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Who they were, what they did, and how. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Viborg Thun. The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance. He will wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. Psalm, chapter 58, verse 10. Tonight, I will bring you, dear listener, to the conclusion of the saga of Son of Sam.
It's been a long ride. I hope you have enjoyed it so far. In this episode, I will go into detail how David Berkowitz committed his final killings, his arrest, conviction, and how he has spent his life in prison. This episode is brought to you by my loyal patrons and is 100% sponsored ad-free.
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Imagine, if you will, the listener being inside apartment 7E at 42 Pine Street.
It was a studio apartment with sweeping views over the Hudson River. David's mattress lay flat on a shag rug. The floors are littered with books and pamphlets. The walls are adorned with cryptic messages and clippings. Around holes in the walls, bizarre notes were scrawled saying that little baby killers lived inside. A lair of a true psycho killer.
The demonic choir inside David's head was once again reaching a howling crescendo, pushing him, urging him, ordering him to go out and feed them with more blood sacrifices. And so it was that on a muggy Sunday evening, the 25th of June, 1977, David left his garbage-strewn studio apartment for his car.
His trusty .44-caliber revolver, as always, stashed inside a paper bag. He drove to Queens this time and eyeballed a disco called Eliphaz. The place was quiet, like most teen hangouts. It was barely surviving the son-of-Sam depressed social climate of that summer. Berkowitz parked two blocks away and tucked the revolver into his waistband. Walking back to within one block of the disco,
He noticed a red Cadillac with two people talking inside. One was a girl, David Cabap, on the passenger's window from the rear, crouched down, and in his usual modus operandi, fired four times. Earlier that evening, seventeen-year-old Judy Placido had celebrated her graduation from St. Catherine's Roman Catholic Academy in the Bronx.
She was a beautiful girl, with lustrous brown waist-length hair. After a party with her family, she and three friends went to Eliphaz, where they discussed the danger posed by Son of Sam. They reassured one another that the killer struck only on clear nights, and this one was overcast. While at the disco, Judy struck up conversation with a young man, from Queens, named Salvatore Lupo.
She stayed behind when her friends left, wishing to chat further with Sal. Shortly after 3 a.m., he was about to give her a ride home, when the car window exploded. Judy felt an oppressive ringing in her ears, and sat helpless and dazed while her companion ran for help.
After a few moments, she staggered out of the car and collapsed. She'd been hit three times. In the neck, the shoulder, and the temple. Although she should have been dead, she wasn't. Sal Lupo, meanwhile, had been struck in the arm. Luckily, both of them survived the attack, but the assailant was nowhere to be found.
Once again, the police had just missed an opportunity to capture Son of Sam. A squad car had been patrolling in the area around the nightclub until moments before the shooting. Two weeks after the Placido Lupo shooting, police still was deep in the dark as to how to locate the killer. The 29th of July, the one-year anniversary of Donna Lauria's death, was coming up.
and the New York tabloids were churning out fevered stories on the possible significance of the anniversary. But David Berkowitz would observe the big day in his own quirky fashion. He quit his job at the post office. Nothing else exceptional happened. However, the very next day, David was back out on the streets on the prowl.
After a tour of Queens and Manhattan, he made his way to Brooklyn, a borough he hadn't yet visited on any of his murderous forays. Just before 2 a.m., he drove into the Jewish-Italian neighborhood of Bensonhurst, not far from where he had worked as a security guard. He parked his car illegally next to a fire hydrant and got out to walk.
As he headed up the street, a police car drove by and one of the patrolmen inside spotted the careless choice of parking places. As Berkowitz watched from a distance, an officer attached a summons to the galaxy's windshield. Berkowitz retrieved the ticket and tossed it on the dashboard before resuming his walk. Passing through a narrow entranceway, he wandered into a park that opened onto a stretch of water.
known as Gravesend Bay. This area, close by the soaring Verrazano Narrows Bridge, was known to the killer as a lover's lane. He spied a blue Corvette under a streetlap. In it were two people, one a woman with long brown hair. Berkowitz crept toward the back of the car.
Inside, 19-year-old Tommy Zaino, part owner of an automobile repair shop, and 17-year-old Debbie Crescendo were kissing. The young woman was somewhat distracted. She knew that the style of color of her hair made her a target for Son of Sam. Beyond that, she disliked sitting in the parked car, especially under a street lamp. She asked her date to move the car.
And he did, but only about seventeen meters. Minutes later, another car pulled into the spot, just vacated. In it sat twenty-year-old Robert Violante, a clothes salesman, and his date, twenty-year-old Stacy Moskowitz. She worked as a secretary in the Empire State Building. Both of them were very attractive people.
Robert had a winning smile, a full head of hair, a typical seventies moustache, and was very fit. Stacy was a slim girl with long, wavy, blonde hair, large eyes and an almost sensual-looking mouth. By the time the Corvette had started up its engine, David had melted back into darkness.
But when Violante's Buick pulled into view, son of Sam had no doubt that he'd found his victims for the night. It was nearly 3 a.m., and he watched as the couple got out of the car and strolled through the park. Violante pushed his date on a playground swing and then kissed her for a moment.
Before long, however, Stacy Moskowitz spied Berkowitz watching from the edge of the park. When she caught him looking over a second time, she grew nervous and asked Violante to take her back to the car. To get there, the couple had to walk right past Berkowitz, and Violante got a good look at his face. Had the couple driven off right away, the night might have ended very differently.
Unfortunately, they lingered a few minutes in the car, just long enough for David Berkowitz to sneak up behind them and open fire. Inside the car, Violante recalled later, he thought he heard a humming sound. Then nothing. He'd been shot twice in the face. His right eye was shattered, and his left eye severely damaged. Suddenly, the young man was blind.
His date slumped forward, struck once in the head. Violante screamed for help and pounded on the horn before staggering out of the car and collapsing. Son of Sam had struck again, but this time there was a witness. Tommy Zaino had seen it all. When the shooting started, he'd pushed his date down on the floor of the car and roared away to the nearby 62nd precinct.
Within minutes there were nearly a dozen police cars at the scene. When officers found a large bullet embedded in the steering wheel hub of Violante's car, they knew it was the work of Son of Sam. The killer himself had loped across the park, exited through a hole in the fence, and made his way back to his car. There David waited for a few minutes, and then drove us slowly away.
Instead of going home across one of the city's bridges, he bought a paper at an all-night newsstand and settled in, in a park less than one mile from the scene of the shooting. He sat on a bench and waited for the sun to rise. At 8 a.m., he returned to his car and drove back to Yonkers, passing through Manhattan on his way.
By spending the night in Brooklyn, he'd avoided an intensive police watch on the bridges leaving the borough. About 38 hours after she was shot in the head, Stacey Moskowitz died. New York City was in a pandemonium. However, the tide of luck that had let David Berkowitz elude police had already begun to turn.
There was not only one witness that clear summer night in Brooklyn, but two. Tommy Zaino and forty-nine-year-old Cecilia Davis. The latter had been walking her dog late on the night of the shooting, and had noticed a man who had smiled at her in a peculiar way. She had also noticed that he appeared to be concealing something in his hand.
When she a few minutes later had heard shots, she realized she had seen the killer, and after three days she overcame her fears and contacted the police. The police were initially doubtful she had actually been in the area, because she claimed she had seen police handing out parking tickets. At first, police thought they had not had any officers ticketing cars that night in that area,
But a more thorough search of the precinct five days after the shooting resulted in five parking tickets. When they were run through a computer, the tickets revealed that the summons had been left on a Ford Galaxy sedan, registered to one David Berkowitz of Yonkers.
The very next day, the 6th of August, Yonkers patrolmen Tom Chamberlain and Edward Wisner fielded a report of suspected arson at 35 Pine Street. They drove to the apartment house and met a tall, stocky man who identified himself as Craig Glassman.
Someone had set a garbage fire outside Glassman's door, and when he rushed to extinguish it, he discovered bullets among the smoldering refuse. He was convinced that the fire had been started by the same person who'd been sending him crazy-sounding letters. This last bit of information piqued the curiosity of Chamberlain and another cop, Peter Intervallo.
who'd helped conduct interviews with Sam Carr and Jack Cassara. The two of them were already suspicious of David Berkowitz. They read Glassman's letters, and the language persuaded them that the messages had come from the same writer who'd contacted Carr and Cassara.
The policemen began taking more seriously their gut feeling that the writer may also had authored the famous Son of Sam letters. While all this was going on, David Berkowitz was making his excursion to Southampton, bent on mass murder.
Sam Carr, meanwhile, was driving into New York City, hoping desperately to convince someone connected with Task Force Omega that the man who'd been harassing him was also their man. It took Omega detectives until Tuesday, the 9th of August, to winnow through the mess with the lost parking tickets and come up with Berkowitz's name.
Finally, with the name in hand, New York detective James Justus called the Yorker's police department. And, as fate would have it, the dispatcher who took the call was Sam Carr's daughter, Wheat. At the mention of David Berkowitz's name, she launched into a tirade about all her father's misadventures with the man.
A few hours later, New York was in touch with the officers in Yonkers who were investigating the car and glass man harassment cases. Excitement began to ripple through Task Force Omega. It seemed that a break in the case might have been here.
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as a family man with three kids i know first-hand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care but it's good to have some things that are non negotiable for some that could be a night out with the boys chugging beers and having a laugh for others it might be an eating night
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. On the 10th of August, David Berkowitz slept until 1 p.m. He wanted to get plenty of rest for the long and bloody night he had planned.
When he finally rose and dressed, he stashed most of his arsenal in the backseat of his car, then went back to his apartment, and spent the better part of the afternoon loading and reloading his .44 caliber revolver. Unbeknownst to him, detectives from the 10th Homicide Zone in Brooklyn by now had his car and apartment under surveillance.
They'd seen the bag of weapons on the back seat of the Ford and were awaiting a search warrant to move on the apartment. A flood of New York City police headed north to Yonkers. While they waited, Craig Glassman walked out of 35 Pine Street and peered into David Berkowitz's car. He was instantly surrounded and searched. But when he identified himself as a deputy sheriff,
He was invited to join in the arrest. A little before 10 p.m., a heavyset figure walked out of the apartment building and slid into the driver's seat of the Galaxy. Detectives Bill Gardella and John Fallotico were the first to approach him. Pointing his gun through the partially open passenger side window, Gardella shouted, "'Police! Don't move! Freeze!'
Berkowitz slowly turned his head and smiled his Mona Lisa smile. Falautico opened the door on the driver's side. Berkowitz stepped out of the car, and Falautico handcuffed him. "'You got me?' said Son of Sam and mumbled something else that was unintelligible. Berkowitz was booked and fingerprinted at Yonkers Police Headquarters."
Photographs of the killer were soon smiling shyly from newspapers everywhere. He looked so harmless. Yet the police had cause to believe that by catching him they had avoided a lot of bloodletting. There was, of course, the arsenal of weapons found in David's car.
But while searching his apartments, they also found maps of Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey, marked and annotated in such a way that investigators took them as evidence that Berkowitz had been planning to extend his killing grounds. During an evaluation at Kings County Hospital after his arrest, Berkowitz drew himself in a cell. On the paper, with the drawing, he wrote,
I am so glad I have been apprehended, but I wish someone would help me. Final desperation. I am not well. Not at all. David's defense lawyers were quick to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The court appointed a special psychiatrist to act for the prosecution.
Dr. David Abrahamsen conducted his own tests and found that while David showed paranoid traits, they did not interfere with his fitness to stand trial. The following mental competency hearing was held before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Joseph Corso. In it, David certainly acted mad.
Pulling away from his guards, he assumed his familiar shooting stance and pretended to hold a revolver in his hands. Then he began to chant, "'Stacey was a whore! Stacey was a whore! Stacey was a whore!' The family of Stacey Moskowitz, present in the courtroom, dissolved into sobs. But the mother of the slain woman overcame with rage."
and shouted out, You're an animal! In the end, despite David's outrageous behavior, he was declared sane, and his lawyers immediately changed his plea to guilty. On the 12th of June, 1978, he was sentenced to six consecutive terms of 25 years to life, one for each of the six murders. He began serving his sentence in
at New York's grim Attica Prison. Now that he had been caught and sentenced, David probably knew that the media would soon lose interest in him and his deeds. Being a narcissistic psychopath, this was unacceptable to him. In February 1979, Berkowitz thus called a press conference at Attica Prison.
There he said that he wanted to let people know that his stories about demons were all a fabrication. He described them as lies, invented by himself in his mind to condone his actions. Reporters at the press conference described him as lucid and calm. The urge to kill, Berkowitz claimed, had left him entirely. His final statement was, and I quote...
Whatever it was has just worked out of me. I've mellowed. I don't know what it is that started it, and I don't know what it is that caused me to lose interest. I don't know." He also said he fully expected to die in prison, and that he was still very much a loner. He ate alone, had little to say to other prisoners, and received very few visitors. He missed his family, he said.
and he missed driving his car. Since the time of the press conference at Attica, David was moved to the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York. There he remained for many years, until he was transferred to Shawongunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County, New York.
Although a model prisoner, Berkowitz claims to have been a Satanist at the time of the murders and suggested that he was part of a violent cult which actually perpetrated the crimes. In 1979, there was a serious attack on Berkowitz's life. Berkowitz refused to identify the person who had cut his throat.
but he has suggested that the act was directed by the cult he once belonged to. Later, Berkowitz reportedly invited the former priest and exorcist Malachi Martin to visit him to discuss his past occult involvement. As with many serial killers claiming to have been redeemed, David claims he was not actually the main villain in The Son of Sam Killings.
He claims that he did not act alone in the killings, and that he was part of an occult group which sacrificed animals to Satan, and which ran a child pornography racket. Berkowitz also claims that he is not the son of Sam Shooter, but merely one of the many lookout men.
In his claims, he puts the blame on John Wheaties Carr as one of the shooters, as well as Carr's brother, Michael, whom he claimed to be the shooter in the Queen's disco shooting. Sam was the name of the father of John and Michael Carr. John Carr lived in a house behind Berkowitz's and owned the Labrador that Berkowitz had claimed to be a demon.
The fact that David still puts the blame for his serial murders on the totally innocent Sam Carr is perhaps an indication that he is not as reformed and rid of delusions as he claims to be. A somewhat strange turn of events occurred in February of 1978, when Sam's son, John Carr, was killed during a shooting in North Dakota.
This was ruled a suicide, and even stranger is the fact that his brother, Michael, was killed in a traffic accident in October 1979 in Manhattan's West Side Highway. There are, as there always tends to be in serial killing cases,
people who have put forth theories that David is telling the truth regarding the murderous satanic cult he supposedly was a part of. However, there is not one single credible piece of evidence ever presented that incriminates anyone other than David Berkowitz. In addition to blaming a mysterious satanic cult for the actual killings,
Berkowitz now describes himself as a born-again Christian, just as Ted Bundy. He also says that his obsession with pornography played a major role in his part in the murders. To his credit, he did send a letter to the then New York governor George Pataki, asking that his parole hearing be cancelled. In the letter, he stated the following...
I can give you no good reason why I should even be considered. In June 2004, he was denied his second parole hearing after he stated that he did not want one. The board saw that Berkowitz had a good record in the prison programs, but decided that the brutality of his crimes called for him to stay imprisoned.
Berkowitz is very involved in prison ministry and regularly counsels troubled inmates. In 2006, David Berkowitz published a book titled Son of Hope. In it, he still puts a lot of blame on the supposed satanic cult he claims to have been seduced by, but also accepts that he is at least partly responsible for the murders.
Most of the book does not focus on the murders, but his path from satanic madness to him being saved by Jesus Christ and born again while in prison. Although David Berkowitz does not have free access to the internet, he has many fans and friends, especially since his supposed conversion to profound Christianity.
and they have, on his orders, created a website. Its address is www.ariseandshine.org, and it mostly consists of him bragging about being born again. He has a quote-unquote testimony section on the website, and it reads as follows.
Looking back, it was all a horrible nightmare, and I would do anything if I could undo everything that happened. Six people lost their lives. Many others suffered at my hands, and will continue to suffer for a lifetime. I'm sorry for that.
As I have communicated many times throughout the years, I am deeply sorry for the pain, suffering, and sorrow I have brought upon the victims of my crimes. I grieve for those who are wounded, and for the family members of those who lost a loved one because of my selfish actions. I regret what I have done, and I am haunted by it. Not a day goes by that I do not think about the suffering I have brought to so many."
Likewise, I cannot even comprehend all the grief and pain they live with now. And these individuals have every right to be angry with me, too. Nevertheless, I apologize for the crimes I committed. My continual prayer is that, as much as is possible, these hurting individuals can go on with their lives.
In addition, I'm not writing this apology for pity or sympathy. I simply believe that such an apology is the right thing to do. And, by the grace of God, I hope to do my very best to make amends whenever and wherever possible, both to society and to my victims."
notice dear listener that he does not directly say that he killed the six people who lost their lives to son of sam only that six people lost their lives and that he is sorry for the victims of my crimes
When reading the rest of the website, not once does it say unequivocally that he, David Berkowitz, is sorry for murdering six innocent people and wounding several more. I think that is very telling of what kind of man David Berkowitz was and still is.
And although I try to shy away from speculation and subjective opinion on this podcast, I personally think it is a seriously offensive thing to put the blame on the multiple attacks carried out by Son of Sam on anyone other than David Berkowitz. He exhibits most of the typical traits affiliated with a true blood psychopath.
And it is thus important to remember that the most common behavior among psychopaths is lying. The most powerful designer drugs are the digital ones we use daily. And we get high off them. One touch, tap, like, scroll at a time. You know, just like tech creators want us to. Use digital without digital using you.
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And so ends the saga of Son of Sam, my special expose into the life and crimes of David Berkowitz.
Next week, I will give you a fresh new Serial Killer Expo say. 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 24 episodes, and their names are Sandy, Maud, Amber, Anne, Charlotte, Christina, Claudette, Evan, Jennifer, Joe,
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