Welcome back to our serial killer hall of infamy, shows that perhaps highlight the darker
aspects of mankind and a topic we’ve been asked time and again to revisit.
To be frank, and this is a terrible truth, there is no shortage of serial killers to
talk about.
Just the USA’s list alone could give you enough grisly bedtime reading for a decade,
and that’s just the bios, not the reams of analysis that followed their bloody deeds.
In case you’re wondering, the FBI tells us that a serial killer is someone who has
committed two or more murders, usually by themselves, on different occasions.
That’s what makes them a bit different from spree killers, people who go on a short-lasting
rampage.
\ So now let’s get down with such a man – there
are female serial killers by the way, but they are rare.
His real name was David Richard Berkowitz, and no, he didn’t have a father whose name
was the diminutive of Samuel, but we’ll get around to his alias soon.
This killer was particularly frightening because he was the kind to leave letters to the cops.
This kind of behavior, undertaken by a few serial killers going all the way back to Jack
the Ripper, adds a very menacing edge to their already horrific deeds.
It’s not enough they kill innocent people, but they flaunt it.
This is one such letter that he wrote to a journalist in the summer of 1976, aka, “The
summer of Sam.”
“Please inform all the detectives working the case that I wish them the best of luck.
Keep ‘em digging, drive on, think positive, get off your butts, knock on coffins, etc.
Upon my capture I promise to buy the guys working on the case a new pair of shoes if
I can get up the money.
Son of Sam”
Hmm, offering to get the cops new shoes.
It was brazen; it was cheeky, and people were dying.
In another letter he informed the cops through the media that he just couldn’t stop killing.
But what exactly did he do?
As with all, or most serial killers, we can’t talk about what they did before we talk about
their childhood as their sadism is usually born during their younger years.
All we know about young David is that he was born in 1953, but his birth was in some ways
a tragedy.
His Jewish mother had grown up in a poor New York City neighborhood.
There she had met a man with the surname Falco.
She married him, and then the man left.
Later she got into a relationship with a married man, and then had a child with him.
As he was married she named her child Richard David Falco.
This baby was the Son of Sam in the making.
As things turned out, at least by some sources, the married man didn’t want anything to
do with the child and threatened to leave the mother if she didn’t do something about
the baby.
She adopted him to a family from the Bronx who had the name Berkowitz.
So, now we have David Berkowitz growing up in the Bronx with a Jewish-American family
of modest means but more than able to bring up a child.
It’s said he was a troubled child, and while being adopted for some kids can present some
challenges, according to the book “Confessions of Son of Sam”, which included interviews
with the killer, he was told as a kid that his real mother had died during childbirth.
We are told this made him feel extremely guilty, and weighed on the young child’s mind.
It’s said in some bios that he became a bully and difficult, so much so that his parents
sent him to see a psychotherapist.
He also enjoyed lighting fires, but let’s face it, many kids do.
He wasn’t an especially bad kid, just a little naughty at times.
But then when he was 14 his adoptive mother died, which in his mind made for two mothers
dead.
Adopted kids sometimes don’t deal well with separation, and it’s said after her death
his relationship with his father became worse.
In 1971 he did what many mixed-up young people do and joined the army.
During his three years it’s said he showed an impressive acumen for marksmanship, something
that would serve him well later on the streets of New York.
He served in Korea and then was given an honorable discharge.
Just after he left the army he found out that he had been lied to, and that his birth mother
was still alive.
Rather than rejoice he later said in interviews that this deception made him furious, as well
as the fact that he had had two fathers in his life that hadn’t cared for him much.
For much of his life he had lived with loss and guilt, and even though he made a fairly
unsuccessful attempt at befriending his birth mother and her family, he would later say
that his sense of identity had been torn apart.
He said he felt unwanted, like an accident, as if he was never meant to be born.
Suffice to say, this didn’t bode well for what was going to happen in the rest of his
life.
He took a few jobs, including one at a Post Office.
Later one of his colleagues said she was terrified of this Son of Sam who was killing on her
streets, and she had no idea that her colleague David was the murderer.
She told New York Magazine that he just chatted about mundane things.
“He talked,” she said, “like anyone else.”
But he wasn’t just anyone else, because he was stalking people on the streets of New
York.
Just after finding out the truth about his real mother not actually dying it seems something
cracked in David, and he got himself a .44 caliber gun.
It’s at this time that it’s said he started lighting fires around New York City and that
he began to hear voices.
He would sometime later be diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia.
Women were his enemies, according to the voices he heard, and his first touch with severe
criminality would be attacking a 15-year girl with a hunting knife.
She didn’t die, but others soon would.
You see, he thought he was doing a job that needed to be done, and that was taking the
lives of what he believed were impure women.
Let’s now remember that it wasn’t long ago he found out his mother had had him with
a married man and then given him away.
”I'd kill her again.
I'd kill them all again,” he once said in court when asked about one murder.
He thought he was doing righteous work.
It’s even said that because he chose women that looked the same: pretty, long brown or
dark hair, many women in New York City cut their hair and dyed it blonde.
We should also say that the adoptive mother who had lied to him about his birth mother,
looked like a lot of his victims.
But we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves here.
Let’s now look at his victims.
David often chose people that were in pairs, and that’s what happened at 1:10 a.m. on
July 29, 1976, when two teenage girls were sitting in their car talking about this and
that in the Bronx area of New York.
One girl opened the car door and a man approached fast; he shot into the car three times in
total, killing one of the women and injuring the other.
A few months later and he was in Queens, and this time his victim would be a 20-year old
man and an 18-year old woman.
The guy was shot in the head and the women only suffered minor injuries.
Both survived the ordeal.
Now a manhunt was on.
A month later, also in Queens, a man approached two girls, 16 and 18, and asked for directions.
Before they could say ‘left at the lights’ a man shot them both.
They both survived, but one girl would never walk again.
Two months later and again in Queens, two women were in a car after seeing the movie
Rocky.
A man shot into the car, killing one of them.
March ’77 and another girl is killed.
This time she was alone.
Police know the same gun was used in other murders, a .44 Bulldog revolver, and they
have been told by witnesses a chubby-looking guy has been seen near the scenes of crimes.
In April he struck again, shooting a couple, 20 and 18, in the Bronx.
They both died, and again a man fitting the description of chubby was seen in the neighborhood.
The press were all over it, not just in the USA but worldwide.
Here was a killer that just walked up to good-looking youngsters on the streets and shot them dead.
It created a huge sense of fear in New York.
Who would be next?
One minute you could be outside talking about that great Iggy Pop or David Bowie concert
you’d just been to and the next minute a maniac has shot you through the neck.
Then comes the first letter.
It started like this: “I am deeply hurt by your calling me a weman
hater.
I am not.
But I am a monster.
I am the ‘Son of Sam.’
I am a little ‘brat’.
When father Sam gets drunk he gets mean.
He beats his family.
Sometimes he ties me up to the back of the house.
Other times he locks me in the garage.
Sam loves to drink blood.
‘Go out and kill’ commands father Sam.”
It gets pretty raw after this, but all the time he talks about being abused by some Sam
character, his father, and talks about hurting women.
More of the letter goes like this, “I love to hunt.
Prowling the streets looking for fair game—tasty meat.
The wemon of Queens are z prettyist of all.
It must be the water they drink.
I live for the hunt—my life.
Blood for papa.
Mr. Borrelli, sir, I dont want to kill anymore no sir, no more but I must, ‘honour thy
father.’
While we can say with assuredness that David perhaps never won any spelling bees, what
we do know is that he actually did have a tempestuous relationship with the father that
adopted him.
In fact, after his mother died his father married again and it’s said David felt unwelcome
in the house after that.
We had a fairly ugly kid, overweight, who’s been rejected by most people in his life.
It’s also said his appearance and personality was so repellant he never had a relationship
with a woman.
But did his father beat him?
Lock him up in a room?
Who knows.
Later David would tell cops that Sam was actually the neighbor’s dog, and it was that dog
who told him to go out and hunt women.
We also know he was crazy, so we won’t dismiss the possibility of Sam being a dog and also
a father-like demon.
The letter was so badly written that cops for a time thought their man might be Scottish,
or Scottish-American, but that wasn’t true.
What’s also weird is that later he wrote another letter, this time to a tabloid columnist,
but it was well written.
It sounded a bit like the American writer Charles Bukowski, and was titled with a biblical
reference, “Blood and Family – Darkness and Death – Absolute Depravity – .44.”
It started like this, “Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure,
vomit, stale wine, urine and blood.
Hello from the sewers of N.Y.C. which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away
by the sweeper trucks.
Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C. and from the ants that dwell in these
cracks and feed in the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks.”
Maybe now the cops were looking at a William Burroughs fan, but they didn’t have much
time before the murdering started again.
Another two incidences happened, both times with couples and not single people.
We won’t go into details but in the end the Son of Sam injured 7 people during those
attacks and killed 6.
As for his arrest…To cut a long story short, a woman had been followed one night by a man
who had fired shots at her once she had run away.
That woman told cops she had seen this guy first near a car that she believed had received
a ticket.
This was investigated and it turned out that a Ford Galaxie owned by none other than David
Berkowitz came up on the radar.
He was brought in for questioning.
Police got a warrant to search David’s apartment, but on seeing him one day head to his car
two cops got in next to him, their guns firmly pointed in his face.
In that car they found a .44-caliber Bulldog revolver.
As the tale goes, the cops said tell me who you are and the man replied, “I am Sam.”
On August 11, 1977, David was interrogated and he didn’t deny anything.
He said that he had killed the women because a demon called Sam that lived inside the head
of his neighbor’s black Labrador had told him to do it.
Despite these obvious mental aberrations he was found competent to stand trial.
He was sentenced to 25 years for each murder, and for each to be served consecutively.
A year later and he said he hadn’t really been ordered to do those things by a dog,
but he was just angry because of how the world had rejected him.
In 1979, a year later, an inmate slashed his throat and almost killed him.
Berkowitz said fair play, I deserved it, and would not identify his assailant.
All kinds of things happened in prison.
In 1987 he became a born again Christian and gave himself the name, The Son of Hope.
He wrote essays about hope and redemption on Christian websites and even counseled prisoners
who had their own troubles.
He also later claimed to be part of a Satanic cult that included the owner of that black
Labrador.
He said two guys in this cult did some of the murders, but we’ll never know because
one committed suicide and the other died in a car accident.
He has actually said a lot of things, including an admission that the voice he heard, the
real Sam, was a druid devil.
The truth is we might never know because no one really believes the words of Sam.
Tell us what you think about the son of Sam in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video America's Deadliest Hitman - The Iceman Killer.
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See you next time.