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Son of Sam

‘Signature’ serial killers are the rarest of all multiple murderers. They are called this because on or near each victim they leave their unmistakable ‘calling card’, or signature, so that their pursuers know that the killing is the handiwork of the same offender. Signature serial killers are also among the best-known killers in history.

To name a few, Jack the Ripper’s mutilations of his victims were unmistakable from one unfortunate prostitute to the next. The Boston Strangler, Albert de Salvo, tied the underwear of his 13 victims in a sailor’s knot around their necks. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, stabbed his victims up to 50 times with a screwdriver and finished them off with a hammer.

Australia has only ever had two true signature serial killers. The first was William ‘the Mutilator’ Macdonald in Sydney in the early 1960s, who specialised in voraciously stabbing derelicts to death in very public places and then souveniring their private parts with the skill of a Macquarie Street surgeon. As the bodies mounted up, police had no problem in assuming it was the work of the one deranged killer.

The other was a beast who became known as the Granny Killer. John Wayne Glover’s specialty was bashing little old ladies to death with a hammer and then strangling them with their underwear in broad daylight in the Sydney Harbour foreshore suburb of Mosman. From the outset, it was obvious the style of killing and type of victim were without doubt the work of the same killer.

But of all of the few signature serial killers throughout history, there is one that has gone down in infamy as the most brazen of them all. His name was Son of Sam.

Late one night in July 1976, a man pulled a .44 calibre Charter Arms Bulldog revolver from a brown paper bag and shot and killed 18-year-old Donna Lauria, wounding her friend Jody Valenti, as they sat in Valenti’s Oldsmobile in New York’s Bronx district. To the police it was just another random killing in a city with a murder rate of 30 per week.

When a young couple cuddling in a car were shot and seriously wounded three months later at 1.30am in nearby Queens, police didn’t link the two incidents. They still didn’t connect the crimes a month later when two young women standing underneath a street light in Queens were seriously wounded by a stranger with a handgun. Police finally took notice when 26-year-old Christine Freund and her boyfriend John Diel, 30, were shot at 12.40am on 30 January 1977 as they sat in Diel’s Pontiac Firebird. Diel escaped injury but Christine died later in hospital.

And then, at about 7.30pm on 8 March 1977, 19-year-old New York Columbia University student Virginia Voskerichian was murdered by a single shot to the forehead. The shot penetrated the school books she had used as a shield against the gunman, whom she must have confronted as she walked home from school near where Christine Freund was killed.

At last police announced that there was a maniac on the loose. The papers labelled him the .44 Calibre Killer. But the killings continued. A month later, as police examined the bullet-riddled bodies of students Valentina Suriani and her boyfriend Alexander Esau, who had been executed in their car at 3.00am in the Bronx, they found the first of what would be many teasing notes from the serial killer.

He complained that he was being badly treated by the press, who called him a woman-hater. ‘I am not a woman-hater. But I am a monster. I am the Son of Sam. I am a little brat. Sam loves to drink blood. “Go out and kill” commands father Sam. I am the monster. Prowling the streets for fair game.’ Then came the words that filled police with dread: ‘I’ll be back. I’ll be back!’ Yours in murder. Mr Monster.

From then on the letters kept coming to the New York Police Department and newspapers, taunting authorities to catch him before he killed again. When New York Times columnist Jimmy Breslin began publishing Sam’s letters and then replying to them through his column in an attempt to draw him out into the open, incredibly, Son of Sam responded. ‘Hello from the gutters of NYC which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood. Hello from the sewers of NYC which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks.’

And in what Breslin described to his readers as ‘the letter from hell,’ when he asked Son of Sam, ‘Will you kill again?’ the killer responded, ‘Mr Breslin, sir, don’t think that because you haven’t heard from me for a while that I went to sleep. No rather, I am still here. Like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest.’

On the night of 29 July 1977, all of New York stayed indoors in anticipation that Son of Sam would strike again on the first anniversary of his reign of terror. But it didn’t happen. Instead, as New York was breathing a collective sigh of relief, at 2.35am the following morning he murdered 20-year-old Stacy Moskowitz and seriously injured her date, Robert Violante, also 20, as they sat in his car near a city park in Brooklyn.

But time was fast running out for Son of Sam. Police checking out parking tickets in the vicinity of the Moskowitz crime scene noted a 1970 Ford Galaxy had been booked for parking too close to a fire hydrant 30 minutes before the murder. When repeated phone calls to the owner went unanswered, on 11 August 1977, detectives called at the address and found the Galaxy parked in the street. Inside they saw a rifle and found a letter addressed to the leader of the Son of Sam task force, which the killer had obviously intended leaving at the scene of his next murder.

Son of Sam was arrested that night as he left his apartment to kill again. A brown paper bag in his hand contained a Bulldog .44. He simply smiled and said, ‘Okay. You’ve got me. What took you so long?’ Instead of the deranged, ranting maniac police had anticipated, Son of Sam turned out to be a 24-year-old mail-sorter, David Berkowitz, who had the cherubic looks of an angel and the demeanour of a kitten. Chances were that the dozens of Son of Sam letters he had posted to the authorities had passed through where he worked.

Berkowitz proudly confessed to the murders and blamed his killing spree on his inadequacies with women. He explained that he could not approach a woman as a man would do and date her or have sex with her. He found sexual gratification in killing them instead. He also explained that he couldn’t have done it of his own volition. Berkowitz said that ‘Sam’ was in fact his neighbour Sam Carr, and Carr’s labrador retriever, Harvey, was possessed by an ancient demon, and the demon issued irresistible commands that Berkowitz must kill people. Son of Sam was in fact a black dog.

David Berkowitz was found sane and guilty of six murders and seven attempted murders; he was sentenced to 365 years in jail. Although he became a born-again Christian in jail, each time his parole comes up for review it is rejected. Son of Sam will die behind bars. And not soon enough, I hear you say.