David Berkowitz

[The Tracker]

Chapter 16

Capture

Two days later, August 8, Chamberlain and Intervallo called Detective Salvesen to tell him about the Craig Glassman event and the letters that Glassman had received. One of the letters was amazingly confessional: "True, I am the killer, but Craig, the killings are at your command." Salvesen promised to inform the task force immediately, but the information didn't get to the task force for days.

In the meantime, several traffic tickets that had been written the night of the shooting, outside witness Davis' apartment, were at last found. All but one were investigated and yielded nothing. One final ticket was yet to be investigated -- one belonging to a Yonkers man named David Berkowitz.

Detective Jimmy Justus called the Yonkers Police Department and talked to Wheat Carr, the daughter of Sam Carr, who had lost her dog. She gave him a real earful about David Berkowitz and everything her father had tried to impress upon the police days earlier. Officer Chamberlain called Justus shortly afterwards and told him everything he knew. They compared notes.

Then after the Carr family and officers Chamberlain and Intervallo had connected all the dots repeatedly for the New York City Police, the latter were more than anxious to go in for the collar and the glory that went with it. On August 10, Shea, Strano, William Gardella and John Falotico put 35 Pine Street under surveillance. The number of cops grew as everyone wanted to be in on the arrest.

Just after 7:30 P.M., a heavy-set Caucasian male walked out of the apartment building and seemed to head towards Berkowitz's Ford Galaxy. The police started to close in on him. Falotico pulled his gun and stopped the man. "David, stay where you are," he warned him.

"Are you the police?" the man wanted to know.

"Yes. Don't move your hands."

It was not David Berkowitz, but Craig Glassman, the part-time deputy sheriff who realized that these men surrounding him were not the Yonkers police but New York City's "finest." Glassman figured it out fast that Berkowitz was a suspect in the Son of Sam murders.

Several hours later another figure emerged from the apartment building, carrying a paper bag. The man was heavy with dark hair and he walked slowly toward the Ford Galaxy. This time, the police waited for the man to get into the car and put the paper bag on the passenger seat. "Let's go!" Falotico yelled and the officers advanced. The man inside did not see the approaching figures. Gardella came from the rear of the car and put the barrel of his gun against the man's head. "Freeze!" he yelled. "Police!"

The man inside the car turned around and smiled idiotically at them. Falotico gave him very explicit instructions to slowly get out of the car and put his hands up on the roof. The man obeyed, still smiling.

"Now that I've got you," Falotico said, "who have I got?"

"You know," the man said politely.

"No, I don't. You tell me."

Still smiling his moronic smile, he answered, "I'm Sam. David Berkowitz."

[The Tracker]

Chapter 17

David Berkowitz

The day of Berkowitz's arrest, Sergeant Joseph Coffey was called in to interview him. Calmly and candidly, David told him about each of the shootings. When the interview was over there was no doubt that Berkowitz was the Son of Sam. The details that he supplied about each assault were bits of information that only the killer would know.

At the end of the session, Berkowitz politely wished him "good night." Coffey was amazed by Berkowitz. "When I first walked into that room I was full of rage. But after talking to him....I feel sorry for him. That man is a fucking vegetable!"

Who was David Berkowitz anyway and how did he become the Son of Sam?

While David did not start his life under the most auspicious circumstances, he grew up in a middle-class family with doting adoptive parents who showered him with gifts and attention. His real mother, Betty Broder, grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Her family was poor and she had to struggle to survive during the Depression. Her Jewish family opposed her marriage to Tony Falco, who was Italian and a gentile.

The two of them scraped some money together to start a fish market in 1939. Then, Betty had a daughter Roslyn. After that, things did not go well with the Falcos' marriage and Tony left her for another woman. The fish market went bust and Betty had to raise Roslyn by herself.

The loneliness of being a single parent was relieved when she began an affair with a married man named Joseph Kleinman. But things went awry when she became pregnant. Kleinman refused to pay any child support and vowed to leave her unless she gave up the baby. Even before David was born on June 1, 1953, she had arranged for his adoption.

Her sadness at giving up her child was mitigated somewhat by the knowledge that a good Jewish couple was ready to adopt her son. With her newborn gone, Betty resumed her affair with Kleinman until he died of cancer in 1965.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 18

Adopted Son

David was lucky to be adopted by Nat and Pearl Berkowitz, a childless couple who were devoted to their new son. He had a normal childhood in the Bronx with no clear warning signs of what was yet to come. Perhaps the most significant factor in his life was that he was a loner. His parents weren't particularly socially oriented and neither was David

He was always big for his age and always felt different and less attractive than his peers. All through his youth he was uncomfortable with other people. He did have one sport -- baseball -- which he played well.

His neighbors remember him as a nice-looking boy but with a violent streak, a bully who assaulted neighborhood kids for no apparent reason. He was hyperactive and very difficult for Pearl and Nat to control.

David did not realize that Pearl had suffered from breast cancer before he was born. When it recurred in 1965 and again in 1967, David was shocked. Nat hadn't kept his adopted son very well informed about the prognosis and David was therefore shocked to see how badly Pearl dissipated from the chemotherapy and the illness itself. He was devastated when Pearl died in the fall of 1967.

When David was in his early teens, his parents tried to flee their changing neighborhood to the middle-class safety of the enormous sprawling high-rise development of Co-Op City. By the time their apartment was ready, Pearl had died. David and his father lived in the new apartment alone.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 19

Fantasyland

David began to deteriorate after Pearl's death. His grade average nose-dived. His faith in God was shaken. He began to imagine that her death was a part of some plan to destroy him. He became more and more introverted.

In 1971, Nat remarried a woman that did not get along with David. The couple moved to a Florida retirement community without him, leaving him to drift, absent of a purpose or a goal. He just existed until his fantasy life had become stronger than his real life.

He did have one relationship with a girl named Iris Gerhardt. The relationship was more fantasy on Berkowitz's part. Iris considered him only a friend. He attended a few classes at Bronx Community College, more to appease Nat than anything else.

David joined the Army in the summer of 1971 and stayed there for three years. He was an excellent marksman, particularly proficient with rifles. During his time in the Army, he briefly converted from Judaism to the Baptist faith, but then lost interest.

At one point, David found his biological mother Betty Falco. She and her daughter Roslyn did everything they could to make David feel welcome in their family. For a while, it worked and David seemed happy in their company, but eventually he drifted away from them too, making excuses for not coming to visit.

Anger and frustration with women, coupled by a bizarre fantasy life, started him down the road to violence when he got out of the Army in 1974. The only consummated sexual experience with a woman that he ever had was with a prostitute in Korea. He contracted a venereal disease as a souvenir.

Even before the murders began, David had set some 1,488 fires in the city of New York and kept a diary of each one. He was acting out a control fantasy. Robert Ressler in his book Whoever Fights Monsters explains: "Most arsonists like the feeling that they are responsible for the excitement and violence of a fire. With the simple act of lighting matches, they control events in society that are not normally controlled; they orchestrate the fire, the screaming arrival and deployment of the fire trucks and fire fighters, the gathering crowds, the destruction of property and sometimes of people."

[The Tracker]

Chapter 20

Cry for Help

Klausner points out in his book that David's state of mind in November was very bleak when he wrote to his father in Florida: "It's cold and gloomy here in New York, but that's okay because the weather fits my mood -- gloomy. Dad, the world is getting dark now. I can feel it more and more. The people, they are developing a hatred for me. You wouldn't believe how much some people hate me. Many of them want to kill me. I don't even know these people, but still they hate me. Most of them are young. I walk down the street and they spit and kick at me. The girls call me ugly and they bother me the most. The guys just laugh. Anyhow, things will soon change for the better."

This letter was a real cry for help. After writing the letter, he locked himself in his tiny apartment for almost a month, leaving only for food. He wrote wacky things on the walls with a marker: "In this hole lives the Wicked King. Kill for my Master. I turn children into Killers."

Around Christmas of 1975, David later claimed to psychiatrists that he was giving into the demons with the hopes that they would stop tormenting him if he did what they asked. On Christmas Eve, he was in a crisis mentally and emotionally. In the early evening he took a large hunting knife and drove around for hours looking for a young female victim. The demons would let him know when he found the right woman.

That night, he had returned to Co-Op City where he and Nat had shared the solitary apartment after Pearl's death. A woman was leaving a grocery store. Suddenly, David's demons ordered him to kill her. "She has to be sacrificed," they told him.

He plunged the hunting knife into her back once and then again. He was shocked at her reaction. "I stabbed her and she didn't do anything. She just turned and looked at me." Then she began to scream and he ran away. Later, police tried unsuccessfully to verify this story.

Then he saw another young woman. He hid the knife and attacked her from behind, stabbing her in the head. Fifteen-year-old Michelle Forman was seriously wounded, but she fought back. Her screaming scared David off and she was able to make it to one of the apartment buildings for help. She had six wounds from the hunting knife.

The attack on Michelle pacified David's demons for the time being. He was relaxed and went out for a burger and fries.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 21

The Demons Take Over

After the two Christmas Eve attacks, David went back to his security guard job at IBI Security. He moved from his tiny Bronx apartment in January to a two-family home in Yonkers owned by Jack and Nann Cassara. He wanted a 2-year lease and paid a $200 security deposit.

Cassara's German shepherd was a noisy dog and howled frequently. The neighborhood dogs howled back. In David's diseased mind demons lived within the dogs and their howling was the way they ordered David to go hunting for blood -- the blood of pretty young women.

Berkowitz was driven to the edge: "I'd come home to Coligni avenue like at six-thirty in the morning. It would begin then, the howling. On my days, off, I heard it all night, too. It made me scream. I used to scream out begging for the noise to stop. It never did.

"The demons never stopped. I couldn't sleep. I had no strength to fight. I could barely drive. Coming home from work one night, I almost killed myself in the car. I needed to sleep....The demons wouldn't give me any peace."

[The Tracker]

Chapter 22

The Blood Monster

After three months, he moved out of the Cassara's house and into an apartment house at 35 Pine Street in Yonkers, never asking for his security deposit back. The Cassaras had taken on a frightening role in David's family life: "When I moved in the Cassaras seemed very nice and quiet. But they tricked me. They lied. I thought they were members of the human race. They weren't! Suddenly the Cassaras began to show up with the demons. They began to howl and cry out. 'Blood and death!' They called out the names of the masters! The Blood Monster, John Wheaties, General Jack Cosmo." As David's fantasies developed, Cassara became General Jack Cosmo, commander in chief of the devil dogs roaming the streets of New York. The demons had a constant need for blood which David helped replenish with his murderous assaults.

David's apartment on Pine Street also had its dogs. Sam Carr's black Labrador, for example. David tried to kill the demon lurking in Harvey with a Molotov cocktail, but it fizzled. Finally, he shot Harvey with a gun.

Sam Carr, in David's elaborate delusion, was the host of a powerful demon named Sam who worked for General Jack Cosmo. When David called himself the Son of Sam, it was the demon living in Sam Carr to which he referred. David warned people that they should take him seriously. "This Sam and his demons have been responsible for a lot of killing." Unfortunately, in David's scheme of things, only God could destroy Sam at Armageddon. At various times in David's mind, Sam was the Devil.

The day before he murdered Donna Lauria, David quit his job as a nighttime security guard and went to work as a taxi driver. He claims that he didn't want to kill Donna and her friend Jody, but the demons forced him to shoot. But once it was done, he felt pleasure, exhaustion from doing a job well. Sam was pleased. Pleased enough to promise Donna to him as a bride. Sam had led David to believe that Donna would some day rise from the dead to join him.

David was classified by the defense psychiatrists as a paranoid schizophrenic. The believed that David's difficulties relating to people drove him further into isolation. The isolation was a fertile ground for wild fantasies. Eventually the fantasies crowded out reality and David lived in a world populated by the demons his mind had created. As his state of mind deteriorated, tension grew and was only released when he successfully attacked someone. For a brief time, the assaults relieved the tensions, but inevitably, the tensions began to increase again and the cycle repeated itself.

When he was arrested, David remained calm and smiling. It appeared as though he was relieved at being caught. Perhaps he thought that finally in jail the demon dogs would stop howling for blood.

However, according to Dr. David Abrahamsen, the prosecution's forensic psychiatrist, "While the defendant shows paranoid traits, they do not interfere with his fitness to stand trial....the defendant is a normal as anyone else. Maybe a little neurotic."

Ultimately, it didn't matter because David Berkowitz pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 365 years in jail.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 23

Ressler's Interview

In 1979, Robert Ressler, the FBI veteran, interviewed Berkowitz in Attica Prison three times. Berkowitz had been allowed to keep a scrapbook he had compiled of all the newspaper stories about the murders. He used these scrapbooks to keep his fantasies alive.

Ressler made it clear that he didn't buy the demon dog theory one bit and eventually he was able to get the truth out of Berkowitz. The demon story was to protect him when and if he was caught so that he could try to convince the authorities he was insane. He admitted to Ressler "that his real reason for shooting women was out of resentment toward his own mother, and because of his inability to establish good relationships with women." He would become sexually aroused in the stalking and shooting of women and would masturbate after it was over.

He also admitted to Ressler that stalking women had become a nightly adventure for him. If he didn't find a victim, he would go back to the scenes of his earlier murders and try to recall them. "It was an erotic experience for him to see the remains of bloodstains on the ground, a police chalkmark or two: seated in his car, he would often contemplate these grisly mementos and masturbate." So murderers do return to the scene of the crime, not out of guilt, but because they want to revive the memories of their crimes for sexual pleasure.

He wanted to go to the funerals of his victims but was afraid that the police would become suspicious. However, he did hang around diners near the police stations hoping to overhear policemen talking about his crimes. He also tried unsuccessfully to find the graves of his victims.

Like many serial killers, he nourished his sick ego from the newspaper attention he received for his crimes. He got the idea of sending the letter to Jimmy Breslin from a book on Jack the Ripper. Ressler found out that "after the press started calling him Son of Sam he adopted the moniker as his own, and even fashioning a logo for it."

This story is repeated time after time in every city experiencing the attacks of a serial killer. The demands of the citizens to know what is happening is balanced against the reality that feeding these demands for information virtually ensures that the killer will keep on killing. Legitimate police work is seriously hampered by a deluge of bogus tips from well-meaning citizens. The only party that benefits from this common problem is the media.

[The Tracker]

Chapter 24

David In Jail

On July 9, 2002, David Berkowitz's first parole hearing was conducted at the place of Berkowitz's incarceration, Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, N.Y. David Berkowitz, 49, attended this hearing, but had chosen not to attend the hearing that had been scheduled a month earlier. Commissioner Irene Platt asked him why he didn't attend in June, but did in July.

"I had a lot of anxiety," Berkowitz answered, "and I thought it would be best for the families that I not come at all and I after a lot of soul searching and a lot of praying I just decided it would be best to just come and face you and apologize. I'm not seeking parole. I don't feel that I deserve parole."

Commissioner Platt asked him why he felt that he didn't deserve parole.

Berkowitz responded, "Well, for the crimes that were committed and people that are suffering today because of my actions. I know they have a lot of pain and hurt that will probably never go awayI wish that I can go back and change the past. I can't, so I have to I came to terms with this and realize that I'm here in prison."

Commissioner Platt stated that she wanted to continue with the hearing, unless he had an objection.

Berkowitz had mixed feelings. He was very concerned about the media, "I was hoping that after this was over with, after the 25-year mark and the media says all that they can possibly say, that everybody, myself, my family, the victims' families can all get on with their lives."

Commissioner Platt asked him what "attracted you to their whereabouts and your need to kill them?"

Berkowitz replied, "Ma'am, I'm sorry. I don't know. I don't understand what happened.It was a nightmare. I was tormented in my mind and in my spirit. My life was out of control at that time and I have nothing but regret for what happened."

"What was this torment," she probed.

"It was just my mind was not focused right. I thought I was a soldier for the devil and all kinds of crazy thingsI had things like the satanic bible that I was reading. I just got stupid ideas out of it. I'm not pushing the blame on anything. I take full responsibility, but I just at the time things got twisted."

At the end of the short hearing, Commissioner Platt suggested that Berkowitz had not developed much of an understanding of the motivations of his crimes. Berkowitz answered, "Ma'am, in all honesty I really haven't. I still struggle with coming to grips with the things of the past. There are still issues that I have to deal with. I'm not there yet."

Not surprisingly, parole was formally denied. Although the panel recognized his good behavior, his activities in helping other inmates and his role as a chaplain's clerk, his completion of a 2-year degree from the state university, and his successful completion of other prison rehabilitation programs, and his expression of remorse for his crimes, "the extraordinary pain, suffering and anger that you have inflicted on the families and the community at large continues. Discretionary release at this time would deprecate the seriousness of these atrocious crimes and diminish respect for the law."

Berkowitz's next parole hearing will be in 24 months in June, 2004.

Berkowitz's first years in prison were filled with conflict. He was a disciplinary problem. However, after his conversion to Christianity, his attitude changed dramatically and the disciplinary problems went away. Many people are skeptical of the dramatic embrace of religion, but in the final analysis it really doesn't matter whether people believe Berkowitz or not. Berkowitz is smart enough to understand that he is never getting out of prison and has learned to adjust to the realities of that life.

Is his new Christian persona really a hoax to deceive the parole board into someday granting him parole? I don't think so because he knows that parole is beyond his reach. His religious beliefs have provided him a spiritually comforting and socially-acceptable lifestyle in an environment where few comforts are normally found. While Berkowitz was not technically insane when he committed murder, he was a very troubled and emotionally unstable personality. Now that he is middle aged, off the hallucinogenic drugs and, possibly, taking more therapeutic medications for his mental state, he is trying to overcome the freakish image that he had created for himself as a young man.

Berkowitz is a long way from normal and always has been. It appears as though he understands this fact and is trying to do the best he can to straighten himself out. He has the rest of his life to work on it in prison, where, he realizes, that he definitely belongs.