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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 these serial killer superstars, Son of Sam.
Last week, I introduced you to who David Berkowitz was as a person growing up. We examined his childhood, youth, and entrance into adulthood. Gradually, we also witnessed his descent into isolation and paranoia.
But fix thine eyes below, for draweth near the river of blood, within which boiling is, whoever by violence doth injure others. Just as Dante, whose poem you just heard a snippet of, together with Virgil descended into hell, shall we, walk along David's, fall into the abyss.
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May of 1975. Brooklyn Heights, New York City. Back in the mid-70s, Brooklyn Heights was not the hipster-infested prime real estate area it is today. Drugs and mobsters ruled the Brooklyn Heights streets throughout the 70s and 80s, while Brooklyn fell into disrepair as the city cut back on basic services.
Still, the borough remained a destination for a diverse set of immigrants from places like Russia, China and Puerto Rico, who intermingled with traditional Brooklyn populations of African Americans, Italians and Jews. The streets were filled with litter, and it was not uncommon for car wrecks to be left on the curbside until they were stripped clean by locals.
It was into this area of downtrodden brownstones, abandoned storage buildings and ample crime, David Berkovitz has just found his biological mother. As with most things he took an interest in, David was obsessed with finding her and consequently identifying with her. He referred to himself as Richard Falco, his given name by his biological mother.
And once he'd found her, through quite impressive detective work, he simply had to meet her. Betty Falco agreed to meet her son at her daughter's apartment. She was David's half-sister, name of Roslyn. The encounter was very likely a very emotional moment for David. The shy, nervous woman he met apologized for giving him up for adoption.
She spoke of the circumstances surrounding his birth, and in the process revealed that even his assumptions regarding his natural father's feelings about him were nothing but a myth. The man who sired him did not blame him, hate him, or care about him in one way or another.
Cataclysmic as these revelations must have been, in later years Berkowitz never described his reunion with his mother in other-than-matter-of-fact terms. His initial reaction, he would say, was mainly disappointment. I quote, "'I wasn't shocked. I wasn't scared. It wasn't the least bit painful. I felt pity for her.'
Regardless of what David said in later interviews, after his arrest, he did strike up a continuing relationship with both his biological mother and half-sister.
He visited them regularly almost every weekend throughout the last half of 1975 and the first half of 1976. The revelation of finding his biological mother did not seem to change David's fundamental criminal tendencies. On the 6th of June, 1975, he started lighting fires again.
He stopped going to Bronx Community College, and he took a job as a security guard near John F. Kennedy Airport. There he worked the shift from midnight to 8 a.m., keeping hours as that only furthered his isolation from people. His main companion was his guard dog that he took on his security rounds. It was by this time, according to him, that he started hearing voices. Over time,
They assumed identities in his mind as demons, urging him to commit violence. He managed for a while to keep the violent thoughts from manifesting into reality, but his life was becoming something like a charade of a life. He went to work at midnight, did his rounds, and came home at 8 a.m. There he sat on his sofa, eating TV dinners, drinking soda and milk, before going to bed.
He never cleaned his apartments, and dishes were piling up in the sink, and the floor was littered with trash. It seems he came to hate the light, perhaps from his job working only at night, and he nailed a dull grey blanket in front of his window to block the sun. It did not last long until he couldn't handle being a security guard. So he quit, and became a duct worker for an air conditioning company.
His foreman remembers him as quiet and something of a loner. More disturbingly, he also appeared to be a person who seemed perpetually depressed and always on the verge of tears. Dear Dad, It's cold and gloomy here in New York, but that's okay, because the weather fits my mood. Gloomy, Dad says.
The world is getting dark now. I can feel it, more and more. The people, they are developing a hatred for me. Many of them want to kill me. I don't even know these people, but they still hate me. Most of them are young. I walk down the street and they spit and kick at me. The girls call me ugly and they bother me the most. The guys just laugh.
This was a letter David Berkowitz sent to his father in November of 1975. After writing it, he vanished from his job and holed up in his apartment for 28 days straight, without meeting anyone. At the same time, he applied for a New York state rifle permit. It was granted the following year.
the voices in his head only grew louder and had now become his only companions more and more these hostile emanations took form in his mind as dogs according to david the dogs acted human
But they weren't. He said they howled at things, yelled like maniacs. They threw tantrums and wanted to get at children, to tear them up. When hearing this, one can easily imagine that it was not demon dogs who howled, yelled and threw tantrums. It was David.
On the 2nd of March, 1975, during the period he was searching for his biological mother, Betty Falco, David slipped out into the dark night with a 12-gauge shotgun. He spotted what he described as a grizzled German Shepherd, surrounded by a pack of other dogs. Drawing a bead on the Shepherd, he shot it.
The killing somehow fit into the demonic fantasy world that was by now Berkowitz's mental terrain, the prime substance of his universe. He left traces of its beginnings in his apartment on Barnes Avenue. Scrawled graffiti defaced the walls. Kill for my master, and I turn children into killers.
Around a gash in a plaster wall, a message proclaimed, "'In this hole lives the wicked king.'" By now David was corrosively lonely, ill-fed, suspicious, and filled with rage. He sought refuge from his internal clamor by driving around his father's old neighborhood in the Bronx. The pressure did not abate.
Instead, it only mounted with the supposed demons urging him to kill. On Christmas Eve, 1975, he tried to obey. Early in the evening, he tucked a hunting knife into the waist of his blue jeans and covered it with a jacket. Climbing into his car, he drove up to Co-op City. He wound in and out along the roads around the complex's supermarket, until he spied a woman leaving the store.
According to Berkowitz's later accounts, the voices in his head told him that this was the one. She had to be sacrificed. The demons commanded it so. Berkowitz double-parked and shuffled after his prospective victim. About thirty feet—that's about ten meters—from the nearest street lamp, he caught up with her and plunged his hunting knife into the innocent woman's back.
The woman, shocked, turned around and looked at Berkowitz. He couldn't have that, so he raised the knife again. And now the woman started to wail. Oddly enough, David was moved by this. I quote, "'I didn't know what the hell to do. It wasn't like in the movies. She was staring at my knife and screaming.'
The woman dropped the groceries and, still screaming, began grappling with Berkowitz. He stabbed repeatedly, but to no apparent effect. Finally, he panicked and bolted away from both his intended victim and his car. Stranger still, there is no official record of this incident, only Berkowitz's testimony.
The woman was perhaps not seriously injured by the clumsy attack, simply not cut deep enough to bother going to the hospital or to involve the police. For Berkowitz, everything about the incident was baffling. He was unable to understand why someone would struggle to live, why they would not complacently accept death. Again, I quote,
I wasn't going to rob her, or touch her, or rape her. I just wanted to kill her. Minutes after the botched first attack, he found another chance to vent his madness. His flight had taken him to the perimeter of Co-op City, within sight of his father's old building. It was close to a pedestrian bridge over the New York State Thruway.
Michelle Foreman was 15 years old and a sophomore at a nearby high school. She was walking across the pedestrian bridge. Berkowitz pursued her and stabbed at her head with his hunting knife from behind.
He took three more thrusts at her upper body, then two more at the teenager's face. In shock, Foreman flailed out, then fell to the concrete, riding and screaming in pure agony. David later said of the incident the following, "'I never heard anyone scream like that. I kept stabbing, and nothing would happen. I just ran off.'"
Foreman, a very brave young woman indeed, tried to stop her assailant by grappling his legs. He kicked her away, and she then managed to stagger to her parents' apartment building, hit the lobby buzzer, and collapsed. She was found lying in a pool of blood. One of Berkowitz's six thrusts with his knife had collapsed one of her lungs.
Luckily, Michelle survived the ordeal, but she was unable to provide police with actionable descriptions of her attacker. He had attacked her from behind, and she thus quickly went into shock, unable to remember much of what followed.
Forever!
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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.
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Less than a month after nearly killing 15-year-old Michelle, David's rifle permit arrived.
He drove to Brooklyn and bought the Commando Mark III semi-automatic for $152.50. He also purchased four boxes of ammunition. In February 1976, David moved out of his dingy Barnes Avenue apartment and left New York City entirely.
Instead, he rented a place above the garage of a married couple in the nearby suburb of New Rochelle. Perhaps thinking the attack on the unknown woman and Michelle Foreman had satisfied his inner demons, he wanted to make a fresh new start. That summer, he had taken the U.S. Civil Service examination and applied for a job with the post office.
He'd scored 80.5%, fairly high, especially considering his limited education. His starting salary turned out to be $13,000 per year. That's around $58,000 in today's money. More than he'd ever earned before. He was to be a letter sorter.
His new lodgings gave him surroundings far more pleasant than David's cramped apartment in the Bronx. But if he had thought the move would quiet the demon voices, he was wrong. The hallucinations were becoming ever more intense now. The devil dogs howled for blood. The married couple, named Nan and Jack Cassara, had a German shepherd.
According to Berkowitz, the dog's nocturnal barking made his life an utter hell. He sometimes did not return home to sleep, opting instead to drive around all night. Soon, one canine was joined by others in a terrible cacophony.
One Sunday morning, the invisible noise became so unendurable that Berkowitz rushed screaming out onto the driveway below his apartment. An alarmed Jack Cassara came out to see what was wrong. Berkowitz shook his fists and yelled, This place is a goddamn kennel, unbeknown to the Cassars.
They, too, had become enmeshed in their tenants' fantasies. During his stay in New Rochelle, Berkowitz became convinced that some of his demons, the most important ones, lived not in the dogs, but in their owners. In his fevered imagination, Jack Cassara was really General Jack Cosmo, commander of the Dog Demon Army.
Cosmo controlled the tormenting voices. He was the Lucifer of Berkowitz's private hell. In April of 1976, Berkowitz tried again to flee his torment. He moved, leaving behind his $200 security deposit. His next address would be his last before prison.
35 Pine Street, an apartment building in a quiet residential section of Yonkers. Again, the demons pursued him. General Jack Cosmo was now far away, but, Berkowitz surmised, the demon chieftain still exerted power. There was also a sort of sub-prince among the demons in Yonkers.
He was Sam Carr, 63 years old, the gaunt semi-retired owner of a local telephone answering service. Carr's home was at 316 Warburton Avenue. From Berkowitz's new apartment, it was visible off in the distance. David had gotten acquainted with the older man when he stopped by to chat one day. Sam Carr had three children, including a daughter named Wheat,
who worked as a dispatcher for the Yonkers Police Department. He also had a black Labrador Retriever. The dog horrified Berkowitz with hideous psychic noises. According to David, Sam Carr worked directly for Jack Cosmo and was a high official of the Devil's Legion. Sam Carr was not the only officer in Lucifer's employ.
At 18 Wicker Street lived Robert Neto, transformed in David Berkowitz's mind into a demon known as Joe Quinn, or the Joker. The Joker was formerly the number two demon, answering only to General Jack Cosmo. But now Sam Carr had usurped his power.
Joaquin shared a house with another prince of darkness, known only as the Duke of Dark. Next door, at 22 Wicker Street, was the home of John Wheaties, who ran a hostel of sorts for the demons who tortured Berkovitz. Devils from all around the world stopped at Wheaties' home to rest.
Both these houses, plus Cosmo's home in New Rochelle, would soon have an even more nefarious purpose in Berkowitz's dream universe. When he killed, he later told investigators, the demons on the scene would snatch the souls of the victims and take them to one of the three demonic residents. There, they would chain the souls and have sex with them forever.
In the ether of these strange delusions, Berkowitz had fashioned a place where he finally belonged. He was Sam's slave. Ordained to carry out the will of an entity he called a speck of evil cosmic dust that had fallen to earth and flourished. He would later claim that Sam used him as his tool, that Sam worked through David.
He said that, and I quote, People should take me seriously. This Sam and his demons have been responsible for a lot of killing. On the 13th of May, 1976, Berkowitz made a bizarre attempt to fight off the demon company crowding around him. Filling a bottle of gasoline, he made a Molotov cocktail and carried it to Sam Carr's home.
Lighting the wick, he flung the bottle toward the house and ran home without observing the results. The fire burned harmlessly on the driveway. No one was injured, but Sam Carr was left to wonder who might want to persecute him in such an eccentric way. The next month, David was on the move again, this time to Florida to visit his father.
He whiled away several days at the beach and barely spoke to anyone. After a week, he drove on to Houston to visit an old army buddy, Billy Dan Parker. The Texas trip was not entirely a social call. Berkowitz had a purpose in mind. He wanted to buy a handgun.
Parker, a construction worker, was remarkably hospitable, allowing his guests to stay for almost a month. When the time drew near for Berkowitz to leave, he asked his host to help him get a gun for security on the long trip home. Parker was happy to help.
In a transaction that lasted only a few minutes, the pair walked into a Houston pawn shop where Parker filled out gun ownership forms required of Texas residents. The purchase was a Charter Arms Bulldog revolver for which Berkowitz paid $130. He also bought three boxes of .44 caliber ammunition. He left.
for New York City fully prepared to satisfy the demons.
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And so ends part three of my special expose into the life and crimes of David Berkowitz. Next week, I will give you part four, where we look closer at the killings and letters signed the son of Sam. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned.
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