Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Meanwhile, Sergeant Ring heard one of his colleagues casually mention that the man he had arrested was being interviewed by detectives from the Ripper Squad. Ring rushed back to Melbourne Avenue. Hidden in the bushes there, he found a ball-peen hammer and a knife.

  Sonia Sutcliffe was questioned and the house was searched. Then, early on Sunday afternoon, Boyle told Sutcliffe that they had found a hammer and knife in Sheffield. Sutcliffe, who had been talkative up to this point, fell silent.

  ‘I think you’re in trouble, serious trouble,’ said Boyle.

  Sutcliffe finally spoke. ‘I think you are leading up to the Yorkshire Ripper,’ he said.

  Boyle nodded.

  ‘Well,’ Sutcliffe said, ‘that’s me.’

  Sutcliffe’s confession took almost 17 hours to complete. He told them of his first killing in 1969 but at that time, he mentioned nothing about hearing a voice from God.

  Sixteen weeks later, Sutcliffe stood trial at the Old Bailey. The Crown Prosecution, defence counsel and Attorney General Sir Michael Havers agreed that Sutcliffe was mentally ill, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. But the judge would have none of this. He told both counsels that the jury would listen to the evidence and decide whether Sutcliffe was a murderer or a mad man.

  Sutcliffe pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He was calm and self-assured, even managing a laugh when he recalled that during his questioning about the size-seven Wellington boot imprinted on Emily Jackson’s thigh and Tina Atkinson’s bed sheet. The policeman interviewing him had not noticed he was wearing the boots. He also claimed that he had been acting on instructions from God to ‘clean the streets’ of prostitutes.

  The jury would have none of it. They found him guilty of 13 murders and he was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he should serve at least 30 years.

  Chapter 10

  Son of Sam

  Name: David Berkowitz

  Nationality: American

  Born: 1953

  Number of victims: 6 killed

  Favoured method of killing: shooting

  Reign of terror: 1976–1977

  Motive: claimed the demons and the dogs made him do it

  Final note: not all the Son of Sam slayings can be attributed to David Berkowitz

  At 1 a.m. on 29 July 1976, 19-year-old Jody Valente and 18-year-old Donna Lauria were sitting in Jody’s car outside Donna’s home in the Bronx, New York. It was a hot summer night and they were discussing their boyfriends. Then Donna said goodnight and opened the door to get out.

  A young man was standing a few feet away. He was holding a brown paper sack. As the car door opened, he reached into the sack, pulled out a gun and dropped to a crouching position.

  ‘What does this guy want?’ said Donna, rather alarmed.

  Before the words were out of her mouth a bullet struck her in the side of the neck. A second bullet smashed the window in the door. A third smashed her elbow as she raised her hands to protect her face. Fatally wounded, she tumbled out of the car on to the sidewalk. The killer then shot Jody in the thigh. She fell forward on to the car’s horn which sounded and the killer ran away.

  Donna’s father, Mike Lauria, was taking the family’s dog for a walk and was halfway down the stairs when he heard the shots. He ran the rest of the way. Jody was still conscious, though hysterical. In the ambulance, Mike Lauria begged his daughter not to die. It was too late. When Donna reached the hospital, she was pronounced DOA – dead on arrival. Jody was treated for hysteria, but nevertheless gave the police a good description of their assailant. He was a young white male, about 30 years old, clean shaven with dark curly hair. He was not a rejected boyfriend. In fact, Jody had never seen him before. The only other clue to his identity was a yellow car parked near Jody’s which was gone by the time the police arrived. But New York is full of yellow cars.

  The car in question actually belonged to David Berkowitz. In the days leading up to the murder, he had been looking for a job. But he had spent the nights, he said, ‘Looking for a victim, waiting for a signal.’ Demon voices inside him told him to kill. Even though the Devil was on his side, he was not sure that he could be successful.

  ‘I never thought I could kill her,’ he said of Donna Lauria. ‘I just fired the gun, you know, at the car, at the windshield. I never knew she was shot.’

  But the police were not looking for a madman driven by demons. They had another theory altogether. As the North Bronx, where the Laurias lived, was a predominantly Italian area, the police immediately suspected Mafia involvement. Perhaps a hit had gone wrong – a case of mistaken identity. However, the Mafia are usually scrupulous when it comes to contract killings. Women and children are out of bounds. Besides, ballistics tests showed that the murder weapon was a Charter Arms, five-round, .44 Bulldog revolver. It had a powerful recoil and was grossly inaccurate at distances of more than a few metres – hardly a hit-man’s weapon. But still, it was no Saturday-night special. It is the weapon for a man who seriously wants to kill. A .44 Bulldog can blow a large hole in a door at close range.

  The other side of the East River from the Bronx lies the borough of Queens. It is a comfortable middle-class area. Eighteen-year-old student Rosemary Keenan attended Queens College there. Twelve weeks after the murder of Donna Lauria, she went to a bar in Flushing, the area of Queens which was considered a ‘posh’ part of New York. There she met 20-year-old record salesman Carl Denaro who was enjoying his last few days of freedom before joining the Air Force. Rosemary and Carl left together in Rosemary’s red Volkswagen. They were parked, talking, when a man crept up on them. He had a .44 Bulldog handgun tucked in his belt. He may have thought Carl, who was sitting in the passenger seat, was a woman because he had long brown hair. He pulled out his gun and fired five times through the passenger window. But his shooting was wildly inaccurate. Only one bullet found its mark. As Carl threw himself forward to protect himself from flying glass, the bullet clipped the back of his head, knocking away part of the skull. Carl Denaro was lucky – he didn’t suffer any brain damage and after two months in hospital, he recovered completely. However, the metal plate in his head ended his career in the Air Force before it had begun.

  On the evening of 27 November 1976, two schoolgirls, 16-year-old Donna DeMasi and her 18-year-old friend Joanne Lomino were sitting on the front porch of Joanne’s home on 262nd Street in Queens. At the end of the conversation, they said good night and Joanne stood up and reached in her handbag for her front door keys. It was then that the two girls noticed a man walking down the other side of the road. He was acting rather suspiciously. When he saw them he suddenly changed direction. After crossing the street at the corner, he came over to them as if he was going to ask for directions.

  ‘Say, can you tell me how to get to…?’ he said, then he pulled a gun from his waistband and began firing.

  The two girls fled toward the front door, Joanne frantically searching for her keys. The first bullet hit Joanne in the back. The second hit Donna in the neck. They stumbled into the bushes as the gunman loosed off the remaining three shots – all of which missed. He ran off down the street and was spotted by a neighbour, with the gun still in his hand.

  The two wounded girls were rushed to Long Island Jewish Hospital, where Donna was found not to be badly injured. In three weeks, she made a full recovery. But Joanne was not so lucky. The bullet had smashed her spinal cord. She was paralysed from the waist down and would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. The neighbour who had spotted the gunman making his escape gave the police a description. One key feature he mentioned was the young man’s dark curly hair. Despite the girls’ claim that he had long fair hair, this tied the shooting of Donna DeMasi and Joanne Lomino to the man who had killed Donna Lauria and wounded Jody Valente.

  On 29 January 1977, 30-year-old John Diel and his 26-year-old girlfriend, Christine Freund, went to see the film Rocky in Queens. Afterwards they went for dinner at the Wine Gallery in Austin Street, where they discussed their
forthcoming engagement. Soon after midnight, the couple walked the several blocks to where their Pontiac Firebird was parked. It was cold outside and their breath fogged the windows. They were eager to get home but stopped for a moment and kissed. Then John turned the key in the ignition. But before he could pull away he heard the blast of gunfire. The passenger window shattered and Christine slumped forward, bleeding. She died a few hours later in St John’s Hospital of bullet wounds to the right temple and the neck. She had never even seen her killer. But he had seen her – and so had the demons within him. Berkowitz later claimed that he had heard voices commanding him to ‘get her, get her and kill her’. After firing three shots and realising that he had hit her, he felt calm again.

  ‘The voices stopped,’ he said. ‘I satisfied the demon’s lust.’

  After the murder of Christine Freund, Berkowitz completely gave in to the impulse to kill. After all, he was getting his reward by all the publicity he was getting. ‘I had finally convinced myself that I was good to do it, and that the public wanted me to kill,’ Berkowitz said later.

  Six weeks later, on 8 March 1977, Virginia Voskerichian, a 19-year-old Armenian student, left Columbia University in Manhattan after her day’s study and set off home to Forest Hills, Queens. Around 7.30 p.m., she was nearing her home on Exeter Street. A young man was approaching her on the sidewalk and she, politely, stepped out of his way. But he pulled a gun and shoved it in her face. As he fired she raised her books in a vain attempt to protect herself. The bullet tore through them and entered through her upper lip, smashing out several teeth and lodging in her brain. Virginia collapsed in the bushes at the side of the street and died instantly. A witness saw a young man running away. This description was of an 18-year-old man, five feet eight inches tall, and there was no dark curly hair to be seen. The killer was wearing a ski mask.

  Berkowitz was almost caught that day. Minutes after the murder of Virginia Voskerichian, the police put out a ‘Code 44’. Two police officers were assigned to the south end of the Bronx with orders to stop all cars containing a single white man. Berkowitz drove up to the checkpoint with his .44 Bulldog loaded and lying in plain view on the passenger seat of his Ford Galaxie. He was third in line when the police called off the search and he could not believe his luck when he watched the officers walk away.

  However, the New York Police Department was on his trail. Their ballistics lab ascertained that the bullet had come from a .44 Bulldog handgun. That, in turn, tied it to the murder of Donna Lauria and the shootings of Jody Valente, Carl Denaro, Donna DeMasi, Joanne Lomino and Christine Freund. However, apart from the mention of dark curly hair by Jody Valente and the neighbour in the DeMasi/ Lomino case, the descriptions of the gunman varied so widely that no one in the NYPD had yet concluded that the four shootings were the job of a single individual.

  On the afternoon of 10 March 1977, a press conference was held at One Police Plaza, a 13-storey red stone building that is New York’s equivalent of London’s New Scotland Yard. Police Commissioner Mike Codd stood with some trepidation before New York’s hard-bitten crime reporters. As he read his carefully-prepared statement, he began to have an inkling that he was unleashing a wave of hysteria that would engulf the city. He started by saying that the murder of Donna Lauria, nine months before, was linked to the killing of Virginia Voskerichian, a mere two days ago. In both cases, the killer had used a .44 Bulldog revolver which had also been used in three other incidents. Worse, the killer chose his victims completely at random. Reporters pushed for other information. Commissioner Codd said that the police were looking for a Caucasian male, about six feet tall, medium build, 25 to 30 years old, with dark hair. Next day, the ‘.44 killer’ made the headlines.

  The man in charge of the investigation was Deputy Inspector Timothy J. Dowd. He had been one of New York’s finest since 1940. By 1973, he had worked his way up to the rank of deputy inspector at a major metropolitan precinct, but the then commissioner, David Crawley, announced a get-tough programme. He said that Dowd and 14 other senior officers had been underperforming and demoted them. Dowd fought the case and a year later it was Crawley who found himself demoted. Michael Codd took over as police commissioner and Dowd was restored to his former rank. But even then it was not plain sailing. As a test, Dowd was put in charge of an investigation in Chinatown. He was to break a secret society called The Flying Dragon and it was generally thought that no westerner could penetrate the Chinese crime syndicates. However, in 1977, Dowd announced that the leader of The Flying Dragons had been arrested for the murder of the leader of the rival gang, The Ghost Shadows. Under Dowd was Chief of Detectives John Keenan who had a special reason for wanting to capture the .44 killer. His daughter was Rosemary Keenan, the girl in the car with Carl Denaro when he was shot in the head.

  ‘I know he was aiming for her,’ Keenan said. ‘So let’s just say I put a little more than I had to into this case.’

  The police realised that their chances of catching a lone, seemingly motiveless killer on the streets of New York were remote. So they announced ‘Operation Omega’ and asked for the help of every New Yorker. Tip-offs jammed the police switchboards. Dowd and the Omega team followed up 250–300 leads a day. There was some speculation that the .44 killer could be the ‘Westchester Dartman’ who had wounded 23 women in Westchester County just north of the Bronx between February 1975 and May 1976. He prowled the area at night and fired inch-long darts at women through ground floor windows, wounding them in the head, neck or chest. He was never caught.

  As the investigation got under way, Berkowitz took pity on the police. He decided he would give them a few clues to juggle with, so he wrote them a letter. It took him two days to complete. Then he had to deliver it. But dropping it in a mail box and letting the postal service handle it was too mundane.

  Another young couple went to the cinema in New York on the night of 16 April 1977. They were 18-year-old Valentina Suriani and her boyfriend, 20-year-old Alexander Esau. After they had seen the film, they went on to a party. Around 3 a.m., they were parked in a borrowed Mercury Montego outside Valentina’s apartment building in the North Bronx, only three blocks from where Donna Lauria had been killed. Valentina was sitting on Alexander’s lap with her legs stretched out across the passenger seat and they were enjoying a prolonged series of goodnight kisses when bullets shattered the passenger window. Two hit Valentina’s head, killing her instantly. Another two hit Alexander Esau in the top of the head as he dived across the seat towards the passenger door. He died two hours later.

  When the police arrived, they found a white envelope in the middle of the road by the car. It was addressed to Captain Joe Borelli, Timothy Dowd’s second-in-command. The letter was all in capitals and full of spelling mistakes. It appeared to be the work of a madman. The writer claimed that he had been ordered to kill by his father, who was a vampire. His father’s name, the writer said, was Sam – hence the killer’s macabre sobriquet ‘Son of Sam’. In the letter, he professed to love the people of Queens, but said he intended to kill more of them – particularly the women, which he spelt as if it rhymed with ‘demon’. The writer signed off with the words:

  ‘I SAY GOODBYE AND GOODNIGHT. POLICE:

  LET ME HAUNT YOU WITH THESE WORDS; I’LL BE BACK! I’LL BE BACK! TO BE INTERPRETED AS – BANG BANG, BANG, BANG, BANK, BANG – UGH!! YOURS IN MURDER, MR. MONSTER.’

  By the time the letter reached the police labs, eight policemen had handled it. Only tiny traces of the writer’s fingerprints remained. He appeared to have held the letter by the tips of his fingers and there was not enough of a print on the paper to identify the sender. Consequently, the police kept the existence of the letter secret. But they showed a copy to celebrated New York columnist Jimmy Breslin, who dropped hints about the letter in his column in the New York Daily News.

  On 1 June 1977, Breslin himself received a letter. It had been posted two days before in Englewood, New Jersey, just over the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan. Although
the Daily News was then the biggest selling newspaper in America – its offices on 42nd Street double as those of the Daily Planet in Superman films – it held back publication of the full letter for six days, instead reproducing it in four parts to give the public a taste of what was to come and to heighten anticipation: on 3 June 1977, they ran the front page headline: ‘THE .44 CALIBER KILLER NEW NOTE: CAN’T STOP KILLING’. The next day, they ran: ‘.44 KILLER: I AM NOT ASLEEP’. By Sunday, they were running: ‘BRESLIN TO .44 KILLER: GIVE UP! IT’S THE ONLY WAY OUT’. This edition sold out within an hour of going on sale. So the presses kept rolling. By the end of the day, the Daily News had sold 1,116,000 copies – a record that would be beaten only on the day Berkowitz was arrested. The editors assumed that interest had peaked and reproduced the letter in full in the Monday edition. Like the Zodiac Killer’s letters, it was written all in capital letters and was as rambling and incoherent as the letter he had sent before to the police. It signed off:

  ‘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.’

  Then there was a long postscript:

  ‘HERE ARE SOME NAMES TO HELP YOU ALONG. FORWARD THEM TO THE INSPECTOR FOR USE BY THE NCIC: “THE DUKE OF DEATH”. “THE WICKED KING WICKER”, “THE TWENTY TWO DISCIPLES OF HELL”, JOHN “WHEATIES” – RAPIST AND SUFFOCATER OF YOUNG GIRLS.

  PS: J.B. PLEASE INFORM ALL THE DETECTIVES WORKING THE SLAYINGS TO REMAIN.’

  At the police’s request, this last page was withheld from publication. The reason they gave was that they wanted the NCIC – the National Crime Information Center – kept secret. But the .44 killer certainly knew about it. Perhaps the real reason was the satanic undertones in the list of pseudonyms he gave. The ‘Wicked King Wicker’ was presumed to be ‘wicca’. The ‘Twenty-Two Disciples of Hell’ sounded like some satanic organisation. John ‘Wheaties’ was supposed to be a ‘rapist and suffocater of young girls’. The police could find no trace of him. In fact, none of the names were much help to the Omega team or the NCIC. Nor were they any use to Jimmy Breslin who now began calling the .44 killer, the ‘Son of Sam’.