her father, who publicly threatened to kill Berkowitz in 2006, years after he was convicted of the murder.) What no one knew then was that the girls would later become immortalized as the Son of Sam’s first victims.
In 1953, Son of Sam was given the name David Richard Berkowitz. He was born Richard David Falco, and on his Brooklyn birth certificate, Anthony Falco was listed as his father. His birth mother, Betty Broder Falco, later claimed that his real father was one Joseph Kleinman, her lover who refused to have a baby with her. They remained lovers until Kleinman died of cancer in 1965.
The baby’s mother gave up the infant for adoption to Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz, a childless middle-aged couple living in the East Bronx. They switched the birth names around and called him David. Baby David was raised on Stratford Avenue in the Bronx. Nathan Berkowitz owned a hardware store and Pearl was a housewife. David was to be their only child.
In an attempt to interview David Berkowitz, I wrote him a letter and sent it to the prison where he is being housed. He answered.
Dear Mr. Sullivan,
I received a letter from you informing me that you are planning on doing a story about my life. I was very saddened to learn this because, first of all, you do not know me at all. Second, so much has changed within the past years.
I am unable to grant you an interview at this time. I cannot stop you from writing anything. However, if you would like to know my opinion about the case and many things related to it I am enclosing some pamphlets I wrote. Today, thanks to God, I am living with a lot of hope.