By Kristina Stancil
At what point do we stare into the darkness so long that we see a connection to the evil that freely haunts our world? Are we, as researchers and investigators, seeing the connection because we want to solve the unsolvable or because the outcome was not what we hoped it would be? I grew up at a time when killers like Richard Ramirez was not just preying on adults, he was also preying on children. He idolized killers like the Hillside Stranglers and seemed almost in desperate hope that the detective responsible for their capture would also hunt him. In Atlanta, Wayne Williams was specifically preying on children. He had his own obsession with the police. In other areas of the criminal world, the first two news reports I would remember would be playing dolls on the floor as the nightly news talked about Tylenol Tampering, and in a bizarre, almost medieval torture device of a car seat when the radio reported that someone attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan.
Somewhere in my darkness-soaked mind I seem to remember hearing that Mr. Rodgers addressed assassination when my mother was a child, and it aired two days after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. I do not know if the episode was reared in light of the assassination attempt of President Reagan or if this was how it was explained to me when I asked what assassination meant.
I am told that the darkness touched upon my mind at an earlier age, as my mother and grandmother had an interest in true crime, television movies like The Deliberate Stranger, and many nights going to bed listening to the sound of Robert Stack detailing crimes and paranormal events. Even now, I can put on Unsolved Mysteries and fall asleep. Until he touches on one of the serial killers that shaped my formative years under the armchair detectives that raised me.
Ironically, while I heard most tales concerning Charlie Manson, Richard Ramirez, and Satanic Panic of the 1980s, I vaguely heard tales of a possible connection between a killer in Arkansas, where I lived at the time and a serial killer that preyed on the Bay Area during the time that my mom was in high school. One may ask, at this point, where in the hell am I going with this?
Unsolved Mysteries was one of my first favorite shows. It inspired my love for Cagney and Lacey, and my middle school obsession with wanting to be like Detective Dee Dee McCall on the television show, Hunter. Even though true crime obsession was heavy on my house and they were adamant that I did not become a cop, Son of Sam and Zodiac became two of my long-term research subjects. The similarities in not just those two crime sprees, among others, make me wonder how I did not know about Ultimate Evil and its connection to Son of Sam. Unsolved Mysteries did several episodes discussing the Maury Theirry book and its connection to the Son of Sam investigation. It was not until I became familiar with the work of documentarian, Josh Zeman, did I learn of Theirry and his book. Zeman would adapt the book into a Netflix documentary.
History will tell us that David Berkowitz is the sole person responsible for the Son of Sam panic in 1970s New York. We have witnesses with vastly different ideas of what the killer looked like. True, traumatic events can shape an interpretation of events, and police will often claim that eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable but how does one person see a short man with sandy blond hair and the next a taller man with a dark perm? Yes, the idea of a wig was presented in the murder of Stacy Moscowitz, but that does not explain the deviation in height.
Berkowitz also does not strike the image of someone smart enough to come up with the taunting letters or the idea of the symbol. How could one of the oldest and most respected law enforcement agencies in the world, potentially screw up a case so bad? You have to realize the NYPD that rose from the ashes of 9/11 with a sense of honor and resilience was not the same department of the 1970s. This was a time of a plague of corruption and the time of Serpico, a police officer who risked coming clean, and it almost cost him his life. Another reason is that the NYPD, potentially from the backlash of the corruption charges, and the physical abusive coercion used on suspects, was that they had just laid off, hundreds if not thousands, of officers.
A serial killer task force would definitely bolster the ranks of the department and a successful caption could bolster the general public’s faith in the mayoral election as well as the police themselves. As Son of Sam, or the .44 Caliber killer as he was called at the time would begin to strike in different boroughs of New York, the mayor would get his task force. Thierry presents an alternate theory as to why Berkowitz was the one who was convicted.
Did Berkowitz fit the description of at least one of the composite sketches? Yes. He did. He fit the description of the larger, flaccid-faced man with the permed hair. However, there were two other shooters that were allegedly seen and at least one of them was younger than Berkowitz. Age is another factor that would be harder to charge in the minutes between witness sightings. The Son of Sam Killer, like Zodiac before him would send taunting letters to the police. He would leave clues about the crimes and the potential idea of who the killer was. ‘The Wicked King Wicker,’ ‘John Wheaties Raper of Young Girls,’ etc. were apart of one of the letters that also told of a demonic dog that informed them of the kills they were to make because ‘they did not want to anger father Sam.’
It is not believed that Berkowitz had many friends but two of his confirmed friends were John and Michael Carr who lived in his neighborhood. They had a lab that barked almost constantly and most damning of all, their father’s name was Sam. They also had a sister who was, conveniently, a 911 operator for the Yonkers Police Department. She is the one who immediately began piling everything up at Berkowitz’s door.
Why would one operator immediately hijack another operator’s call when it was simply a call to notify a potential witness? Potential conspiracy 2 could be entered here as this operator, Wheat Carr, John and Michael’s sister, immediately jumped on the phone with the detective who was trying to notify Berkowitz because his parking ticket was finally tracked down from the night Robert Violante and Stacy Moscowitz were attacked. At this point, Berkowitz was only being asked to come in to speak about what he may have seen on the night in question. Thierry produces the transcript of the hijacked courtesy call between departments in his book.
The missteps taken by the police department began when they allowed the father of one of the victims to remain on the case despite his own daughter having been killed by the serial killer in question. At the time, it is believed that they were overwhelmed and had no idea how to handle an investigation of this magnitude. I did not see any indication that they asked for help from the FBI or even one of their closest geographic neighbors, Boston. Who had their own manhunt for a serial killer in the 1960s, Albert Di Salvo, aka The Boston Strangler.
The mayor was up for re-election. The Police Commissioner serves at the pleasure of the sitting mayor. Many of the street cops and even some of the detectives working on the task force did not know about developments in the investigation until they saw them on the nightly news or read the morning paper. As Theirry travels further in the abyss, he brings to light that a Satanic Cult had even farther reaches than the local park where the Carr Brothers and Berkowitz allegedly participated in Satanic Rites. Could he be suggesting that someone higher up in politics or the actual mayor been involved at the very beginning?
The mayor, I believe, was reelected and the Police Commissioner got to rehire hundreds if not thousands of officers that had been released due to the corruption and the budget cuts. The capture of Berkowitz had an officer, not working on the case, leech on, because he had claimed he had been harassed by Berkowitz. After Berkowitz was captured, he seemed resigned to his fate. It is rumored that he asked them, What took so long?
For a reign of terror like Son of Sam’s the conclusion was anti-climactic. A rifle is said to have been visible on the back seat (none of the Son of Sam murders were the result of a rifle), an unmailed Son of Sam letter was found in the glove box, and wonder of wonders, the car was left unlocked. It was also not the same make, model, or color as the yellow VW Beetle or Bug that they had spent months hunting for. Speculation arose that Berkowitz was being sacrificed for being dumb enough to be caught at one of the crime scenes and having his name associated with an almost unsolvable crime. Until this point, the misinformation fed to the press, the conflicting sketches, and the attacks not being within a geographic comfort zone left the public and the police spinning their wheels.
Someone had to be sacrificed in order for the mayor and 1 Police Plaza to get the adulation from the public that would increase their favor and their funding. Thierry would not be the only one who would be allowed access to Berkowitz. Photos of him would be leaked to the press, including one of his sleeping, as he had no care in the world. In his initial conversations with Theirry, Berkowitz would hit at the idea that he was not the only one involved. Although in 1979, his narrative that he was not the only one involved would change, as his throat was slashed so severely, it is a miracle that he survived. Even though he knew who attacked him, he would refuse to say, and he would now begin to take sole responsibility, at least verbally, for the Son of Sam murders. He would survive but his two good friends would not be so lucky.
However, when John and Michael Carr would end up dead, with stories of potential murder, and forced suicide as far away as Minot, North Dakota, Berkowitz would suddenly change his story. He was the only one. He would claim wigs and other tactics to attempt to make his story more plausible. He would refute eyewitness testimonies, claiming he never came face to face with them, or changing the situation in which they interacted. It is my understanding that the detectives working the death of John Carr in Minot, ND, felt that this was not a suicide. His brother, Michael, would also die. Both of the brothers would die less than a year after Berkowitz was convicted. John, who was outright named in one of the letters Son of Sam, would die six months after Berkowitz’s arrest. The police would find the Son of Sam logo inked in a book in the home, Carr shared with his girlfriend.
Theirry would spend several hundred pages stretching the conspiracy from an offshoot of the Church of Scientology to the Manson Family Murders back in 1968. Carr’s death in Minot, North Dakota would not be the only death connected to the Son of Sam Conspiracy. A daughter of Minot, ND, a young Christian girl, following her husband to Stanford, in California, would be desecrated in a church on campus. This was before the Son of Sam murders.
The Son of Sam Serial Killer is one of the big names in the Serial Killers of the 1970s. The reason for the conspiracy connecting to my own darkness-tinged mind is the connection to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. I was born in 1979. My cousin Amber, 1981. We were both young blond girls in elementary school in a small Arkansas town where rumors of Satanic events were being practiced in parks. I know I spent first through third grade where I would be sent out of town on Halloween weekend. It has always been in the back of my mind to investigate whether any girls who fit our description, young, innocent, blond females, were killed on Halloween weekend. Everyone, though, does have that one case that sticks with them. The one case that starts them on whatever journey it is that takes them into a professional world of true crime. I have two. I have the one that started my interest and the one that actually started my path to becoming a Criminologist.
The general that I investigated which makes me tend to follow the idea that Theirry was going down his own conspiracy rabbit hole was the corruption that the New York State Attorney General’s office committed on cases involving the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department in the 1970s. At least one case of a rape and murder was overturned because a detective in question beat a confession out of a suspect. Those who are familiar with my writing know that the two cases I have never been able to let go of are the Chris Benoit Murder-Suicide and the Amityville Murders.
Ironically, I cannot find the name of the officer investigated by the State Attorney General’s Office. This officer is also the lead officer on the arrest of Ronnie De Feo. At one time, there were articles concerning how De Feo was constantly moved so that his grandfather’s attorneys could not provide him with his right to counsel. I believe Ric Osuna wrote in his book, The Night The Defeos Died, that De Feo was not showing signs of any injury in the photos of his arrest, but when he was actually booked, and brought to jail he had to see the medical staff associated with the hospital due to bruising on his face, and injury to his ribs. Defeo’s original story spoke of demonic possession that caused him to commit the crimes. Inconsistencies with the investigation, such as the trace evidence left on the front of his sister, Dawn’s, nightgown, were inconsistent with the location in which she was found. There is also the question of how six people could be murdered with a shotgun, one at a time, and no one inside or outside of the house heard anything but the barking of the family dog.
Osuna also presents the idea that Dawn wanted to flee her home and marry her boyfriend and also that when the bodies were allegedly found, there were other people who entered with DeFeo, and were not brought to trial. One also has to consider the fact that Louise DeFeo was the cherished daughter of Michael Brigante, an influential member of the New York Mafia. She hid the fact that her husband physically abused her and suffered from religious mania prior to their murders.
The question now remains what would make the Brigante family not retaliate over the cold-blooded murders of the daughter and grandchildren of a major player in the New York mob? One of the rules of the mob is that they are allegedly not allowed to murder children, although my friend Dexter, studying the mob for his doctoral program, believes that certain hitmen broke these rules on a regular basis. They just had to be able to justify them.
Brigante had to believe that his grandson was not guilty in order for De Feo to receive some protection within the penal system. De Feo would die in prison under what was originally reported as suspicious circumstances almost forty years after his conviction. His grandfather’s protection would explain why he would be allowed to live relatively unscathed within the prison system. However, if De Feo is connected to the Satanic Cult in New York, at the time, and he agreed to take the fall, (as he refused initially to testify that he was possessed), who is running the show that would keep the mob from taking action?
The Amityville Murders happened in 1974 and the New York Mob were still at work within the shadows and hits were still occurring. The Son of Sam was mobile and killing as early as alleged stabbings in 1975. There is approximately an hour from Amityville to where the Son of Sam murders occurred. It is interesting to note that David Berkowitz has been up for parole many times, but he refuses to ask for his release and sometimes skips the hearing altogether.
If we bring the story full circle to 2025, we know that a serial killer is active in Long Island, New York. The police cannot seem to come up with any suspects. At one time, either their Chief of Police or the County Sheriff was suspended in regard to the case. The lack of significant forensic evidence has led many true crime buffs to believe that a police officer is involved. However, the access to the internet and the details provided in many criminal justice programs, in which investigative techniques are taught, someone who has studied criminal justice could be a potential suspect. The murders in Moscow, Idaho had me also believing that whoever Theirry was investigating could still have been working in the shadows. They have someone for that murder but the Long Island Serial Killer has been working within the shadows for far longer. A theory has also been floated that there is more than one person using the same location as a dumping ground for their victims.
I’ll be honest. I have my own theory, and I was reminded of it as I began to rewatch the television series Bones, a series based on the career of Dr. Kathy Reichs. Whether or not she used actual cases as plot lines for her novels or the scripts for her shows, it brought me around to the idea that yes there is potentially another killer: the student and the teacher.
Editor's note: this essay ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written. It is an account of conspiracy literature about famous cases, chiefly Maury Terry's work on the Son of Sam shootings, and it reports those authors' theories rather than endorsing them. The reader should hold on to what the record establishes. David Berkowitz is recorded in this archive at six deaths; he confessed, pleaded guilty in 1978 and is serving six consecutive life sentences, and no other person has ever been charged in connection with those shootings. John and Michael Carr, named here as Terry names them, were never charged with anything and both are dead. Wayne Williams has two convictions with twenty two deaths attributed, and Albert DeSalvo was never convicted of any murder, with up to thirteen suspected. The Amityville material concerns Ronald DeFeo Jr, who was convicted of six murders in 1975. Every alternative account described in this piece is unproved, and the article's own repeated use of “allegedly” should be read as meaning exactly that.