Latest / True Nightmare Stories / He Smiled When Caught - "You Got Me. What Took You So Long?"

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He Smiled When Caught - "You Got Me. What Took You So Long?" · True Nightmare Stories

0:03
Speaker 1: He smiled when they caught him. Not a nervous smile,
0:07
Speaker 1: not relieved, a slow, deliberate smile, a kind of someone
0:11
Speaker 1: who has been expecting you. He turned, looked at the detective,
0:15
Speaker 1: pointing a gun at his chest, and said, you got me.
0:18
Speaker 1: What took you so long? That It was August tenth,
0:21
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven, David Berkowitz had spent thirteen months shooting
0:25
Speaker 1: strangers in parked cars across New York City. Six people
0:29
Speaker 1: were dead, seven more permanently injured. In the back seat
0:32
Speaker 1: of his car, wrapped in a military style bag, sat
0:36
Speaker 1: a semi automatic rifle loaded for a mass shooting planned
0:39
Speaker 1: that weekend. The police expected a monster. What they found
0:43
Speaker 1: was utterly ordinary. That detail never stopped being disturbing. The
0:48
Speaker 1: deeper question not who he was, but what he believed
0:51
Speaker 1: he was. Because David Berkowitz did not believe he acted alone.
0:55
Speaker 1: He said, the orders came through a dog. This case
0:58
Speaker 1: pulled me back for the violence, but for the space
1:01
Speaker 1: between what can be explained and what can not. On
1:05
Speaker 1: the night of July twenty ninth, nineteen seventy six, Donna
1:08
Speaker 1: Lauria eighteen, sat in the passenger seat of a car
1:12
Speaker 1: parked outside her Bronx apartment late after a disco windows down.
1:17
Speaker 1: A man approached on foot, crouched, pulled a revolver from
1:20
Speaker 1: a brown paper bag, and fired five shots in under
1:24
Speaker 1: four seconds. Donna Lauria died. She was the first. Berkowitz
1:28
Speaker 1: was not clever, He was careless. He parked illegally. He
1:31
Speaker 1: wrote and mailed letters, taunting detectives by name and writing
1:35
Speaker 1: to columnists. He signed one letter referencing a specific person
1:39
Speaker 1: living on his street. The difficulty was something else. The
1:43
Speaker 1: city sought a pattern where the only consistent element was randomness.
1:47
Speaker 1: Targets shifted young women with dark hair, then a man,
1:51
Speaker 1: then couples, then a woman alone. The weapons stayed the same,
1:56
Speaker 1: a point four to four caliber Charter Arm's Bulldog revolver
1:59
Speaker 1: acquired illegally. That fixed point mattered, and still it took
2:03
Speaker 1: thirteen months to find him. David Berkowitz was born Richard
2:07
Speaker 1: David Falco on June first, nineteen fifty three, in New
2:12
Speaker 1: York City. His mother, Betty unmarried his biological father, a
2:16
Speaker 1: married business man named Joseph, was never part of the picture.
2:20
Speaker 1: Betty gave him up days after birth. Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz,
2:24
Speaker 1: a childless Jewish, working class Bronx couple adopted him. By
2:28
Speaker 1: his account, his childhood was unremarkable, quiet parents a small apartment.
2:34
Speaker 1: At seven, he overheard a fragment that revealed he was adopted.
2:37
Speaker 1: At fourteen, Pearl died of cancer, Nathan remarried. Berkowitz resented it.
2:43
Speaker 1: At eighteen, he enlisted in the Army, and a letter
2:46
Speaker 1: from basic training he wrote, all of these courses will
2:49
Speaker 1: come in handy one day, referring to weapons training, and
2:52
Speaker 1: closed with one day there will be a better world.
2:56
Speaker 1: He returned to New York in June thousand, nine hundred
2:58
Speaker 1: seventy four one one, trained with an M sixteen, working
3:02
Speaker 1: night security, living alone. He had wanted to be a
3:05
Speaker 1: fire fighter. That door closed. In May nineteen seventy five,
3:10
Speaker 1: he found his birth mother, Betty. The reunion was warm
3:13
Speaker 1: at first, and he learned she had kept another child,
3:16
Speaker 1: a daughter, his half sister, while giving him away. Psychologists
3:21
Speaker 1: later said this discovery locked his internal narrative. He was
3:24
Speaker 1: the one she chose not to keep disposable. He moved
3:27
Speaker 1: to Yonkers. His neighbor, retired Sam Carr, who had a
3:30
Speaker 1: black labrador named Harvey. Harvey barked at night. What follows
3:35
Speaker 1: Strain's rational explanation, the Pine Street building was ordinary. Berkowitz
3:40
Speaker 1: lived there long enough no one thought him unusual. Inside
3:43
Speaker 1: his apartment, investigators later found newspaper photographs of every victim
3:47
Speaker 1: cut out and laid on the floor, not pinned, just
3:51
Speaker 1: on the floor. To understand what he believed happened there,
3:55
Speaker 1: go back to the noise. Harvey barked after dark for hours.
3:58
Speaker 1: The sound traveled up through the building in a way
4:00
Speaker 1: Berkowitz described as unbearable, not merely annoying, but penetrating. He
4:06
Speaker 1: sent anonymous threatening letters to Karr about the dog. He
4:10
Speaker 1: threw a Molotov cocktail into Karr's yard. He set fires
4:13
Speaker 1: in nearby buildings. On April twenty seventh, nineteen seventy seven,
4:18
Speaker 1: he shot Harvey with a point two two rifle from
4:20
Speaker 1: his window. Harvey survived. Then, Berkowitz told investigators something psychiatric
4:26
Speaker 1: evaluations could not fully resolve. The barking was a voice.
4:30
Speaker 1: Sam Carr was a demon. The dog was the channel
4:33
Speaker 1: the voice ordering him to kill Caine through Harvey. Investigators
4:36
Speaker 1: confirmed the letters Arson the shooting of the dog. They
4:40
Speaker 1: could not confirm the voice order claim. Berkowitz ultimately insisted
4:44
Speaker 1: on it and retreated. Psychiatrists for prosecution and defense could
4:47
Speaker 1: not agree on whether he truly believed it or used
4:50
Speaker 1: it as language. They agreed he was fit for trial.
4:54
Speaker 1: Berkowitz rejected insanity, pled guilty voluntarily, son of Sam, the
5:00
Speaker 1: Albployd's name for over a year. An era of fear
5:02
Speaker 1: in NYC was not a mythic reference, but a reference
5:06
Speaker 1: to Sam Carr, his neighbor, and the dog. New York
5:10
Speaker 1: in summer nineteen seventy seven was near bankruptcy, unemployment high.
5:15
Speaker 1: A massive July blackout had triggered looting. Beneath all that
5:18
Speaker 1: ran a fear built since the first shooting, the fear
5:21
Speaker 1: of sitting in a parked car walking home alone, of
5:24
Speaker 1: having dark hair, women cut and dyed their hair. Restaurants
5:28
Speaker 1: and clubs reported business drops. The fear produced concrete bodily
5:32
Speaker 1: choices by hundreds of thousands of people with no way
5:35
Speaker 1: of knowing if they were targets. Because Berkowitz gave no logic,
5:39
Speaker 1: no consistent sex, neighborhood, or time. Battern rigid enough to
5:42
Speaker 1: avoid the city was large, the gun small. The only
5:46
Speaker 1: connecting thread was a point four to four bullet and
5:48
Speaker 1: the car they found it in. The Omega task force
5:51
Speaker 1: grew from sixteen detectives to thirty and seventy five with
5:55
Speaker 1: two twenty five uniformed officers in support. A hodline got
5:59
Speaker 1: two hundred fifty calls a day. Investigators used manequins and
6:03
Speaker 1: cars as decoys. Nothing produced a lead with traction until
6:07
Speaker 1: a parking ticket on the knight Stacy Moskowitz was shot
6:10
Speaker 1: in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The last attack July thirty first, nineteen
6:14
Speaker 1: seventy seven. A patrolman had issued parking violations in the area.
6:18
Speaker 1: Detective James Justice track down the officer. The ticket sat
6:22
Speaker 1: in the officer's locker. Four citations total that night, one
6:26
Speaker 1: read David Berkowitz, Yonkers. When investigators called the Yonkers Police Department,
6:32
Speaker 1: the operator was Wheat Car Sam Carr's daughter. She confirmed
6:36
Speaker 1: her family had been having problems with a man of
6:38
Speaker 1: that name for some time. The connection that broke the
6:41
Speaker 1: case open was not a fingerprint or a description. It
6:44
Speaker 1: was a parking ticket that almost never got pulled, found
6:48
Speaker 1: by chance two weeks after it was issued. The first
6:51
Speaker 1: shot was fired on a Tuesday night in late July
6:54
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy six. Donaluria was eighteen years old. She
6:59
Speaker 1: had just come home Medisco with her friend Jody Valenti,
7:02
Speaker 1: and they were still sitting in Jody's car outside Donna's
7:05
Speaker 1: apartment building in the Bronx, talking the way people do
7:08
Speaker 1: when a night isn't quite finished yet. It was past midnight,
7:12
Speaker 1: the street was quiet. Then a man walked up to
7:14
Speaker 1: the car, crouched down, pulled a gun, and fired through
7:18
Speaker 1: the window. Donna died before the ambulance arrived. Jody was
7:22
Speaker 1: shot in the thigh and survived. No one got a
7:24
Speaker 1: clear look at the shooter. He walked away. That detail matters,
7:29
Speaker 1: not the running, not the panic, not the dramatic exit
7:32
Speaker 1: he walked. The police had almost nothing, no motive, no
7:36
Speaker 1: connection between the victims, no non enemies, no robbery. Investigators
7:41
Speaker 1: treated it as an isolated street crime in a city
7:43
Speaker 1: that had plenty of them. New York in nineteen seventy
7:47
Speaker 1: six was broke, overwhelmed, and bleeding. Population. One shooting outside
7:51
Speaker 1: a Bronx apartment at midnight did not immediately suggest anything larger.
7:56
Speaker 1: Three months later and happened again on the twenty third
7:59
Speaker 1: of October nineteen seventy six, Carl de Mero and a
8:03
Speaker 1: young woman were parked on a quiet street in Queen's
8:06
Speaker 1: the kind of street people called a lover's lane. Without
8:08
Speaker 1: any irony, someone fired into the car. Karl took a
8:12
Speaker 1: bullet to the back of the head and survived, though
8:14
Speaker 1: part of his skull had to be replaced with a
8:16
Speaker 1: metal plate. The woman beside him was physically unhurt. The
8:20
Speaker 1: shooter was gone before anyone could respond. Then November, Donna
8:24
Speaker 1: Demasi sixteen and Joanne Lomino eighteen were sitting on the
8:28
Speaker 1: front steps of a house in Queen's when a man
8:31
Speaker 1: approached and asked for directions. Before they could answer, he
8:34
Speaker 1: pulled a gun. Both were shot. Both survived, Joanne did
8:38
Speaker 1: not walk again. The man disappeared into the dark between houses.
8:42
Speaker 1: Three incidents, three different locations in two burrows. Investigators noted
8:47
Speaker 1: the weapon was consistent a large caliber revolver, but the
8:51
Speaker 1: victim seemed random. Young people parked cars or outdoor spaces
8:55
Speaker 1: at night, no apparent connection between any of them. The
8:59
Speaker 1: rational frame work held barely A pattern was possible, A
9:03
Speaker 1: single shooter was possible, but possible was a long way
9:07
Speaker 1: from certain, and certain was a long way from stopped.
9:10
Speaker 1: Christine Freund was shot on the thirtieth of January nineteen
9:14
Speaker 1: seventy seven. She and her boyfriend John Deale were parked
9:17
Speaker 1: in Queen's after seeing a movie. A bullet came through
9:20
Speaker 1: the passenger window and struck Christine in the side of
9:22
Speaker 1: the head, then the neck. She died hours later at
9:25
Speaker 1: the hospital. John was untouched. He had no explanation for
9:29
Speaker 1: why he was sitting there, and she was dead and
9:31
Speaker 1: he was not. Police formed the Omega Task Force sixteen detectives,
9:36
Speaker 1: initially a number that would grow. They mapped the shootings,
9:40
Speaker 1: cross referenced descriptions, ran ballistics. The bullets were consistent, a
9:45
Speaker 1: point four to four caliber fired from a revolver later
9:48
Speaker 1: identified as a Charter Arms Bulldog. Every victim had been
9:52
Speaker 1: in or near a parked car at night. Most were young.
9:55
Speaker 1: Several were women with dark hair. The dark haired detail
9:59
Speaker 1: moved through the city of the way the way rumors do
10:01
Speaker 1: it became a theory. Women in New York started changing
10:04
Speaker 1: the way they looked, cutting hair short, dying it blonde.
10:07
Speaker 1: Restaurants in the areas near shootings reported drops in business.
10:10
Speaker 1: People made concrete choices based on incomplete information, and the
10:14
Speaker 1: choices felt rational because there was nothing else to do.
10:18
Speaker 1: The task force grew to thirty detectives, then seventy five,
10:21
Speaker 1: with over two hundred uniformed officers in support. A hotline
10:25
Speaker 1: generated two hundred fifty calls a day. Investigators placed mannikins
10:29
Speaker 1: with dark hair and parked cars as decoys. None of
10:32
Speaker 1: it produced a lead. On the eighth of March, Virginia
10:35
Speaker 1: Veskarian was walking home alone in Forest Hills, Queens. She
10:39
Speaker 1: was twenty years old, a Bulgarian immigrant, a student. When
10:44
Speaker 1: the shooter approached, she raised the stack of textbooks she
10:47
Speaker 1: was carrying in front of her face. The bullet went
10:49
Speaker 1: through the books and killed her instantly. She was found
10:52
Speaker 1: on the sidewalk, the book still in her hands. That
10:55
Speaker 1: image broke something in the public understanding of what was happening.
10:58
Speaker 1: This was not a parked car are late at night.
11:01
Speaker 1: This was a young woman walking home in the early
11:03
Speaker 1: evening with her school books. The rational adjustments people had
11:06
Speaker 1: been making stay out of parked cars, avoid certain neighborhoods
11:10
Speaker 1: at certain hours suddenly had no purchase. Six days later,
11:14
Speaker 1: the police confirmed publicly that the same gun had been
11:17
Speaker 1: used in the Vascarichian shooting. And at least two previous
11:21
Speaker 1: attacks the city had a serial shooter. The name the
11:25
Speaker 1: press would eventually use Son of Sam, did not exist yet.
11:29
Speaker 1: On the seventeenth of April, Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau
11:33
Speaker 1: were parked in the Bronx at three in the morning.
11:35
Speaker 1: Both were shot. Valentina died within minutes, Alexander died two
11:40
Speaker 1: hours later at the hospital. They were the fourth and
11:42
Speaker 1: fifth people killed. Left at the scene beside the bodies
11:46
Speaker 1: was a lever. It was addressed to Detective Joseph Beirelli,
11:49
Speaker 1: the lead investigator on the task force. It was hand written,
11:53
Speaker 1: densely strange, and it signed off with a name no
11:56
Speaker 1: one had heard before, Son of Sam. The writer disc
12:00
Speaker 1: described hearing commands, described a pressure that would not stop,
12:03
Speaker 1: described an entity called Sam. He wrote the word women
12:07
Speaker 1: as W E, M O N. Linguists and investigators noted
12:11
Speaker 1: that if you changed the W to a D, the
12:14
Speaker 1: word became demon. Whether that was intentional was unclear. Most
12:18
Speaker 1: things about the letter were unclear. One line read, I
12:22
Speaker 1: don't want to kill any more, but I must honor
12:25
Speaker 1: thy father. The task force now had a correspondent that
12:29
Speaker 1: change the nature of the investigation. Without changing its momentum,
12:33
Speaker 1: which was still merely zero. In late May of nineteen
12:37
Speaker 1: seventy seven, a second letter arrived. This one was sent
12:40
Speaker 1: not to the police, but to Jimmy Breslin, a columnist
12:44
Speaker 1: at the Davy News. Breslin was one of the most
12:46
Speaker 1: widely read voices in the city. The letter was more
12:49
Speaker 1: elaborate than the first. It included a confession to the
12:52
Speaker 1: killing of donal Loya, the first victim. It asked that
12:55
Speaker 1: readers memorized the anniversary of her death. It contained a
12:59
Speaker 1: line that begame came famous within hours of publication. Sam's
13:03
Speaker 1: a thirsty lad and he won't let me stop killing
13:05
Speaker 1: until he gets his fill of blood. Preslent's editors debated
13:08
Speaker 1: whether to print it. They printed it. The Daily News
13:12
Speaker 1: sold over a million copies that day. The last attack
13:15
Speaker 1: happened on the thirty first of July nineteen seventy seven.
13:19
Speaker 1: Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante were parked in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn,
13:23
Speaker 1: the first attack in that burrow. They were both twenty
13:26
Speaker 1: years old. It was late at night. A man walked
13:29
Speaker 1: up to the car and fired through the window. Stacy
13:32
Speaker 1: was shot in the head. She died at thirty eight
13:34
Speaker 1: hours later, never having regained consciousness, Robert was shot in
13:38
Speaker 1: the face. His left eye was destroyed, his right eye
13:41
Speaker 1: retained only partial vision. He would spend the rest of
13:44
Speaker 1: his life largely blind, with only fragmented light perception in
13:48
Speaker 1: one eye. This was the thing that broke open what
13:51
Speaker 1: nothing else had. Not a tip, not a witness who
13:54
Speaker 1: came forward, clearly not a forensic breakthrough. A patrolman had
13:58
Speaker 1: issued parking citation in the area around the time of
14:01
Speaker 1: the shooting. This was routine. The citations went into the
14:05
Speaker 1: officer's locker. They stayed there. Detective James Justice tracked down
14:09
Speaker 1: that officer two weeks after the shooting and pulled the citations,
14:13
Speaker 1: four of them. Three were unremarkable. The fourth read David
14:17
Speaker 1: Berkowitz Yunkers. When investigators contacted the Ynkers Police Department to
14:22
Speaker 1: run the name, the operator who answered was Wheat Car.
14:25
Speaker 1: She was Sam Carr's daughter, and when she heard the
14:28
Speaker 1: name David Berkowitz, she said that her family had been
14:31
Speaker 1: having serious problems with a man by that name, letters harassment.
14:36
Speaker 1: Her father's dog had been shot. The thread that had
14:39
Speaker 1: been invisible for over a year was right there, waiting
14:42
Speaker 1: in a locker. Detective Sergeant Bill Gardella led the stakeout
14:46
Speaker 1: on Pine Street in Yonkers on the night of August tenth,
14:49
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven. They waited for four hours. When Berkowitz
14:54
Speaker 1: walked toward his car, Gardella crossed the street with his
14:56
Speaker 1: weapon drawn, shouting that he was police at Burkowy, which
15:00
Speaker 1: should not reach for anything. Berkowitz turned round slowly. He smiled.
15:04
Speaker 1: He said, you got me. What took you so long?
15:08
Speaker 1: In the back of the car on the floor a
15:10
Speaker 1: military bag containing a semiau atomatic rifle. In the car
15:14
Speaker 1: a letter addressed to the Chief of Police of Suffolk County.
15:18
Speaker 1: It read, in part, you can't stop me. I'm coming out.
15:22
Speaker 1: He had been planning a mass shooting that weekend. On
15:24
Speaker 1: the way to the precinct, Berkowitz asked if someone could
15:27
Speaker 1: comb his hair. He said the press was probably waiting.
15:30
Speaker 1: In his apartment, investigators found newspaper photographs of every victim
15:35
Speaker 1: cut out and laid on the floor. Berkowitz told investigators
15:38
Speaker 1: that a demon had spoken to him through Harvey the
15:41
Speaker 1: black lambradoor, belonging to his neighbor Sam Carr. The dob's barking.
15:45
Speaker 1: He said, was not ordinary noise. It was instruction. It
15:50
Speaker 1: was command. The entity speaking through it identified itself as Sam.
15:54
Speaker 1: That was where the name came from, not mythology, not literature,
15:59
Speaker 1: not the t babloid's imagination. Sam was the man next door.
16:03
Speaker 1: The dog was the vessel. Psychiatrists examining Berkowitz before trial
16:07
Speaker 1: were divided. Some concluded he was genuinely delusional. Others believed
16:12
Speaker 1: the demonic framework was constructed after the fact, a narrative
16:15
Speaker 1: built to explain behavior that had no other explanation he
16:19
Speaker 1: was willing to offer. Both groups agreed that the question
16:21
Speaker 1: was clinically real. Neither group agreed on the answer. The
16:25
Speaker 1: court ultimately found incompetent to stand trial. Berkowitz himself rejected
16:29
Speaker 1: an insanity defense. He said he understood what he had
16:32
Speaker 1: done and what the consequences would be. He pleaded guilty
16:35
Speaker 1: voluntarily on June twelfth, nineteen seventy eight, and received three
16:40
Speaker 1: hundred sixty five years in prison. He has never been released.
16:44
Speaker 1: What stayed unresolved. What remains unresolved is the question the
16:48
Speaker 1: psychiatric division leaves open. If the demonic compulsion was real
16:51
Speaker 1: to him, that changes one thing. If it was constructed,
16:55
Speaker 1: it changes something else entirely. What it does not change
16:59
Speaker 1: is the list of names. Donna Lauria, Christine Freund, Virginia Voskarichian,
17:04
Speaker 1: Valentina Suriani, Alexander Esau, Stacy Moskowitz, Six people who were
17:10
Speaker 1: in the wrong place, parked on a quiet street, walking
17:13
Speaker 1: home with textbooks, sitting outside on a summer night. There
17:16
Speaker 1: is a version of this story where a man heard voices,
17:19
Speaker 1: believed them, and acted on them. There is another version
17:22
Speaker 1: where a man chose violence and then reached for a
17:25
Speaker 1: story that might make it survivable to tell. Both versions
17:28
Speaker 1: contain the same gun both versions, and in the same
17:31
Speaker 1: apartment in Yonkers, with the photographs on the floor. What
17:35
Speaker 1: the photographs meant to him, whether they were trophies, documentation,
17:39
Speaker 1: something that resembles grief in a form we have no
17:41
Speaker 1: name for. Berkowitz has never fully explained. He has said
17:45
Speaker 1: many things over decades of interviews. The answers shift, the
17:49
Speaker 1: photographs do not. The dog outlived most of the investigation.
17:54
Speaker 1: Harvey shot in April of nineteen seventy seven and left
17:57
Speaker 1: for dead. Recovered Sam Carr, the neighbor, the man whose
18:01
Speaker 1: name became the case's public face without his knowledge, or
18:04
Speaker 1: consent died years later. The name Sun of Sam outlasted
18:08
Speaker 1: everyone who gave it meaning. In New York, a law
18:11
Speaker 1: now bears that name, the Son of Sam Law, which
18:14
Speaker 1: prohibits convicted criminals from profiting financially from accounts of their crimes.
18:19
Speaker 1: It was challenged in court and rewritten, and it still exists.
18:23
Speaker 1: Berkowitz's story generated enough commercial interest that legislators had to
18:27
Speaker 1: create a legal architecture to contain it. That too, is
18:30
Speaker 1: part of what he left behind. On June twelfth, nineteen
18:34
Speaker 1: seventy eight, a judge sentenced David Berkowitz to three hundred
18:37
Speaker 1: sixty five years in prison, one year for every day
18:41
Speaker 1: the city had spent afraid to go outside after dark.
18:43
Speaker 1: He would never leave. The photographs cut from newspapers, the
18:47
Speaker 1: ones found scattered across his apartment floor, were entered into
18:50
Speaker 1: evidence and then sealed. No one has explained why he
18:53
Speaker 1: kept them arranged that way, face up, in a rough
18:56
Speaker 1: circle around the center of the room. The psychiatric question
18:59
Speaker 1: never closed cleanly. Two teens of doctors examined Berkowitz and
19:04
Speaker 1: reached opposing conclusions. One sight saw a man constructing a
19:07
Speaker 1: mythology around his violence. The demon the dog, the father's
19:11
Speaker 1: voice as a framework built after the fact, not before.
19:15
Speaker 1: The other saw a man who had been genuinely fracturing
19:18
Speaker 1: for years, whose diaries and letters showed a mind that
19:22
Speaker 1: had been rehearsing this story long before the first shot.
19:25
Speaker 1: The court declared him competent to stand trial. Berkowitz refused
19:29
Speaker 1: the insanity defense himself. He pled guilty to all charges
19:33
Speaker 1: voluntarily and said he understood exactly what he was doing.
19:36
Speaker 1: That detail has never stopped being strange. A man who
19:40
Speaker 1: claimed a demon commanded him to kill chose, at the
19:43
Speaker 1: moment of maximum legal protection, to say I knew I
19:47
Speaker 1: was responsible. I did this. Six people did not come home. Donaloya,
19:52
Speaker 1: Christine Freund, Virginia Vuskerichian Valentinas Suriani, Alexander Esau, Stacy Moskowitz.
20:00
Speaker 1: Seven others carried permanent injuries out of that year, Robert
20:03
Speaker 1: Violante blinded in one eye. Among them, Joanne Lomino, who
20:07
Speaker 1: had been sitting on a front stoop on an ordinary
20:10
Speaker 1: November night in nineteen seventy six, spent the rest of
20:13
Speaker 1: her life in a wheelchair. New York passed what became
20:16
Speaker 1: known as the Son of Sam Law. Within a year
20:18
Speaker 1: of the arrest. It barred convicted criminals from profiting financially
20:22
Speaker 1: from accounts or books or interviews about their crimes. The
20:27
Speaker 1: law was later challenged and narrowed by courts, but the
20:30
Speaker 1: original impulse that this name should not become a brand
20:34
Speaker 1: came directly from the summer of nineteen seventy seven. Berkowitz
20:37
Speaker 1: converted to Christianity in prison. He gives interviews. He says
20:41
Speaker 1: he is a changed man. The families of his victims
20:44
Speaker 1: have in several cases said publicly that they do not
20:47
Speaker 1: believe him, and that they do not need to. There
20:50
Speaker 1: is a version of this story where the demon explains everything,
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Speaker 1: where the dog barked, the voice spoke, and a broken
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Speaker 1: man followed orders he could not refuse. That version lets
20:59
Speaker 1: everyone off the hook Berkowitz most of all, but Berkowitz
21:03
Speaker 1: himself rejected it. Standing in a court room in nineteen
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Speaker 1: seventy eight, with every legal avenue opened to him, he
21:09
Speaker 1: said guilty. He said it six times, once for each
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Speaker 1: person who did not survive. The dob's name was Harvey.
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Speaker 1: He outlived the investigation. Sam Carr, the neighbor, died years later.
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Speaker 1: The parking ticket that ended a thirteen month man hunt.
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Speaker 1: A single slip of paper left on a windshield two
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Speaker 1: blocks from where Stacy Moskowitz was shot, sat in a
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Speaker 1: police officer's locker for days before anyone looked at it.
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Speaker 1: When Detective Sergeant Bill Gardella finally reached Berkowitz in the
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Speaker 1: dark outside the Pine Street apartment, Berkowitz turned slowly, smiled
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Speaker 1: and said, you got me. What took you so long?
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Speaker 1: He had a rifle in the car, a letter addressed
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Speaker 1: to another police department promising he was coming. He had
21:50
Speaker 1: been planning another mass shooting for that same weekend. What
21:53
Speaker 1: took you so long? Those four words at a specific wait.
21:57
Speaker 1: They suggest he had been waiting, that some part part
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Speaker 1: of him wanted the door to open, or that he
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Speaker 1: simply could not imagine a world in which it didn't.
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Speaker 1: The photographs on the apartment floor, the faces of his victims,
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Speaker 1: cut from newspapers and arranged in that circle, were never
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Speaker 1: explained by Berkowitz in any interview or testimony. He has
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Speaker 1: spoken about the dog. He has spoken about his childhood,
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Speaker 1: his mother, his sense of abandonment. He has never spoken
22:22
Speaker 1: about the photographs. That silence is the part that stays.
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Speaker 1: This show is made by OBA Media.