“The reason I believe I ultimately won was because of the fear in the city—and what should be done about it,” Mr. Koch said. “The fear was palpable.”
Some of the accounts yesterday elaborated on well-known stories, including a description by former Detective Bill Clark of the thorough police work and odd twists of fate that solved the case. Detectives traced a parking ticket issued on the night of what turned out to be his final murder to a car registered to a 24-year-old postal worker living in Yonkers: David R. Berkowitz. He confessed to the crimes and is serving several life sentences.
Other scraps of information that emerged from the three panel discussions were far from familiar. Louis B. Schlesinger, a professor of forensic psychology at John Jay, said that Mr. Berkowitz had set nearly 1,500 fires in his life, a little-noted fact.
Part of what separated Son of Sam from many other serial killers was the way he communicated with the public through letters sent to detectives and reporters.
One of the recipients of those communiqués, Jimmy Breslin, then a columnist for The Daily News, described the energy and cadence of Mr. Berkowitz’s literary style, saying his early letters were full of “the fear, the blood and the cracks in the sidewalk of the city.”
Some attending the symposium said they remembered those dangerous days.
Joan Boyd, 49, a journalist from Belfast, Northern Ireland, said she was living in Sunnyside, Queens, when the murders were taking place. She said that one night in the summer of 1977, she went out for a walk and realized it was the first anniversary of Mr. Berkowitz’s first killing. It was also a night on which, he had suggested in a letter to Mr. Breslin, he might strike again.
The normally bustling neighborhood was eerily silent.
“There was not one single person on the street,” Ms. Boyd said. “I was terrified.”
The Unrelenting Search For Etan Patz
By SELWYN RAAB | July 26, 1979
EVERY DAY DETECTIVE WILLIAM BUTLER retraces the route that 6-year-old Etan Patz should have taken on that morning two months ago when he disappeared.
Starting at 7:30 a.m., Detective Butler, a husky man who stands 6 feet, 2 inches tall, walks slowly back and forth for two hours on Prince Street: past a health-food store, a restaurant, several art galleries and a bakery. He is searching desperately for something—a witness or a clue—that might have been overlooked in the investigation of the boy’s disappearance on May 25 in SoHo.
“Yes, it’s a long shot,” Detective Butler said, “but by now I feel like he’s my own son, and you can’t give up.”
The possible kidnapping of Etan, a blond-haired first grader who is 3 foot, 4 inches tall and weighs 50 pounds, has led to the most extensive and longest search for a missing child in New York in decades, according to the Missing Persons Squad. Etan was last seen walking from his home at 113 Prince Street to a schoolbus stop less than two blocks away. It was the first time his parents had let him go to the bus unescorted.
Detective Butler, who has six children of his own, was assigned to the investigation the day the boy was reported missing. He has interviewed more than 200 people, talked with psychics who maintain that they have had visions of the youngster, wandered through scores of vacant buildings and climbed a water tower in response to a report that a boy was seen on a roof.
Longtime detectives in the Missing Persons Squad say they cannot recall a similar case where a child as young as Etan has been missing for so long. “This is the toughest of crimes to solve,” said Lieut. Earl J. Campazzi, commander of the squad. “There are virtually no clues.”
Why Hedda Nussbaum Fascinates: Most Can Identify
By WILLIAM GLABERSON | December 9, 1988
WHY IS NEW YORK SO FASCINATED BY HEDDA Nussbaum’s story? Quite simply, people wonder what separates her from them. Her very ordinariness, experts in human behavior say, is the attraction, a reminder that even a life with all the trimmings of stability can slide into disarray.
Hedda Nussbaum is a daughter of the middle class—a former teacher and children’s book editor who was living with a lawyer and raising two children. That apparently heightens the attraction as a media event. Stories of family violence in poor neighborhoods rarely draw attention. But, the experts say, there is something in her tale of submission that fascinates people of all races and classes both in New York and across the country.
The interest in the Steinberg trial, said William B. Helmreich, a professor of sociology at the City College of New York, is much like the public focus on a string of other cases in recent years. Trials that provoke mass public interest are often vehicles for people to test themselves and the limits set by society, Mr. Helmreich said. The interest in the Steinberg trial, he said, is much like the public focus on a series of other trials in recent years.
The trial last spring of Robert E. Chambers Jr. and the 1980 murder trial of Jean Harris both had similar elements, Mr. Helmreich said.
In many such cases, it is the commonness of the anguish behind the misdeeds that captivates the public, said Burton M. Leiser, a professor of philosophy and law at Pace University. “People have become entangled in webs of their own making that result from ordinary human impulses,” he said. “Every parent tries to help their child. In the Joel Steinberg case, every parent has felt moments when they could imagine being violent … These things are fascinating and scary to all of us.”
Bright Promise And Dark Decline
By STEVEN ERLANGER | November 6, 1987
IN ONLY EIGHT YEARS, HEDDA NUSSBAUM’S friends and former colleagues say that she was transformed from a skillful, articulate senior editor and author of children’s books at Random House to an increasingly ineffective and absent employee whom the publishing house had to dismiss, reluctantly, in August 1982.
The loss of that institutional affiliation seemed to accelerate Ms. Nussbaum’s isolation, estrangement and deterioration, these friends say. She became even more dependent on her longtime lover, Joel B. Steinberg, a lawyer described by those who have met him as a Svengali with a mesmeric hold on a woman with little remaining self-respect, whom, they say, he frequently beat and belittled.
Mr. Steinberg and Ms. Nussbaum are now accused of murdering a child they had adopted in 1981. It had become so clear by then that she was regularly beaten—despite Ms. Nussbaum’s regular denials—that at least one co-worker at Random House said she had tried to have the adoption stopped. She called the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. But when she was informed that any effort to interfere with an adoption would require a public complaint, she desisted.
Larry Weinberg, a lawyer turned writer, worked with Ms. Nussbaum at Random House and was represented, for a time, by Mr. Steinberg. Like most of those interviewed, he said he was convinced that Ms. Nussbaum would have never harmed her adopted children, but that she remained with Mr. Steinberg, in part, to protect them.
“Hedda is a victim,” he said. “She is a woman who has undergone brutalization for many years, mental and physical.
After adopting Elizabeth, Ms. Nussbaum often took the child to the office. And there were increasing, unexplained absences from work, often followed by Ms. Nussbaum’s appearing with bandages on her face and dark glasses.
“One day after Hedda wasn’t in,” a colleague said, “I saw her wheeling the baby down the hall. And the baby had a cut lip, and Hedda had on sunglasses and a bandage. I just said, ‘Hello.’ But everybody knew she was a lady with a lot of trouble.”
Youths Rape and Beat Central Park Jogger
By CRAIG WOLFF | April 21, 1989
Trisha Meili, who went public in 2003 with a memoir, “I Am the Central Park Jogger.”
A YOUNG WOMAN, JOGGING ON HER USUAL nighttime path in Central Park, was raped, severely beaten and left unconscious in an attack by as many as 12 youths, who roamed the park in a vicious rampage, the police said.
The woman, a 30-year-old investment banker, was found in the early morning wearing only a bra, her hands bound with her
sweatshirt and her mouth gagged. Her body temperature, the police said, dropped to 80 degrees while she lay bleeding in a puddle for nearly four hours about 200 yards from where she had been set upon.
The woman, who was found by two passers-by at 1:30 yesterday morning, was listed in critical condition yesterday at Metropolitan Hospital with two skull fractures.
Five youths were arrested in connection with another attack the same night, and the police said that they were considered suspects in the assault on the jogger.
The teenagers began marauding shortly after 9 p.m., with the robbery of a 52-year-old man at 102nd Street on the East Drive. The youths got away with just a sandwich, and the police were unsure how the man, who was walking and carrying a shopping bag, was able to fend them off.
In the next hour, they threw rocks at a taxicab, chased a man and woman riding a tandem bicycle at 100th Street on the East Drive and attacked a 40-year-old jogger, hitting him on the head with a lead pipe, the police said. The jogger told the police that the group turned on him after he came upon them as they attacked a woman on the bridle path about 96th Street, just east of the jogging track around the Reservoir. The man was not seriously injured.
At 10 o’clock, the police said, the group came upon the female jogger as she was running on a desolate transverse. The police said that the youths numbered as many as 20 when the attacks began and that as many as 12 assaulted the jogger.
Convictions Are Voided In Central Park Jogger Attack
By SUSAN SAULNY | December 20, 2002
THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER AN INVESTMENT banker jogging in Central Park was savagely beaten, raped and left for dead, a Manhattan judge threw out the convictions yesterday of the five young men who had confessed to attacking the woman on a night of violence that stunned the city and the nation.
In one final, extraordinary ruling that took about five minutes, Justice Charles J. Tejada of State Supreme Court in Manhattan relied on new evidence pointing to another man, Matias Reyes, a convicted murderer-rapist who stepped forward in January, as the probable sole attacker of the jogger. He was linked to the rape by DNA and other evidence that cast doubt on the earlier confessions.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly reacted to the judge’s decision with a bluntly worded statement that underscored the breach that had opened in recent weeks between the police department and the district attorney’s office. Among other things, Mr. Kelly challenged the credibility of Mr. Reyes’s claim that he had acted alone.
Technically, Justice Tejada’s ruling made a new trial possible. But after he vacated the convictions, Peter Casolaro, an assistant district attorney, immediately responded with a motion dismissing the indictments and forgoing a new trial.
Justice Tejada replied, “The motion is granted. Have a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.”
The stuffy, crowded courtroom erupted in screams, cheers and applause by family and supporters of the five young men—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Kharey Wise and Raymond Santana. They are now 28 to 30 years old and have all completed prison terms of 7 to 13 years for the park offenses. None attended the hearing.
“I think I stopped breathing for a minute,” said Angela Cuffee, Mr. Richardson’s sister. “I can’t even tell you—it doesn’t feel real. I can’t even speak.”
In Central Park Slaying, The Darkness Beneath the Glitter
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN | August 28, 1986
FOR JENNIFER DAWN LEVIN AND ROBERT E. Chambers Jr., life was private schools, fancy apartments, foreign vacations and underage drinking at a preppy hangout called Dorrian’s Red Hand, where they spent the hours before Miss Levin’s murder. But for Mr. Chambers, life was also unemployment, academic futility and signs of cocaine abuse.
The two had known each other for about two months and dated several times, the police said, before they met early Tuesday morning at Dorrian’s Red Hand, at 300 East 84th Street. The owner, Jack Dorrian, said he knew both as regulars.
Mr. Chambers and Miss Levin left together at 4:30 a.m., exchanging “boy-girl talk” as they walked toward Central Park, the police said. It was there, the police believe, that she was killed.
Less than two hours later, a passer-by found Miss Levin’s body in the park, just behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
His lawyer, Jack Littman, entered a plea of not guilty at the arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court before Judge Richard Lowe 3d.
At one point Judge Lowe asked, “Are you saying this was an accident?” “Yes, your honor,” said Mr. Littman. “At the hands of the defendant?” asked the judge. “Yes, your honor, a tragic accident.” Mr. Chambers wept.
After the arraignment, details of both Mr. Chambers’s life and Miss Levin’s began to emerge—details that contradicted Mr. Chambers’s golden-boy image and revealed a naivete beneath Miss Levin’s worldly exterior.
Mr. Chambers had a particular way with young women. Mr. Dorrian, the bar owner, said: “He didn’t have to chase girls. They chased him.” But he added that Mr. Chambers had “a drug problem” and had gone to treatment program in Michigan about three months ago.
Mr. Dorrian said Ms. Levin’s regular boyfriend was vacationing in Europe this summer. Miss Levin had dated several different co-workers from Flutie’s, the restaurant in the South Street Seaport where she had worked as a hostess, according to Eric Barger, the manager.
Miss Levin’s father, Steven, said that his daughter was “always the straight kid of her crowd.” Still, he acknowledged that his daughter “liked to go out at night.” Mr. Dorrian said she came into his bar two or three times a week. And amid Miss Levin’s belongings at the murder scene, the police found a learner’s driving permit giving her age as 22. It had been her passport into Dorrian’s Red Hand.
Malcolm X Assassinated At Rally of Followers
By PETER KIHISS | February 22, 1965
Malcolm X speaking at the Domestic Peace Corps Center in Harlem, 1964.
MALCOLM X, THE 39-YEAR-OLD LEADER OF A militant black nationalist movement, was shot to death yesterday afternoon at a rally of his followers in a ballroom in Washington Heights.
Shortly before midnight, a 22-year- old Negro, Thomas Hagan, was charged with the killing. The police rescued him from the ballroom crowd after he had been shot and beaten.
Malcolm, a bearded extremist, had said only a few words of greeting when a fusillade rang out. The bullets knocked him over backward.
Pandemonium broke out among the 400 Negroes in the Audubon Ballroom at 166th Street and Broadway. As men, women and children ducked under tables and flattened themselves on the floor, more shots were fired. Some witnesses said 30 shots had been fired.
The police said seven bullets had struck Malcolm.
The police said seven bullets had struck Malcolm. Three other Negroes were shot.
About two hours later the police said the shooting had apparently been a result of a feud between followers of Malcolm and members of the extremist group he broke with last year, the Black Muslims. However, the police declined to say whether Hagan is a Muslim.
One police theory was that as many as five conspirators might have been involved, two creating a diversionary disturbance. As Hagen fired at Malcolm, said Capt. Paul Glaser of the Police Department’s Community Relations Bureau, Reuben Francis, a follower of Malcolm, drew a .45-caliber automatic pistol and shot Hagan in the leg. Francis, 33, of 871 East 179th Street, the Bronx, was charged with felonious assault and violation of the Sullivan Law.
James X, New York spokesman for the Black Muslims, denied that his organization had had anything to do with the killing. A week ago, Malcolm was bombed out of the small brick home in East Elmhurst, Queens, where he had been living. James X suggested that Malcolm had set off firebombs himself “to get publicity.”
Assemblyman Percy Sutton, Malcolm’s lawyer, said the murdered leader had planned to disclose at yesterday’s rally “the names of those who were trying to kill him.”
Mr. Sutton added that Malcolm
had taken to carrying a pistol “because he feared for his life” and had notified the police by telephone that he was doing so even though he did not have a permit. Assistant Chief Inspector Taylor, however, said Malcolm was unarmed when he was shot.
John Lennon Killed; Suspect Held In Shooting at the Dakota
By LES LEDBETTER | December 9, 1980
A silent vigil in memory of John Lennon was held in Central Park five days after he was shot.
JOHN LENNON, ONE OF THE FOUR BEATLES, was shot and killed last night while entering the apartment building where he lived, the Dakota, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A suspect was seized at the scene.
The 40-year-old Mr. Lennon was shot in the back twice after getting out of a limousine and walking into an entrance way of the Dakota at 1 West 72nd Street, Sgt. Robert Barnes of the 20th Precinct said.
“Obviously the man was waiting for him,” Sergeant Barnes said of the assailant. The suspect was identified as Mark David Chapman, 25, of Hawaii, who had been living in New York for about a week, according to James L. Sullivan, chief of detectives of the 20th Precinct.
Jeff Smith, a neighbor, said that he heard five shots shortly before 11 p.m. Other witnesses said they heard four when the shooting occurred at 10:45 p.m.
With the singer when he was shot was his wife, Yoko Ono, who was not hurt by the bullets that struck her husband as they entered an archway that led into the courtyard of the Dakota complex.
Witnesses said the suspect paced back and forth in the entrance way to the Dakota after shooting the musician, arguing with the door- man and holding the gun in his hand pointing downward. One witness, Ben Eruchson, a cab driver from Brooklyn, said, “He could have gotten away. He had plenty of time.”
The New York Times Book of New York Page 43
