David Berkowitz | Son of Sam - Part 1
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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Weyborg Thun. As I promised you last week, I think it is high time I brought you another saga of one of the serial killer superstars. There are quite a few of them.

But they still make up a very limited number of people. Because of this, I have to dole them out between several episodes covering less famous killers. In Norway, we have a saying for situations where you have waited a long time for something really good. In Norwegian, it goes...

Translated into English, this is Those Who Wait for Something Good Does Not Wait in Vain. And tonight's episode is indeed a juicy morsel, a gem in the crown of serial killer luminaries. We travel once more to the United States of America.

Four decades ago, in the age of disco, the 70s, the streets of New York are haunted by a man saying he performs the commands of a demon. When he at last is captured, the world will know his name as David Berkovitz, son of Sam, serial killer of six human beings, and this is his saga.

Also, a quick update on my Patreon. I have introduced bonus episodes and exclusive content for patrons that donate $10 or more. For example, right now, there is a really interesting interview with me, your humble host, by an American radio station available to those patrons. So, go to theserialkillerpodcast.com slash donate.

or patreon.com forward slash the serial killer podcast to join the exclusive $10 plus club now. Imagine, if you will, dear listener, a cream-colored 1974 Galaxy car as it threaded through the Saturday shopping crowd crisscrossing high-toned Main Street.

Beyond the village, the fords slipped past short rows of catering vans whose occupants paid no notice as they carted the makings of garden parties onto private-lined grounds. Fashionable Southampton, New York, is about two and a half hours' drive from Manhattan.

It has long been one of the wealthiest summer communities on the East Coast, an enclave of rambling million-dollar homes, tennis courts, private beaches, and, in season, ceaseless traffic to New York City and back. And high season it was.

the sixth of august nineteen seventy seven a busy time when only the oddest of tourist vehicles might have drawn scrutiny from anyone there was nothing particularly interesting or arresting about ford's driver either

He was a pudgy-faced, clean-shaven, heavyset man in his middle twenties. He had short, curly, dark hair, and wore a denim jacket and jeans. Occasionally, a smile would flit across his full, oddly feminine lips. There was a Mona Lisa aspect to it, at once gentle and sly. It had a disturbing quality, that smile, but nothing else in his face commanded a second look.

He was bland and ordinary, almost to the point of invisibility. At least he looked that way. There was, in fact, a peculiarity that set him most distinctly apart from the weak enders around him. Only no one could see it.

It was the chorus of demons who howled and shuddered inside his head, the devils who swore and blasphemed, cursed and threatened. The demons lived inside him, and they were mean and vicious and thirsty for blood. Today, the young man determined, they would drink their fill. He'd come prepared to serve them.

Stuffed inside the waistband of his pants was a reassuring bulk of a .44 caliber Charter Arms Bulldog revolver. It had functioned well enough in weeks gone by, but it had its limitations. It was a cumbersome killer, requiring a hammer pull for every shot, and it could only shoot five times without a reload.

For the slaughter the driver envisioned this day, the .44 was insufficient. So, in the Ford's trunk there was a .45 Commando Mark III semi-automatic rifle, capable of expending a 30-round clip in less than 30 seconds. And with it, he had two loaded clips of ammunition.

The deadly hardware, meant for mass murder, was concealed in a green U.S. Army duffel bag with a name stenciled across it. D. Berkowitz. D for David. On this steamy summer day, the name was as anonymous as the man who wore it. Four days later, however, it would be a name known in all the world.

Four days later, David Berkowitz would at last be linked in the public mind with his deadly alter ego, Son of Sam. David Berkowitz was still unknown that hot 6th of August, but Son of Sam was already quite famous. People talked about him night and day. He was the object of the biggest manhunt in New York City.

With some help from hysterical headlines, he had virtually brought the mightiest of cities to its knees in fear. It killed six people, blinded or paralyzed another two, and wounded an additional seven. But it was not the numbers so much as the mystery surrounding Son of Sam that inspired terror.

It was the demented, semi-literate letters that he wrote to the newspapers. It was the randomness of his attacks in the Bronx, in Brooklyn, in Queens.

It was his trademark style, his modus operandi, lumbering out of the night to approach parked cars, crouching with his heavy gun clasped in two hands, firing suddenly, spasmodically, at his victims' heads. No one knew who he was, or where he might strike next, so no one felt safe. Southampton, however, had little cause for fear.

Heretofore, Son of Sam had never hunted outside New York City. There were plenty of pretty women in the great metropolis, and pretty women were the fare that demons preferred, especially women with long brown hair, women who parked in cars with men and kissed them. Sometimes the men were shot as well, but that was incidental. It was the women who mattered. Still,

There were good-looking women in Southampton, too. And besides, it was familiar ground. David Berkovitz had been at camp there in his boyhood, and he knew a bit about the habits of the community. More to the point, Southampton was where the demons had commanded him to go. There was no question of disobeying them.

If he didn't provide them with blood, they'd make his life unendurable with their mad screeching and yowling. Not long ago, their caterwauling had left him so desperate that he rushed out into the street in agony. But if they hounded him, Berkowitz believed, they also protected him. They had cast an illusion around him, making him invisible to the police.

It must be so, he reasoned. His pursuers already knew so much about him. His choice of weapons, his taste in victims. They even knew about the demons. He'd told them in his letters, and still they couldn't catch him. The Fiends were shielding him. He would give them their feast. As the ford cruised along, however, a summer storm blew up.

Berkowitz pulled over to wait it out. Rain was bad for his mission, perhaps even a sign that he should call it off. The demons often spoke to him through the weather. He restarted the car and doubled back for home. In sleek Southampton, the summer routine remained intact. The chic, secure residence, unmindful of the mayhem that had just been rained out.

For David Berkowitz, it was no great matter. There would be other opportunities. As it turned out, however, there were no other opportunities. Son of Sam had blown his one chance for mass murder.

On the 10th of August 1977, 24-year-old Berkovits was captured following a six-hour stakeout of his apartment at 35 Pine Street in Yonkers.

His soft, secretive smile flashed across every front page and television screen in the U.S., and the whole world learned about the chilling contents of his army duffel bag, now swollen with even more armament than he'd lugged to Southampton. When the police retrieved the bag from Berkovits' galaxy car,

They found the commando, a twelve-gauge shotgun, a .22-caliber AR-7 semi-automatic rifle, and substantial quantities of ammunition. Once again, the killer had apparently prepared for a massive bloodletting that was averted at the last minute. The soft-voiced Berkovits soon enlightened his captors about his motives and mission.

He was, he said, carrying out the wishes of a six-thousand-year-old demon named Sam, who passed his instructions through the unlikely medium of a black Labrador retriever.

Along with these muddle-headed explanations, the world also heard the single most salient fact about the self-described monster who had wrecked so many lives, kept an army of police at bay, and terrified a tough and cynical city. There was almost nothing to know. The monster caught

at last after one year and twelve days of terror turned out to be a quiet, mannerly former employee of the U.S. Postal Service.

prepared to confront an evil genius or a foam-flecked maniac. The public got instead a nobody, a loner, a loser, a man who, had he not killed, would probably have passed through life leaving scarcely a trace.

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For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.

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Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. His fellow workers recalled him, if at all, as quiet, polite and helpful. He was always courteous. If we had to lift anything heavy, he helped us. He was a gentleman, said one.

Even so, no one knew him very well. So isolated was he that his colleagues remembered him best for eating his lunch, alone, in a corridor outside the cafeteria. Berkowitz was capable of consideration. He'd even advised one scared co-worker to wear her hair pinned up. Since the .44-caliber killer, his first moniker in the tabloids,

only shot women with long flowing hair, but none at the post office employees had considered Berkovits a friend. The same held true at all his former places of employment. The terror of New York's night had been a security guard, an air conditioner repairman, a taxi driver, an undistinguished soldier, an indifferent student—

He was unmemorable. A floating speck in a teeming city. There was an idea of a David Berkowitz, some kind of abstraction, but there was no real identity, only an entity, something illusory.

And though he could hide his cold gaze, and you could shake his hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you could even sense your lifestyles were somewhat comparable, he simply was not there. As he summed it up himself, and I quote, Without Sam, I'm nothing. Many psychiatrists believe that Berkowitz's lack of identity was rooted in pathology—

Paranoid schizophrenics

often call themselves pawns of some external force that tells them what to do and is responsible for their actions. Paranoid schizophrenia is a mental illness. The legal and the clinical definitions of insanity are, however, altogether different.

And, in the view of the criminal justice system, Berkowitz was perfectly sane and had to answer for his deeds. Sane or mad, Berkowitz was well aware of his own isolation. He felt it keenly. Time and again, throughout his life, the slender ties he forged with the external world were torn away.

He began life as an adopted child. His natural parents never married. His adoptive mother, by far his closest emotional tie, died when he was in his early teens. Bereft of firm family roots, he was further plagued throughout his life by a radical inability to communicate, especially with girls and women.

There is a force to turn people away from me, he once wrote. Someone wants me destroyed, makes people dislike me, and makes girls be not attracted to me in any way. If I had close friends or girlfriends, I would be able to resist the force. But the leap from loneliness and murder...

is a long jump indeed, and psychiatrists who questioned David Berkowitz wondered precisely what drove him. Behind his confused ramblings, one possible answer emerged. Berkowitz was consumed with unspoken rage toward women. His antipathy began with the central woman in his life,

and eventually expanded to include all his prospective victims. As he told us psychiatrists, I blame them for everything. Everything evil that's happened in the world, somehow it goes back to them. Hearing this, it is not unreasonable to compare David to a more contemporary figure.

That of Elliot Rodger, the mass murderer who made the word incel a household term. He too blamed all his troubles on women, or females, as he would prefer to say, and decided to resolve this by killing as many women as he could before killing himself. So...

Who was this spiteful, hateful, socially inept serial killer calling himself the son of Sam? Richard David Falco was born on the 1st of June, 1953. His mother, Betty Broder Falco, was born in 1914 and was raised in Brooklyn, one of nine children of a tailor.

She finished grade school, then went to work in factories and offices. At sixteen she became a chorus girl and performed briefly with the Ziegfeld Follies. A Jew, she married a Gentile and had a daughter. The Falcos ran a fish store in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn until the deadbeat dad-husband deserted Betty for another woman.

This was thirteen years before her son was born. Betty Falco never divorced, but for more than twenty years she carried on an affair with a Long Island businessman named Joseph Kleinman. He was also married, but had managed to weave his relationship with Betty into the fabric of his family life.

In keeping with his singular view of the world, he positively refused to raise a child out of wedlock. So, when Betty told him she was pregnant, he told her to get rid of the baby. She dutifully relinquished the infant at birth, putting him up for adoption.

Thus, even as Richard Falco drew his first breath, he was already profoundly an outsider.

by all rights. However, this early rejection should have passed without leaving severe emotional scars. The baby was only a few days old when he was adopted by Nathan and Pearl Berkovitz, a hard-working Jewish couple from a stable community in the Bronx. Nat Berkovitz ran a hardware store

Pearl was a warm, outgoing woman who lavished love on her new son. The couple reversed the order of the baby's given names and called him David. He would be their only child. Except in light of his later notoriety, nothing that's known of David Berkowitz's early childhood would seem particularly significant.

He was a solitary child, but not to a worrisome extreme. His earliest memories were of cowboys and Indians, war games and other aggressive activities typical of many young boys. He was a chubby youngster and was teased for it. But he was not unintelligent, scoring 118, deemed superior level, on an IQ test in 1960.

Young David was, however, hardly an overachiever. Once old enough to attend school, he became an habitual truant, often feigning sickness to win permission to stay home. The Dodge never failed with his doting mother, who waited on him hand and foot. Acquaintances of the family remarked that David seemed able to get anything he wanted, simply by showing his temper.

One of his elementary school teachers described him as a moody child that was easily upset. According to what he told psychiatrists, after his arrest, he was also a morbid child. Time and again, he referred to his early fascination with death, and I quote, "'I always had a fetish for murder and death,'

Sudden death and bloodshed appealed to me. To make switching to the new Boost Mobile risk-free, we're offering a 30-day money-back guarantee. So why wouldn't you switch from Verizon or T-Mobile? Because you have nothing to lose. Boost Mobile is offering a 30-day money-back guarantee. No, I asked why wouldn't you switch from Verizon or T-Mobile. Oh. Wouldn't. Uh, because you love wasting money as a way to punish yourself because your mother never showed you enough love as a child? Whoa, easy there. Yeah.

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Next week I will give you part two. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. I have been your host, Thomas Weyborg Thun, and this podcast would not be possible if it had not been for my dear patrons, who pledge their hard-earned money every month. There are especially a few of those patrons I would like to thank in person.

These patrons are my 18 most loyal patrons. They have contributed for at least the last 22 episodes, and their names are Sandy, Maud, Charlotte, Christina, Claudette, Evan, Jennifer, Joe, Lisbeth, Mickey, Philip, PJ, Sarah, Kerry, Russell, and Troy.

You guys really helped produce this show and you have my deepest gratitude. Thank you. If you wish to join this exclusive club of TSK producers, go to theserialkillerpodcast.com forward slash donate and pledge $15 or more to have your name read live on this show.

As always, I thank you, dear listener, for listening. Please feel free to leave a review on your favorite podcast app, my Facebook page at facebook.com slash theskpodcast or Reddit. And please do subscribe to the show if you enjoy it. Thank you, good night, and good luck.