O MADNESS AND MURDER
Ryan also suggested that someone
besides the killer knew who committed
the crime, and that it could have been
the work of one man using a gun and a
second man using a knife.
At that stage, True Detective
was offering a $1,000 reward for
information leading to the arrest of the
Weiss-Hajek killer and to move things
along the magazine decided to do some
digging of its own.
One of its journalists found that from
ancient times a circle or geometrically
enclosed symbol had been used tointerest to the journalists and TV
producers offering money to Berkowitz
for his story, led to a new law – called
the Son of Sam Law – introduced
specifically to seize any profit from
his misdeeds. The law was declared
unconstitutional in 1991.
David Berkowitz now describes
himself as a born-again Christian and
several years ago asked the New York
governor to cancel his parole hearings.
“I can give you no good reason why I
should even be considered,” he said.
In June 2004 and July 2006 he
was denied parole,
despite his good
record in prison,
as a result of
the brutality of
his crimes. He
remains behind
bars.ward off evil. The sign had then passed
beyond protection and evolved into “a
mystic focus of power.”
Armed with this information,
reporter Michael Stern and editor John
Shuttleworth set out for Hollis Woods
and the crime scene.
“We walked about three hundred
yards before coming to a hard gravel
clearing where the bodies had been
found. There’s a dead end a little
further on, so why did they stop here?”
asked Stern.
“The complete isolation and privacy
of the place impressed us,” he wrote.
“Here was indeed a spot ideal for a
murderous mind to achieve its macabre
masterpiece in villainy.”
The police were still fine-combing
the woods for the murder weapons, but
not far from the death scene Stern and
Shuttleworth found pages ripped from
a porn magazine.
“As I see it,” said Shuttleworth,
“these two young people never drove
to this spot of their own free will even
though Weiss knew the place. The
killer was either a psychopath given
an unmissable opportunity or there’s
something in all this we haven’t yet
fathomed.”
Stern agreed that the killer was
insane, delusional, impotent, and driven
by fury to avenge his frustration with
gun and knife.
John Ryan held to the belief that the
killer had posed as a police officer, but
his reasons for this are not on record.
The case remained unsolved.
Forty years later, from July 1976 to
July 1977, New York was terrorised by
a killer who identified himself only as
“Son of Sam” (see panel left for details)
He perpetrated eight separate handgunassaults, several against amorous
couples in parked cars. In all cases, the
primary targets were young women in
their teens and twenties. Six of the 13
people attacked died from their injuries.
When David Berkowitz was finally
arrested, he confessed to all the
shootings and to writing a series of
“satanic” letters to the NYPD and
reporter Jimmy Breslin.
Several years later, he accused other
people of involvement in the crimes –
particularly two Satanists called John
and Michael Carr who, significantly,
both died violently within two years of
Berkowitz’s arrest.
The Son of Sam parallels with
Weiss-Hajek are only partial, but
they offer a new slant on an old
case. In the end, did Ryan and his
team underrate and fail to explore
the significance of the red circles?Above and left, True
Detective magazine
offered a substantial
sum for exclusive
information leading
to the apprehension of
the killer of Hajek and
Weiss. However, editor
John Shuttleworth
(below centre) never
paid out the $1,000 and
the solution of the case
remained one exclusive
that he never got to runSam Carr and
his labrador
Harvey, who
was shot and
wounded in
the flank by
Berkowitz