David Berkowitz

[The Tracker]

SON OF SAM

By Marilyn Bardsley

Chapter 1

The Letter

Captain Joseph Borrelli of the New York City Police Department was one of the key members of the Omega Group. Operation Omega was the task force headed by Deputy Inspector Timothy Dowd to find the psycho who was killing women in various parts of the city with a .44 caliber handgun.

The ".44 Caliber Killer" was getting a great deal of press and Borrelli's name had appeared frequently. Now on April 17, 1977, he was looking at a letter addressed to him that had been left at the scene of the latest in this series of murders: With misspellings, it read:


Dear Captain Joseph Borrelli,

I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the 'Son of Sam.' I am a little brat.

When father Sam gets drunk he gets mean. He beats his family. Sometimes he ties me up to the back of the house. Other times he locks me in the garage. Sam loves to drink blood.

'Go out and kill,' commands father Sam.

'Behind our house some rest. Mostly young -- raped and slaughtered -- their blood drained -- just bones now.

Papa Sam keeps me locked in the attic too. I can't get out but I look out the attic window and watch the world go by.

I feel like an outsider. I am on a different wavelength then everybody else -- programmed too kill.

However, to stop me you must kill me. Attention all police: Shoot me first -- shoot to kill or else keep out of my way or you will die!

Papa Sam is old now. He needs some blood to preserve his youth. He has had too many heart attacks. 'Ugh, me hoot, it hurts, sonny boy.'

I miss my pretty princess most of all. She's resting in our ladies house. But I'll see her soon.

I am the 'Monster' -- 'Beelzebub' -- the chubby behemouth.

I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game -- tasty meat. The wemon of Queens are prettyist of all. It must be the water they drink. I live for the hunt -- my life. Blood for papa.

Mr. Borrelli, sir, I don't want to kill anymore. No sur, no more but I must, 'honour thy father.'

I want to make love to the world. I love people. I don't belong on earth. Return me to yahoos.

To the people of Queens, I love you. And I want to wish all of you a happy Easter. May

God bless you in this life and in the next.


First Son of Sam letter

The letter did not have any useful fingerprints and the envelope had been handled by so many people that if there were any of the murderer's prints, they were lost. This letter was leaked to the press in early June and the world finally heard the name, "Son of Sam."

[The Tracker]

chapter 2

Sam

One week before the latest Son of Sam murder, a retired city worker named Sam Carr, who lived in Yonkers, N.Y., with his wife and children, received an anonymous letter about his black Labrador, Harvey. The writer was complaining about Harvey's barking. On April 19, two days after the latest murder, another letter in the same handwriting came in the mail:

"I have asked you kindly to stop that dog from howling all day long, yet he continues to do so. I pleaded with you. I told you how this is destroying my family. We have no peace, no rest.

"Now I know what kind of a person you are and what kind of a family you are. You are cruel and inconsiderate. You have no love for any other human beings. Your selfish, Mr. Carr. My life is destroyed now. I have nothing to lose anymore. I can see that there shall be no peace in my life, or my families life until I end yours."

Carr and his wife called the police, but all they did was listen sympathetically.Ten days later, Carr heard a gunshot coming from his backyard where he discovered the black Labrador bleeding on the ground. A man wearing jeans and a yellow shirt was bounding away.

He rushed Harvey to the veterinarian where he was saved. Carr phoned the police again. This time, Patrolmen Peter Intervallo and Thomas Chamberlain examined the letters and began an investigation.

At this time, the Son of Sam's letter to Captain Borrelli had not been leaked to the newspapers so no one thought to connect these letters to the Borrelli letter.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 3

Operation Omega

Operation Omega was growing in size and resources. It had expanded to some two hundred detectives. With the city in the midst of panic, being assigned to the Omega task force was considered an honor. Catching the perpetrator of six murderous assaults would mean tremendous awards for the detectives involved -- and they knew it. It was an extra incentive to put in long hours to catch this nut.

Such long hours, however, brought frayed nerves. Detectives were at each others' throats over trivialities, relationships with wives and children were severely strained. Caffeine and alcohol consumption increased. Cots were put in the Omega headquarters station so that the officers could grab at least a few hours of sleep before they started again

Several very talented players joined Operation Omega: In addition to Captain Joe Borrelli, there was Sergeant Joseph Coffey and Detective Redmond Keenan. Keenan's daughter Rosemary was present at one of these assaults when her date was seriously injured. All in all, Operation Omega comprised the cream of New York City detectives with a strong sense of mission

[The Tracker]

Chapter 4

Panic

When Son of Sam first struck on the morning of July 29, 1976, no one could expect that a serial killer was making his debut


Two young women, Donna Lauria, an eighteen-year-old brunette, and her nineteen-year-old friend Jody Valenti, were talking in Jody's car near the entrance of the Lauria's apartment building in the Bronx, New York City. Because of the dangerous hour (one o'clock in the morning), her parents stopped by the car on their way home from an evening out and told her it was time to come upstairs.

Donna promised she would. But, after her parents went inside, Donna noticed a man standing alongside the passenger side of the car. "Who is this guy?" she asked. "What does he want?"

Her question went unanswered. The man pulled out a Charter Arms .44 Bulldog handgun from a paper bag, squatted down and fired into the car five times. Donna died immediately, hit in the neck. Jody, shot in the thigh, leaned on the horn while the man continued to pull the trigger, even though the chamber was now empty.

Jody scrambled from the car, screaming for help. Soon, Donna's father heard the noise and ran down. In his pajamas and bare feet, he raced his car to the hospital, hoping that doctors could save his Donna.

Police could find no motive for the attack. Finally, they theorized that it may have been either a mob execution with mistaken victims or a lone psycho. Jody, semi-shocked, did manage to give something of a description of the assailant. But, under duress, her description lacked.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 5

Permanent Damage

On the night of October 23, 1976, three months after the Lauria girl's senseless murder, twenty-year-old Carl Denaro drank beer with his friends at a bar in Queens. In a few days he would be entering the Air Force for at least four years. He really wanted to live it up with his buddies since it would be a while before he saw them all again. Among his party was a girl, Rosemary Keenan, whom he knew from college.

The party broke up after 2:30 A.M and Carl drove Rosemary home. The couple parked near her home and talked. Suddenly, a man appeared outside the passenger side. He drew a gun and fired five times into the car, wounding Carl in the head. Terrified, Rosemary drove the car back to the bar from where friends rushed Carl to the hospital. There, surgeons replaced a part of his damaged skull with a metal plate. His injuries would haunt him for the rest of his life

A little more than a month later, on the evening of November 26, 1976, sixteen-year-old Donna DeMasi and her eighteen-year-old friend Joanne Lomino were coming home from a movie late at night. The bus stopped close to Joanne's house. Joanne noticed a man standing nearby. She urged her friend to walk faster. He began following them.

"Do you know where..." he addressed them as though he was about to ask directions, but he never finished his sentence. Instead, he pulled a gun from beneath his jacket and fired at them. Both girls were hit. Then their assailant emptied his gun by firing at a house.

Hearing the girls' screams, Joanne's family rushed from their house to help the girls. When they reached the hospital, surgeons determined that Donna would be okay. The bullet had passed within a quarter inch of her spine and exited her body. Joanne was not so lucky. Her spine had been shattered by the bullet. She would live, but was now paraplegic.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 6

Christina

Of these three assaults which had occurred in two different areas, the Bronx and Queens, only one bullet had been recovered intact. Consequently, police were not yet able to link these attacks to a single individual.

Things quieted for two months. Then in the early hours of January 30, 1977, the killer went hunting for his next victim.

Twenty-six-year-old Christine Freund and her fiance John Diel left The Wine Gallery in Queens around 12:10 A.M. and strolled towards his car. They were too absorbed in each other to observe that man who had been watching them.

As they sat in the car, two shots broke the night, shattering the windshield. Christine grabbed her head; both shots had struck her. John rested her head on the driver's seat and ran for help, trying to flag down passing cars, but to no avail. People in nearby homes had heard the shots and had called the police.

A few hours later Christine died in the hospital.

Forty-three-year-old Detective Sergeant Joe Coffey was a big, handsome Irishman known for his toughness and dedication. He and Captain Joe Borrelli started to work on this latest homicide. They had two theories: that the killer was either a psycho or someone who had something personal against Christine Freund.

Coffey could see that the bullets used to kill her were not typical. They had come from a powerful, large caliber gun. Investigating further, he discovered that her murder matched those other assaults on Donna Lauria, Donna DeMasi and Joanne Lomino.

Coffey had a hunch that they were dealing with one psycho packing a .44, stalking women in various parts of the city. As his investigation began to bear fruit, a homicide task force was formed under Captain Borrelli. Ballistics reported that the weapon employed was a .44 Charter Arms Bulldog -- an unusual weapon.

After probing into the backgrounds of the murders and their victims, police were unable to find any suspect on record; nor could they find any common thread that linked the victims to one another or a third party. It was beginning to look as though a psycho had randomly targeted attractive young women for assassination.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 7

Virginia

On the evening of Tuesday, March 8, 1977, an attractive young Barnard College honor student named Virginia Voskerichian was walking home from classes in the affluent Forest Hills Gardens area. Virginia was a very talented and hardworking young woman who had fled Bulgaria with her family in the late 1950's.

As she followed Dartmouth Street towards her home, a man approached her from the opposite direction. When they were very close, he pulled out a .44 and aimed it at her. She raised her books to protect herself, but a single shot hit her in the face. Virginia died immediately.


As the killer ran away, he passed a man who had witnessed the whole thing. "Hi, mister," the killer said to the middle-aged man.

A passing patrol car spotted the running man. But, when they heard on their radio that a woman had been shot on Dartmouth Street, they abandoned their plan to stop the suspicious man and immediately raced to the crime scene.

The police felt helpless, unable to find the murderer. As well, these murders were taking a huge toll on the officers who had been working non-stop to track down every possible lead.

Laurence D. Klausner in his book Son of Sam quotes Joe Borrelli on the aftermath of this crime. "If you watch detectives at any homicide, you'll notice that they go about their jobs unemotionally....they didn't want to look at her. They knew it was senseless. She was someone beautiful and she was laying under the sheet, a bullet in her face had destroyed her. It began to grab at them, in the guts, and they just turned away. These were veterans and they couldn't take it."

The next day, the police had a match on the bullet. It had come from the same gun that had killed Donna Lauria. They were looking for a psycho and they knew he was going to kill again. Some random shooting of an attractive young woman. How would they ever prevent it?

The following day, the police commissioner held a press conference to announce to the City of New York that they had linked the various shootings. The commissioner stated that the only description of the murderer was that of "a white male, twenty-five to thirty years old, six feet tall, medium build, with dark hair."

More emphasis was put on finding this psycho before he killed again. Deputy Inspector Timothy Dowd was given the job of organizing the Operation Omega task force and staffing it with the highly experienced men it needed. Dowd, a native of Ireland, was not a typical cop. The sixty-one-year-old veteran had majored in Latin and English at City College and had studied for a master's degree in business at the Baruch School of City College. Pragmatic and persistent despite political setbacks, he was not easily discouraged.

Captain Borrelli had a new boss. This crime series had become too big to be handled by just a captain.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 8

Valentina

As expected, the phantom reappeared. On April 17, 1977, two young lovers sat kissing in their parked car near the Hutchinson River Parkway, not far from where Donna Lauria had been murdered the previous year. Eighteen-year-old Valentina Suriani, an aspiring actress and model, sat in the car with her twenty-year-old boyfriend Alexander Esau, a tow truck operator

At 3 A.M. that Sunday, another car pulled up along side them. Its driver shot each of them twice. Valentina died immediately and Alexander a bit later at the hospital. This was just what the police department had been fearing -- the next inevitable attack in the series of the .44 caliber murders. This psycho who would keep on killing until he could be found among the millions of men who fit his description.

But -- this time there was something different: the killer's letter left at the scene of the murders addressed to Captain Borrelli. The letter in which the killer gave the police his "name" -- the Son of Sam.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 9

Paranoid Schizo

New York City Mayor Abraham Beame called what he saw as a much needed press conference to discuss the Son of Sam case. It was the kind of name that the press would really grab on to and create a media persona. Beame dreaded the whole thing: "The killings were a horror. The police were under terrible strain. Everyone was beginning to question his ability to capture the gunman. The letter fused everything together. It was a man against an entire city. He had written this one policeman, but I knew it wasn't that captain he was writing about. It was every cop who was after him, all twenty-five thousand of them."


Dr. Martin Lubin, former head of forensic psychiatry at Bellevue, along with some forty-five other psychiatrists, convened to contribute to the psychological profile of the man they were seeking. In May of 1977, the police knew they were looking for a paranoid schizophrenic, who may have considered himself possessed of a demonic power. The killer was almost certainly a loner who had difficulty with relationships, particularly relationships with women.

The Omega task force was flooded with calls. Everyone, it seemed, knew the killer: he was the neighbor who came home late every night, the odd brother-in-law who played with guns all the time, the weird guy in the bar who hated pretty girls. The list of suspects was endless. Every one of these thousands of leads had to be checked out and disqualified -- a huge chore for any task force.

While the police were chasing down every suspect, checking registrations for .44 weapons, tracing activities of former mental patients and generally running themselves ragged, the Son of Sam had become emboldened by the publicity. He decided to write to Jimmy Breslin, a reporter for the Daily News.

"Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of NYC and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed in the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks.

"Hello from the gutters of NYC, which is filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood. Hello from the sewers of NYC which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks.

"Don't think because you haven't heard [from me] for a while that I went to sleep. No, rather, I am still here. Like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest; anxious to please Sam.

"Sam's a thirsty lad. He won't let me stop killing until he gets his fill of blood. Tell me, Jim, what will you have for July 29? You can forget about me if you like because I don't care for publicity. However, you must not forget Donna Lauria and you cannot let the people forget her either. She was a very sweet girl.

"Not knowing what the future holds, I shall say farewell and I will see you at the next job? Or should I say you will see my handiwork at the next job? Remember Ms. Lauria. Thank you.

"In their blood and from the gutter-- 'Sam's creation' .44"

The Daily News withheld some portions of the letter at the insistence of the police. The omitted passage read: "Here are some names to help you along. Forward them to the Inspector for use by the NCIC [National Crime Information Center] Center. They have everything on computer, everything. They just might turn up, from some other crimes. Maybe they could make associations.

"Duke of Death. Wicked King Wicker. The twenty-two Disciples of Hell. And lastly, John Wheaties, rapist and suffocator of young girls. P.S., drive on, think positive, get off your butts, knock on coffins, etc."

Partial fingerprints were salvaged from the letter, which were of no value in finding the suspect, but would be valuable to match against a suspect once captured.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 10

The Devil Dog

On June 10, a man named Jack Cassara, who lived in New Rochelle, found an odd get-well note in his mailbox from someone named Carr in Yonkers. The card included a picture of a German shepherd dog. It read: "Dear Jack, I'm sorry to hear about that fall you took from the roof of your house. Just want to say 'I'm sorry' but I'm sure it won't be long until you feel much better, healthy, well and strong: Please be careful next time. Since your going to be confined for a long time, let us know if Nann needs anything. Sincerely: Sam and Francis."

Cassara had not fallen off his roof nor had he ever met Sam and Francis Carr. He called them up and, discussing the odd situation, they agreed to meet at the Carrs' home that evening. The Carrs told the Cassaras about the strange letters they had received about their dog Harvey and how Harvey had been shot. Sam Carr told them about a German shepherd in the neighborhood that also had been shot.

Carr had his daughter, Wheat, a dispatcher for the Yonkers police, bring in officers Intervallo and Chamberlain to investigate, while Cassara had contacted New Rochelle police.

Later, Cassara's nineteen-year-old son Stephen drew an interesting conclusion. He remembered the odd guy, David Berkowitz, who had briefly rented a room in their house in early 1976. "He never came back for his two-hundred dollar security deposit when he left. Well, he was always bothered by our dog, too."

Nann Cassara, Jack's wife, called the Carrs, who promised that their daughter would have the Yonkers police act on that information. She also called the New Rochelle police, who waited some two months later to call her back. When they did contact her, she was sure that Berkowitz was the Son of Sam.



David Berkowitz


The detective mentioned that Craig Glassman, a deputy sheriff and neighbor of Berkowitz, had received an anonymous letter talking about a demon group composed of Glassman, the Cassaras and the Carrs. All that proved, however, was that Berkowitz was a little strange, but not a killer and not the Son of Sam. Police are often confronted with odd, yet perfectly legal, behavior on the part of citizens, but cannot do much about it.

In the meantime, Chamberlain and Intervallo of the Yonkers police put Berkowitz's name into their computer and learned his address, the registration number of his Ford Galaxy and the fact that his license had just been suspended.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 11

Queens

At 3 A.M. June 26, 1977, attractive young Judy Placido turned to Sal Lupo, the young man she was talking with, and suggested that it was time for him to take her home from the the Elephas, a disco in Queens. The disco was almost empty. The Son of Sam had thinned out crowds all across the city.

"This Son of Sam is really scary," she told Sal. "The way that guy comes out of nowhere. You never know where he'll hit next."

Then as if she had just predicted the future, she later recounted: "All of a sudden, I heard echoing in the car. There wasn't any pain, just ringing in my ears. I looked at Sal, and his eyes were open wide, just like his mouth. There were no screams. I don't know why I didn't scream.

"All the windows had been closed. I couldn't understand what this pounding noise was. After that, I felt disoriented, dazed."

Sal's first impression was that someone had thrown rocks at the car, so he ran back to the disco for help.

Judy looked in the mirror and found herself covered with blood. Her right arm was immobile. She collapsed when she tried to run back to the disco. Sal had also been hit in the forearm. Both victims were very lucky. Although Judy had been shot three times, she had avoided serious injury and death.

Ironically, Detective Coffey had been outside the Elephas about fifteen minutes before the shooting. Once the news came over the radio, he returned to the scene in a flash, but there was nothing to learn from either Judy or Sal about the identity of the assailant.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 12

Stacy

Donna Lauria, Son of Sam's first victim, had been murdered on July 29, 1976. Considering the Son of Sam letter that was sent to reporter Jimmy Breslin, in which she alone was prominently mentioned, police were worried about an anniversary killing. The newspapers made absolutely certain that the entire city expected another killing on or around that day.

The Omega task force was desperate. How to protect a whole city of young women from a random killer? Detective Coffey even considered placing cops in bullet-proof cars with mannequins to try to lure the killer. It was a waiting game. Tensions built steadily until July 29 and nerves were at a breaking point all that day and night, but no Son of Sam. Not that day. Two days later when the police were beginning to feel relieved that the anniversary had passed without another murder, the Son of Sam took his last victims.

In the early morning of Sunday, July 31, 1977, a pretty, vivacious young woman named Stacy Moskowitz sat with her handsome young boyfriend Bobby Violante in his dad's car. They had gone to see a movie and had ended the evening parked in a quiet spot near Gravesend Bay.

"How about taking a walk in the park?" He suggested.

Stacy was reticent. "What if the Son of Sam is hiding there?"

"This is Brooklyn, not Queens. Come on," he urged her. They got out of the car and walked over to the park swings. Bobby leaned forward to kiss her and she saw something.

"Someone's looking at us," she whispered.

Bobby saw a man nearby, but the stranger turned away and disappeared behind the parked cars.

Stacy was frightened and wanted to go back to the car. When they got to the car, Stacy wanted to leave, but Bobby persuaded her to stay for another few minutes while they kissed.

"All of a sudden," Bobby recalled, "I heard like a humming sound. First I thought I heard glass break. Then I didn't hear Stacy any more. I didn't feel anything, but I saw her fall away from me. I don't know who got shot first, her or me."

Bobby Violante had been shot twice in the face. Stacy had been shot once in the head. Bobby could hear her moaning. He hit the car's horn and then pulled himself from the car and cried for help.

Police were on the spot in short order and Stacy and Bobby were on their way to Coney Island Hospital. Stacy's parents arrived at the hospital just in time to see her being wheeled out of the hospital. The seriousness of her head wounds required her to be moved to Kings County Hospital where the facilities for head trauma were more extensive.

Together, the parents of Bobby and Stacy waited for hours as surgeons worked to save their children. Thirty-eight hours later, Stacy Moskowitz died. Bobby Violante survived, but he had lost his left eye and had only 20% vision in his right eye.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 13

Investigation

On August 3, 1977, several days after the attack on Stacy Moskowitz and Bobby Violante, the two Yonkers cops, Chamberlain and Intervallo, talked about the bizarre letters received by the Carrs and Cassaras and the shooting of the two dogs -- Carr's Labrador and the Wicker Street shooting of a German shepherd.

They were concerned that if they started to investigate this David Berkowitz, it would look as though they were trying to do the work of detectives rather than the patrolmen that they were. They proceeded cautiously and queried the state computer network about Berkowitz. The computer gave a brief profile of him from his driver's license. Berkowitz appeared to be approximately the same age, height and build as the Son of Sam, as described by various witnesses.



The patrolmen talked to the rental agent of the building at 35 Pine Street, Berkowitz's place of residence. All she could tell him was that he paid his rent on time and that he wrote on his rental application that he worked at IBI Security in Queens. That sparse information indicated that Berkowitz probably had some knowledge of guns if he worked for a security company.

Next, they called IBI and found out that Berkowitz quit in July of 1976 to go work for some cab company. The first Son of Sam murder was in July of 1976. Between the two of them, they called a couple hundred cab companies based in the Bronx area. None of them employed Berkowitz. However, hundreds of other cab companies operated in the Greater New York area. Calling them all seemed insurmountable.

The two policemen were certain that they were on to something, however, and confided in their boss who was impressed with the information they had collected. He urged them to talk to New York City Detective Richard Salvesen. They showed Salvesen all the letters. The latter was favorably impressed and agreed to pass on the information to the Omega task force.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 14

An Eye Witness

Another development in the case occurred a couple of days after the Moskowitz-Violante shooting. Mrs. Cacilia Davis, an attractive middle-aged Austrian immigrant, reluctantly came forward with the claim that she had seen the man who shot the couple. Detective Joe Strano went to see her at her home on Bay 17th Street, a block from the scene of the shooting.

Davis told Strano that she came home in the early morning hours and had to walk her dog Snowball. She thought a man was following her. "...he looked like he was trying to hide behind a tree. But the tree was too small, too narrow. He stood out. He kept staring in my direction....Then he began walking in my direction, smiling a peculiar smile. It wasn't anything sinister, just a friendly kind of smile, almost."

When she got a closer look at him,she thought that he had a gun concealed in his hand. "I was frightened. I walked into my house and began to slip off Snowball's collar. Just then I heard pops, or something that sounded like firecrackers. They were kind of loud, but far off. I didn't think too much of it at the time.

"The next morning...there were crowds of people at Shore Road. It was then that I learned what happened the night before. Suddenly I realized that I must have seen the killer. I panicked, and I couldn't say anything....

"I would never forget his face until the day I die. It was frightening."

[The Tracker]

Chapter 15

Connecting the Dots

In the meantime, things seemed to be popping all over. Officer Chamberlain of the Yonkers PD responded to a call about a suspected arson at Berkowitz's apartment house at 35 Pine Street. The call had been made by Craig Glassman, a male nurse and part-time sheriff's deputy. (Glassman had been the fellow descibed in Berkowitz's letter as one of a group of demons along with the Cassaras and the Carrs.)

Glassman explained what happened: "I smelled the smoke and ran to the door. When I opened it the fire was almost out...It probably never got hot enough to set the bullets off." He showed Chamberlain the .22 caliber bullets that had been put into the fire outside his door."

Then Glassman showed them the squirrelly letters he had received from Berkowitz, who lived just above him. The handwriting looked identical to the letters that the Carrs had received.

That same afternoon, Sam Carr, still upset over the shooting of his dog and what he saw as non-action by the police, independently pursued the matter with the Omega Task Force. He drove down to the police station where the task force was headquartered.

Not much happened when Sam Carr related his story of the shootings of the dogs, the weird letters, the eccentric David Berkowitz. The task force had been inundated for many months with leads by people who spoke as passionately as Sam Carr. They put the information in a folder of level two priorities and forgot about it -- for a little while.

The fact was, despite the subsequent excuses, Sam Carr had just handed them the name of the killer and they sat on it.