David Berkowitz | Son of Sam - Part 2
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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. Tonight, I will bring you along on the continued journey into the life and crimes of one of the serial killer superstars, Son of Sam.

Last week, I introduced you to what David Berkowitz did, and a brief introduction as to who he was. This week, I will tell you more about who David really was. We delve into his childhood and youth even more, and how he turned from awkward youth to ravenous killer. If you haven't listened to episode one of this series, please do so now.

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 forward slash donate or patreon.com forward slash theserialkillerpodcast now to join the exclusive $10 plus club. As David Berkovitz grew from child to adolescent, he often pondered his own demise.

He is quoted from later interviews as saying he begged God for death. When he sat in the New York twilight, he sat on the fire escape and, according to him, thought of throwing himself off it. He said, and I quote, When I thought about dying, I thought of being transported into a world of bliss and happiness. End quote.

Sometimes he would even dream about becoming a fireman, a hero, dying to save others. He also had keen, painful, although rather trivial memories of wrongs done to him by quote-unquote females, starting when he was very young. In prison, he spoke of an incident when he was five years old.

A group of girls poured sand in his hair, and his mother, unsympathetic, blamed him for the childish trouble and slapped him. There were also wrongs that he claimed to have done in return. At about the same time as the sand-throwing incident, he said, he hit a little girl with a toy gun and split her scalp.

Young David had a taste for hiding and for private fantasy. His father's nicknames for him were very telling. The nut called the child various names, such as Sneaky, Snoop, and Spy. David loved to slip through the house, doing his best to be invisible. He would steal into the kitchen for food, and before long he was eating compulsively, binging in secret.

David's first school was Public School No. 77 in the Bronx, although scarcely any of his fellow pupils remember him there. A third-grade classmate recalls that he was shy and quiet, quick to weep when reprimanded. The adult Berkowitz remembered himself quite differently.

He was a wild, unruly, undisciplined child, one of the worst in the school, according to himself. He might have wanted to have been a bad boy growing up, but he was not bad enough to make much of an impression on anyone else. By the time he was in the sixth grade, classmates would say he was something of a bully and a brat, largely friendless and prone to temper tantrums.

He could perhaps best be described as unpleasant, but hardly evil, hardly even memorable. There was little or nothing to foreshadow a murderous obsession. But unbeknown to his schoolmate, David Berkowitz, young as he was, had long grappled with an intense, disturbing problem. When he was only three, Nat and Paul had told him that he was adopted.

They lied about the circumstances, saying that his natural mother had died giving birth to him. The story, according to David, left him with a tremendous sense of guilt. He believed he'd caused his mother's death, and that, consequently, his natural father had hated him.

It hardly bears noting that the vast majority of adopted children, including those in far worse circumstances than young Berkowitz, grew up to become healthy, productive members of society. Perhaps David learned too young that he was adopted, or perhaps the knowledge exasperated some inborn flaw that was the true author of his homicidal nature.

Whatever the case, his childhood behavior gradually became more aberrant. By the sixth grade, he'd lost whatever thirst for learning he might have had, and was often in trouble for failing to do his homework. In junior high, he engaged in petty vandalism, breaking car windows and the like. He was also on the way to becoming a pyromaniac, setting dozens of tiny fires only to extinguish them.

To psychologists, this last behavior is worrisome indeed. It signals, they say, deep anger and aggression. David himself seemed to confirm that conclusion in his prison interviews. Even in childhood, he would say his habits and obsessions had already taken a very dark turn.

Along with setting fires, he began to torture and kill small animals, among them his mother's pet parakeet. He dispatched the bird in a typically sly way, feeding it small quantities of cleaning powder over a period of weeks. This is textbook behavior for a potential serial killer.

Killing and torturing small animals is something found among many famous serial killers, such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Berkowitz was never caught in his acts of animal cruelty, but a pattern was taking shape, one of hiding antisocial behavior behind a mask of innocence. As a teenager, David Berkowitz's isolation settled on him like a second skin.

Even his recreation was solitary. He favoured long bike rides or retreats into the countryside for rock climbing, always by himself. And for the second time in his young life, he was about to lose his mother. In 1967, Pearl Berkowitz died of breast cancer. David was 14 at the time, and he was devastated by her death.

Family friends recall that he wept piteously at the funeral and returned time and again to visit her grave. Nevertheless, when he was asked later to comment on this passage in his life, he claimed to be both happy and sad. According to him, it was freedom, as he thought his mother had been a pest at times, always nagging him.

His mother's death did make David's ruinous isolation even more pronounced, and every aspect of his life suffered as a result. For all his truancy and misbehavior, he still managed to maintain a B-plus average in junior high, while his adoptive mother was still alive. After the funeral, his grades and attendance both plummeted.

If his mother's excessive attentiveness and lax discipline had brought forth David's selfishness, her death brought out increasing aimlessness and resentment. The whole world, he decided, was against him. Later, under the full-blown influence of his paranoia, Berkowitz would declare that his mother died as a part of a master plan to break him down.

He was convinced evil forces had made her get cancer by putting something in her food. After nearly twenty-one months as a widower, Nat Berkowitz moved David from his familiar Bronx home to Co-op City and agglomeration of thirty-five high-rise apartment buildings in a northerly corner of the borough.

The father was working long hours at his struggling business, and David, in mid-adolescence and more alone than ever, found a specific focus for the pain of his solitude. He didn't merely lack friends. He lacked contact with the opposite sex. He later said, and I quote, "'The girls in Co-op City didn't find me attractive. I began to hate girls.'

and wanted to join the army. End quote. Lacking much individual identity, he found the idea of institutional identity appealing. He also became an auxiliary fireman, and trained as an auxiliary policeman at a local 45th precinct.

In the spring of 1971, the 18-year-old Berkowitz suffered yet another psychological blow when his father remarried. David thus acquired a stepmother, Julia, and a 25-year-old stepsister. The teenager showed no overt disapproval of the new family arrangement, but not noticed that in the weeks following the wedding, he became more and more reclusive.

If the marriage did not please young Berkowitz, apparently it did firm his resolve to seek a new life for himself. He decided to join the army. His ideas about enlistment were morbidly romantic. He wanted to die for a cause, he said. The Vietnam War was in full swing, and Berkowitz declared himself, quote-unquote, fanatically patriotic.

He envisioned winning glory in battle as an infantryman. Instead, he was stationed in Korea, where he would not see combat. Berkowitz's gung-ho attitude quickly vanished, and it became obvious that he didn't have much of a future in the army. He was caught stealing food from the mess hall, and was cited on two occasions for failing to move with his unit when ordered to do so.

His dreams of valor never materialized, but he did master a skill that he would find useful in later years, the use of deadly weapons. He won the ranking of marksman, the military's basic designation for shooting proficiency. Berkowitz's relationships with his peers in the military were typically flimsy. He had buddies, but no close friends.

His barracksmates nicknamed him Wolf, a teasing reference to his abundant body hair. In later days, he would brag about liaisons with Korean prostitutes and about wide-ranging experimentation with drugs such as LSD, marijuana, mescaline, and amphetamines.

Whether he actually acquired any of these vices is subject to considerable doubt. His main sexual activity throughout his life appears to have been masturbation. In January 1973, Berkowitz's unit was rotated back to the United States for assignments at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

This move seemed to have halted his deteriorating standing in the military, and his general rating after arrival at Fort Knox declared him an outstanding and dependable soldier. He even entered an educational program to better himself and improve his military performance.

But more dramatic than his career improvement was the spiritual rebirth that he seemed to experience in Kentucky. He took to attending services at Bethhaven Baptist Church in Louisville, and soon changed from an indifferent Jew to an ardent Christian. David's religious upbringing had been minimal. He had avoided formal instruction and had never learned Hebrew.

He had been lonely and isolated in the north, but found a powerful sense of belonging in the evangelical Christianity of the Bible Belt. He found the Baptist services very uplifting, and the sermons, according to him, were all about demons, sin, hell, and eternal damnation. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up.

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He would arrive at 9 a.m. on Sundays, sometimes stay until 10 o'clock at night. He also showed up for evening services on Wednesday, Thursdays, and Fridays. Radio Preachers was the soundtrack of his days. He had read religious tracts and became obsessive on the subjects of the end of the world and the damnation for sinners.

In May 1974, he underwent the ritual of full immersion in water, as he was baptized as a member of the congregation. At last, it seemed, he belonged somewhere. A glow with passion for his new beliefs, David became a sidewalk proselytizer, hungry to save souls — male ones, anyway.

According to his prison interviews, he said of this to him the following, I just wanted to see the men go to heaven. They're all hard-working, clean-cut patriotic men. Who the hell needed those sluts, those go-go dancers? Too many women in heaven would spoil it. End quote. Just as with so many things in Berkowitz's life, his early passion soon began to fade.

he was capable of intense and single-minded fervor he had shown it in his avid patriotism and his whole-hearted religious conversion but the pattern of his enthusiasms was to flare hotly and die leaving only ashes

This pattern of focusing heavily on one single thing and dedicating yourself wholly to that for a brief period of time before abandoning it is typical of another psychological disability, Asperger's syndrome. He was never formally diagnosed with this, but researching his life, it does seem to fit very well with his general behavior and personality.

In June of 1974, he was given an honorable discharge from the army. He traveled back to his family in Co-op City, but the reunified household didn't fare well. Reviving the traits that had earned him the nicknames of Snoop and Spy, David became compulsively suspicious of his father's second wife.

He rummaged through her personal belongings in order to, and I quote, ascertain her motive in marrying my dad, and to make sure that there were no other men in her life. I didn't trust her one bit, end quote. Berkowitz was also leery of his stepsister, who was in every way his opposite, gregarious, motivated, and friendly.

By this time, David had reverted to the secret pyromania of his earlier youth. But now, this was taken to an extraordinary scale. If Berkowitz is to be believed, between the 13th of May 1974 and his arrest in 1977, he set no less than 1,411 fires.

He left detailed records of every episode in journals for the years 1974, 75 and 77. Police never found a notebook for 76.

The journals were laid out on grids that included the dates and times of the fires, the streets and boroughs in which they occurred, the numbers of the local fireboxes, and the fire department codes indicating the types of responding apparatus. Some of the fires were in empty lots, others were in cars, and at least a few resulted in major blazes that destroyed buildings.

While his secret compulsions grew, Berkowitz was still able to hide behind his unremarkable facade. In December 1974, Nat Berkowitz announced that he was moving to Florida. His hardware store had been robbed, souring him finally on urban living. David would stay behind, losing his last sympathetic contact in the city.

With his father's help, he moved into an apartment on Barnes Avenue in the Bronx. He began driving a taxi for a living, and in the spring of 1975, he enrolled at Bronx Community College. As was typical of his personality, he wanted to specialize in something, but he had no idea what that should be. Thus, he quickly lost interest and skipped classes regularly.

And while he did attend, he usually sat in the back of the room, abstracted and silent. Berkowitz may have lacked academic drive, but he was not without focus. His new obsession, just as intense as his religious conversion and patriotism had been, was all-consuming. He wanted to find his natural father.

After Nat Berkovits moved to Florida, David joined an organization called the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association. It gives counsel and emotional support to adoptees searching for their birth parents. At an Alma meeting, he told the story of his biological mother's death and was flabbergasted when the audience laughed.

Many other adoptees, he was informed, had heard a similar story. He was told how the story of her dying was most likely a lie and that his mother was probably alive. Enraged by this news, David pressed Nat Berkowitz for the truth and got it.

David was jolted by what he learned, that he was an accident, as he put it, a mistake never meant to be born, unwanted. The bittersweet tragedy of innocently killing his mother by being born was supplanted with a more brutal truth, that his birth mother had cast him aside.

He concluded he had to find this woman, and he set about a task with his usual fervor, working around the clock. While he labored with the task of finding his birth mother, his other compulsions were put on hold. It was May 1975, almost Mother's Day. David's labors had yielded fruit after intense research worthy of the most dedicated detective.

He had found a woman named Betty Falco, and also managed to dig up her unlisted number and address. He penned the following poem on a greeting card. So, as once before, we've been destined to meet once more. And I guess the time is now. I should say hello. But how? Happy Mother's Day. You were my mother in a very special way.

He signed the poem RF for his birth name of Richard Falco and added his telephone number, then carried it to Betty Falco's Brooklyn apartment house and put it in her mailbox. Several days later, his phone rang. He had found her.

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And so ends part two of my special expose into the life and crimes of David Berkowitz. Next week I will give you part three, where I dig deeper into Son of Sam's emerging madness. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. I have been your host, Thomas Weyborg Thun.

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