David Richard Berkowitz was born Richard David Falco in Brooklyn on June 1, 1953, and adopted days later by Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz, who reversed his given names. He was a solitary, heavy child with a reputation on his block as a bully. Pearl died of breast cancer in 1967, and by his own account he never recovered from it. He served in the Army from 1971 to 1974, in the United States and South Korea, and was an excellent marksman. He found his birth mother, learned the circumstances of his conception, and let the contact lapse. Before he ever fired a gun in New York he had set, and logged in a diary, well over a thousand fires.
The shootings began at about one in the morning on July 29, 1976, outside an apartment building in the Bronx. Donna Lauria, eighteen, and Jody Valenti, nineteen, were talking in a parked car. He fired five rounds from a .44 Charter Arms Bulldog. Lauria died; Valenti was shot in the thigh and lived. On October 23 he shot into a parked car in Queens, hitting Carl Denaro in the head. Denaro survived with a metal plate in his skull; his companion Rosemary Keenan was unhurt. On November 26 he shot Donna DeMasi and Joanne Lomino as they walked home from a film. DeMasi recovered. Lomino was left paraplegic. Before the letters gave him his own name, the press called him the .44 Caliber Killer, after the revolver.
On January 30, 1977, Christine Freund was shot in a car in Queens beside her fiancé and died hours later. On March 8 he shot the Barnard student Virginia Voskerichian in the face on a Forest Hills street as she walked home with her books raised. Ballistics matched her killing to Lauria's, and the city learned it had a serial shooter. Operation Omega, under Deputy Inspector Timothy Dowd, grew to hundreds of officers working an enormous field of leads. On April 17 he killed Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau in the Bronx and left a letter in the street addressed to Captain Joseph Borrelli. It called him a woman hater and denied it, and it gave him his name: Son of Sam. He wrote again in May, to the Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin, and the paper sold over a million copies of the issue that printed it.
On June 26 he shot and wounded Judy Placido and Salvatore Lupo outside a Queens disco. The city expected an anniversary attack on July 29 and got nothing. In the early hours of July 31 he shot Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante in a parked car near Gravesend Bay in Brooklyn. Moskowitz died thirty-eight hours later. Violante survived, having lost his left eye and most of the sight in the other.
He was caught by a parking ticket. Cacilia Davis, walking her dog near the Moskowitz scene, saw a man remove a summons from a car parked by a hydrant minutes before the shots. The ticket traced to a David Berkowitz of 35 Pine Street, Yonkers. Yonkers patrolmen Peter Intervallo and Thomas Chamberlain had independently been building a file on the same man over a set of poison-pen letters and two shot dogs in the neighbourhood, one belonging to Sam Carr. Their information and the Carr family's had been passed to the task force repeatedly and had sat unread. On the night of August 10, 1977, officers took him at his car outside the building. The .44 was in a paper bag on the seat. His first words were reported as What took you so long.
He confessed at once and told detectives that a demon in Sam Carr's black Labrador had ordered the killings, a story that read as a bid for an insanity defence. He was found competent and pleaded guilty. On June 12, 1978, he was given six consecutive twenty-five-to-life sentences, a maximum term reported at the time as 365 years.
Interviewed at Attica in 1979 by the FBI's Robert Ressler, he dropped the demons. He said he had shot women out of resentment of his mother and his failure with women, that stalking and shooting aroused him, and that he returned to the scenes to look at the chalk marks. He has since claimed he was part of a satanic cult and did not fire every shot himself, naming the Carr brothers, both of whom died within two years of his arrest. The claim drew serious attention from the Queens district attorney and from the journalist Maury Terry, and the case was formally reopened in 1996, but no one else has ever been charged. Berkowitz became a born-again Christian in prison, has repeatedly asked that his parole hearings be cancelled, and remains in New York state custody. The publicity around a possible book deal produced the first Son of Sam law, which the Supreme Court struck down in 1991.