Brooklyn Noir 3

by Tim McLoughlin

  On March 8, 1977, the now labeled .44 Caliber Killer took back the headlines by shooting a college student named Virginia Voskerichian as she walked home from the subway to her apartment in Forest Hills. As the gunman approached her, her only defense was her textbooks, with which she covered her face. The bullets tore through her books and found her head. The shooting was two blocks away from the January ambush.

  This was a busy neighborhood, and eyewitnesses saw two completely different-looking people running from the scene. Two drawings were published; one looked like Berkowitz and the other showed a soft-featured person, maybe a woman, in a knit cap.

  On March 10, 1977, New York’s littlest mayor, Abe Beame, held a press conference at the 112th Precinct, just a few blocks away from the last shooting. He announced that a murderer with a .44 caliber weapon was stalking New Yorkers and that an NYPD command called the Omega task force, manned with more than three hundred cops, had been set up to apprehend the fiend.

  Then came the aforementioned April shooting in the Bronx, where Berkowitz dropped a letter giving himself the name Son of Sam. On May 30, 1977, he got the writing bug again.

  David Berkowitz mailed a letter from New Jersey to the Daily News addressed to columnist Jimmy Breslin. I talked with Breslin about receiving Berkowitz’s missive. He was home in Forest Hills when it reached the News.

  “A secretary called and read some of this madness to me over the phone,” Breslin said. “She really didn’t even want to read it. Said she was scared of it. It was an eerie letter. Very eerie. I told her to get rid of it and give it to the cops. I’ve made a conscious effort to not remember what it said. It was a sick letter written by a sick, depraved mind. It was hurled out of the depths of insanity … but I will say he is probably the only serial killer in history that knew how to use a semicolon.”

  The letter started out: Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood …

  This was reminiscent of Robert De Niro’s character, Travis Bickle, in the 1976 film Taxi Driver, as the character let go with a tirade to a politician in his cab.

  Berkowitz’s letter went on:

  JB … I also want to tell you that I read your column daily and find it quite informative … Sam’s a thirsty lad and he won’t let me stop killing until he gets his fill of blood … Here are some names to help you along: “The Duke of Death,” “The Wicked King Wicker,” “The Twenty Two Disciples of Hell,” “John Wheaties—Rapist and Suffocater [sic] of Young Girls.”

  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, so
me 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.

  Fitzgerald smiled at the memory. He and other Brooklyn court officers had been exuberant because they thought they were going to make a ton of money in overtime when the case went to trial. Also, since it was the biggest case to hit Kings County in decades, the courts were swarming with media and the officers were looking to become stars.

  Fitzgerald was one of ten officers who escorted Berkowitz down a long hallway of 360 Adams Street on the seventh floor for a pretrial hearing. As they reached the back door to the courtroom, Berkowitz suddenly broke away from the officers and tried to throw himself out of a window. It didn’t work. All the courthouse windows have strong steel mesh reinforcing the glass. Security wrestled the wild Berkowitz to the ground. He bit one of the officers, then started to foam at the mouth.

  Fitzgerald: “So we bring him into the major’s office to calm him down. I mean, ten guys are restraining him. One guy on one arm, one guy on the other arm, one guy on a leg—like that. After about fifteen minutes, he starts to calm down. We look around the room and it’s just Berkowitz and us. Then one of the guys says, ‘Maybe this flake really is a dog. After all, he bit Murphy.’ One by one we start letting go of him, and just let him lay there on the couch. I remember one guy lit a cigarette, and another said to open the window because it’s getting stuffy in here. I started to laugh, ’cause you gotta remember this nut just tried to throw himself out the window.”

  The next day Fitzgerald was assigned to watch the rail between Berkowitz and the victims’ families.

  “So Berkowitz walks up to the defendant’s table and he’s looking right at me,” said Fitzgerald. “Then he starts yelling, ‘Stacy’s a whore! Stacy’s a whore!’ I’m thinking he’s talking to me. Then I realize Stacy’s mother, Mrs. Moskowitz, was right behind me. The crowd went wild and rushed the bench yelling they were going to kill him.”

  They hustled Berkowitz out of the courtroom and tried again the next day. Fitzgerald was assigned to watch the victims’ families in plainclothes. As soon as Berkowitz came into the courtroom, someone from the Moskowitz family jumped up on a bench and made a dive for him. Fitzgerald caught the guy in midair and wrestled him to the ground.

  While awaiting trial in Brooklyn, Berkowitz caught a brutal jailhouse beating from another inmate in the Brooklyn House of Detention, causing his eyes to hemorrhage. Brooklynite doctor David Klein worked on his injuries.

  Previously, in July 1977, Dr. Klein had operated on Bobby Violante’s eyes, saving his life, after Berkowitz had shot him in the head.

  Klein told the Sun-Herald that he looked at Berkowitz and said, “I’m your doctor. I operated on one of your victims and now I am going to treat you.” Klein recalled his mixed feelings: “In the back of your mind you want to strangle him. But you have to respect your oath.”

  Maybe the beating in Brooklyn did some good. On May 8, 1978, David Berkowitz pled guilty to all charges. In June he was sentenced to 365 years in prison. But his trouble in jail didn’t end. In 1979, an inmate slashed his throat. It took fiftysix stitches to close his neck wound, but Berkowitz survived.

  Berkowitz may have pled guilty to all charges, but he now claims that he only carried out two of the shootings and that members of a Satanic cult he was involved with committed the others. Did he commit all the crimes he was charged with? There are two prominent theories about the Son of Sam case. One is that Berkowitz was a type of Manchurian Candidate assassin who, on some unknown command, was sent out to randomly kill. For proof they offer that one of his letters reads, I am programmed to kill.

  The other theory is the one that Berkowitz has been braying about for years. Son of Sam was not one person but an evil Satanic cult that wanted to bring mayhem upon the city of New York. The evidence for that, besides Berkowitz’s words, are the police sketches of three distinctly different shooters. One of the closest eyewitnesses—Bobby Violante—said the shooter was a tall and thin blond man—very different from the chubby postman Berkowitz.

  Maury Terry, in his book The Ultimate Evil, makes some good arguments for Berkowitz not acting alone. But Terry undermines his own perspective by connecting the Son of Sam shootings to the Mason family and every other murder with even the slightest whiff of Satanism that has hit the media from 1969 onward. Even so, there are some strange coincidences with David Berkowitz.

  Berkowitz lived in New Rochelle in 1976 for a few months. His landlord worked at the Neptune Moving Company with Fred Cowan, the aforementioned Nazi, who went ballistic on Valentine’s Day in 1977, killing five people and himself. Renting a room to the Son of Sam and working with another mass murderer is beyond weird.

  In August of 1977, an NYPD detective called Yonkers PD on a routine matter, checking out one David Berkowitz, who had gotten a parking ticket in Brooklyn the night Stacy Moskowitz was shot. The daughter of Sam Carr, Wheat Carr, answered the phone. She told the detective that she lived behind Berkowitz and claimed he was a serious whacko. She also told them that he owned guns and she suspected him of being the Son of Sam. The Daughter of Sam was the best tip PD had.

  A month after David Berkowitz was arrested, the postman who had delivered his mail to 35 Pine Street committed suicide.

  In 1982, Leon Stern, one of Berkowitz’s lawyers when he entered his guilty plea, was killed in his own house by an armed intruder. Stern was gunned down on May 8, four years to the day after Berkowitz gave his plea.

  Both of the sons of Sam Carr—I guess that makes them the real Sons of Sam—were dead by 1980. John Carr committed suicide in North Dakota, putting a shotgun into his mouth and pulling the trigger. Berkowitz has suggested that John Carr (in his letter to Breslin he was identified as John Wheaties—Rapist and Suffocater of Young Girls) was a part of his cult.

  The other son of Sam Carr, Mike Carr (The Duke of Death in the Breslin letter), died in a car crash on 70th Street and the West Side Highway.

  * * *

  I talked with former Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Dominic J. Lodato, who handled the David Berkowitz case from the civil side, when the families of his victims were trying to prevent Berkowitz from profiting off of any publications or movies about his crimes. Lodato, along with former Queens D.A. John Santucci, had his doubts about whether Berkowitz acted alone.

  Lodato told me, “I was very leery about the case. There was a suspicion that there might have been more than one gunman. The police sketches clearly showed two completely different peop
le, and these were from eyewitness to the shootings. But it wasn’t for me to decide that, and he did plead guilty, so that ended that.”

  During the civil case, Lodato got plenty of motions from Berkowitz’s side. He remembered that one was for Berkowitz to change his name. Lodato couldn’t remember what he wanted to change it to. Lodato also received strange and threatening letters from Berkowitz whenever he denied any motions made by him. I asked about the letters.

  “I wasn’t too scared,” said Lodato. “He was in jail and I guess you just have to have faith in the system.”

  In 2003, I saw Berkowitz on television. He talked about being a born-again Christian and how he now sends Bibles to poor people.

  A minister had sent him a letter in 1978. Berkowitz wrote back and said that when he got out of jail he would hunt down the preacher and kill him. Today, Berkowitz and the minister pray together and are, as the minister solemnly states, friends in Christ.

  On the TV show, Berkowitz was shown a tape of Mrs. Moskowitz saying that she now believes he didn’t act alone and would he please just tell her who had murdered her daughter.

  Berkowitz watched the tape and shook his head. “I can’t, I’m sorry but I just can’t do it,” he said.

  Berkowitz’s Son of Samhain pamphlet ends with:

  I believe we are now living in … the “last days” … Society is seeing an increase in demonic activity at this time. Tens of thousands of people are under intense pressure. Life in America has never been harder … We are a nation in chaos and crisis.

  Berkowitz first came up for parole in 2002. He refused to attend the hearing, admitting he deserved to be in jail until his death. In 2004, he was denied parole and this year will be the same. Berkowitz will only leave prison in a coffin.

  In 2005, Berkowitz wrote a book titled, Son of Hope. It is all about his conversion to Christianity and how Jesus is now his savior. Christian organizations push the book and the proceeds go to the needy. It seems that David just can’t quit writing.