Son Of Sam: This Summer In 1977, An NYC Serial Killer Is Taken Down By A Parking Ticket (2024)

It's the 40th anniversary of the arrest of David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz — and the finale of the largest manhunt in NYPD history.

Posted Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 8:29 pm ET|Updated Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 9:49 pm ET

It was also the Summer of Sam.

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In spring 1977, police connected the dots and alerted the public: A serial killer known only as the "Son of Sam" — a name he gave himself in letters sent to the NYPD — had, for upward of a year by then, been stalking and killing beautiful young women and their lovers with his .44-caliber Bulldog revolver in the city's outer boroughs.

By July, the killer, later identified as 24-year-old postal worker and Bronx native David Berkowitz, had struck eight times. Six people were dead and another seven wounded, some of them maimed for life.

Among the dead: college student Virginia Voskerichian, 19, shot as she walked home from school in Queens; Christine Freund, 26, shot while canoodling with her fiancé in a parked car, also in Queens (they had just returned from the cinema, where they saw "Rocky," and were about to head to a late-night disco); and young couple Alexander Esau, 20, and Valentina Suriani, 18, likewise shot in their car, this time in the Bronx.

Berkowitz had a type, police said. His targets were mostly young, white, middle-class women — the youngest just 16 years old — who wore their hair long and dark.

The killer was also playful, in the sickest sense — taunting police and the public with notes and other tokens of his crimes.

"I love to hunt," he reportedly wrote in a letter to NYPD Captain Joseph Borrelli. "Prowling the streets looking for fair game — tasty meat. The wemon of Queens are z prettyist of all [stet]. I must be the water they drink. I live for the hunt — my life. Blood for papa."

With each unpredictable outburst, Sam boxed the city farther into a prison of fear.

Nights were blazing hot, and AC wasn't cheap; still, many opted to stay indoors. Young women reportedly took to the salon en masse, asking their stylists to chop their hair short or dye it blonde. Spending a night on the town with a lover or taking a stroll home after dark were no longer carefree acts of summer living — they were acts of defiance.

Sam's reign of terror was given all the more reach by its bombastic coverage in the New York Post and the New York Daily News, the city's two leading tabloids. The Post and the Daily News were at the height of their rivalry that summer, media folks often recall, and were constantly trying to out-dramatize each other.

“NO ONE IS SAFE FROM SON OF SAM," screamed the Post's front page on Aug. 1.

And when Daily News staffer Jimmy Breslin began receiving letters from the killer himself, the newspaper ran them in full. “You can forget about me if you like because I don’t care for publicity," one letter read. "However, you must not forget [victim] Donna Lauria and you cannot let the people forget her either. She was a very sweet girl, but Sam’s thirsty lad and he won’t let me stop killing until he gets his fill of blood.”

Berkowitz would later clarify what, exactly, his "fill" would have been: A mass shooting he planned to carry out at a Hamptons nightclub, leaving scores of "pretty girls" dead on the dance floor.

He wanted to go down in a "blaze of glory," he reportedly told police, and commit suicide by cop.

Fortunately for a city in turmoil, it never came to that — thanks to a single parking ticket.

According to a story on his capture in Time Magazine, the tip that would end the NYPD's epic manhunt for Sam — the largest the city had ever seen — came from a middle-aged woman in South Brooklyn who had been walking her dog, Snowball, on the night of his final attack.

From the story:

A young man "who walked strange, like a cat" approached her on the sidewalk, looked directly into her face, then passed. She said he held his right arm down stiffly, as though he were carrying something partly up his sleeve. Five minutes later she heard shots and the wail of a car horn. Next day, learning of the double shooting, she was certain the passing stranger had been the killer. When detectives questioned her, she recalled another vital detail: she had seen a cop tagging a cream-colored car parked illegally near a fire hydrant one block from the murder site.

Incredibly, Berkowitz, who had so cleverly eluded police for so long, had used his own properly registered 1970 Ford Galaxie sedan as his getaway car for each attack, not bothering even to acquire stolen license plates. When New York police checked parking tickets for the murder night in the Gravesend neighborhood, they found one issued to Berkowitz; it led to his Yonkers address. They wondered: What was a Yonkers resident doing 25 miles away in Brooklyn at 2:30 a.m.?

So, on the fated evening of Aug. 10, 1977 — 40 years ago on Thursday — a pair of homicide detectives headed to the Ford Galaxie's registered address in Yonkers, a small town just north of the Bronx.

Sure enough, parked in front of 35 Pine St., cops discovered the Ford in question. And on the front seat, in plain view, was a machine gun poking from a duffel bag labeled "D. Berkowitz," according to the Post. The detectives knew then that they had their guy.

The NYPD was waiting for Berkowitz outside his building when he emerged around 10 p.m. that night — carrying his alter ego's signature .44-caliber revolver, no less.

The killer confessed right away. “You’ve got me!” he reportedly told police at the scene of his arrest. “Who do I have?” one detective asked. “The Son of Sam," he replied.

Berkowitz's photo was plastered across the city's newsstands by morning. And it didn't quite resemble the monster many had been picturing. The menacing Son of Sam was, as NYC crime reporter Murray Weiss later put it, in fact a "a pudgy oddball postal worker with a meek, cherubic appearance."

The public was confused, repulsed, fascinated: How had this average Joe from the Bronx transformed into the most infamous serial killer in New York City history?

In subsequent conversations with police and prosecutors, Berkowitz would claim he had been following the orders of the devil, who had been speaking to him through Harvey, his neighbor's dog.

The name of this supposed neighbor? Sam.

In old notebooks of his recovered by the NYPD, the troubled loner also bragged about starting hundreds of fires throughout the city.

Experts would later opine that Berkowitz's descent into madness was set off by his discovery, a few years before he morphed into Sam, that he was adopted and had been abandoned by his birth mom.

Things only got worse from there. Upon returning to NYC after a three-year stint in the U.S. Army, one biographer wrote, "anger and frustration with women, coupled by a bizarre fantasy life, started him down the road to violence."

"You wouldn't believe how much some people hate me," Berkowitz reportedly wrote in a letter to his dad before the murders began. "Many of them want to kill me. ... Most of them are young. I walk down the street and they spit and kick at me. The girls call me ugly and bother me the most."

In the end, Berkowitz was found mentally competent to stand trial for his murders — and was convicted for each. He's now serving an impossible series of life sentences that add up to hundreds of years in state prison.

Never one to avoid the limelight, though, Berkowitz has granted various jailhouse interviews in his four decades behind bars. In them, he always claims to have found God: He's tuned out the demons who drove him to kill, he says, and has accepted Jesus Christ into his life.

His latest interview, recorded earlier this summer, will air on CBS this Friday, Aug. 11, at 10 p.m. ET/PT

"I see that people will never understand where I come from, no matter how much I try to explain it," Berkowitz told the news station. "They wouldn't understand what it was like to walk in darkness. ... I was just very lost and confused. There was a battle going on inside me."

He said he truly believed at the time that he was "doing something to appease the devil."

"As far as I'm concerned, that was not me," Berkowitz told CBS. "That was not me. Even the name, I hate that name, I despise the name. ... That moniker, 'Son of Sam.' That was not — that was a demon."

Some have been more convinced by his turnaround than others. A bizarre deep dive in New York Magazine exactly 10 years ago, on the 30th anniversary of Berkowitz's arrest, profiled "a growing flock of renegade Christians" who — no joke — believed the reformed serial killer to be "an apostle of the Lord."

These are the names of the people he hurt and killed in the summer of 1977.

• Michelle Forman, 15, wounded in the Bronx
• Donna Lauria, 18, killed in the Bronx
• Jody Valenti, 19, wounded in the Bronx
• Carl Denaro, 20, wounded in Queens
• Rosemary Keenan, 18, wounded in Queens
• Donna DeMasi, 16, wounded in Queens
• Joanne Lomino, 18, wounded in Queens
• Christine Freund, 26, killed in Queens
• John Diel, 30, wounded in Queens
• Virginia Voskerichian, 19, killed in Queens
• Alexander Esau, 20, killed in the Bronx
• Valentina Suriani, 18, killed in the Bronx
• Sal Lupo, 20, wounded in Queens
• Judy Placido, 17, wounded in Queens
• Stacy Moskowitz, 20, killed in Brooklyn
• Robert Violante, 20, wounded in Brooklyn

Pictured at top: In this August 11, 1977 file photo, David Berkowitz, center, the tabloid-loving, police-taunting "Son of Sam" killer, is in the custody of police after his arrest, in New York. Thursday, Aug. 10, 2017 is the 40th anniversary of Berkowitz's capture. (AP Photo/File)