David Berkowitz The Son of Sam Murders

Sam This is the story of a killer who terrorized New York for a year with no name, until he gave himself one — the Son of Sam — and left police hunting a man nobody could connect to a single lead. Before any of that, he was a child given away at birth, and it helps to start there, in Brooklyn, in the summer of 1953.

Sam On June 1, 1953, a boy was born in Brooklyn to a waitress named Betty Broder, the result of an affair with a married businessman named Joseph Kleinman. Betty already had a daughter, Roslyn. Because Kleinman wanted no part of raising the child, Betty gave the newborn up for adoption within days. A couple named Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz, who ran a hardware store, took him in and renamed him David Richard Berkowitz. Both his birth parents and his adoptive parents were Jewish, but the boy who became David Berkowitz would grow up with no memory of the first family at all.

Sam His childhood with the Berkowitzes was not an easy one. He suffered from severe depression as a boy — there were stretches when he shut himself in the apartment for hours, and times he thought about killing himself. At school and at home he had episodes of violent, disruptive behavior serious enough that his adoptive parents brought in school counselors, a rabbi, and a psychologist to try to help him. Then in 1967, when David was fourteen, Pearl developed cancer and died. It was a loss layered on top of a childhood that had already been unstable.

Sam Around the same years, troubling patterns emerged that only made sense in hindsight. At twelve, he began setting fires, which he kept a record of in his own diary. By thirteen he'd moved on to torturing and killing animals and insects — most notably, he poisoned his adoptive mother's pet parakeet, a bird named Pudgy, with cleaning fluid.

Sam At eighteen, Berkowitz enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving in South Korea and later in Kentucky, where he trained as a marksman — a skill that would matter later. During his service he was baptized into Christianity, though he stopped attending church once he was honorably discharged in 1974. Back in New York, he tried Bronx Community College for a while and worked as a security guard and a cab driver, unremarkable jobs for a young man who, underneath, was still carrying the same instability from childhood.

Sam In 1975, Berkowitz tracked down his birth mother, Betty, and built a relationship with his half-sister, Roslyn. It did not go the way he might have hoped. Whatever Betty told him during their brief contact left him, by his own later account, feeling shocked and abandoned — a second rejection, in effect, layered on the first one he'd never consciously known about.

Sam Before the crimes that made his name famous, Berkowitz is believed to have carried out at least one earlier attack that went unconnected at the time. In December 1975, he stabbed a young woman named Michelle Forman. She survived, and he was never charged over it. Some accounts also count a woman named Wendy Savino among the people he shot at who survived, though the details of that attack remain thin.

Sam The attack that did draw attention came a few months later. On July 28, 1976, Berkowitz quit his job as a security guard. Early the next morning, in the Bronx, two young women — nineteen-year-old Jody Valenti and eighteen-year-old Donna Lauria — were sitting in Valenti's double-parked car when a man approached and fired three shots. Lauria was killed instantly. Valenti was hit in the thigh and survived, watching the gunman walk quickly away afterward. She described him to police as a white male in his thirties, roughly five-foot-eight and about two hundred pounds, with short, dark, curly hair. At the time, investigators found no motive and no leads, and the shooting barely registered beyond the immediate neighborhood — nobody yet had any reason to think it was the first of anything.

Sam Three months after Lauria's death, the attacks resumed in Queens. On October 23rd, Carl Denaro, twenty, and Rosemary Keenan, eighteen, were sitting in Denaro's parked car when gunfire tore through it. Both survived, though Denaro was struck in the head.

Sam A month later, on the night of November 27th, sixteen-year-old Donna DeMasi and eighteen-year-old Joanne Lomino were walking home from a late movie in Queens when a man shot them both on the porch steps of Lomino's house. DeMasi recovered fully. Lomino did not — the bullet left her paralyzed for life. At this stage, investigators still had no confirmed link between these shootings and the Bronx attack on Lauria and Valenti, though the pattern was starting to worry detectives who compared notes across precincts.

Sam The new year brought the first confirmed death since Lauria. On January 30th, Christine Freund, twenty-six, was shot and killed in a parked car in Queens alongside her fiancé, John Diel, who survived. Police now had enough cases stacking up to notice the shape of it — young women with long, dark hair, often sitting with a male companion, shot at close range with the same caliber of revolver, a point of ballistic detail that would soon tie the cases together formally.

Sam That formal link came in March. On the 8th, a Columbia University student named Virginia Voskerichian was walking home in Forest Hills when she was shot and killed. This time, a bullet was recovered intact from the scene, and when ballistics examiners matched it to the round that had killed Donna Lauria, there was no more room for doubt — one gun, one shooter, was behind all of it.

Sam The following month, on April 17th, Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau were shot dead while sitting in a car in the Bronx. For the first time, the gunman left something behind besides bullets — a handwritten note, addressed directly to Captain Joseph Borrelli, the officer leading the police task force assembled to catch him, a unit known internally as Operation Omega. The letter was full of spelling errors, but it gave the city something it hadn't had before: a name for the man they were hunting. It insisted he was not a woman-hater, and then it said: "I am a monster. I am the 'Son of Sam.' I am a little brat."

Sam Weeks later, the case took an unexpected turn through the press rather than the investigation. On May 30th, Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin received a handwritten letter from someone claiming to be the killer. It named Donna Lauria directly and warned Breslin not to let people forget her.

Sam The News sat on that letter for days, building anticipation with teaser promotion, before finally publishing it on June 5th — timed deliberately for the paper's most profitable Sunday edition. It opened with the killer describing himself as writing from "the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood," offered himself alternate titles like "The Duke of Death" and "The Wicked King Wicker," and closed with a taunt — "I'll be back. I'll be back" — signed "Yours in murder, Mr. Monster." It helped ignite a circulation war between the Daily News and the New York Post that would run for the rest of the case.

Sam Three weeks later, on June 26th, seventeen-year-old Judy Placido and twenty-year-old Sal Lupo were shot as they left a Queens disco. Both survived, though the attack added two more names to a list of victims that was growing steadily longer with each passing month, and still nobody had a face to put to any of it.

Sam The final attack in the series came on the night of July 31st, in Brooklyn. Stacy Moskowitz, twenty, and Robert Violante, twenty, had parked at a lover's lane for what was their first date together when they were shot in Violante's car. Moskowitz died from her wounds. Violante survived, but the shooting left him partially blind for the rest of his life.

Sam Taken together, the string of attacks that had begun in the Bronx the previous summer had by now killed six people and wounded seven more, all shot within the same twelve-month stretch across three boroughs. In the days after the Moskowitz-Violante shooting, police released a composite sketch of the suspect built from witness descriptions at that final scene — the first real image anyone had to work from.

Sam With that sketch now circulating, the break in the case still came from something far more ordinary than a tip about the killer's face. A woman named Cacilia Davis had been out walking her dog near the scene of the Moskowitz-Violante shooting on the night it happened, and she'd noticed a man she thought might be armed, walking past a car that had just been given a parking ticket. Minutes later she heard gunshots. She didn't go to police right away — it was several days before she reported what she'd seen.

Sam That detail about the parking ticket turned out to matter more than anything else recovered from the scene. Detectives went back through the tickets issued in that neighborhood that night and found only a handful. One of them had been written against a 1970 Ford Galaxie registered to a man named David Berkowitz, living in Yonkers.

Sam Officers staked out the car and waited. On August 10, 1977 — eleven days after the Moskowitz-Violante shooting — they arrested him there. As he was taken into custody, Berkowitz reportedly said, "Well, you got me."

Sam At his arraignment, Judge Richard A. Brown asked him directly, "You, sir, are David Berkowitz?" Berkowitz answered, "Yes, sir." Those were the only words he spoke at that hearing. He was sent to Kings County Hospital for psychiatric evaluation, without entering a plea to anything yet.

Sam Once in custody, he stopped holding anything back. He confessed to all the shootings, and gave investigators details about the crime scenes that had never been released publicly, closing off any doubt that he was the man responsible.

Sam He also explained where the name in his letters had come from. The "Sam," he told police, was a Yonkers neighbor named Sam Carr, who Berkowitz claimed was a six-thousand-year-old demon. He said Carr's black Labrador — whose real name was Harvey — had been possessed, and that the dog transmitted murderous commands to him.

Sam Before his arrest, in what police later realized was no coincidence at all, Berkowitz had tried to kill that dog, shooting it in the leg, and had sent Sam Carr threatening letters blaming the animal for ruining his life. When officers first phoned Berkowitz's name in to the local precinct, it was Carr's own daughter, Wheat Carr, who picked up — and recognized the name instantly as the man who had shot her father's dog.

Sam The case had already drawn an extraordinary level of public attention, and that raised an immediate worry: that Berkowitz might profit from selling his story. Soon after his arrest, New York amended its crime-victim compensation law to stop criminals from selling book or film rights to their crimes. It was the country's first statute of its kind, and it became known as the Son of Sam law.

Sam State senator Emanuel Gold, who sponsored it, said it was "abhorrent to one's sense of justice and decency that an individual such as Berkowitz can expect to receive large sums of money for his story... while six people are dead." New York invoked the law eleven times between 1977 and 1990 — including against John Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman — before the Supreme Court struck it down in 1991 as an unconstitutional restriction on speech, in a case called Simon & Schuster v. Members of the New York State Crime Victims Board. Other states went on to pass their own versions anyway, trying to write around that ruling.

Sam Through 1978, Berkowitz's lawyers, Ira Jultak and Leon Stern, tried to steer him toward pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. Court-appointed psychiatrists split sharply on whether that would even hold up — two of them concluded he genuinely believed demons were communicating with him and judged him mentally incompetent to stand trial, while a third disagreed entirely. The court ultimately sided with the finding that he was fit to stand trial.

Sam Berkowitz himself later undercut the whole defense. He said the demon-dog story had been invented from the start, built specifically to support an eventual insanity plea, and once he dropped that strategy he admitted the tale of demons and talking dogs and satanic henchmen had been a hoax all along.

Sam On May 8, 1978, with the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn cases all folded into a single proceeding, Berkowitz pleaded guilty before three judges — Joseph Corso, William Kapelman, and Nicholas Tsoucalas — to second-degree murder, attempted murder, and assault. At one point the hearing was interrupted by an outburst in which he shouted, "I'd kill them all again."

Sam Sentencing came on June 12, 1978. He received six consecutive terms of twenty-five years to life for the murders, plus additional fifteen- and twenty-five-year terms stacked on for the assaults and attempted murders — a total sentence of 365 years. He was first held under New York's Department of Mental Hygiene before being moved, within months, to Attica Correctional Facility.

Sam Attica did not stay quiet for him. In 1979, another inmate attacked Berkowitz with a knife, slashing his neck so badly it took fifty-six stitches to close, and he came close to dying from it. He later suggested, without ever offering proof, that the attack had been arranged by a satanic group trying to silence him.

Sam Roughly a decade into his sentence, something changed in him. Berkowitz said a fellow inmate approached him in the prison yard and told him that Jesus Christ loved him very much, and that the encounter sent him back to his cell to read a single verse, Psalm 34:6, alone.

Sam He described that reading as a genuine religious conversion. Afterward he began attending Bible studies and chapel services inside Attica, and adopted a new description for himself — not "Son of Sam" but "Son of Hope."

Sam He has kept writing from prison ever since, letters and journal entries posted to a website called Arise and Shine, run by a supporter on the outside. He has also given testimony in person to Christian audiences and to media outlets, describing his own path from the killings to the faith he now claims.

Sam Not everyone accepted that Berkowitz had acted entirely alone, and in the late 1980s that doubt found its fullest expression in print. A reporter named Maury Terry, who had covered the case from early on, became convinced there had been other people involved in the killings.

Sam In his 1987 book, The Ultimate Evil, Terry argued that Berkowitz belonged to a satanic group he called "The Children," which he linked to the sons of Sam Carr — the same neighbor whose dog supposedly gave Berkowitz his orders. Terry went further still, tying that group to the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a group he also connected, without verified proof, to the Manson killings.

Sam A retired NYPD detective named Jim Rothstein, who looked into the cult angle himself, has said he believes Berkowitz didn't commit all the killings alone, and he's pointed to claims of satanic animal sacrifices said to have taken place near Untermyer Park in Yonkers.

Sam Other researchers have pushed back hard on all of it. One critic has argued that Terry's book helped fuel a wider Satanic Panic with little solid evidence behind it, and described Terry himself, in later accounts, as a tragic figure consumed by his own obsession.

Sam Berkowitz himself has, at different points, claimed some cult involvement, but he has never named any surviving accomplice, saying he fears for his relatives' safety if he did. Law enforcement has never substantiated that claim, and the case remains officially closed as the work of Berkowitz acting alone.

Sam Parole entered the picture in 2002, when Berkowitz first became eligible under the terms of his sentence. He said publicly, even before that date arrived, that he would not seek release.

Sam New York's parole board reviewed his case anyway, roughly every two years, as the law required, and denied him every single time it came up. His most recent appearance before the board, the twelfth in that sequence, took place on May 14, 2024, and ended the same way the previous eleven had — in another denial. He was seventy years old.

Sam Around that same period, in an interview with CBS News, Berkowitz said: "I've apologized many times and I just always sort of let them know that I'm very sorry for what happened... I never forget where I came from, and what my situation was like some four decades ago. People that were hurt, people that are still in pain, suffering the loss because of my criminal actions."

Sam By that twelfth denial, he had spent decades at Shawangunk Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison roughly sixty miles north of New York City, still serving out the 365-year sentence handed down back in 1978.

Sam That twelfth denial did not end the public's interest in Berkowitz — if anything, the opposite happened. In 2025, Netflix released a documentary called Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes, built around previously unreleased audio from a 1980 interview Berkowitz had given to crime reporter Jack Jones.

Sam It landed as part of a broader wave of renewed attention to the case, following an earlier Netflix docuseries, The Sons of Sam: A Descent Into Darkness, which had already revisited Maury Terry's theory that Berkowitz hadn't acted alone.

Sam Then came a decision that broke his own pattern. Berkowitz was scheduled for another parole review in May 2026, and this time he chose not to appear at all, telling the New York Post by email that he had other things to do that felt more meaningful to him.

Sam He wrote that his work was in prison, where he said God had His people confined, and that those men needed guidance, help and encouragement. "I'm an elder," he wrote, "and this is my calling." He was seventy-two at the time.

Sam He went further, describing himself as already free through his faith. "My home is in heaven, not in the Bronx," he wrote, adding that the only place he was looking forward to going was heaven, to be with the Lord.

Sam As of October 2026, he remains incarcerated at Shawangunk, still serving the sentence handed down nearly five decades ago, having now skipped the hearing that would have marked his thirteenth chance at parole.

Sam He signs his correspondence these days as "Brother David," describes himself as a born-again Christian acting as an informal chaplain to other inmates, and says he no longer trusts the media.

Sam He also continues to maintain that he was part of a larger group behind some of the killings — the claim Maury Terry first popularized decades ago, still unverified by investigators, and still met with the same skepticism that has followed it since the 1980s.

Sam The law his arrest inspired didn't survive the Supreme Court's 1991 ruling, but it still gets cited whenever the question comes up of whether people convicted of crimes should be able to profit from telling their own story.

Sam Six people were killed and seven wounded in the span of about a year, and nearly fifty years later the case is still being reopened by documentary crews, still argued over by researchers chasing the cult theory, and still watched by a parole board that has turned him down every time it's been asked.

Sam That's where it stands — a man in his seventies, behind the same walls, telling a story about himself that investigators have never been able to confirm, in a case the state of New York still calls closed.

Sam Before I go, I'll say plainly that this show is AI-generated — the research, the script and the voice you're hearing are all synthetic, built from reporting rather than firsthand interviews.

Sam Everything today came from reporting by CBS News, Biography, Encyclopedia.com, Psychology Today, and the New York Post, along with background drawn from Wikipedia — none of whose authors are affiliated with this show in any way.

Sam The next episode of Notorious arrives next week, with another case told the same way, from the beginning. Thanks for listening.