It was signed Son of Sam. The return address was Blood and Family, Darkness and Death, Absolute Depravity, 44.
Breslin: “It has always fascinated me how they could make such a big deal over these serial killers. I mean, why study them? I find them depressing and dull. They’re a depraved, hideous, and grizzly lot of men who are not even worth studying. Forget them.”
After Berkowitz was arrested, Breslin felt spent.
“You were left with nothing after he was caught,” he said. “Just this little bug with a mind full of oatmeal.”
I asked him about people who deny that Berkowitz was the sole killer.
“They’re crazy. He was the one who did it. The guy pleads guilty to all the shootings. They’re a bunch of conspiracy nuts.”
Breslin went on to tell me that after Berkowitz was in jail, he wrote him another letter.
“It went something like, Dear Jimmy, How are you? And it was full of clichés like, The politicians are using me like a political football.” Breslin laughed and said, “The letter was written in a scrawl like a twelve-year-old would write. Completely different from the first one. I guess they gave him his medication in prison and then he was all right.”
The Daily News printed the first letter to Breslin and the Son of Sam was born.
Another one of Berkowitz’s prison pamphlets read:
The police and media used to call me “The Son of Sam,” but God has given me a new name, “the son of Hope,” because now, my life is about hope.
Like most convicted felons, Berkowitz had a very convenient memory. No one in the media or police force had named him: The Bogeyman had given himself his own moniker, Son of Sam.
I took a ride up to some of Berkowitz’s old haunts in Yonkers. The years have changed the neighborhood as much as they have Berkowitz’s appearance. He has gone from a stocky, wildhaired youth to a balding, middle-aged man who resembles the actor Richard Dreyfuss. His neighborhood in the north of Yonkers has slid from working class to ghetto poor.
It was a quiet Sunday in a desolate area that looked like a depressed small town in the rust belt. I sat in my car in front of the old Carr house on Warburton Avenue. This is where Berkowitz said a 6,000-year-old demon lived with his dog and commanded him to kill from his apartment up the hill on Pine Street.
The Carr house was a rambling three-story wood frame, with new aluminum siding and four cars parked in the front yard. Above the house, up on the crest of a hill, I could see Berkowitz’s old seventh-floor studio apartment window, which had a curtain over it. I hoped it wouldn’t move.
I made a left onto the hill of Wicker Street and passed the home where Berkowitz said the Wicked King Wicker lived. It didn’t look he was home. Snaking up the steep drive, I came onto Pine Street and made a right. I started looking for Berkowitz’s old address, number 35. I found his apartment building, but it’s not 35 anymore. I guess they changed it to fool curious Berkowitz buffs. On a wall across the street was a sign: Beware of Dog.
I headed up North Broadway to Untermyer Park, where Berkowitz has claimed his Satanic cult held black masses. I made my way into a walled garden, and saw a sign that forbade photos being taken without a permit. I ambled around the gardens but stayed on the beaten paths. In a white stone gazebo there was a tiled floor with the face of a cherub in the middle. Someone had dug the tiles out of the angel’s eyes, leaving him blind.
I slid over to a long trail of stairs that led down into the thick woods. An unleashed Labrador retriever ran by me, its owner nowhere in sight. A brisk river wind kicked up and the late winter sun was setting over the banks of the Hudson. I hurried back to my car.
For a time, Berkowitz laid low. Then around 3 o’clock in the morning of June 26, 1977, a kid named Sal Lupo left a Queens disco, Elephas, with a pretty girl named Judy Placido. As they got into a red Cadillac, Berkowitz sneaked up and shot Placido three times. The windows exploded and Lupo ran back to the disco to get help. Placido survived.
The only thing bigger than the Son of Sam story that July was the citywide blackout on the 13th. New York went dark and looters went wild. More than three thousand people were arrested. Sam was momentarily forgotten.
Berkowitz took out his pen again and promised New York he would strike on July 29, to mark the anniversary of his first killing. That night, most city streets were deserted. No one wanted to tempt the Bogeyman. Cops sat in cars with female mannequins hoping to lure him into an attack. The night passed without incident and that somehow made things worse. We all knew it was coming.
On July 31, Berkowitz returned to the borough of his birth, Brooklyn. He drove around the neighborhoods of Gravesend and Bensonhurst as Stacy Moskowitz and Bobby Violante had their first date. They had gone to see the Robert De Niro/ Liza Minnelli flick, New York, New York, before driving back to Bensonhurst and parking on a quiet street. As they kissed, Berkowitz opened fire, hitting Moskowitz once in the head and Violante twice in the face. The Violante boy survived, but Stacy Moskowitz died a day later.
The Son of Sam had now killed six people.
There has been a rumor circulating for years that the Moskowitz killing was filmed, and has been watched ritually by “snuff” fanatics. Snuff films constituted a 1970s urban legend, movies that supposedly caught actual killings on tape. No credible source for such films has ever stepped forward, nor have any ever been found. Law enforcement officials claim that snuff films do not exist. Still, in Bronx bars and in the blogosphere, some swear Berkowitz’s crew of Satanists filmed the killing.
In a 1994 article on snuff films, Rider McDowell writes that journalist Maury Terry told him, “It is believed Berkowitz filmed his murders to circulate within the Church of Satan. On the night of the Stacy Moskowitz killing, there was a VW van parked across the street from the murder site under a bright sodium streetlamp.”
Terry believed a crew was in that van making a snuff film of the death of the twenty-year-old Brooklyn woman.
What finally brought David Berkowitz down was the bane of the average Brooklynite: a parking ticket. He received one that night, two blocks from the shooting.
On August 10, 1977, four NYPD detectives nabbed him as he approached his 1970 Ford Galaxy in Yonkers. His .44 caliber gun was sitting on the front seat. Berkowitz allegedly told the cops, “You got me. What took you so long?”
Sid Horowitz, a former court officer captain in Queens Supreme Court, went to Kings County Hospital with a judge to arraign Berkowitz for his Queens shootings. He told me his impressions of the Son of Sam.
“I am standing there with the judge and Berkowitz comes out with his head down. I remember saying to myself, ‘This is it? This is the Son of Sam?’ I couldn’t believe what a little twerp he was. He was a nothing. He just stared straight ahead with this blank look on his face. I left there shaking my head that this meek little nothing had killed six people.”
I went to Brooklyn Supreme Court to talk with J.B. Fitzgerald, a retired court officer who had worked security for all of Berkowitz’s Brooklyn court appearances.