Between July 1976 and July 1977, a gunman with a .44 caliber revolver shot 13 people in eight attacks in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. Six died. Most of the victims were young women, many of them sitting in parked cars with a boyfriend or a friend late at night. The gunman left one note at a shooting scene and mailed another to a newspaper columnist, and in them he called himself the "Son of Sam." By the summer of 1977, the New York Police Department had about 300 officers on the case, and young women across the city were cutting or dyeing their hair and staying home at night.
The gunman was David Berkowitz, a 24-year-old postal worker who lived alone in a small apartment in Yonkers, just north of the city line. He was arrested on August 10, 1977, after a witness and a parking ticket led detectives to his car. He told police that a neighbor's dog had relayed demonic orders to kill. In May 1978, against his lawyers' advice, he pleaded guilty to all six murders, and he received the maximum sentence of 25 years to life for each. He has been eligible for parole since 2002 and has been refused at every appearance. In later years he said he had invented the demons, and he also claimed he had been part of a group of devil worshippers who shared the shootings. No one else has ever been charged.
Berkowitz was born on June 1, 1953, in Brooklyn. His birth mother was Betty Broder; his father was Joseph Kleinman, a married Brooklyn businessman with whom she had a long relationship, according to a 2011 study of his life in the Pace Law Review. The baby was given the surname Falco. Britannica gives his original name as David Falco; the Pace Law Review says he was born Richard David Falco and that his adoptive parents switched his first and middle names.
He was adopted by Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz, a childless couple in the Bronx. Nathan Berkowitz owned a small hardware store. In 2017 Berkowitz told CBS News that he learned he was adopted when he was about four or five, and that his parents told him his birth mother had died. He later found out she was alive. He described a childhood that was mostly ordinary, with ball games and friends, but said he struggled with depression and was preoccupied with death because he believed he deserved to die. He also said he had ordinary hopes: a place of his own, a girlfriend, marriage and a family.
Others remembered a harder child. Britannica describes him as a difficult and sometimes violent child whose behavior grew more erratic after Pearl Berkowitz died of cancer in 1967. CBS gives his age then as 14; the Pace Law Review says 13. Time magazine reported in 1977 that he sobbed openly at her funeral and was never close to his father's second wife.
He went to Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, where, according to Time, he rarely dated and was teased for being overweight. He graduated in 1971. That year, Britannica says, his father remarried and moved to Florida without him; Time reported that Nathan Berkowitz retired to Boynton Beach about two years before the arrest.
Berkowitz joined the Army in 1971, at 18, straight out of high school. Time reported in 1977 that he failed his first rifle test but later qualified as an infantry sharpshooter with the M16. He served for a year in South Korea with the 2nd Infantry Division, patrolled near the demilitarized zone and saw no combat, according to the Pace Law Review. His only recorded blemish, Time said, was a temporary demotion over a late truck convoy. While in the service he left Judaism for a fundamentalist Baptist church after attending revival meetings. He was honorably discharged in 1974.
A friend told CBS News that he came home a different man, more drawn to fantasy than to reality. Berkowitz said in 2017 that he found his old friends had moved on and he felt alone. In 1974, the Pace Law Review says, he traced his birth mother, who told him the story of his birth; the relationship did not last.
Back in New York, he spent a year at Bronx Community College and took training as a city auxiliary police officer in traffic direction, first aid and rescue work, but not firearms, Time reported. He worked as a private security guard, including night shifts at a warehouse on the Hudson River, then passed a civil service examination. By March 1976, CBS News says, he was a part-time mail sorter at a Postal Service hub in the Bronx; by the summer of 1977 Time put his pay at 256 dollars a week on the 4 p.m. to midnight shift.
In April 1976 Berkowitz rented a small two-and-a-half-room apartment in a renovated seven-story brick building on Pine Street in Yonkers, The Washington Post reported after his arrest. Time described it as a studio on the seventh floor overlooking the Hudson, rented for 238.50 dollars a month. Neighbors later called him quiet, perhaps a little strange, but nice, and said he disliked noise. He sometimes greeted them warmly, and he once tipped a newspaper delivery boy 30 dollars.
A few blocks away lived Sam Carr, 64, who ran a telephone answering service from his home and owned a black Labrador named Harvey. Months before the arrest, Carr began receiving handwritten notes complaining that his dog's howling was keeping the writer awake, The Washington Post reported. Time said one of the letters warned that there would be no peace until the writer ended Carr's life, and Carr said Berkowitz later shot the dog in the leg. A second neighbor, Craig Glassman, 29, a nurse and part-time sheriff's corporal who lived below Berkowitz, received four letters that called him a demon and accused him of driving the writer to kill. Yonkers police opened a file on the letters.
The killings the city came to know began in July 1976, but Berkowitz's violence did not start there. After his arrest he told police about a knife attack on Christmas Eve 1975 in the Bronx. Britannica describes one woman who survived several stab wounds; Jewish Currents, in a 2017 account, says he stabbed two young women that night and that the crime was not linked to him until after his arrest. No charge for the stabbing was reported.
In 2024 the NYPD confirmed another earlier victim. Wendy Savino was shot on April 9, 1976, Time reported in 2025, and police then recognized her as the first victim of the gunman later called Son of Sam. She survived, and she was 88 when she appeared in a 2025 documentary series. The shooting was never the subject of a charge.
Shortly after 1 a.m. on July 29, 1976, Donna Lauria, 18, was sitting with her friend Jody Valenti in Valenti's two-door Oldsmobile outside the Lauria family's building at 2860 Buhre Avenue, in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx. The two had spent the evening at a disco. Donna's parents, coming home from their own night out, had driven past the car. A man walked up and fired through the passenger window. Donna Lauria died; Jody Valenti was wounded and survived.
Donna was the middle of three children and her parents' only daughter. Her mother, Rose Lauria, told PIX11 on the 40th anniversary that it still felt as though it had happened the day before, and that she had had a Mass said for Donna every year since. "There's not a day that goes by she's not on my mind," she said. At the time, no one connected the shooting to anything else.
On October 23, 1976, Carl Denaro and Rosemary Keenan, 18, were sitting in a parked Volkswagen on 160th Street in Flushing, Queens, early in the morning when a man approached and fired into the car, the Queens Chronicle reported. Keenan was not hurt. Denaro was shot in the head. The Associated Press, which gave his age as 20, reported that he needed a steel plate in his skull, spent weeks in the hospital and had to give up a place in the U.S. Air Force. Forty years later he told the AP, "I'm the luckiest man alive, I really am," and said he did not let the shooting define him.
On November 27, 1976, two young women were talking on the porch of Joanne Lomino's house in Floral Park, Queens, after coming home from a late movie, when a man walked up and fired at them. Donna DeMasi was hit and recovered without lasting physical harm, according to CBS News. A bullet struck Joanne Lomino's spine and left her paralyzed. Accounts of their ages differ: CBS lists both as 18, while the Queens Chronicle gives Lomino as 18 and DeMasi as 17.
Just after midnight on January 30, 1977, Christine Freund, 26, of Ridgewood, Queens, was sitting with her fiancé, John Diel, 30, a bartender, in his car at Station Square in Forest Hills. The gunman came up without a word and fired into the car. Freund was shot twice and died; Diel was not seriously hurt. She is buried at Linden Hill Cemetery. After the arrest, Diel told reporters that Berkowitz had no place on earth.
At about 7:30 on the evening of March 8, 1977, Virginia Voskerichian was walking home from the Continental Avenue subway station to her family's house on Exeter Street in Forest Hills Gardens, Queens. Outside 4 Dartmouth Street, a man came toward her. She raised her schoolbooks in front of her face, and the bullet passed through them and killed her.
She was a sophomore at Barnard College in Manhattan and worked at a duty-free shop at Kennedy Airport. Her family, of Armenian descent, had lived in Bulgaria and came to the United States in 1968 after waiting more than ten years for permission to leave. Her brother, Deek, told the Queens Chronicle about 35 years later that she spoke five languages and might have become a translator, and that she loved music, reading, art and fashion. Her father was a watchmaker. A neighbor called Deek to identify her before police arrived, and he was so shaken he could not tell whether it was Virginia or their older sister. He said he drove past the spot every day on his way to work because he did not want to forget, and that he still blamed himself for not meeting her at the subway. Most accounts give her age as 19; the Queens Chronicle gives 20.
The shooting broke the pattern of late-night attacks on couples. Berkowitz later claimed it was partly meant to confuse the police, the Queens Chronicle reported.
After the Voskerichian shooting, ballistics tests showed that one gunman had fired in all five attacks to that point, the Associated Press reported. By then three young people were dead and four wounded. The weapon was a .44 caliber Charter Arms Bulldog, a short-barreled revolver that was easy to hide; Time reported that Charter Arms had made about 28,000 of them over five years and that at least 600 had been reported stolen.
The NYPD formed a special task force, code-named Operation Omega, under Deputy Inspector Timothy J. Dowd, with Joseph Borrelli as his second in command. It grew from about 70 investigators to 300 after the final shooting; the AP has described it as a 200-person task force. The chief of detectives, John Keenan, oversaw it and went on television to appeal directly to the gunman.
On April 17, 1977, Valentina Suriani, 18, and Alexander Esau, 20, were shot in a car in the Bronx. Each was hit twice, according to CBS News, and both died. At the scene, police found a letter addressed to Captain Joseph Borrelli of the NYPD. In it the writer denied hating women and gave himself the name "Son of Sam," with a sign-off that described him as a creature to be feared. Time reported in 1977 that the letter spoke of a father figure called Sam who directed him. The name leaked to the press and stuck.
On May 30, 1977, the gunman mailed a handwritten letter to Jimmy Breslin, a columnist at the New York Daily News. It was postmarked in New Jersey. The writer opened with a description of the city's gutters, said he read Breslin's column every day and found it "quite informative," and asked him to tell the detectives on the case that he wished them the best of luck. Time reported that the letter called its author a spirit roaming the night, eager to please Sam, and that it joked that the detectives would need new shoes. The Daily News published the letter on June 6.
Breslin printed excerpts and urged the writer to give himself up, to the police or to him. He later said that police had wanted the letter published in the hope of drawing out more clues, and that he had consulted the police and a psychiatrist before answering it in print. The New York Times executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal, said he had serious doubts about newspapers appealing directly to a killer.
Early on June 26, 1977, Salvatore Lupo, 20, of Maspeth, and Judy Placido, 17, were sitting in a parked car near 211th Street and 45th Road in Bayside, Queens, shortly after leaving the Elephas discotheque on Northern Boulevard. Four shots were fired into the car. Placido was hit three times. Both survived.
By midsummer the case dominated New York. Time reported in August 1977 that 75 detectives and 225 uniformed officers were assigned full time, that about 700 more had volunteered off duty, and that the task force center at the 109th Precinct in Queens sometimes logged more than 100 calls an hour. Police received at least 5,000 names to check; women named husbands, former boyfriends and co-workers. Officers recorded the license plates of cars parked in lovers' lanes after midnight and put mannequins in parked cars as bait; live decoys were judged too dangerous. A police profile drawn up in May described the gunman as a paranoid loner, possibly with religious delusions. Witness sketches did not resemble one another and led people to name the wrong men.
The pattern was not as tidy as the newspapers made it. Time counted six attacks on parked cars, most of them on quiet residential streets rather than lovers' lanes, and noted that some of the women did not have long dark hair. Still, Queens District Attorney John Santucci later said young women cut their hair or pinned it up and stayed home in fear, and the WCBS radio reporter Irene Cornell remembered beauty parlors struggling to keep up with women changing their looks. Discos in Queens and the Bronx lost business. The owner of one Queens club said a Friday night in the summer of 1977 was the worst he had seen.
At about 2:35 a.m. on Sunday, July 31, 1977, two days after the anniversary of the first killing, Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante, both 20, were sitting in his car on Shore Parkway, by Gravesend Bay in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn. It was their first date. The street was open and well lit, far from the gunman's earlier ground in the east Bronx and north Queens. He walked up and fired four shots into the front seat. Both were hit in the head.
Stacy Moskowitz was a secretary for a shoe company with offices in the Empire State Building. Robert Violante had just applied for a construction job with Con Edison; an AP report described him as a clothing salesman. Doctors at Kings County Hospital operated on Stacy twice. She died on the afternoon of Monday, August 1, about 39 hours after she was shot. Violante lost his left eye and much of the sight in his right. Her father, Jerry Moskowitz, a Teamster, told reporters, "I lost a daughter I loved very much... she was a great kid." Her mother, Neysa, said the killer had to be caught and should suffer for the rest of his life. After the shooting Mayor Abraham Beame added 100 officers to the task force.
Cacilia Davis, 49, who lived nearby, was walking her dog at about 2:30 that morning. A young man passed her holding his right arm stiffly, with something in his hand, and walking, as she put it, "like a cat," Time reported. Minutes later she heard shots. She had also noticed a police officer ticketing a cream-colored car parked by a fire hydrant a block away. She went to the police about four days after the killing.
Detectives began checking every ticket written in the area that night. One was for a 1970 Ford Galaxie registered to David Berkowitz of Yonkers. Investigators asked why a Yonkers man would be in Brooklyn at 2:30 in the morning. The AP, writing in 2011 after the death of Detective Edward Zigo, said Zigo had followed the lead to Yonkers and, after a wrong turn onto Wicker Street, a name that appeared in one of the Son of Sam letters, told his partner, "John, we got him."
Yonkers had its own file. On August 6, Craig Glassman reported a fire outside his apartment door, with a note. Yonkers detectives connected the letters he had received with those sent to Sam Carr, knew Berkowitz's car and license number, and suspected he might be the gunman. The city task force learned of this three days later, Time reported. Police Commissioner Michael Codd said afterward that the parking ticket and the tip from Yonkers were the keys to the arrest, and that the result came not from sudden inspiration but from day-to-day work.
On August 10, 1977, Detectives Zigo and John Longo found the Galaxie parked outside the Pine Street building. Through the window they saw an Army duffel bag with a rifle butt sticking out and a note on the front seat in the distinctive hand printing of the letters. About a dozen officers watched the car and the building while a search warrant was sought. At about 10:30 p.m. Berkowitz came out, got into the car and started it. Officers drew their guns and ordered him out.
Accounts of his first words differ. Time reported that he recognized Dowd and said, "Inspector, you finally got me," and then, "I guess this is the end of the trail." The Washington Post reported that he looked at Dowd, smiled and said, "Inspector." The AP's obituary of John Keenan, in 2019, said Keenan asked him who he was and he answered, "I am the Son of Sam." Zigo's family said in 2011 that Zigo introduced himself and Berkowitz answered, "Hi, Ed. I'm the Son of Sam."
In the car police found the .44 caliber revolver, a semiautomatic rifle made to look like a submachine gun, and a large quantity of ammunition. There was also an unmailed letter to the Suffolk County police and a map of Long Island beaches. Berkowitz told police he had been on his way to the Hamptons, on Long Island, to attack a crowded nightclub and "go out in a blaze of glory." Bill Clark, a young detective on the task force, recalled in 2017 that the note named the Oak Beach Inn. Codd said a fingerprint on one of the earlier notes matched Berkowitz, and ballistics tests matched his revolver to the Moskowitz shooting.
Police searched the apartment. The windows were covered with sheets, and there was little furniture beyond a mattress. Messages were written on the walls, among them Sam Carr's name, and police found a scrapbook of clippings about the shootings, Army fatigues, two hunting knives and survival manuals. He was taken to police headquarters in Manhattan.
At headquarters he was questioned, in part by Detective Sergeant Joseph Coffey of the task force, who later said his anger drained away as he listened and called Berkowitz "just a pathetic, limp, wet noodle." Berkowitz said the shootings had been commands. "Sam told me what to do and I did it," he said, according to Time. He described Sam Carr as a man who had really lived 6,000 years ago and said messages reached him through Carr's dog. Sam, he said, was the Devil.
He corrected some of what the papers had written. He said he did not always fire with two hands, that he was "lousy" as a marksman, that he chose his targets at random by a "sign," such as a convenient parking space, and that he "ran like hell" afterward. He said he had gone back to at least two of the scenes, had tried to find Donna Lauria's grave, and had favored Queens for a time because he thought the young women there were prettier. A detective told Time he showed no remorse. Edward Zigo remembered him instead as "this little schlub of a kid, as nice and soft-spoken as could be."
He also kept notebooks recording fires. Prosecutors said in 1978 that the records, kept from 1974 to 1977 under the name "Phantom of the Bronx," listed as many as 2,000 fires, mostly in the Bronx. Time put the number in the diaries at about 1,400 and reported that he told his lawyers it was closer to 2,000. The Bronx District Attorney, Mario Merola, said spot checks found fires on the dates and at the places listed, but it was not established whether anyone had been hurt. He was never charged with arson.
Berkowitz was arraigned on August 11, 1977, in Brooklyn Criminal Court before Judge Richard A. Brown, because the last killing had taken place in Brooklyn. Brown had just finished night court when he was called back. The courtroom was packed with reporters, victims' relatives and onlookers, and about two dozen court officers and six detectives surrounded the prisoner. Asked whether he was David Berkowitz, he said, "Yes, sir," the only words he spoke. A pretrial report had recommended release without bail because of his steady job and community ties; Brown refused, ordered him held without bail and sent him to the prison ward of Kings County Hospital for psychiatric examination, saying he "definitely may be an incapacitated person." Brooklyn District Attorney Eugene Gold told the court that it had before it the .44 caliber killer, also known as Son of Sam. Outside, a crowd chanted for his death.
Brown, who later became Queens District Attorney, told DNAinfo in 2016 that Berkowitz looked nothing like anyone had imagined, and the AP quoted him calling Berkowitz a "sad sack." One of the killings had happened about ten blocks from Brown's home in Forest Hills, and he said that after the arrest the neighborhood was full of people for the first time in months.
He was indicted in Brooklyn for the Moskowitz shooting and pleaded not guilty at a second arraignment that week, UPI reported on August 17, with indictments in the Bronx for three murders and one wounding and in Queens for two killings and five woundings to follow. Stacy Moskowitz's family filed a 10 million dollar lawsuit against the Yonkers police, alleging they had failed to follow up leads, United Press International reported. A judge barred police from discussing the case with reporters, and one of his early lawyers was accused of trying to sell taped interviews and book rights to two newspapers for up to 100,000 dollars; both papers refused.
The arrest made headlines around the world. The Washington Post reported that newsstands saw the greatest demand for papers since President Kennedy's assassination: the New York Post, recently bought by Rupert Murdoch, sold more than a million copies under the front-page headline "Caught!", and the Daily News added 400,000 copies to its run of 1.9 million and still ran short. The coverage drew criticism. The New Yorker had published a piece before the arrest arguing that the press had fed public hysteria, and Breslin in particular was criticized for his exchanges with the killer. In 1993 Breslin wrote that Berkowitz had sent him a Christmas card from Attica.
Two court-appointed psychiatrists, Daniel W. Schwartz and Richard L. Weidenbacher Jr., examined Berkowitz for 11 hours. On August 30, 1977, Justice Gerald Held of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn read their conclusion in court: Berkowitz had paranoia and lacked the capacity to understand the proceedings against him or to help in his defense. Gold, the district attorney, told the court he believed Berkowitz was fit. Held gave the prosecution until October 4 to present its own evidence. The doctors had also spoken with Nathan Berkowitz, and their report reviewed his son's statements, photographs of the apartment and car, brain tests and the Son of Sam letters.
The prosecution's psychiatrist, David Abrahamsen, interviewed Berkowitz for about a month and concluded that the demons were a conscious invention he could control, not a psychosis, and that he could help his lawyers, according to a legal history of the case in Gale's Great American Trials. On October 21, Justice John R. Starkey found him competent; a week later Starkey withdrew from the case after a controversy over his comments to the press about the demon defense. In the spring of 1978, before Justice Joseph R. Corso, Schwartz and Weidenbacher reported that treatment had improved his condition and that he could now take part in his defense, though they did not say he had been sane at the time of the crimes. Corso found him fit for trial.
Berkowitz insisted on pleading guilty. His lawyers, Leon Stern and Ira Jultak, had urged him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. To save money and simplify security, the Bronx and Queens judges, prosecutors and clerks came to the Brooklyn courthouse, and on May 8, 1978, he pleaded guilty before all three judges. Corso led the questioning, which took 21 minutes, then handed the case to Justice William Kapelman of the Bronx and Justice Nicholas Tsoucalas of Queens. Five court officers surrounded him, visitors passed through two metal detectors, and a helicopter flew over his motorcade.
Asked why he had driven to Brooklyn on July 31, 1977, he said, "To kill somebody." He hesitated before naming Stacy Moskowitz as his first target, then said he had aimed at her head and meant to kill. He said he knew murder was wrong, and when asked what he expected to happen, he said he would be arrested and put in jail. Questioned about the Queens shootings, he said he had wanted to kill. He described the killing of Donna Lauria, and from a seat in the fourth row her mother, Rose, cried out at him. He did not repeat the story of the demons or the dog. Her father, Michael Lauria, told reporters he should go to the electric chair; Governor Hugh Carey had vetoed a bill to restore the death penalty, and the State Senate had failed by one vote to override him.
In custody he had undergone a religious conversion of a kind. A court-appointed psychiatrist arranged visits from Ollie Smith, a Pentecostal volunteer prison worker from Brooklyn, and Time reported that he afterward quoted Scripture freely; Smith said he wanted to become a Pentecostal minister.
The three judges met again in Brooklyn on May 22 to pass sentence. Spectators waited about an hour and a half while guards struggled with Berkowitz, who kicked, scratched and bit them and tried to throw himself from a seventh-floor window; two officers were hospitalized. In the courtroom he chanted an insult about Stacy Moskowitz. Her mother shouted at him, and Robert Violante yelled that he should be killed. As guards took him out he shouted that he would kill them all again. Sentencing was postponed and new psychiatric tests were ordered. Merola, the Bronx prosecutor, complained that it would be the third psychiatric report and asked where it would end.
On June 12, 1978, he was sentenced to the maximum of 25 years to life for each of the six murders, with terms for the attempted murders and assaults. He sat quietly, handcuffed to a restraining belt; an unnamed court source told the AP he was heavily sedated. When Corso pronounced the first sentences, Daniel Carrique, a friend of the Moskowitz family, vaulted over the benches toward him shouting that he would burn in hell, and was tackled and charged with assault. Berkowitz was hurried out, and an officer reported him asking why they did not let the man kill him.
Kapelman said it was his fervent wish that Berkowitz be imprisoned until the day he died, though the AP and The Washington Post recorded the words slightly differently. Tsoucalas ordered the Queens sentences to run consecutively. Under New York law, Kapelman and others believed, the terms would merge into a single 25-year minimum, and The Washington Post reported that he would be eligible for parole in 25 years; AP copy that week said 30. Gold called on the legislature to allow life without parole. Santucci called the year of shootings a reign of terror.
Berkowitz told his lawyers to drop all appeals, according to Great American Trials.
He arrived at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora on June 13, 1978. A routine psychiatric examination there led prison psychiatrists to recommend a transfer, and Acting Clinton County Court Judge Irving Goldman declared him so mentally ill that he needed hospitalization. Berkowitz waived a hearing and signed his consent. He was sent to the Central New York Psychiatric Center at Marcy, where he spent about four months, and then to Attica Correctional Facility.
In 1979 another prisoner cut his neck with a razor. Doctors said the blade came within an inch of a major artery, the Pace Law Review reported. He survived and would not name his attacker. He later spent about seven years at Clinton. A former guard who became a town court judge remembered him as a troubled soul, and at one point he served 90 days in disciplinary confinement for fighting. In December 1987 he was moved to Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, in the Catskills, where he stayed until 2016. In April 2016 he was transferred to Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Wallkill, Ulster County, a maximum-security prison about 60 miles north of New York City, where CBS News found him working as a library clerk in 2017.
Berkowitz says that in about 1987 another prisoner gave him a pocket New Testament and urged him to read the Psalms, and that Psalm 34:6 brought about his conversion. He describes himself as a born-again Christian, and he took the name "Son of Hope." At Sullivan he became heavily involved in the chapel and Bible studies, completed a Quaker-run Alternatives to Violence course, worked in the Intermediate Care Program helping mentally ill prisoners, and served as a peer counselor and chapel elder. He wrote to young people warning them away from the occult, took part in a Christian video with the Teen Challenge program, and in 2006 published Son of Hope: The Prison Journals of David Berkowitz. He received 80 to 100 letters a month, the Pace Law Review reported.
He also used the internet through supporters. In 2004 UPI reported on a website, forgivenforlife.com, where he posted writings; prison officials said it broke no rules. Neysa Moskowitz, then 71, said that if she were the warden he would not be allowed to do anything, and that the prison treated him like a little prince. He later ran a site called Arise and Shine.
In 2000 a Houston crime victims' advocate, Andy Kahan, wrote to 20 serial killers asking whether they knew their belongings were being sold online. Berkowitz alone supported him, the AP reported in 2009, and gave a notarized statement disavowing any part in the trade in killers' memorabilia. The two exchanged dozens of letters over nine years, and Kahan credited him with helping persuade eBay to ban such sales. "I would give my life if I could go back into the past to have prevented this from happening," Berkowitz wrote. He said he took no psychiatric medication and had never planned a book about his crimes.
In 2006 Berkowitz sued his former lawyer, Hugo Harmatz, who he said had used letters and other items given to him for safekeeping in a book called Dear David. Berkowitz took part in a hearing in Manhattan Supreme Court by speakerphone from prison in January 2006, and in May his lawyers said he wanted to use the law that bears his nickname to strip the author of his profits. The outcome was not reported.
In 1977, after reports that Berkowitz's story would be worth a large sum, the New York Legislature passed what the ABA Journal later called the nation's first law to keep criminals from profiting from the sale of their stories. Under the "Son of Sam" law, money owed to an accused or convicted person for a book, film or other account of the crime was to be paid to the state Crime Victims Board and held in escrow for five years for victims who won civil judgments.
The law was never applied to Berkowitz. The U.S. Supreme Court noted in 1991 that it then covered only people actually convicted, and that he had been found incompetent to stand trial. According to the Board, he paid his share of the royalties from the 1981 book Son of Sam to his victims or their estates voluntarily. The Board used the law only a handful of times, against figures such as Jean Harris, Mark David Chapman and the former Wall Street Journal columnist R. Foster Winans.
In 1986 the Board went after the publisher Simon & Schuster over Wiseguy, Nicholas Pileggi's book about the mobster Henry Hill. The publisher sued, and on December 10, 1991, in Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Members of the New York State Crime Victims Board, the Supreme Court struck the law down as an unconstitutional burden on speech based on its content. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the Court; Justices Harry Blackmun and Anthony Kennedy concurred in the judgment, and Justice Clarence Thomas took no part. New York later adopted a narrower law, and the ABA Journal reported in 2007 that more than 40 states had similar statutes.
Berkowitz first became eligible for parole in 2002, after 25 years. Before the hearing he wrote to Governor George Pataki, in a letter dated March 25, that he had "no interest" in parole: "In all honesty I believe that I deserve to be in prison for the rest of my life." On July 9, 2002, a two-member panel refused him, citing his "limited understanding of the motivation" for crimes it called atrocious, and noting his letter. In June 2004, after a hearing of less than ten minutes, the board refused him again. It acknowledged his excellent disciplinary record and his work in prison programs but said the brutality of the crimes required him to stay in prison. "You caused irreparable harm to many victims and society was gripped in fear because of your acts," the board wrote. He did not attend the June 2006 hearing, and was refused.
In a 2011 letter to Fox News he wrote that he would not seek release because he was "already a 'free man,'" forgiven by Jesus, as Time reported. In May 2012 he was refused for the sixth time, at 58, after 35 years in prison. At a hearing in 2016, Rose and Michael Lauria joined by telephone to argue again that he should never be freed. He told CBS News in 2017, "As a realistic hope, I don't see any hope for parole, no." He was interviewed by the board on May 14, 2024, at 70, and refused after what the AP described as his 12th appearance. State officials gave no further details.
In May 2026 Berkowitz did not attend his scheduled appearance before the Board of Parole, Fox News reported in July 2026, and he said he was not trying to get out. The board's decision on that hearing has not been reported. In the same Fox News report, published on the 50th anniversary of the Lauria shooting, he declined an interview through an intermediary, wrote that he did not trust the media, and complained that the media had distorted what he said about changes to New York's parole law. He is serving his sentence in the New York State prison system; the most recent report naming his prison, from May 2024, placed him at Shawangunk Correctional Facility. No release or death has been reported.
Berkowitz's account of why he killed has shifted several times. At his arrest he spoke of a demon speaking through Sam Carr's dog. UPI reported in 2004 that he had since admitted making that story up, and Britannica says the same. In the 2025 series Conversations with a Killer he says that when he learned he was adopted he "was so angry, I blamed others, and I started committing my crimes to make people pay attention to me"; in a 2024 telephone interview with the director, Joe Berlinger, he said he was very sorry for the murders and should have sought help sooner. To CBS News in 2017 he called the shootings "a break from reality," said he thought he was appeasing the devil, and said he hated the name Son of Sam: "That was a demon." He also said, "I'm very sorry for what happened," and that the pain of his victims weighed heavily on him.
By the early 1980s Berkowitz was saying, in letters and later in interviews, that he had not acted alone. These claims have never been tested in court, and no one else has been charged. In a 1981 letter quoted in the 2021 documentary series The Sons of Sam, he wrote, "I am guilty of these crimes. But I didn't do it all." In 1993, in a prison interview broadcast on Inside Edition and reported by the Daily News, he said he had belonged to a satanic group, had been present at all the shootings scouting and reporting on targets, and had personally killed only three of the victims. He said he had met Michael Carr, one of Sam Carr's sons, at a Bronx party in mid-1975 and was drawn into rituals in Yonkers parks, and that he obtained the revolver in Houston on June 12, 1976. He named Michael Carr and his brother, John Carr, as gunmen. Both were dead by then: John Carr was shot dead in North Dakota in 1978, and Michael Carr died in a car crash on the West Side Highway in Manhattan less than two years later. In a 1997 interview with the journalist Maury Terry, cited by Dateline NBC, he said he had been a lookout rather than the triggerman at some shootings, while still saying, "I was there, at all of them." He has refused to name anyone living, saying his family could be at risk, and he has never testified or been cross-examined on it.
The chief advocate of the cult theory was Terry, a writer who took up the case soon after the arrest. He pointed to witness sketches that did not resemble Berkowitz or one another, to clues in the letters, and to reports of satanic activity around Untermyer Park in Yonkers, and he tried to link the case to wider networks of cults in his book The Ultimate Evil. He traveled to Minot, North Dakota, to look into John Carr's death. Terry died in 2015, and his work was the basis of the Netflix series The Sons of Sam, directed by Joshua Zeman and released on May 5, 2021. Reviewers were skeptical. Time noted that Terry's questions to Berkowitz in their recorded interview were highly leading, and the critic Brian Tallerico wrote that the interview, in which Terry feeds answers to Berkowitz, undermines the theory. A 2025 documentary series, Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes, rejected the cult theory and argued that Berkowitz acted alone, noting that the shootings stopped when he was arrested.
Some officials and survivors have taken the claims seriously. Santucci, the Queens district attorney at the time of the shootings, said he believed Berkowitz did not act alone and suspected the gun had been passed among several people, and his office reopened the case, but it found too little evidence for court and later closed it, Dateline NBC reported. Yonkers police began an inquiry in 1996; Dateline reported that it had never been closed and had never gone before a grand jury. A former Yonkers officer told Dateline he thought "half a dozen" people may have been involved, and three victims' parents said they thought Berkowitz probably had help. Carl Denaro has said he believes a woman fired the shot that hit him as part of a group that included Berkowitz, while acknowledging he does not know it for a fact.
Against this, the NYPD has always held that Berkowitz was the only gunman. Detectives Bill Clark and Joseph Borrelli told CBS News in 2017 that they rejected his claims, and Borrelli pointed out that the shootings ended with his arrest. Breslin dismissed the conspiracy theories, and a former FBI profiler who interviewed Berkowitz concluded that he was a withdrawn loner who acted alone, Dateline reported. Berkowitz's own pleas, in which he described aiming at the victims, are the only account tested in court.
Terry's theories also touched the 1974 killing of Arlis Perry, a 19-year-old receptionist found dead in Stanford University's Memorial Church. Investigators had at one point considered Berkowitz among other suspects, the Pleasanton Weekly reported. In June 2018 the Santa Clara County sheriff's office said new DNA evidence linked the killing to the campus security guard who had reported finding her body; he died by suicide as deputies served a search warrant. No link to Berkowitz was found.
The families have spoken for decades. Neysa Moskowitz said in 1977 that she would die on the spot to see the killer punished. In 2004 she complained that the prison treated him too well; the Pace Law Review reports that she eventually forgave him. Rose Lauria told PIX11 in 2016 that he would never be sane and would not know how to live outside. Deek Voskerichian told the Queens Chronicle in 2015 that only Berkowitz knew why he did it and that he hoped he would die a miserable death. Robert Violante told CBS News in 2017 that he would never forgive him, and that whatever second chance God might be giving Berkowitz did not change how he felt. Carl Denaro said Berkowitz's faith did not mean he was exonerated.
Several of the officers have died. Timothy Dowd died on December 26, 2014, at 99; his daughter said he had done a great service to the city. Edward Zigo died in February 2011, at 84, at his home in Lynbrook; he had worked on a 1985 CBS television film about the case, in which Martin Sheen played him. John Keenan, the chief of detectives, died on September 19, 2019, at 99.
Books on the case include Lawrence D. Klausner's Son of Sam (1981), based on Berkowitz's tapes and diaries; David Abrahamsen's Confessions of Son of Sam (1985); Maury Terry's The Ultimate Evil; and Berkowitz's own Son of Hope (2006). Spike Lee's film Summer of Sam (1999) dramatized the summer of 1977, with Breslin in a role. Documentaries include The Sons of Sam (Netflix, 2021), Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes (2025, directed by Joe Berlinger, using interviews Berkowitz gave to Jack Jones of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and a 2024 telephone interview), and the CBS News special Son of Sam: The Killer Speaks (2017).
Proven by final judgment, on guilty pleas: the murders of Donna Lauria, Christine Freund, Virginia Voskerichian, Valentina Suriani, Alexander Esau and Stacy Moskowitz, and the attempted murders and assaults of the seven people wounded in the same eight attacks.
Attributed but never charged: the shooting of Wendy Savino on April 9, 1976 (recognized by the NYPD in 2024, as reported by Time), and the Christmas Eve 1975 knife attack in the Bronx. Claimed but never charged: the fires listed in his notebooks.
Unproven: his claims, made from the early 1980s onward, that members of a satanic group, including John and Michael Carr, fired some of the shots. No one else has been charged, the Queens inquiry was closed, and the NYPD maintains that he acted alone.
Details that vary between accounts: the ages of several victims (Voskerichian 19 or 20; Suriani 18 or 19; DeMasi 17 or 18; Denaro 20 or 25; Moskowitz 20, or 19 in one CBS caption); whether one or two women were stabbed in December 1975; the cost of the parking ticket (35 dollars in one 1977 report, 25 in another); his first words at the arrest; the reported total of his sentence (315 years in AP copy of June 1978; 365 years in later accounts); and whether he was first eligible for parole after 25 or 30 years (it came in 2002). The Supreme Court's 1991 opinion says he was "found incompetent to stand trial," which matches the August 1977 psychiatric report but not the later rulings that he was fit.
June 1, 1953: born in Brooklyn; adopted by Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz and raised in the Bronx.
1967: Pearl Berkowitz dies of cancer.
1971: graduates from Christopher Columbus High School; joins the Army.
1974: honorably discharged; traces his birth mother.
December 24, 1975: knife attack in the Bronx, later admitted.
March 1976: begins work as a mail sorter (CBS News).
April 1976: rents an apartment on Pine Street, Yonkers.
April 9, 1976: Wendy Savino is shot; recognized by the NYPD in 2024 as an earlier victim.
July 29, 1976: Donna Lauria is killed and Jody Valenti wounded in Pelham Bay, the Bronx.
October 23, 1976: Carl Denaro is wounded in Flushing, Queens; Rosemary Keenan is unhurt.
November 27, 1976: Joanne Lomino and Donna DeMasi are wounded in Floral Park, Queens.
January 30, 1977: Christine Freund is killed in Forest Hills, Queens.
March 8, 1977: Virginia Voskerichian is killed in Forest Hills; ballistics link the five shootings.
April 17, 1977: Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau are killed in the Bronx; a letter signed "Son of Sam" is left at the scene.
May 30, 1977: a letter is mailed to Jimmy Breslin; the Daily News publishes it on June 6.
June 26, 1977: Judy Placido and Salvatore Lupo are wounded in Bayside, Queens.
July 31, 1977: Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante are shot in Brooklyn; she dies on August 1.
August 6, 1977: a fire is set outside Craig Glassman's door in Yonkers.
August 10, 1977, about 10:30 p.m.: Berkowitz is arrested outside his building in Yonkers.
August 11, 1977: arraigned before Judge Richard A. Brown in Brooklyn; sent to Kings County Hospital.
August 30, 1977: two court psychiatrists report him unfit to stand trial.
October 21, 1977: Justice John Starkey finds him competent; Starkey later withdraws.
Spring 1978: Justice Joseph Corso finds him fit for trial.
May 8, 1978: pleads guilty before Justices Corso, Kapelman and Tsoucalas.
May 22, 1978: sentencing postponed after his outburst in court.
June 12, 1978: sentenced to 25 years to life on each murder.
June 13, 1978: arrives at Clinton Correctional Facility; later sent to the Central New York Psychiatric Center at Marcy, then to Attica.
1979: his neck is cut by another prisoner at Attica.
1987: says he became a Christian; moved to Sullivan Correctional Facility in December.
December 10, 1991: the Supreme Court strikes down the original Son of Sam law.
November 1993: says in a television interview that he was part of a cult and did not fire every shot.
1996: Yonkers police begin an inquiry into his claims.
July 9, 2002: refused parole at his first hearing.
June 2004: refused a second time.
2006: sues his former lawyer over the book Dear David; publishes Son of Hope.
May 2012: refused parole a sixth time.
April 2016: transferred to Shawangunk Correctional Facility.
August 2017: CBS News interview on the 40th anniversary of his arrest.
May 5, 2021: The Sons of Sam is released on Netflix.
2024: the NYPD recognizes Wendy Savino as an earlier victim.
May 14, 2024: interviewed by the parole board; refused after his 12th appearance.
July 30, 2025: Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes is released.
May 2026: does not attend his parole board appearance.
October 20, 2026: in state prison; no later development found.