God bless you!
Sincerely,
David Berkowitz was, by all reports, a normal kid growing up in the Bronx. A number of his friends have stated that he was very good baseball player. His adoptive mother died in 1967 from breast cancer. In 1969, David moved with his father to Co-op City in the Bronx. They were a widowed father and son living together like in the TV show of that time The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.
Berkowitz volunteered for the army in 1971 because he wanted to fight in the Vietnam War. He passed all his medical and psychiatric tests. In a typical illustration of government inefficiency, he was not sent to Vietnam, but to Korea. In June of 1974, he received an honorable discharge.
Berkowitz came back to the Bronx and got a job as a security guard, then left that position to become a cab driver. In 1975, after an armed robbery at his hardware store, Nathan Berkowitz left New York for Florida and gave the Co-Op City apartment to his son. Berkowitz soon lost that and then moved to New Rochelle and, finally, to Pine Street in Yonkers.
After moving to Yonkers he started working at a post office in the Bronx, pretty much finalizing the background requirements for a serial killer: got his army weapons training, did the rent-a-cop thing, a bid as a cabby, and now he was a full-fledged post office employee about to go postal.
One of the small pamphlets that Berkowitz wrote in prison and sent me was called: SON OF SAMhain [an ancient druid name for the highest-ranking demon] The Incredible True Story of David Berkowitz.
He explained that his cult members were “sons of sam... sons of satan!” He claimed that he became heavily involved with the occult and witchcraft in 1975.
I recall a force that would drive me into the darkened streets... I roamed the streets like an alley cat in the darkness... Thoughts of suicide plagued me continually... I was so depressed and haunted... I was so wild, mixed-up and crazy that I could barely hang on to my sanity... I was overwhelmed with thoughts about dying... Books about witchcraft seemed to pop up all around me. Everywhere I looked there appeared a sign... pointing me to Satan... To someone who has never been involved in the occult, this could be hard to understand... The power leading me could not be resisted... I had no defense against the devil.
None of his victims had any defense against .44 caliber bullets.
After Berkowitz’s July hit in the Bronx, he went out to Queens on October 23, 1976. There, he hunted down a man and a woman. The woman was the daughter of a New York detective. He found them in a red Volkswagen, on 160th Street in Flushing. Several rounds were fired into the car, shattering the windows. The woman was able to put the vehicle into gear and escape unharmed. The man suffered a head wound, but eventually recovered.
Berkowitz later said he went to a White Castle on Northern Boulevard to celebrate with a bunch of belly-bomber hamburgers. He claimed that shooting couples in cars was starting to be fun.
He certainly seemed to like Queens. On November 27, 1976, Berkowitz asked two girls on 262nd Street for directions to a nearby house. Before they could answer he opened fire, hitting both. They survived, although one remains paralyzed for life.
Neither of these attacks got much press. No one had made a connection between the three shootings in 1976.
That would change on the cold winter night of January 29, 1977 — the day that TV actor Freddy Prinze of the hit series Chico and the Man committed suicide. A young Queens couple went out to Forest Hills on a date to see a movie called Rocky. Afterwards they stopped for a drink at a local pub and then walked quickly to their car, parked on Station Plaza.
They sat in a blue Pontiac Firebird, shivering in the bitter five-degree temperature, waiting for the car to warm up. As they started to snuggle, Berkowitz opened fire, killing the woman, Christine Freund.
February 1, 1977 marked the first story in the tabloids that alluded to the fact that the shootings might be connected. A sketch was shown of the gunman; it looked like the Berkowitz we later came to know. The police now suspected they had a serial killer on their hands.
But this was soon forgotten because on Valentine’s Day 1977 a neo-Nazi nut stormed the Neptune Moving Company in New Rochelle, a town just north of the Bronx, killing five people and himself in an all-day siege.
The local news stations broadcasted live footage of this and the next day’s papers were filled with the horrific tales of Fred Cowan, a thirty-three-year-old man from New Rochelle. He was a bald, hulking six foot, 250-pound weight lifter. He was a self-described Nazi, and a hater of blacks and Jews. In a rage over being suspended from his job at the moving company, he decided to take out his Jewish boss and some of his black coworkers.
For days afterwards the papers and TV news were filled with stories on Cowan. What they all missed was his odd connection to Son of Sam.
On March 8, 1977, the now labeled .44 Caliber Killer took back the headlines by shooting a college student named Virginia Voskerichian as she walked home from the subway to her apartment in Forest Hills. As the gunman approached her, her only defense was her textbooks, with which she covered her face. The bullets tore through her books and found her head. The shooting was two blocks away from the January ambush.
This was a busy neighborhood, and eyewitnesses saw two completely different-looking people running from the scene. Two drawings were published; one looked like Berkowitz and the other showed a soft-featured person, maybe a woman, in a knit cap.
On March 10, 1977, New York’s littlest mayor, Abe Beame, held a press conference at the 112th Precinct, just a few blocks away from the last shooting. He announced that a murderer with a .44 caliber weapon was stalking New Yorkers and that an NYPD command called the Omega task force, manned with more than three hundred cops, had been set up to apprehend the fiend.
Then came the aforementioned April shooting in the Bronx, where Berkowitz dropped a letter giving himself the name Son of Sam. On May 30, 1977, he got the writing bug again.
David Berkowitz mailed a letter from New Jersey to the Daily News addressed to columnist Jimmy Breslin. I talked with Breslin about receiving Berkowitz’s missive. He was home in Forest Hills when it reached the News.
“A secretary called and read some of this madness to me over the phone,” Breslin said. “She really didn’t even want to read it. Said she was scared of it. It was an eerie letter. Very eerie. I told her to get rid of it and give it to the cops. I’ve made a conscious effort to not remember what it said. It was a sick letter written by a sick, depraved mind. It was hurled out of the depths of insanity... but I will say he is probably the only serial killer in history that knew how to use a semicolon.”
The letter started out: Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood...
This was reminiscent of Robert De Niro’s character, Travis Bickle, in the 1976 film Taxi Driver, as the character let go with a tirade to a politician in his cab.
Berkowitz’s letter went on:
JB... I also want to tell you that I read your column daily and find it quite informative... Sam’s a thirsty lad and he won’t let me stop killing until he gets his fill of blood... Here are some names to help you along: “The Duke of Death,” “The Wicked King Wicker,” “The Twenty Two Disciples of Hell,” “John Wheaties — Rapist and Suffocater [sic] of Young Girls.”