Hollis Woods?”
Ryan wasted no time. Over the
next seven nights, one of his burliest
six-foot-two detectives dressed in drag
and parked at the crime scene with
a “lover.” Elsewhere in Queens, 20
other detectives disguised themselves
as couples enjoying a bit of backseat
passion in secluded parking spots. Their
efforts provoked gales of hilarity at
police HQ, but proved futile.
Hopes rose briefly when a dry-cleaner
found a .25 automatic in a suit pocket,
but ballistic tests proved it was not the
DEMONS DROVE “SON OF SAM” TO MADNESS
A
t one o’clock on the morning of
July 29th, 1976, an 18-year-old
medical technician named Donna
Lauria and her friend, 19-year-old Jody
Valente, a student nurse, were sitting in
Jody’s stationary car outside Donna’s
home in the Bronx. As they were about
to call it a night and go home to bed a
young man walked out of the darkness
towards the car, took a gun from a
brown paper bag and started shooting;
he left Donna Lauria dead and her
friend wounded in the thigh.
Another similar shooting took place
on October 23rd, in the middle-class
Queens district. Carl Denaro had a
small portion of his skull shattered
but suffered no brain damage; his
18-year-old girlfriend Rosemary
Keenan was unharmed. A month later,
at midnight on November 27th, Donna
DeMasi and her friend Joanne Lamina
were shot and wounded while sitting
on the steps outside Joanne’s home at
262nd Street in the same district of
Queens. Donna fully recovered from
a neck wound, but the lower half of
Joanne’s body was paralysed by a bullet
in her spine.
Ballistics experts quickly established
that all three attacks had been carried
out using the same handgun, a
distinctive .44 Bulldog – giving the
murderer the provisional name “The
.44 Killer.”
On January 30th, 1977, as John Diel
and Christine Freund sat in a Pontiac
in Queens the passenger window was
shattered by bullets, one of which tore
into Christine’s skull; she died later in
hospital but her fiancé was unharmed.
The next random attack was made
on March 8th, when 19-year-old
Columbia University student Virginia
Voskerichian was shot dead in the
street.
When Valentina Suriani and
Alexander Esau were both fatally shot
as they sat in their car in the Bronx
on April 14th, 1977, the breakthrough
came. The killer began to expose
himself.
Police officers from Operation
Omega, the task force established to
investigate the killings, found a letter
lying near Alex Esau’s car. Addressed
to the New York Police Department,
it read: “Dear Captain Joseph Borelli,I am deeply hurt by your calling me
a woman-hater, I am not. But I am a
monster.”
The killer also wrote a letter to
flamboyant New York Daily News
columnist Jimmy Breslin on June 1st:
“...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. In their blood and from the gutter,
‘Sam’s Creation’ .44.”Now the Daily News had a new name
for the killer: “Son of Sam.” Breslin,
through his column, replied to the
letter, goading the killer into making
another move.
It came on June 26th, in Queens,
where Salvatore Lupo and Judith
Placido were wounded while they sat in
a car. On July 31st, Stacy Moskowitz
and Robert Violante became the last
victims of “Son of Sam;” shot in their
car; 20-year-old Stacy died in hospital
and Robert was blinded.
Son of Sam then made one fatal
mistake. After the final shooting he
walked back to his yellow Ford Galaxie,
took a parking ticket off the window
and threw it in the gutter. Mrs. Cecilia
Davis saw this, and thought no more
of it until she saw the same young man
while she was out walking her dog later
that night. This time he was carrying
something up his sleeve that Mrs.murder weapon.
Investigating a report that the couple
had gone from Mineola to another rink
in Queens, detectives learned that the
manager there would certainly have
noticed Frances and Lewis because he
was very friendly with the Weiss family.
“Lewis was a member of the
Christian Science congregation which
I also belong to, and his dad is a lay
reader there,” said the manager. “I’m
certain neither of the young people
were at my rink.”
Detectives had also wondered abouta possible connection with the red
circles stamped on the wrists of people
attending the college dance that Frances
had been invited to. But this, too, was
discounted as simply a way of making
sure who had tickets. That year the head
of the dance committee had happened
to secure a circular bank stamp.
In an interview with MMF’s sister
magazine True Detective in February
1937, John Ryan revealed that Lewis
Weiss had told a friend he often visited
the clearing in Hollis Woods “for one
purpose or another.”Davis thought might be a gun.
When the police were informed, they
ran a check on the car that the ticket
had been issued to and came up with
the name David Berkowitz, resident of
Pine Street in the suburb of Yonkers.
When detectives found his car there
was a loaded semi-automatic rifle on
the seat and a letter in the glove box,
addressed to the head of Operation
Omega, threatening another killing.
They settled down to wait till Berkowitz
came out of his apartment to claim
them. No sooner had he settled himself
behind the wheel than he was taken
from the car and asked: “Who are you?”
“I’m Sam,” he replied with a smile.
He went quietly to the police station
and made a full confession.
David Berkowitz, born illegitimately
in June 1953, was rejected by his
mother, a fact which prompted his slow
descent into illness. Uncomfortable in
female company, his paranoia grew
over the years. In 1974, so he later
claimed, Berkowitz became aware of
“the voices”– as he lay in the darkness
of his squalid apartment; they were
telling him to kill. When police searched
the Yonkers flat after his arrest they
found the walls covered with scribbled
messages such as “Kill for My Master.”
The source of the name “Sam’s
Creation” seems to have been
Berkowitz’s neighbour Sam Carr,
whose black labrador kept Berkowitz
awake at night with its barking. He
began sending a series of hate letters
to Carr, and in April 1977 shot and
wounded the dog.
With his generally peculiar behaviour
and a fondness for sending anonymous
letters to people he believed were intent
on doing him harm, Berkowitz had
already provoked complaints to the
police, though such was his otherwise
engaging charm that nobody seriously
considered him a candidate for Son of
Sam.
Obviously a paranoid schizophrenic,
Berkowitz was nevertheless found
fit to stand trial, though that process
was pre-empted by his plea of guilty.
On August 3rd, 1977, Berkowitz was
sentenced to 365 years, to be served at
the Attica Correctional Facility.
The great clamour surrounding the
case, from the high level of publicParanoia: David Berkowitz