Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time (14 page)

However, Berkowitz was not the only suspect in the Son-of-Sam slayings. New York has a rich supply of paranoid schizophrenics. Besides, Berkowitz did not fit the description given by Tommy Zaino. Nor did he drive a yellow VW. So it was not until 10 August 1977 that Omega detectives John Longo and Ed Zigo went to Yonkers to check Berkowitz out. Zigo spotted Berkowitz’s Ford Galaxie parked outside the apartment block in Pine Street. There was a bag on the back seat with a rifle butt protruding from it. In New York, possessing a rifle did not even require a licence. Nevertheless, Zigo forced open the car. Inside he found another, more formidable weapon, a Commando Mark III semi-automatic. Then in the glove compartment, he found a letter addressed to the head of Operation Omega, Deputy Inspector Timothy Dowd. It said that the next shooting would be in Long Island. Detective Zigo phoned into Operation Omega and told Sergeant James Shea, ‘I think we’ve got him.’

Police from all over the city were brought in. They staked out the car for six hours until Berkowitz turned up. He was a stocky man with a round cherubic face and dark hair. When he got into the driver’s seat, he found himself looking down the barrel of a police revolver.

‘Freeze!’ yelled Detective William Gardella. ‘Police!’

Berkowitz simply smiled.

Detective John Falotico opened the passenger door, held his .38 to Berkowitz’s head and told him to get out. When he put his hands on the roof, Falotico asked, ‘Who are you?’ Berkowitz answered, ‘I am Sam.’

At One Police Plaza Berkowitz confessed to the shootings and the anonymous letters. He also admitted that his crime spree had begun on Christmas Eve 1975. About seven o’clock he had driven to the Co-op City in the Bronx, where his adoptive father lived. He saw a young Hispanic woman leaving a store and followed her. He pulled a knife and stabbed her in the back. She did not realise what had happened, turned, screamed and grabbed his wrist. He ran away. But on his way home, he followed 15-year-old Michelle Forman and stabbed her in the back and head. She fell screaming on the sidewalk. Again Berkowitz fled. Somehow she managed to stagger to the apartment block where her parents lived. They rushed her to hospital where they found that she had a collapsed lung. Her other injuries were superficial and she only spent a week in hospital. His first victim did not even report the attack and was never identified. These early attacks convinced Berkowitz that he needed a gun. A friend called Billy Dan Parka bought him a .44 Bulldog revolver in Houston, Texas, for $130. Under interrogation, Berkowitz explained that he had been ordered to commit the murders by Sam Carr, via Carr’s demon dog Harvey. Other demon voices accompanied him when he was stalking his victims. Berkowitz was so forthcoming that his complete confession took only half an hour.

Further enquiries revealed that Richard David Berkowitz had been an illegitimate child who had been given up for adoption as a baby. His natural mother, Betty Broder, was Jewish. At 19, she married Tony Falco, an Italian-American. He left her for another woman six years later. She began an affair with real estate agent Joseph Kleinman, a married man, in 1947. She got pregnant by him, but when she told him that she was going to have a child, he said she had better get rid of it, if she wanted to go on seeing him. The child was born on 1 June 1953 and was adopted immediately by a Jewish couple, Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz, who were unable to have children of their own. They named him David. But in 1967, when David was just 14, Pearl Berkowitz succumbed to cancer. He was deeply upset at this new loss.

Two years later, Nathan decided to move to Co-op City in the Bronx, a middle-class suburb. But the area was deteriorating and gangs of youths soon began terrorising the neighbourhood. David’s school grades plunged and he seemed to lose any sense of direction. He was shy and found himself a victim of bullying, though others saw him as spoilt and something of a bully himself. He was big for his age, strong and an excellent baseball player. But he liked to play with kids younger than himself. His biggest problem was with girls. One friend remembers Berkowitz asking him if he wanted to join the ‘girl-haters club’. He only ever dated one girl in Co-op City, Iris Gerhardt. She liked his warm and obliging nature, but the relationship was never consummated. While Berkowitz remained chaste, almost everyone else seemed to be at it. This provided his motive.

‘After a while, at Co-op City, there wasn’t one girl who was a virgin,’ he said resentfully.

In prison, Berkowitz wrote: ‘I must slay women for revenge purposes to get back at them for all the suffering they caused me.’

His friends also started smoking marijuana but, again, Berkowitz was too inhibited to join in.

Things got worse in 1971 when his father remarried. Berkowitz resented his stepmother and stepsister, and decided to join the army. But that did not last long. Home again in 1974, Berkowitz had rejected Judaism and become a Baptist. Nathan Berkowitz remembers his son standing in front of the mirror beating his head with his fists. Things became so uncomfortable in the Berkowitz household that David moved out to take a drab one-room apartment at 2151 Barnes Avenue in the Bronx. By this time Nathan became convinced that his son needed psychiatric help. But Nathan and his new family were moving to Florida and nothing was done. With his father gone, another door closed for Berkowitz.

He had known from the age of seven that he had been adopted. Isolated, he tried to trace his real family. It took a year. Through the Bureau of Records, he discovered that his real name was Richard Falco and he came from Brooklyn. Using an old telephone directory, he managed to trace his mother and an elder sister. He dropped a card in his mother’s mailbox and, a few days later, she called him. The reunion was emotional. He also met his 37-year-old sister and became a regular visitor to the house where she lived with her husband and children. At last, he had found a family and, at last, Berkowitz was happy. Or so it seemed.

In the first half of 1976, his visits to his real mother and sister became increasingly rare. He complained of headaches. In February, he moved into the room above the Cassarases’ garage out in New Rochelle. Two months later, he moved suddenly to Pine Street, Yonkers. And in July, he killed Donna Lauria.

After a year-long killing spree the police at last had Berkowitz under lock and key. He pleaded guilty to all six charges of murder and was sentenced to 365 years in prison. One of the Omega team, Sergeant Joseph Coffey, who had conducted the initial interrogation, said: ‘I feel sorry for him. The man is a fucking vegetable.’

However, not everyone was satisfied. Investigative journalist Maury Terry spotted a number of inconsistencies in Berkowitz’s story. Berkowitz claimed that he had acted alone. But he simply could not have been responsible for the Violante-Moskowitz shooting if Tommy Zaino’s description was accurate. Even if he had been wearing a wig, he was not tall enough. And if he was the man Mrs Cacilia Davis had seen outside her apartment building, only minutes before the shootings, he could not have got to Violante’s car on Shore Parkway in time. Terry interviewed Zaino and Davis. Both confirmed their original accounts. When Davis went through her story again, Terry realised that it was unlikely that, if Berkowitz had been carrying a .44 Bulldog revolver already connected to a number of murders, he would have sped off after a police car, honking his horn late at night. Maybe, as Berkowitz said, ‘The demons were protecting me, I had nothing to fear from the police.’ Terry tracked down the witnesses who said that they had seen a fair-haired man in a yellow VW. All of them stuck to their stories. They could have been mistaken. But their descriptions seemed to match those given by the two schoolgirls who had been shot in Queens. Terry concluded that Berkowitz had a fair-haired accomplice.

Another inconsistency was Berkowitz’s pseudonym ‘Son of Sam’. His real father’s name was Tony, and his adoptive father’s name was Nathan. The only Sam in the case was Sam Carr, who Berkowitz claimed had given him orders to kill via the demon dog Harvey. However, although the Carr house was visible from Berkowitz’s sixth floor apartment, they had never met. Carr confirmed that the first time he had even heard Berkowitz’s name was when Mrs Cassaras called and told him about their former lodger. So why was Berkowitz so obsessed with Carr? Sam Carr did, in fact, have two sons, John and Michael. Both of them hated their father. Carr’s daughter was called Wheat and John Carr was nicknamed ‘Wheaties’. Then Terry remembered ‘John “Wheaties”, rapist and suffocater of young girls’ in the Son of Sam’s letter to Jimmy Breslin. John ‘Wheaties’ Carr was tall, with long stringy fair hair. While Terry tried to trace John Carr, he became interested in some of the Satanic clues in the Breslin letter. He was also concerned about Berkowitz’s seeming obsession with dogs. He did discover that in Walden, New York, about an hour’s drive from Yonkers, 85 Dobermans and Alsatians had been found skinned during the year of the Son-of-Sam killings. More dead dogs had been found in a wooded area of Untermeyer Park in Yonkers. A local teenager said that devil-worshippers held ceremonies there. Could Berkowitz have been involved in a satanic cult? The police dismissed the idea.

In October 1978, when Terry eventually traced John Carr, it was too late to ask him about any of this. He had been shot dead in the small town of Minot, North Dakota. His body had been found in the bedroom of his girlfriend Linda O’Connor, with a bullet through the roof of the mouth and rifle beside the body. The coroner’s verdict was suicide, but the police believed he had been murdered.

John Carr had been born in Yonkers, New York, on 12 October 1946 – he shared a birthday with the self-styled ‘wickedest man in the world’ the Satanist Aleister Crowley. After leaving Catholic school, Carr joined the US Air Force. He was stationed in Korea and served for 12 years. In 1972, he returned to the US and was stationed in Minot, North Dakota. He was discharged in 1976, allegedly for drug addiction. In 1976 and 1977, he went to hospital three times with overdoses and had a reputation as a drug dealer and a heavy drinker. He was in New York for probably five of the eight Son-of-Sam attacks, including the shootings of Donna DeMasi and Joanne Lomino, and he closely resembled the descriptions they had given.

In late January 1978, Carr drove the 1,500 miles from Minot to New York, saying he was going to stay for a long time. But within two weeks, he called his girlfriend and told her that the police were after him. On 14 February, he flew back to Minot. He rented a post office box, opened a bank account and enquired about the continued payment of a disability allowance he received for a service injury, hardly the actions of a man contemplating suicide. Two days later he was dead.

Mysteriously, on the skirting board by the body, the letters ‘S.S.N.Y.C.’ had been scrawled in blood. A man who has blown the top of his head off with a rifle bullet seldom has time to write things in his own blood. Terry deduced that Carr had been beaten to the ground by his assailants, then his killer, or killers, had gone to search for his gun, leaving Carr time to write his message before he was killed. The letters ‘S.S.N.Y.C.’, Terry concluded, stood for ‘Son of Sam, New York City’. Carr also had the figures ‘666’ written in blood on his hand. 666 was the number of the Beast in the Book of Revelations and was used as a Satanic pseudonym by Aleister Crowley. The police in Minot had also discovered that Carr was connected with a number of local occult groups and his girlfriend said that when Carr had seen news of Berkowitz’s arrest for the Son-of-Sam shootings on the TV, he had said, ‘Oh shit’.

Up to this point Terry had been dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. But John Santucci, the District Attorney of Queens, began to believe there was something to Terry’s investigation. He re-opened the case. It was soon discovered that, far from being the classic psychotic loner, Berkowitz had a wide circle of friends. Chief among them was John ‘Wheaties’ Carr’s brother Michael. In 1975, the year before the killings started, when Berkowitz was living in his drab one-room apartment in Barnes Avenue, he met Michael, a young drug addict who had been hanging about outside the apartment block. He invited Berkowitz to a party. The guests included John Carr and other members of The Twenty-Two Disciples of Hell, the Satanic group Berkowitz referred to in his letter to Breslin. In due course, Berkowitz moved to Yonkers, to within 200 yards of Sam Carr’s house where Michael Carr then lived. Michael Carr had since moved out and, by the time he could be traced, he, too, was dead. In the early hours of 4 October 1979, Michael Carr’s car ran into a street lamp at 75 miles an hour as he drove towards Manhattan. There were no skid marks and his sister, Wheat, was convinced that he had been forced off the road or that one of his tyres had been shot out.

The most unexpected witness in Santucci’s new investigation was Berkowitz himself. In February 1979, he had called a press conference and announced that his story about Sam Carr’s dog and demon voices had been concocted in the hope that he would be able to enter a plea of insanity. But court-appointed psychiatrists had declared him sane. Now, a year after being incarcerated in Attica Correctional Facility, he said that he had bought his .44 knowing exactly what he intended to do. He wanted to kill women because of his disappointments with sex.

In prison, Berkowitz had become a prolific letter writer. In them, he described how he had stage dressed his apartment to back his insanity plea. A week before his arrest, he had stripped his apartment of an expensive Japanese stereo system, a dinner service, a bureau, sofa and bed. These had been loaded into a van and dumped in front of a Salvation Army warehouse in Mount Vernon. Berkowitz specified the location of the garage he had rented the van from, the cost of the rental and the location of the warehouse – all of which checked out. He had also vandalised his apartment, knocking a hole in a wall so violently that it had cracked the plaster in a neighbour’s flat. He had also covered the walls with ravings. This was all true. In a letter to a priest in California, Berkowitz wrote:

‘I really don’t know how to begin this letter, but at one time I was a member of an occult group. Being sworn to secrecy or face death, I cannot reveal the name of this group, nor do I wish to. The group contained a mixture of Satanic practices which included the teachings of Aleister Crowley and Eliphaz Levi. It was (and still is) blood orientated, and I am certain you know what I mean. The Coven’s doctrines are a blend of ancient Druidism, the teachings of the Secret Order of the Golden Dawn, Black Magick, and a host of other unlawful and obnoxious practices. These people will stop at nothing, including murder. They had no fear of manmade laws or the Ten Commandments.’