Serial Killer Investigations (11 page)

Despite the media frenzy and the intensive police manhunt, on the morning of 17 April 1977, there were two more deaths. Alexander Esau and Valentina Suriani were sitting in a parked car in the Bronx when the killer shot both of them. Valentina died instantly; Esau died later in the hospital, three bullets in his head. Only a few blocks away was the spot where Donna Lauria and Jody Valenti had been shot.

In the street near the victims, a policeman found an envelope. It contained a letter addressed to Captain Joseph Borrelli, and it was from the killer. The hand-written missive was littered with misspellings: ‘I am deeply hurt by your calling me a weman-hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the Son of Sam. I am a little brat...’ It claimed that his father, Sam, was a brute who beat his family when he got drunk, and who ordered him to go out and kill. ‘I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game—tasty meat. The wemen of Queens are prettyist of all...’ It was reminiscent of the letters that Jack the Ripper and so many other ‘thrill killers’ have written to the police, revealing an urge to ‘be somebody,’ to make an impact on society. A further rambling, incoherent note, signed ‘Son of Sam’, was sent to New York
Daily News
columnist, Jimmy Breslin.

The next attack, on 26 June 1977, was like so many of the others: a young couple sitting in their car in the early hours of Sunday morning, saying good night after a date. They were Salvatore Lupo and Judy Placido, and the car was in front of a house on 211th Street, Bayside, Queens. Four shots shattered the windshield. The assailant ran away. Fortunately, his aim had been bad; both these victims were only wounded, and recovered.

It was now a year since the Son of Sam had killed Donna Lauria; on the anniversary of her death, Queens and the Bronx were swarming with police. But the Son of Sam had decided that these areas were dangerous, and that his next shootings would be as far away as possible. On 31 July Robert Violante and Stacy Moskowitz were sitting in a parking lot close to the Brooklyn shore; it was 1.30 a.m. on Sunday morning. The windshield exploded as four shots were fired. Both were hit in the head. Stacy Moskowitz died hours later in hospital; Robert Violante recovered, but was blinded.

But this shooting brought the break in the case. A woman out walking her dog had noticed two policemen putting a ticket on a car parked near a fire hydrant on Bay Seventeenth Street, a block from the crime scene. Minutes later, a man ran up to the car, leapt in, and drove off. Only four parking tickets had been issued in the Coney Island area that Sunday morning, and only one of those was for parking near a hydrant. The carbon copy of the ticket contained the car’s registration number. And the Division of Motor Vehicles was able to identify its owner as David Berkowitz, aged 24, of Pine Street, Yonkers.

On the Wednesday after the last killing, detectives found the Ford Galaxie parked in front of an apartment building on Pine Street. They peered in through its window, and saw the butt of a gun, and a note written in the same block capitals as the other Son of Sam letters. A police team staked out the car. When David Berkowitz approached it at 10.15 that evening, Deputy Inspector Tim Dowd, who had led the hunt, said, ‘Hello, David.’ Berkowitz looked at him in surprise, and then said, ‘Inspector Dowd! You finally got me!’

After the terror he had aroused, the Son of Sam was something of an anticlimax, a pudgy little man with a beaming smile, and a tendency to look like a slightly moronic child who has been caught stealing sweets.

He proved to be a paranoid schizophrenic who lived alone in a room lit by a naked light bulb, sleeping on a bare mattress. The floor was covered with empty milk cartons and bottles. On the walls he had scrawled messages such as: ‘In this hole lives the wicked king.’ ‘Kill for my Master.’ ‘I turn children into killers.’

His father, who had run a hardware store in the Bronx, had retired to Florida after being robbed. Nat Berkowitz was not the Son of Sam’s real father. David Berkowitz, born 1 June 1953, was illegitimate, and his mother had offered him up for adoption. He had felt rejected from the beginning, and longed to find his real mother.

He reacted to his poor self-image by boasting and lying—particularly about his sexual prowess. In reality, he was afraid of women. He told the police that demons began telling him to kill in 1974. Living alone in apartments that he allowed to degenerate into pigsties, kept awake at night by the sound of trucks or barking dogs, he slipped into paranoia, telling his father in a letter that people hated him and spat at him as he walked down the street. ‘The girls call me ugly, and they bother me the most.’ On Christmas Eve 1975, he began his attempt at revenge on women by taking a knife and attacking two of them. The first one screamed and he ran away. The second, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, was badly cut and had one lung punctured, but recovered. The blood disturbed him, which is why he travelled to Texas to buy a gun. Seven months later, he used it in his first murder.

The name Sam seems to have been taken from a neighbour called Sam Carr, whose black Labrador sometimes kept Berkowitz awake. He wrote Carr anonymous letters, and on 27 April 1977, shot the dog—which recovered. He also wrote anonymous letters to people he believed to be persecuting him. He had been reported to the police on a number of occasions as a ‘nut’, but no one suspected that he might be the Son of Sam.

Berkowitz was judged legally sane, and was arraigned on 23 August 1977. He pleaded guilty, saving New York the cost of a trial. He was sentenced to 365 years in prison.

The aftermath is worth describing. His Yonkers apartment building became a place of pilgrimage for sensation-seekers. They stole doorknobs, cut out pieces of carpet, even chipped pieces of paint from Berkowitz’s door. In the middle of the night, people shouted, ‘David, come out,’ from the street. Berkowitz’s apartment remained empty, and a quarter of the building’s tenants moved out, even though the landlord changed its number from 25 to 42 Pine Street to try to mislead the souvenir hunters.

Even after Berkowitz was arrested, most Americans found the crimes incomprehensible. One psychiatrist who interviewed him was convinced that his story of ‘voices’ was an attempt to establish a defence of insanity. On the other hand, journalist Maury Terry became convinced that Berkowitz had not acted alone, but that he was a member of a satanic cult who committed some of the murders attributed to Berkowitz, and filmed the shootings to sell as ‘snuff movies’.

Two years after Berkowitz’s arrest, Ressler and Douglas went to interview him—three times. As usual, they prepared by learning everything about Berkowitz that was on record. One important discovery was that Berkowitz was an arsonist, and that he had set at least 1,488 fires in New York, which are documented in his diary. He had also triggered hundreds of false alarms. For a long time now, arson has been recognised as basically a sex crime—many arsonists masturbate as they watch the flames. This helped confirm Ressler’s suspicions that the Son of Sam shootings were sexual in origin.

Ressler found Berkowitz to be shy, reserved, polite, and low key, and that he spoke only when spoken to. When Ressler tried to touch on the possible sexual aspect of the murders. Berkowitz flatly denied that they had any, claiming that he had had a normal sex life, with girlfriends, and that the murders were just shootings. This, Ressler discovered, was an attempt to mislead. Berkowitz had never had girlfriends, and this was the root of his trouble. In that respect he resembled Harvey Glatman, feeling that he lacked the physical attractiveness to appeal to women.

Where Glatman attempted to satisfy his desires through kidnapping and rape, Berkowitz was far too shy and withdrawn to attempt anything so ambitious. He lacked the aggression to be a true predator. So every evening he went out with a .44, looking for lone women or girls, or couples necking in cars. As he stalked them and then shot them, he admitted, he became sexually excited, and would masturbate afterwards.

The men were shot simply because they happened to be with the young women, the true targets.

On the nights when he couldn’t find a victim, he told them, he would drive to the scenes of earlier murders and replay them in his imagination. If there were still bloodstains visible on the pavement, he would sit in his car and masturbate.

Ressler was pleased that he had made another discovery: that it was true that murderers returned to the scene of their crimes, so offering the manhunters a chance to catch them.

It gave support to another of Ressler’s theories: that aberrant behaviour is an extension of normal behaviour. Teenaged boys ride their bicycles past the homes of teenaged girls, or hang around them and ‘engage in impetuous spontaneous behaviour’. Mark Twain had observed the same thing in the scene where Tom Sawyer sets out to attract the attention of Becky Thatcher in the school playground—and we have already noted that Harvey Glatman did the same thing at school, and how the playful snatching of purses developed into armed robbery, and then rape.

Berkowitz would have liked to attend the funerals of his victims, but was afraid of being spotted. But he stayed away from work on the day of the funeral, and hung around diners near police stations hoping to hear cops discussing his crimes. (He never succeeded.)

In all, it seems clear that Berkowitz belonged to a class of killers who are basically ‘wannabes’. While most people attempt to achieve a sense of value or worth by doing something that their fellows regard as admirable or useful, people whose self-esteem is irretrievably low daydream of shocking or outraging them, so that they can at least regard themselves as mavericks or rebel outsiders. Berkowitz told Ressler how, as a teenager, he wanted to get to Vietnam, daydreaming of receiving medals and ‘being recognised as an important individual, and thereby fashioning an identity for himself’. It was not to be. His army career—in Korea—was undistinguished and a visit to a prostitute resulted in syphilis.

Back in New York, he began trying to trace his natural mother, Betty Falco, and finally succeeded through an old telephone directory. There was an emotional reunion at her home in Coney Island in May 1975. He also met his half-sister Roslyn, 37, who welcomed him to her home.

But although he was glad to have found his family, it was too late. He was too frustrated and unfulfilled to find satisfaction in his new role as a son and brother. He began suffering from frequent headaches. And on Christmas Eve 1975, he took a hickory-handled hunting knife and went out in search of a woman to stab. On Co-Op City Boulevard he doubleparked and followed a woman who came out of a supermarket. She was wearing a long, heavy coat, and he raised the knife and brought it down on her back. The knife failed to penetrate the thick material, but the woman turned, saw a man with his arm raised to strike again, and began to scream. Berkowitz turned and ran away.

He wandered around until he saw another female approaching; this was a 15-year-old schoolgirl named Michelle Forman. He followed her across a pedestrian bridge, and stabbed her in the head, and then the upper body. As she turned he saw she was pretty; she lashed out at him, and then fell down. When she tried to grab his leg, he ran off.

As he began to describe the attacks and murders, Berkowitz started to repeat the story he had told to psychiatrists: that he killed because Sam Carr’s dog, possessed by a 3,000-year-old demon, had barked orders at him. Douglas called his bluff. ‘Hey David, knock off the bullshit. The dog has nothing to do with it.’ When Berkowitz persisted, they told him the interview was over. ‘We want the factual basis for these crimes.’ As they started to leave, Berkowitz laughed and admitted that the demon dog story was false, designed to back his defence of insanity.

The real motive, it seemed, was the desire to become known, to become notorious. There was a sense of potency in holding a whole city to ransom, in seeing the crowds who bought the newspapers that described the latest shooting. That is why he began communicating with the police, and with journalist Jimmy Breslin. Ressler has some harsh words to say about the journalists who kept feeding the media frenzy, even when there were no new developments to write about. They, he believed, simply encouraged Berkowitz to continue, like a child who enjoys attention.

Yet what emerged from these interviews is that Berkowitz was not simply a nonentity looking for action to give him a sense of identity. There had been a touch of sadism in his make-up since childhood, when he had poured ammonia into his adoptive mother’s fish tank to kill the fish, and killed her pet bird with rat poison, getting pleasure from watching it die slowly. He enjoyed torturing mice and moths. In adolescence, his masturbation fantasies were mixed with violence. And when he graduated to arson, he enjoyed watching bodies being carried out of burning buildings.

As to the stories about the evil spirits in his head that told him to kill, these were, he admitted, an invention. His insistence that he had been enslaved by demonic voices—which would become the basis of the standard book on the case,
Son of Sam
by Lawrence D. Klausner (1981)—was designed to achieve the effect it did, in fact, achieve, to allow him to plead guilty to second-degree murder, with the eventual possibility of parole.

At the end of the interview, Berkowitz told them that if he had been able to settle into a relationship with a good woman who would fulfil his fantasies, he would not have committed the killings. Ressler comments that he does not believe it for a moment. Berkowitz’s problem was that he felt inadequate and compensated with violent fantasies, which made him incapable of the give and take of a relationship. Ressler concludes: ‘Like so many of the criminals I interviewed, he had grown up to murder.’

The psychologist Dorothy Otnow Lewis had once made the controversial remark that she felt some criminals were just ‘born bad’. Ressler seemed to be saying the same thing in a different way.

Chapter Six

What Ressler was learning was that once you had talked to enough killers, you began to develop an instinct about what kind of person would commit a particular crime.