The Behavioral Science Unit
When he returned to Quantico from California, Ressler told his immediate superior, Larry Monroe, what he had been doing. Monroe was aghast. “You saw who?” But he allowed Ressler to visit Squeaky Fromme and Sandra Good on condition that he did not officially know about it, and that Ressler would later make it official by putting something on paper when he got back.
But their scheme was revealed prematurely. A colleague to whom Ressler had spoken about his interviews talked to someone about them in the lunchroom, within earshot of the FBI Academy chief, Ken Joseph, a member of the Hoover old guard. Monroe and Ressler were ordered to present themselves in Joseph’s office.
Asked why he had not been told about the initiative, Ressler was able to point out that Joseph has issued a memo a few months ago encouraging instructors to do research. That, Ressler said, is what he was planning.
Joseph pointed out that interviewing people like Sirhan and Manson could cause problems for the Bureau. Ressler replied that he had put his intentions in a memo before he left for California, and Joseph said he hadn’t seen it (which was inevitable, since no memo had been written). Ressler was told to go and dig out the memo. He did this promptly, by writing one up, backdating it, and crumpling and Xeroxing it to make it look bedraggled. It said that he planned to interview some serial killers to see if they would be willing to participate in the research. He called it the Criminal Personality Research Project.
Ressler was told to expand it and explain its long-term objectives. He did this, adding that he would not need to spend money on the project, since it could be done in the course of his road schools.
The memo was then sent out to John McDermott, the Bureau’s second-in-command in Washington. McDermott lost no time in turning it down flat. The Bureau’s job, he said, was to catch criminals, not to behave like social workers.
There was nothing for it but to forget the idea until McDermott retired. Fortunately, that was later the same year. The forward-looking William Webster replaced him. Ken Joseph also retired, and his replacement, James McKenzie, was enthusiastic about the idea. At a working lunch presided over by Webster, Ressler presented his idea, adding that the previous director had turned it down. Whether or not this influenced Webster, the project was approved. As a result, the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) was set up with a grant of $128,000 from the National Institute of Justice, with Howard Teten as an adviser.
The Behavioral Science Unit provides a preliminary idea of the sort of person the police should be looking for. It was obviously of central importance that this idea should be accurate, otherwise it would send the police looking in the wrong direction. Interviewing murderers gives the profilers the necessary background to begin to formulate a picture of the man they are looking for. The wider the range of their knowledge of such criminals, the more profilers can trust intuition.
Sometimes the details of a case seem to offer no possible clue to the culprit. At the time Ressler was brooding on the idea of psychological profiling, there occurred in Yorkshire, England, a series of violent attacks on women that recalled the Jack the Ripper murders that took place in London’s East End in 1888. The Yorkshire murders, mostly of prostitutes, began in the summer of 1985, when the man who became known as the Yorkshire Ripper attacked two women with a hammer, and then slashed them with a knife. Both victims recovered. The third victim, Wilma McCann, was knocked unconscious with a hammer, dragged into a sports field, and had injuries inflicted on her stomach, chest, and genital area with a knife. The fourth victim was battered beyond recognition with a hammer, and then stabbed fifty times in the chest. Two more prostitute murders followed, but the eighth victim, sixteen-year-old Jayne MacDonald, was a pretty schoolgirl, made it look as if the notion that the killer was driven by a hatred of prostitutes was inaccurate after all.
When Robert Ressler came to England in 1978, he was accompanied by a young and flamboyant agent named John Douglas, who had come to Quantico as a visiting counselor and then joined the Behavioral Science Unit on Ressler’s recommendation. Douglas would accompany Ressler during his second interview with Ed Kemper.
Ressler and Douglas were at the Bramshill Police Academy, where Ressler had coined the phrase “serial killer,” and they were drinking at a nearby bar when one of the leading investigators in the three-year-old Ripper case, John Domaille, walked over to speak to them, with several other detectives. They sketched out for the benefit of the FBI agents the background of the case, and the scenes of the crimes. The man in charge of the case, Chief Inspector George Oldfield, had received a cassette containing a message that purported to be from the killer. Ressler and Douglas had heard the tape in the United States, and Douglas now commented: “Based on the crime scenes you’ve described and the audiotape, that’s not the Ripper. You’re wasting your time with that.”
Douglas then sketched out his own notion of the killer. He would be an almost invisible loner in his late twenties or early thirties, with a pathological hatred of women, a school dropout, and possibly a truck driver, since he seemed to get around quite a bit. The murders were his attempt to punish prostitutes in general.
In fact, the Ripper was caught by accident in January 1981, after thirteen murders and four serious attacks. Two policemen doing a routine check on a parked Rover interrupted prostitute Olivia Reivers, and her client, who gave his name as Peter Williams. Recognizing Reivers as a convicted prostitute with a suspended sentence, the policemen checked the number plate of the car and found it to be false—in fact it came from a scrapyard for used cars. When they ordered Reivers into their car, the man asked if he might relieve himself, and went behind an oil storage tank before being taken to the police station. There he gave his correct name, Peter Sutcliffe, aged thirty-five, but continued to insist that he had done nothing wrong. But when one of the policemen, acting on a sudden hunch, returned to the storage tank, he found a hammer and a knife that Sutcliffe had dropped among the leaves. After forty-eight hours in custody, Sutcliffe confessed to being the Ripper. The massive hunt for him had taken six years.
Psychologically speaking, Peter Sutcliffe proved to be as strange and complex as Ed Kemper. This working-class young man was the last person in the world anyone would have expected to become the sadistic disemboweler of women. As a child he had been so gentle and timid that he seemed destined for a life of self-effacement. His father, who was mad about cricket and football and was regarded as something of a ladies’ man, treated him with a kind of irritable contempt, which reflected his feeling that his eldest son would always remain a sissy.
John Sutcliffe’s large family was terrified of him. He was the kind of man who would walk into the room when everyone was watching television, and change the channel on to a sports program. Then he would sit in front of it, so close that no one could see past him. One of his daughters admitted that she daydreamed of murdering him.
Peter, born in June 1946, was undersized and shy, a scrawny, miserable little boy who spent hours staring blankly into space. He learned to walk quite literally by clinging to his mother’s skirts. And he continued to cling to them for years after.
At school he was so withdrawn and passive that after his arrest, most of his teachers could not even recall his face. His headmaster remembered him because Peter had once played truant for two weeks because he was being bullied. When his father found out, he made such a scene at the school that from then on, the headmaster took great care that Peter would never be bullied again.
The Sutcliffe home in Bingley, Yorkshire, was no background for an introspective child. With a dominant, self-assertive tyrant for a father, Peter inevitably took his mother’s side. But his younger brothers were more like their father. One of them once floored the local boxing champion by punching him in the testicles. The house was always jammed with people, and John Sutcliffe enjoyed “feeling up” any girl who strayed too close. The atmosphere was heavy with sex, and even Peter’s mother, a quiet doormat of a woman, had an affair with a local police sergeant. When her husband found out, he retaliated by moving in with a deaf woman who lived a few doors down the street.
Peter was twenty-three when the unthinkable happened, and he discovered that his mother, the woman he regarded as his ideal, his vision of what a woman ought to be, loving, hard-working, self-sacrificing, always warm and sympathetic, had been having an extramarital affair. His father later confessed to a female reporter that he thought this had “turned Peter’s mind.”
John Sutcliffe had learned about the affair when his wife mistook his voice on the phone for that of her lover. (They had never before spoken on the phone, and he was not wearing his teeth.) He arranged to meet her in a hotel room, arrived three hours early, and persuaded a member of staff to let him into the room. He had taken his children with him to witness her shame.
When Kathleen Sutcliffe came into the room, carrying a bag with her nightclothes, she was confronted by her family, including Peter and his fiancée, Sonia. Her husband began to shout at her, calling her a prostitute. He then made her open her night bag, take out the expensive negligee she had packed for her tryst, and hold it up. John later told the reporter: “I remember Peter were just standing there—he were shook rigid. He had a look on his face like an animal, it were. I think it may have turned his mind.”
There was another factor: Kathleen’s lover was a policeman. This made it even worse. Coppers were not held in high esteem in their house. John had been arrested for breaking and entering. The second brother was always in and out of jail, and some of Peter’s best mates were burglars. The infidelity of Peter’s mother with one of the “enemy” must have convinced him that even the nicest women were whores at heart.
By this time, Peter himself was no longer the pathologically shy boy. Ashamed of being so weak, he had flung himself into bodybuilding until by his late teens he had the physique of a wrestler. As soon as he could afford it, he had bought his first car, and used to drive at eighty miles an hour through the narrow Bingley streets. For as much as he disliked his father, he also admired him, and wanted to be more like him.
Where women were concerned he could never match his father or his brothers. He liked to drive around the red-light district of Bradford and stare at the women, but he never dared to accost one, even though he boasted to his mates about his nonexistent sexual experience. With his obsessive, semi-incestuous feelings about his mother, Peter Sutcliffe was undoubtedly a psychological mess.
Then he finally found himself a girlfriend. She was a Czech émigrée named Sonia Szurma, who was even shyer than he was, and so plain that even his father did not try to put his hand up her skirt.
And it was the timid Sonia, oddly enough, who started the train of events that turned him into a killer. For when she began having an affair with an Italian who owned a sports car, Sutcliffe was thrown into a frenzy of jealousy. It was like his mother all over again; this young woman who seemed so shy and withdrawn was just like the rest of them. Peter finally took the plunge and went to a prostitute. But even this turned out to be a fiasco. He was unable to raise an erection, and the girl swindled him out of five pounds. Worse still, when he saw her later in a pub, and asked for his change, she jeered at him and told the whole story at the top of her voice, so he became a laughingstock. For the introspective boy who had been fighting all his life to feel like a man, the humiliation bit deep, and turned poisonous.
One day, eating fish and chips in a friend’s minivan, he thought he saw the prostitute, and followed her. He was carrying in his pocket a brick inside a sock that was precisely for this kind of opportunity. He hit her on the back of the head and then ran back to the van. But she succeeded in taking its number, and police questioned him. He managed to convince them that it had been an ordinary quarrel, and they let him go.
But that act of hitting a prostitute had taken possession of his imagination. He realized that it had given gave him some deep and strange satisfaction that was intensely sexual. He became a kind of dual personality. While the Peter known to his friends and Sonia remained genial and courteous, another Peter enjoyed stopping his car by prostitutes and asking what they charged. When they told him, he would shout, “Is that all you’re worth?” and drive off.
In 1975, a prostitute turned him down and released once more the wellspring of rage; he followed her and hit her with a hammer, then raised her clothes and took out a knife. Someone called out, and he ran away. But the feverish excitement that swept through him again made him realize that what he really wanted was to assert his masculinity by killing a prostitute. A month later he again crept up behind a woman and hit her with a hammer; again he was disturbed and was forced to flee. But now it was only a matter of time before he committed murder.
It happened two months later, when he picked up a drunken hooker who was thumbing a lift. He took her to a playing field, where he once again proved to be impotent. He then made up for it by hitting her with a hammer and stabbing her repeatedly in the breasts and stomach.
What he had failed to realize, as he daydreamed of revenge on “whores,” is that he was handing himself over to a demon who would give him no peace. He would have to carry on murdering and disemboweling woman after woman, even when he knew perfectly well that they were not prostitutes, because only this could make him feel fully alive. Roy Hazelwood was right: “Sex crime isn’t about sex, it’s about power.” A murderer such as Sutcliffe is the living illustration of what he meant.
The hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper was the biggest police operation ever mounted in the United Kingdom. It cost $10 million, and involved 200,000 interviews—including four with Sutcliffe and 30,000 searches of homes. But it taught the British police the same lesson that the FBI had learned through Manson, Kemper, and the rest: there had to be some more logical way of trapping serial killers. The Yorkshire police reached the conclusion Pierce Brooks had reached in 1948: the answer lay in computerization. In the United Kingdom, this happened in the early 1980s, and would later help to trap serial killers such as Duffy and Mulcahy, the “Railway Rapists.”
In the United States, it also began to happen in the early 1980s, when Pierce Brooks persuaded the Department of Justice to host a conference at Sam Houston State University, and the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was approved. It was decided to run it from Quantico, and in May 1985 Brooks was appointed its first director, and joined the team there.
By that time, Ressler had already inaugurated a new project that he called the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), which sprang from that plan to interview killers—Ressler’s original “Criminal Personality Research Project” of 1978. The idea, as Ressler put it, was to “bring together the fragmented efforts from around the country so they could be consolidated into one national resource center available to the entire law enforcement community.”
But at the time Ressler and Douglas were advising the British police about the Yorkshire Ripper, all this lay some years in the future. And on the other side of the Atlantic, in New York, another series of random and apparently motiveless killings was underlining the need for some method of psychological profiling.
It had started in the stiflingly hot early hours of July 29, 1976, as two young women sat talking in the front seats of an Oldsmobile on Buhre Avenue in the Bronx; they were eighteen-year-old Donna Lauria, a medical technician, and nineteen-year-old Jody Valenti, a student nurse. Donna’s parents, on their way back from a night out, passed them at about 1 a.m., and said good night. A few moments after they reached their apartment, they heard the sound of shots and screams. A man had walked up to the car, pulled a gun out of a brown paper bag, and fired five shots. Donna was killed immediately; Jody was wounded in the thigh.
Total lack of motive for the shooting convinced police that they were dealing with a man who killed for pleasure, without knowing his victims.
On October 23, 1976, three months after the Bronx murder, twenty-year-old Carl Denaro shared a few beers with friends at a Queens bar. At 2:30 a.m., he left with Rosemary Keenan and parked his car near her house. Suddenly a man appeared and fired five shots into the car; one of them struck Carl in the head. Rosemary raced the car back to the bar and his friends, who rushed him to the hospital. Surgeons replaced a part of his skull with a metal plate.
Just a month later, on November 26, two young women were talking on the stoop in front of a house in the Floral Park section of Queens; it was half an hour past midnight when a man walked toward them, started to ask if they could direct him, then, before he finished the sentence, pulled out a gun and began shooting. Donna DeMasi, sixteen, and Joanne Lomino, eighteen, were both wounded. A bullet lodged in Joanne’s spine, paralyzing her.
On January 30, 1977, a young couple were kissing goodnight in a car in the Ridgewood section of Queens; there was a deafening explosion, the windscreen shattered, and Christine Freund, twenty-six, slumped into the arms of her boyfriend, John Diel. She died a few hours later in hospital.
On March 8, 1977, Virginia Voskerichian, an Armenian student, was on her way home, and only a few hundred yards from her mother’s house in Forest Hills, Queens, when a gunman walked up to her, and shot her in the face at a few yards’ range; the bullet went into her mouth, shattering her front teeth. She died immediately. Christine Freund had been shot only three hundred yards away.
By now police recognized that the bullets that had killed three and wounded four had all come from the same gun, an uncommon .44 Charter Arms Bulldog revolver. And this indicated a homicidal psychopath who would probably go on until he was caught. The problem was that the police had no clues to his identity, no idea of where to begin searching. Unless he was caught during an attempted murder, the chances of arresting him seemed minimal. New York City mayor Abraham Beame called a press conference in which he announced: “We have a savage killer on the loose.” He was able to say that the man was white, about five feet ten inches tall, well groomed, with hair combed straight back.” The press dubbed the unknown shooter “the .44-Caliber Killer.”
Despite the media frenzy and the intensive police manhunt, on the morning of April 17, 1977, there were two more deaths. Alexander Esau and Valentina Suriani were sitting in a parked car in the Bronx when the killer shot both of them. Valentina died instantly; Esau died later in the hospital, three bullets in his head. Only a few blocks away was the spot where Donna Lauria and Jody Valenti had been shot.
In the street near the victims, a policeman found an envelope. It contained a letter addressed to Captain Joseph Borrelli, and it was from the killer. The hand-written missive was littered with misspellings: “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 . . .” It claimed that his father, Sam, was a brute who beat his family when he got drunk, and who ordered him to go out and kill. “I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game—tasty meat. The wemen of Queens are prettyist of all . . .” It was reminiscent of the letters that Jack the Ripper and so many other “thrill killers” have written to the police, revealing an urge to “be somebody,” to make an impact on society. A further rambling, incoherent note, signed “Son of Sam,” was sent to New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin.
The next attack, on June 26, 1977, was like so many of the others: a young couple sitting in their car in the early hours of Sunday morning, saying good night after a date. They were Salvatore Lupo and Judy Placido, and the car was in front of a house on 211th Street, Bayside, Queens. Four shots shattered the windshield. The assailant ran away. Fortunately, his aim had been bad; both these victims were only wounded, and recovered.
It was now a year since the Son of Sam had killed Donna Lauria; on the anniversary of her death, Queens and the Bronx were swarming with police. But the Son of Sam had decided that these areas were dangerous, and that his next shootings would be as far away as possible. On July 31, Robert Violante and Stacy Moskowitz were sitting in a parking lot close to the Brooklyn shore; it was 1:30 a.m. on Sunday morning. The windshield exploded as four shots were fired. Both were hit in the head. Stacy Moskowitz died hours later in hospital; Robert Violante recovered, but was blinded.
But this shooting brought the break in the case. A woman out walking her dog had noticed two policemen putting a ticket on a car parked near a fire hydrant on Bay Seventeenth Street, a block from the crime scene. Minutes later, a man ran up to the car, leapt in, and drove off. Only four parking tickets had been issued in the Coney Island area that Sunday morning, and only one of those was for parking near a hydrant. The carbon copy of the ticket contained the car’s registration number. And the Division of Motor Vehicles was able to identify its owner as David Berkowitz, aged twenty-four, of Pine Street, Yonkers.
On the Wednesday after the last killing, detectives found the Ford Galaxie parked in front of an apartment building on Pine Street. They peered in through its window, and saw the butt of a gun, and a note written in the same block capitals as the other Son of Sam letters. A police team staked out the car. When David Berkowitz approached it at 10:15 that evening, Deputy Inspector Tim Dowd, who had led the hunt, said, “Hello, David.” Berkowitz looked at him in surprise, and then said, “Inspector Dowd! You finally got me!”
After the terror he had aroused, the Son of Sam was something of an anticlimax, a pudgy little man with a beaming smile, and a tendency to look like a slightly moronic child who has been caught stealing sweets.
He proved to be a paranoid schizophrenic who lived alone in a room lit by a naked light bulb, sleeping on a bare mattress. The floor was covered with empty milk cartons and bottles. On the walls he had scrawled messages such as “In this hole lives the wicked king.” “Kill for my Master.” “I turn children into killers.”
His father, who had run a hardware store in the Bronx, had retired to Florida after being robbed. Nat Berkowitz was not the Son of Sam’s real father. David Berkowitz, born June 1, 1953, was illegitimate, and his mother had offered him up for adoption. He had felt rejected from the beginning, and longed to find his biological mother.
He reacted to his poor self-image by boasting and lying—particularly about his sexual prowess. In reality, he was afraid of women. He told the police that demons began telling him to kill in 1974. Living alone in apartments that he allowed to degenerate into pigsties, kept awake at night by the sound of trucks or barking dogs, he slipped into paranoia, telling his father in a letter that people hated him and spat at him as he walked down the street. “The girls call me ugly, and they bother me the most.” On Christmas Eve 1975, he began his attempt at revenge on women by taking a knife and attacking two of them. The first one screamed and he ran away. The second, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, was badly cut and had one lung punctured, but recovered. The blood disturbed him, which is why he traveled to Texas to buy a gun. Seven months later, he used it in his first murder.
David Berkowitz, aka the “Son of Sam,” during an interview at Attica prison in New York in 1979. Berkowitz killed six people and wounded seven others in New York City in 1976 and 1977. He claimed to have been driven by an “unknown urge to kill.” (Associated Press)
The name Sam seems to have been taken from a neighbor called Sam Carr, whose black Labrador sometimes kept Berkowitz awake. He wrote Carr anonymous letters, and on April 27, 1977, shot the dog—which recovered. He also wrote anonymous letters to people he believed to be persecuting him. He had been reported to the police on a number of occasions as a “nut,” but no one suspected that he might be the Son of Sam.
Berkowitz was judged legally sane, and was arraigned on August 23, 1977. He pleaded guilty, saving New York the cost of a trial. He was sentenced to 365 years in prison.
The aftermath is worth describing. His Yonkers apartment building became a place of pilgrimage for sensation-seekers. They stole door-knobs, cut out pieces of carpet, even chipped pieces of paint from Berkowitz’s door. In the middle of the night, people shouted, “David, come out,” from the street. Berkowitz’s apartment remained empty, and a quarter of the building’s tenants moved out, even though the landlord changed its number from 25 to 42 Pine Street to try to mislead the souvenir hunters.
Even after Berkowitz was arrested, most Americans found the crimes incomprehensible. One psychiatrist who interviewed him was convinced that his story of “voices” was an attempt to establish a defense of insanity. On the other hand, journalist Maury Terry became convinced that Berkowitz had not acted alone, but that he was a member of a satanic cult who committed some of the murders attributed to Berkowitz, and filmed the shootings to sell as “snuff movies.”
Two years after Berkowitz’s arrest, Ressler and Douglas went to interview him—three times. As usual, they prepared by learning everything about Berkowitz that was on record. One important discovery was that Berkowitz was an arsonist, and that he had set at least 1,488 fires in New York, which are documented in his diary. He had also triggered hundreds of false alarms. For a long time now, arson has been recognized as basically a sex crime—many arsonists masturbate as they watch the flames. This helped confirm Ressler’s suspicions that the Son of Sam shootings were sexual in origin.
Ressler found Berkowitz to be shy, reserved, polite, and low key, and that he spoke only when spoken to. When Ressler tried to touch on the possible sexual aspect of the murders, Berkowitz flatly denied that they had any, claiming that he had had a normal sex life, with girlfriends, and that the murders were just shootings. This, Ressler discovered, was an attempt to mislead. Berkowitz had never had girlfriends, and this was the root of his trouble. In that respect he resembled Harvey Glatman, feeling that he lacked the physical attractiveness to appeal to women.
Where Glatman attempted to satisfy his desires through kidnapping and rape, Berkowitz was far too shy and withdrawn to attempt anything so ambitious. He lacked the aggression to be a true predator. So every evening he went out with a .44, looking for lone women or girls, or couples necking in cars. As he stalked them and then shot them, he admitted, he became sexually excited, and would masturbate afterwards. The men were shot simply because they happened to with the young women, the true targets.
On the nights when he couldn’t find a victim, he told them, he would drive to the scenes of earlier murders and replay them in his imagination. If there were still bloodstains visible on the pavement, he would sit in his car and masturbate.
Ressler was pleased that he had made another discovery: that it was true that murderers returned to the scene of their crimes, so offering the manhunters a chance to catch them.
It gave support to another of Ressler’s theories: that aberrant behavior is an extension of normal behavior. Teenaged boys ride their bicycles past the homes of teenaged girls, or hang around them and “engage in impetuous spontaneous behavior.” Mark Twain had observed the same thing in the scene where Tom Sawyer sets out to attract the attention of Becky Thatcher in the school playground—and we have already noted that Harvey Glatman did the same thing at school, and how the playful snatching of purses developed into armed robbery and then rape.
Berkowitz would have liked to attend the funerals of his victims, but was afraid of being spotted. But he stayed away from work on the day of the funeral, and hung around diners near police stations hoping to hear cops discussing his crimes. (He never succeeded.)
In all, it seems clear that Berkowitz belonged to a class of killers who are basically “wannabes.” While most people attempt to achieve a sense of value or worth by doing something that their fellows regard as admirable or useful, people whose self-esteem is irretrievably low daydream of shocking or outraging them, so that they can at least regard themselves as mavericks or rebel outsiders. Berkowitz told Ressler how, as a teenager, he wanted to get to Vietnam, daydreaming of receiving medals and “being recognized as an important individual, and thereby fashioning an identity for himself.” It was not to be. His army career—in Korea—was undistinguished and a visit to a prostitute resulted in syphilis.
Back in New York, he began trying to trace his natural mother, Betty Falco, and finally succeeded through an old telephone directory. There was an emotional reunion at her home in Coney Island in May 1975. He also met his half-sister, Roslyn, thirty-seven, who welcomed him to her home. But although he was glad to have found his family, it was too late. He was too frustrated and unfulfilled to find satisfaction in his new role as a son and brother. He began suffering from frequent headaches. And on Christmas Eve 1975, he took a hickory-handled hunting knife and went out in search of a woman to stab. On Co-Op City Boulevard he double-parked and followed a woman who came out of a supermarket. She was wearing a long, heavy coat, and he raised the knife and brought it down on her back. The knife failed to penetrate the thick material, but the woman turned, saw a man with his arm raised to strike again, and screamed. Berkowitz turned and ran away.
He wandered around until he saw another female approaching; this was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl named Michelle Forman. He followed her across a pedestrian bridge, and stabbed her in the head, and then the upper body. As she turned he saw she was pretty; she lashed out at him, and then fell down. When she tried to grab his leg, he ran off.
As he began to describe the attacks and murders, Berkowitz started to repeat the story he had told to psychiatrists: that he killed because Sam Carr’s dog, possessed by a three-thousand-year-old demon, had barked orders at him. Douglas called his bluff. “Hey David, knock off the bullshit. The dog has nothing to do with it.” When Berkowitz persisted, they told him the interview was over. “We want the factual basis for these crimes.” As they started to leave, Berkowitz laughed and admitted that the demon dog story was false, designed to back his defense of insanity.
The real motive, it seemed, was the desire to become known, to become notorious. There was a sense of potency in holding a whole city to ransom, in seeing the crowds who bought the newspapers that described the latest shooting. That is why he began communicating with the police and with journalist Jimmy Breslin. Ressler has some harsh words to say about the journalists who kept feeding the media frenzy, even when there were no new developments to write about. They, he believed, simply encouraged Berkowitz to continue, like a child who enjoys attention.
Yet what emerged from these interviews is that Berkowitz was not simply a nonentity looking for action to give him a sense of identity. There had been a touch of sadism in his makeup since childhood, when he had poured ammonia into his adoptive mother’s fish tank to kill the fish, and killed her pet bird with rat poison, getting pleasure from watching it die slowly. He enjoyed torturing mice and moths. In adolescence, his masturbation fantasies were mixed with violence. And when he graduated to arson, he enjoyed watching bodies being carried out of burning buildings.
As to the stories about the evil spirits in his head that told him to kill, these were, he admitted, an invention. His insistence that he had been enslaved by demonic voices—which would become the basis of the standard book on the case, Son of Sam by Lawrence D. Klausner (1981)—were designed to achieve the effect they did, in fact, achieve, to allow him to plead guilty to second-degree murder, with the eventual possibility of parole.
At the end of the interview, Berkowitz told them that if he had been able to settle into a relationship with a good woman who would fulfill his fantasies, he would not have committed the killings. Ressler comments that he does not believe it for a moment. Berkowitz’s problem was that he felt inadequate and compensated with violent fantasies, which made him incapable of the give and take of a relationship. Ressler concludes: “Like so many of the criminals I interviewed, he had grown up to murder.”
The psychologist Dorothy Otnow Lewis had once made the controversial remark that she felt some criminals were just “born bad.” Ressler seemed to be saying the same thing in a different way.
