Cacilia Davis was out walking her dog in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, in the early hours of July 31, 1977, when she passed a patrol officer, Michael Cataneo, writing a ticket for a car parked too close to a fire hydrant. A few moments after the officer moved on, a young man came past her from the direction of the car, holding something dark in his hand and looking at her with an interest she did not like. She hurried home and heard shots behind her in the street. Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante, both twenty, were on their first date, kissing in Violante's car under a streetlight near a park, when a man walked to within three feet of the passenger side and fired four rounds. Both were hit in the head. Moskowitz, a secretary, died thirty-eight hours later. Violante, a clothing salesman, lost his left eye. Davis kept what she had seen to herself for four days, then called the police, who went back through every ticket written in the area that night. One was for a yellow 1970 Ford Galaxie registered to David Berkowitz of 35 Pine Street, Yonkers.
On August 9 a New York detective, James Justis, telephoned the Yonkers police to arrange an interview with Berkowitz. The dispatcher who took the call, Wheat Carr, recognized the name at once. She said she knew him and that he lived right behind her, and that he had shot and wounded a black Labrador belonging to her father, Sam Carr. Yonkers officers had their own suspicions about him already, over strange incidents in the city, including threatening letters to neighbors, that one of the Son of Sam letters seemed to refer to, and they told Justis that Berkowitz might be the man.
The next day officers went to the car outside 35 Pine Street. Through the window they could see a gun on the back seat, and inside they found a duffel bag of ammunition, maps of the crime scenes, and a threatening letter addressed to Deputy Inspector Timothy Dowd, who ran the task force. Rather than go up the building's narrow hallway, they waited for him to come down, and at about ten that night, with the search warrant still on its way, he walked out and got into the car. Detective John Falotico put a gun to his head from the driver's side while Sergeant William Gardella covered the passenger side. On the seat beside him was a paper bag holding a .44 caliber Charter Arms Bulldog revolver. "Well, you got me," he said. In the account Falotico gave the writer Lawrence Klausner, he asked who he had got, and the man answered, softly, "I'm Sam." Another version has his first words as "Well, you got me. How come it took you such a long time?" At about one in the morning Mayor Abraham Beame came to see the prisoner for himself and told reporters that the people of the city could rest easy. The address of the Yonkers building was later changed from 35 to 42 Pine Street.
The first attack he admitted came nineteen months earlier, on Christmas Eve 1975, in the Bronx housing complex of Co-op City, where he lived with his father. With a hunting knife he stabbed two young women within a few minutes of each other. The first was never identified by police. The second, Michelle Forman, a fifteen-year-old sophomore at Truman High School, was stabbed six times on a bridge near Dreiser Loop and spent a week in the hospital. Nobody suspected him, and soon afterward he moved to Yonkers.
At about ten past one on the morning of July 29, 1976, in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx, Donna Lauria, an eighteen-year-old emergency medical technician, and her friend Jody Valenti, nineteen, a nurse, were sitting in Valenti's double-parked Oldsmobile on Buhre Avenue, talking over their night at a New Rochelle discotheque. Lauria had opened the door to leave when a man came up quickly carrying a paper bag. He took out a gun, crouched, braced an elbow on his knee and fired with both hands. Lauria was killed instantly. Valenti was shot in the thigh and lived. She described a white man in his thirties with short, dark, curly hair, and Lauria's father and several neighbors remembered a yellow compact car cruising the block that night.
On October 23, beside Bowne Park in Flushing, Queens, Carl Denaro, a twenty-year-old Citibank security guard, and Rosemary Keenan, eighteen, a Queens College student, were sitting in her car when the windows blew in. Keenan drove off for help, neither of them understanding they had been shot at, while Denaro bled from a bullet wound to the head; he recovered with a metal plate in his skull. Keenan's father was a twenty-year NYPD detective. The police later wondered whether Denaro's shoulder-length hair had made the gunman take him for a woman. Just after midnight on November 27, in Floral Park, two high school students, Donna DeMasi, sixteen, and Joanne Lomino, eighteen, were talking on the porch of Lomino's house after walking home from a movie when a man in military fatigues began to ask directions in a high-pitched voice, drew a revolver and shot them both. DeMasi was hit in the neck and recovered. Lomino was hit in the back and left paraplegic. Because the shootings happened in different boroughs and were handled by different precincts, nobody yet connected them.
At about 12:40 a.m. on January 30, 1977, Christine Freund, a twenty-six-year-old secretary, and her fiancé, John Diel, a bartender, were sitting in his car near the Forest Hills station of the Long Island Rail Road, in an area some accounts call Ridgewood, getting ready to go dancing after a movie. Three shots came through the car. Diel was barely hurt. Freund was hit twice and died hours later. The police now said publicly that the shootings seemed to be linked: .44 caliber bullets, young women with long dark hair. They released two composite sketches that looked nothing alike and said they might be looking for more than one man. On the evening of March 8, Virginia Voskerichian, a Columbia University student, twenty in most accounts and twenty-one in some, was walking home a block from where Freund had been killed when a man stepped in front of her. She raised her textbooks between them, and the bullet went through them into her head. Two days later Beame and police officials announced that the same revolver had killed Lauria and Voskerichian, although documents released later showed the ballistics evidence was less conclusive than they said. The task force, Operation Omega, came under Dowd's command, and it would grow to two hundred officers.
At about three in the morning on April 17, Valentina Suriani, eighteen, a Lehman College student who hoped to act and model, and Alexander Esau, twenty, a tow truck operator, were sitting in a car on the service road of the Hutchinson River Parkway in the Bronx, a block from her home and a few blocks from where Lauria had died. Suriani was shot once and Esau twice, both in the head. She died at the scene and he died that afternoon. In the road police found a letter in block capitals addressed to Captain Joseph Borrelli. The writer objected to being called a woman hater, wrote "I am a monster. I am the 'Son of Sam,'" and said that his father Sam told him to go out and kill. The letter was kept from the public, but parts leaked, and the .44 Caliber Killer became the Son of Sam. On May 30 a second letter, postmarked in Englewood, New Jersey, reached the Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin. It told him "Sam's a thirsty lad," asked what Breslin would have for July 29, the anniversary of the Lauria shooting, and urged him never to let the city forget Donna Lauria. The paper printed most of it a week later, and that edition sold more than 1.1 million copies, the biggest in its history to that point. Across the city women cut their hair short or dyed it bright colors, and stores ran out of wigs.
At about three in the morning on June 26, outside the Elephas discotheque in Bayside, Queens, Salvatore Lupo, twenty, and Judy Placido, seventeen, were sitting in his car talking about the Son of Sam when three shots came through it. He was hit in the forearm, she in the temple, shoulder and neck, and both lived. With the anniversary coming, the police flooded the old hunting grounds in Queens and the Bronx. The last shooting came two days after it, in Brooklyn.
Bill Clark, an NYPD homicide detective on the case, said forty years later that what he wanted most was to know why, because none of the people in those cars had done a thing to bring it on themselves; they had been sitting and talking to each other. Breslin put it more flatly. The man, he said, just went out thirty nights a month looking for someone to kill.
He was questioned for about half an hour in the early morning of August 11 and confessed quickly; the detective who took the statement was John Keenan, Rosemary Keenan's father. He said that the Sam of the letter was his old neighbor Sam Carr, and that Carr's black Labrador was possessed by an ancient demon that gave him orders he could not refuse, demanding the blood of pretty young girls. In his apartment, its walls covered with Satanic graffiti, police found three stenographer's notebooks, nearly full, in which he had logged hundreds of fires he had set around the city, and he said he was the arsonist the press had called the Phantom of the Bronx, blamed for more than two thousand fires. He also said he had meant to end it by going down in a blaze of glory at a nightclub in the Hamptons. In a letter to the New York Post that September he warned that there were other sons out there. At a press conference in February 1979 he said the demon story had been a hoax, and he later told his court-appointed psychiatrist, David Abrahamsen, that he had long thought of killing as revenge on a world he believed had rejected him.
He was indicted for eight shootings. Three psychiatric examinations found him competent to stand trial, and his lawyers urged him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity; he refused. On May 8, 1978, he calmly pleaded guilty to all of the shootings, six counts of second-degree murder and seven of attempted second-degree murder. At his sentencing hearing two weeks later he tried to jump from a window of the seventh-floor courtroom, and after he was restrained he chanted abuse at Stacy Moskowitz and shouted that he would kill them all again. The court ordered another examination, during which he drew a man walled into a cell and wrote beneath it, "I am not well. Not well at all." He was found competent again. On June 12, 1978, he was given twenty-five years to life for each murder, to run consecutively. The sentencing minutes the parole board keeps on file are from Queens County Supreme Court, before Justice Nicholas Tsoucalas, with Leon Stern and Ira Jultak appearing for him, and the board counts twenty-one convictions from three boroughs, assault and weapons counts among them alongside the murders and attempted murders. Over the prosecutors' objections, the terms of his plea made him eligible for parole after twenty-five years. Press accounts have totaled the sentence at 365 years.
He went first to the psychiatric ward at Kings County Hospital, then through Sing Sing, Clinton and the Central New York Psychiatric Center to Attica. In 1979 another prisoner slashed the left side of his neck from front to back, a wound that took more than fifty stitches; he never named his attacker and said he was grateful for the punishment he deserved. That same year, interviewed at Attica by the FBI agent Robert Ressler, he dropped the demons entirely, saying he had resented his mother and failed with women, that the stalking and the shooting excited him, and that he went back to the scenes afterward. He was moved to a protective unit at Clinton in 1981, and in 1987 to the general population at Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg. That year he said he had become an evangelical Christian after reading the sixth verse of Psalm 34, and asked to be called the Son of Hope. He stayed at Sullivan for more than twenty-eight years. He took an associate degree in business administration from Sullivan Community College, graduating with honors, worked for two decades among the prisoners of the mental health block, the Intermediate Care Program, guided sight-impaired inmates around the facility, and served as a chapel clerk who sometimes preached when the visiting minister failed to arrive. On April 12, 2016, an officer told him to pack; he was put in a van and driven to Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County. He guessed the move had to do with the tightening of security after two men escaped from Clinton the year before. At Shawangunk he went to work as a clerk in the prison library.
Larry King took a CNN crew to Sullivan in 1999 for an hour that ranged over the 1979 attack, his early suicide attempts, his conversion and his meeting with his birth mother. Asked whether he had always acted alone, he answered, "Well, not really. Not totally like that," and said most of the others had died. The program cut straight to Joseph Coffey, the retired NYPD detective, rejecting the claim and challenging anyone to produce evidence for it. Asked whether the shootings had given him any pleasure, Berkowitz said nothing, nothing; he talked about a pact with the devil and feeling like a brainwashed robot, said he had known it was wrong but felt empty, and refused to talk about the dog. The complete CNN transcript is on the site as 1999: David Berkowitz with Larry King, and the CBS News program made at Shawangunk for the fortieth anniversary is there as 2017: David Berkowitz Forty Years On.
By then he had changed his story again. He said he had joined a Satanic cult in 1975, and in 1993 he told the press he had fired the shots only at Lauria and Valenti and at Esau and Suriani, and that cult members had done the rest. He named two of them, John and Michael Carr, Sam Carr's sons, both long dead: John of a gunshot in North Dakota in 1978 that was ruled a suicide, Michael in a car crash in 1979. The journalist Maury Terry had been challenging the lone-gunman finding since a series of articles for Gannett newspapers in 1979, and the Queens district attorney at the time of the killings, John Santucci, and some detectives believed he had help. Denaro thought more than one person was involved, and Diel has said the man who shot Freund could not have been Berkowitz. Yonkers police reopened the case in 1996, filed no charges, and suspended the investigation without closing it. Breslin, the FBI profiler John Douglas and the anthropologist Elliott Leyton all rejected the cult story, Douglas calling him a loner incapable of group activity. A 1979 claim that he knew who had murdered Arlis Perry at Stanford in 1974 came to nothing; that case was solved in 2018, and the killer had no known connection to him.
The Queens office did more than talk about the theory. On the afternoon of October 29, 1979, Assistant District Attorney Herbert Leifer and Detective Investigator George Byrd sat down with Sam, Frances and Wheat Carr and the family's lawyer at 316 Warburton Avenue in Yonkers, with a tape recorder running, and spent more than two hours on John Carr's death in Minot the year before: who the family had spoken to in North Dakota and when, what had become of his car and his belongings, whether anyone had been calling the house. Sam Carr described noticing cars behind his own and driving out of his way so he would not lead them to an eighty-three-year-old friend he played pinochle with. The covering memorandum, from Tom McCarthy to District Attorney John Santucci, forwarded a selection of detectives' reports on the Voskerichian killing. Berkowitz never appears in the recording, and nobody in it was charged with anything. The typed transcript is on the site as The Queens DA Interviews the Carr Family, 1979.
Much of the paper the case produced has been hard to find since. On September 8, 1977, the Brooklyn District Attorney, Eugene Gold, subpoenaed "any and all records" on Berkowitz from I.B.I. Security; a police report of the time noted that he had resigned voluntarily and that nobody at the company remembered him, and the firm was liquidated in 1990. In 2026 the researcher Chris Clough reported that a request for the Brooklyn court file drew a reply from the Kings County clerk that earlier requests had met little success because of a 2015 fire at the court's storage contractor, though the clerk did not say the file had burned. Berkowitz has told Clough that the employment records might have given him an alibi for a separate shooting of a young woman that the NYPD closed in his name by exceptional clearance, without a charge. Nothing in the surviving record has tested that claim either way.
The law that carries his name was never used against him. New York passed the original Son of Sam statute in 1977, while he was still at large and publishers were said to be bidding for his story, requiring any money owed to a criminal for an account of his crimes to be handed to the state Crime Victims Board and held for the victims. The Board applied it to Jean Harris, Mark David Chapman and the Wall Street Journal columnist R. Foster Winans, but as the statute then stood it reached only people actually convicted, and at the relevant moment Berkowitz had been found incompetent; the Board also recorded that he paid his share of the royalties from the 1981 book Son of Sam to his victims and their estates voluntarily. In 1986 the Board went after Simon & Schuster over Wiseguy, Nicholas Pileggi's book about the mobster Henry Hill. The publisher sued, and in December 1991, in Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Members of the New York State Crime Victims Board, the Supreme Court struck the law down as a content-based burden on speech, Justice O'Connor writing for a Court unanimous in the result. New York passed a narrower version the next year, and forty-one states and the federal government now have laws of the kind. In 2005 Berkowitz sued a former lawyer, Hugo Harmatz, who had self-published his letters and belongings as Dear David; they settled in October 2006, with Harmatz returning the items and giving part of his profits to the Crime Victims Board.
He was born Richard David Falco in Brooklyn on June 1, 1953. His mother, Elizabeth Broder, known as Betty, was a waitress, still married to a man named Tony Falco who had left her years before; his father was Joseph Kleinman, a married businessman. Within days she gave him up, and he was adopted by Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz, childless hardware store owners in the Bronx, who reversed his first two names and raised him as their only child. He was bullied for being Jewish and for being heavy, and neighbors and relatives remembered him as difficult, spoiled and a bully himself; he stole, set fires, and was taken to at least one therapist. In 2017 he told CBS News that he learned he was adopted when he was four or five, and that his parents, following what adoptive parents were then advised to say, told him his mother had died giving birth to him. He said he grew up depressed and preoccupied with death, convinced he deserved to die. When he was fourteen Pearl died of breast cancer, and home became harder after his father remarried. He graduated from Christopher Columbus High School in 1971 and joined the Army, serving at Fort Knox and with an infantry division in South Korea, and after his honorable discharge in June 1974 he traced his birth mother. What she told him about his birth disturbed him deeply, and the contact lapsed. He told Larry King in 1999 that he had learned his natural father died in the early 1970s, and that he was still in regular touch with Nathan Berkowitz, whom he called a great dad. He spent a year at Bronx Community College, worked as a security guard for I.B.I. Security Services, drove a cab for the Co-Op City Taxi Company, and at the time of his arrest was sorting letters for the Postal Service.
State law entitles him to a parole hearing every two years, and he has never asked to be let out. Before the first, in 2002, he wrote to Governor George Pataki asking that it be canceled: "In all honesty, I believe that I deserve to be in prison for the rest of my life." The board turned him down, saying he showed a limited understanding of the motivation for his crimes. The transcript of the May 17, 2016, interview, held by video link from Shawangunk before Commissioners Ludlow, Elovich and Thompson, shows how these hearings go. Ludlow counted it as his fifteenth appearance; Berkowitz thought it was his eighth and admitted he had lost count. The state's risk instrument rated him low on every measure, his file showed no disciplinary trouble since November 2004, and a social worker's report recorded no diagnosis and no recommended treatment. He had no place to live lined up. "I feel I am no risk, whatsoever," he said, and he confirmed telling staff that parole was not realistic for a man whose crimes had done so much damage. Commissioner Elovich asked where the rage that killed six people had come from. "Ma'am, I'll be frank," he said. "I just... I can't even explain that. I can't put that into words." The panel noted official and community opposition on file and refused him unanimously. The certified transcript is on the site as 2016: David Berkowitz Before the Parole Board. In May 2024, before his twelfth hearing, he told the Post he knew he had no chance but attended because skipping it could look like defiance and because he wanted to apologize openly; he was denied. In May 2026, at seventy-two, he did not attend. In an email to the Post he said he was not seeking release, that Jesus had set him free from the power of sin and Satan, and that he expected to go to heaven, and the paper described him as leading a small congregation inside his housing unit at Shawangunk.
That spring two bills before the New York legislature would have changed the rules for men like him: one requiring a hearing for older prisoners who had served long terms whatever their offense, and one directing the board to weigh present risk and rehabilitation ahead of the original crime. Opponents named him and Chapman as the men the bills would help.
Neysa Moskowitz spent years saying in public what she thought of his conversion. Larry King read him her words in 1999: "Show me one person that goes away for murder that doesn't turn to religion." She also wrote to him. He told King that in 1993 he had received a long letter from her, and on the same program she said she had wanted him to know who her daughter had been, from the day she was born through her girlhood, because she had only had her for twenty years. She wrote him again shortly before her death in 2006, forgiving him for killing Stacy. She outlived all three of her children.