For David Berkowitz the killing began at around 1:10 A.M. on July 29, 1976.
Donna Lauria, eighteen, with dark brown hair, was stepping from an Oldsmobile car owned by her friend Jody Valenti when an assailant described as a short, stout, white man stepped from the darkness, the only light provided by a thin crescent moon. He pulled a one hundred-and-fifty-three-dollar revolver from a paper bag and killed Donna Lauria with a bullet that came with the first loud bark of the gun.
Her last known words were believed to be “Now what is this—” which sounds about right, as that is the way people still speak in some parts of the Bronx.
Lauria had been training to be an emergency medical technician. Valenti, nineteen and a nursing student, was shot in the thigh. A third bullet missed them both and was found by police lodged in the Oldsmobile’s body.
The young women had been sitting, double-parked, in the blue Cutlass on a quiet street in the pleasant Pelham Bay enclave of the Bronx. They had been talking about their Thursday night at Peachtree’s, a discotheque in the Westchester suburb of New Rochelle, which was on a hot nightlife strip a little over six and a half miles north.
This sitting in cars—for conversation, for romance, for the kinds of sex that such space permitted—would figure prominently in the reporting of what would happen in the twelve months ahead. During that time six young women and men were killed and nine were wounded. Many of the victims had been in parked cars, others were hunted as they emerged from discos and one was a student, her arms filled with books, shot in the face after she stepped up from the subway.
As the shootings continued and the evidence developed, police could see where the killer hunted: the Bronx and Queens. They could identify locations where he might strike: near discos, on darkened side streets. Another possible piece of the puzzle, as the evidence emerged, was the fact that like his first victim, Donna Lauria, most of the victims were women, and all but one of them would have long brown hair. The survivor and witness descriptions of the assailant varied in nearly every way but for this one fact: the killer was a white man. A white man who had emerged from the dark, said not a word, and opened fire.
Another important part of the witness testimony was the stubby gun that survivors described. Ballistic evidence and a lack of shell casings pointed to a revolver. A powerful one. The deformed slugs seemed to be .44 or .45 caliber. Thick and ugly things. Soon after the student was killed, ballistics tests would show that the same gun had been used in prior incidents. But as the months went on, detectives seemed no closer to catching their killer.
Investigations are very often built on the simplest things. The ballistic evidence is, of course, very useful and is part of this. The witness description of the suspect also can be helpful, but is often woefully inaccurate. But the other facts gathered through the shoe leather of dozens of police officers on the street—sometimes scribbled on matchbook covers, in notebooks pushed into a detective’s suitcoat pocket, or on some scrap of paper under a patrolman’s hat—can be the most helpful of all when they are later pieced together in some room smelling of sweat and coffee and lunch.
It would soon become clear from the canvassers that none of the victims knew each other. None of them were robbed. Finally, the victims came from two boroughs—the Bronx and Queens—that were separated by deep water spanned by three bridges. Where he killed would not provide much help in figuring out where he lived.
There is also the luck that comes with this hard work. In the end, it would be luck—in the form of a parking ticket—that would bring an end to the killing in this case.
But for now, we go back to about 3 A.M. on that July morning in 1976, when it is time for Donna Lauria to step out of the car that was parked right in front of her building at 2860 Buhre Avenue and go upstairs to her family’s apartment. Her parents were home. She had seen them arrive a short while earlier. And she was just a few yards away from her front door when Sam struck.
Just moments later, her father emerged to walk the dog and saw his fallen daughter. He ran to her, but it already was too late even as he gathered her into his arms and tried to race her to the hospital. This would be in his memory forever: the last time he would see the brightness of his daughter, it was cooling down on the dark street.
The bullet that killed their daughter also killed the Laurias’ chance at a normal life. They never recovered from the senselessness, from the grief.
For the cops, though, for the moment, this was another random shooting in a city that was violent, burning, and broke. It was added to the big pile of uncleared cases at the New York Police Department’s Detective Bureau.
In the months that followed there were three more shootings that the evidence indicated appeared to be linked: one in October, one in November, and one in January. The shootings claimed five victims: one dead, one paralyzed, one shot in the head, one in the neck, and one with less critical injuries.
For Jimmy Breslin, the story of the killings began a few months later on March 8, 1977, with the murder of a young woman that hit very close to home.
A Columbia University School of General Studies Russian major, Virginia Voskerichian, 19, born in Sofia, Bulgaria and already in less than one generation, with parents still struggling with the English language, was attending the best of colleges America could offer. She had just made the Dean’s list. Now with her arms filled with books, she had stepped off the subway at the Continental Avenue stop in Forest Hills and begun her walk home when a man stepped in front of her and pulled his weapon from a brown paper bag. She raised her books, but her speed was no match for a heavy, soft lead-tipped bullet.
The heavy bullet left residue on her books but ruined her young face. She fell across the sidewalk and died with her head in the bushes in front of 4 Dartmouth Street. She had been wearing a peasant blouse, a skirt, a jacket made in Paris and tall boots.
The gunman, as he fled, made sure to scare off any witnesses by emptying the other four cylinders into the no longer quiet night. Virginia Voskerichian was about two and a half blocks from her home at 69-11 Exeter Street when she died between 7:30 and 7:40 P.M., as near as the detectives could determine.
She also was about 100 yards away from where another young woman, Christine Freund, 26, was killed on January 30, five weeks and three days earlier. Christine Freund had been hit by two bullets. Both went into her head. She had been sitting in a car with her boyfriend, John Diel, 30. You could call him lucky in that he was physically unharmed. Another brunette with shoulder-length hair killed.
Virginia’s death was also about three minutes away from the Breslin home at 52 Deepdene Road, where a wife and two young daughters—Rosemary, with her brown hair, and Kelly, whose was blonde—resided. This made it personal for Breslin, who thrived on the personal.
Throughout his career, any attack or slight perceived, any fear felt or illness survived, or any wound to the heart, whether real or imagined, would fuel his prose. Making it personal was also a trait that helped make him, in the words of one editor, the “miserable man” he knew. The editor, Dick Oliver, claimed that the rumpled Irish tabloid bard would be the first to acknowledge this.
Much of the time he served no one except his readers. That he did well. He called himself, proudly and loudly, “J.B. Number One.” But he was an often miserable man.
But in this instance, what fueled his prose was his fear for his daughters. The same fear that, once he put it on the page, you would now have had for yours.
The two bullets that took Freund’s life were 246 grain, .44 caliber Winchester Westerns. Ugly things with soft lead tips. They would turn out to be the same kind as the one that went into Virginia Voskerichian, shattering her teeth and searing through her brain into the spinal column.
It would later be determined that they came from a Charter Arms .44 Bulldog revolver, a five-shot revolver manufactured in Connecticut’s Gun Valley. They left something of a unique pattern on all their expended rounds.
Now, instead of wearing a cap and gown and stepping into the upper ranks of America’s educated, Virginia’s valediction would be that of a victim, and would be told in black ink and halftone pictures on the dull off-white pages of a big city newspaper. A beautiful, dead, dark-haired young woman rubbing off on our fingers.
Breslin’s first attempt at telling the Daily News readers what was occurring that day in New York City began:
The morning after the murder, Tony Cama, who is a detective of homicide, was out on the street looking for the killer. Tony was in his cop clothes: brown checked jacket, formless blue checked pants, cocoa shirt, wine red tie, olive raincoat and red face. He held a spiral notepad and a hand radio. On the sidewalk at his feet the sun glistened on the dried blood of the girl who had been killed the night before.
A woman came along the street and Cama smiled at her. “Excuse me, ma’am. Police Department,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” the woman said. “Is this where the murder was last night?”
“Oh, yes,” Cama said. He pointed at the blood on the sidewalk.
“Oh,” the woman said. She stepped back.
“Isn’t this—right where the first one was too?” she said.
“Right over there,” Cama said, pointing past the corner.
The man—and it was a man on the copy desk—who wrote the headline over the column did what good copy desk persons do. He had summed up the topic of Breslin’s writing in a few clear words:
TO BE A COP, TO ASK & ASK & ASK
What Breslin did under it was classic crime reporting, spare and vivid.
“Do you think the same person could’ve done both murders?” the woman asked.
“We’re in a lot of trouble if it is,” Cama said . . .
“They’re checking down in the morgue now to see if the bullets are the same,” Cama said, “If they are, we got a nut to put up with.”
Clear. Matter of fact. The scenes sharply defined through dialogue. Here was the fifteenth paragraph of the column on Virginia:
A workman began chopping down pine bushes that lined the sidewalk.
And here were the end of the eighteenth and the whole of the nineteenth:
She walked along the row of pine bushes.
Somebody shot her in the face and she pitched into the pine bushes and died.
Here was someone who could, just like a team of skilled detectives, take a pattern of facts and using his thick, fat fingers, tell you—his audience of one—everything you needed in order to actually see what had happened. The night before you read it, he had used this gift to hammer out the story. Rat-tat-tatting and slamming—powerful, fast heavy-fingered key strikes—sweating, smoking, crumpling pages into balls that cluttered the desk and dropped onto the floor. All the while he was selecting the details that would evoke with great clarity what you, specifically you, needed to understand.
In this case, that was what the city’s police detectives and the city’s parents were facing. He had to put you right there in their heads and in their shoes. No other young woman’s head would fall into those same bushes. You could see the sadness of a life cut down, requiring bushes to be cut down. The tragic. The counterpoint. You could wonder where the next victim might fall. What you could not see were all the words he had tried and then rejected and crumpled into balls before he had what he needed to simply put you where he knew you needed to be. In Queens. On a street. With the beginning of an adulthood that would now be an incomplete story. A treasure spent by someone who stole it.
What you could not see was the cursing, the smoking, the picking up and banging down of telephones and the impatience of the editors he had to fend off.
“His was a one-on-one with the reader, not writing for a lot of people—it was one on one. And so, consequently as an editor, he’s talking to you,” explained Oliver, who was the Metropolitan Editor of the Daily News, and the burly cigar-smoking man responsible for Breslin. “And as an editor then, you’re able to come up with some questions . . . sometimes come up with some—to flesh out what he’s writing. But really it was not a big deal to edit Jimmy Breslin. It’s a big deal to get him on time. And he was always, always late, always.”
The Daily News had a very good team of police reporters, the best in New York City, covering this young woman’s death. They could see the larger story unfolding. But a beat reporter at a blue-collar tabloid was constrained. The inverted pyramid convention laid out the facts with an orderly “who, what, where, when” insistence, but largely eliminated any narrative. There were the one- and two-sentence paragraphs. The sentences with few or no commas. The very short lengths.
“Tabloid” was not a bad word. The word itself sounds tainted now, but actually it was a format—a compact one that could be read without taking up the whole kitchen table, unlike a standard broadsheet newspaper. One that could be read while hanging on a strap on a crowded bus. Accuracy was prized. A little sensation would not be refused. But a tabloid was simply a mass circulation newspaper, with plenty of pictures, aimed at the working-class reader.
Breslin’s work however, was not constrained by the usual conventions. He was allowed a column length often of 1,100 or more words. His narratives were novels for a tabloid audience.
On the corner, detectives stood in groups and looked over mimeographed forms. They split up, like groups of door-to-door salesmen and started for the houses on the block.
“What they gave me,” Cama was saying, “was to come out here and stand here and ask anybody, if they saw anything.”
“For how long?”
“As long as they tell me. This is the only way you do it, you know. Legwork. Stand and ask. Go knock on doors and ask. This isn’t a television show. This is a murder.”
“How many murders have you been on?”
“My own cases, I’ve had 13. I cleared 11 of them. You clear them this good, some guys say they’re grounders. You know, easy things to pick up. I say I make them grounders.”
A man came up and Cama said excuse me, and began talking to him, making notes. Taking the name and address: the drudgery of solving the highest crime.
“I hope this isn’t the same person who did the first murder,” the man said to Cama.
“So do I. Because we’d be in some trouble.”
He stood in the sunlight and asked his questions and waited to hear about the autopsy.
And this is how Breslin allowed the story to unfold. It was a story about a serial killer who soon would have a name, but for now did not. A serial killer who despite the police sketch artist’s efforts did not yet have a face. A serial killer who a task force of detectives had already begun to quietly hunt. Who a homicide detective named Cama already had the instinct to fear. Because who is it that kills two women for no money and with no apparent connection between them? A madman. Suddenly the idea of motive must take you to a very dark place. But so far, the clues were still thin, and the city’s residents, with a lot of other crime to contend with, had not yet paid close attention.
When Virginia Voskerichian’s death was told in this way, the subways became crowded with fear as well as elbows, sweat, and open newspapers. The arc of the story that Breslin had begun to own was one that would emerge over weeks and weeks and finally months until there was a year-long serialization of fear. The sensational aspect of the story would also grow, and in this the tabloids knew something too: Punch in the gut to capture your audience. Aim for the heart. Not for the head. The audience is probably smarter than the editor. But they have even less time.
✶✶✶
There was something else to note here—an aside in the story of Sam, but important to the story of Breslin.
His portrayal of the dedicated detectives and their work would put the lie to the later accusations that he hated cops. He didn’t. He hated sloppy cops. He despised racist cops. He was insulted by corrupt cops. Most of all, he was angered by cops who took the paychecks but did not take the time to understand the city and the residents they were sworn to protect.
✶✶✶
And the audience was now in fear for their daughters’ lives. For the parents of the low-rise neighborhoods of New York where the Daily News readers lived, where Metropolitan Editor Oliver came from, where Breslin himself came from, this was far more important than a city budget, or the political landscape of Washington, D.C. These murders in the Bronx and Queens could drive people from the city.
Breslin was born in one of these boroughs of New York—in Queens, a sprawling place with more residents than almost any American city—and raised in a rundown detached house. It was a borough of New York City where there were far more buildings with stairs to climb than with elevators to ride. Where low-wattage lightbulbs often left those stairwells in gloom.
He was painting a picture that could tell his readers what they were up against.
The first clues worth very much to Breslin were those that Cama was thinking about and talking about. They were the ones that pointed to the bullets and to the gun.
In Cama’s mind, the gun almost certainly was in the hands of the most frightening of men: a serial killer. And the Daily News audience had now been so informed in Cama’s own words.
The Bulldog was a gun with a short barrel and a heavy round, and it took a lot to control its power. Recoil would make the 21-ounce gun jump, and it could hurt the hand. But the killer certainly seemed to know how to handle it. The descriptions of him, though they varied widely, did include a couple of mentions that he had crouched, used a two-handed grip, and even rested his elbow on his thigh for stability. This led, of course, to theories as to his training and background. A soldier, a cop.
Like many of the physical descriptions, almost everything explored would turn out at least partially inaccurate. Slowly these things would be ruled out. Breslin would explain this as he began to write after going to the crime scene and speaking with Detective Tony Cama. But that is the way of investigations. Sam himself would later say, when he had been caught, that at first he fired one-handed, and was very inaccurate. Later he would change his stance and his grip on the gun.
Breslin, it is worth noting, sometimes moved his lips as he wrote his columns. And sometimes he tried the words and phrases aloud. He was certain you moved yours as you read. The sentences were short. But they were, as they came one after another, a kind of poetry you might have read if Auden or Yeats had written for a person who drove a cab.
“He was quite a plus for the Daily News—to have a powerhouse like him,” Oliver said. As Editor, “you’re thinking constantly of what’s breaking, what’s going on, but Jimmy would probably be on the phone before you. He was tuned in to virtually everyone. By that, I mean, somebody could know something was going on—Jimmy would be talking to that person.”
This was the reporting that the poetry conveyed. This was why, Tom Wolfe explained, there was no one better than Jimmy Breslin on deadline. He had witnessed that as long ago as 1963, when they were young stars in the firmament of the Herald Tribune.
“He always reminded me of three or four different-sized bowling balls stacked on top of each other,” Wolfe said in an interview in his impeccable and sunny Fifth Avenue apartment.
“He was the greatest writer on deadline . . . he was about 30 feet from where I sat and there would be these bowling balls with smoke coming out of him.”
Wolfe wore a white suit, of course, and diamond-patterned black socks. He was trying a new kind of black shirt, collarless, and he wanted to know if the interviewer liked it.
“Yes,” the interviewer replied.
Wolfe expanded on his observations. “And he got to a point where he would go up to the City Desk and say . . . what have you got for me today, and if there was a story he thought was interesting he would take it, he won’t just do a column on the story— That’s the story.”
Standing near the blood that had dried on a street in Queens, Breslin knew now he had that story.
When a president died, there would be pages and pages in The New York Times.
When a Donna or Virginia died, The Times could have a lot less room and the tabloid a great deal more.
Breslin and the News reporters knew who they wrote for, and they knew what the reader needed to know.
Already, on February 1, five full weeks earlier, The News, on Page Five, at the top, across the page, in fifteen paragraphs, had told its readers there was now a task force of detectives numbering fifty. That is a police number; those numbers often count cops who might or might not be doing other things, or who weren’t essential to the investigation. Still, the police wanted the public to know they were making a big effort to solve several murders and shootings that could be linked.
More than 50 detectives are investigating possible links between the mysterious murder of Christine Freund in Forest Hills, Queens early Sunday and three episodes last year—two in Queens and one in Bronx.
Two young women have been killed and three were wounded, one of them seriously, in the four incidents.
“We are leaning toward a connection in all these cases,” said Sgt. Richard Conlon of the Queens 15th homicide zone.
They were keeping this thing calm as they could.
“In each of the cases a single gunman acting without apparent motive emerged in the early morning darkness to shoot down his unsuspecting victims.” It was the same single gunman each time, police came to believe. Though in years to come, theories would emerge that others were involved.
What is interesting, looking backward more than forty-five years at this point, is that the headlines on the stories were large and black—not simply for sensationalism, although that would be true too, but because they were meant to sell papers on newsstands. Just like the title of a book was meant to be read in a bookstore by someone standing several feet from a shelf. It was graphic design, not itself sensationalism. Until Sam himself started writing, most of the prose was not breathless—far from it, it was understated and clean. At this point, no one was publicly calling this a serial killing. Not yet. But the list of victims was growing:
The sketches the police artists prepared convey the uncertainty of witness testimony much better than courtroom scenes in many television shows of that period. One shows a young man with Elvis-plump lips and thick curly hair, the other a square-jawed man with a part in his light-colored hair. Taken together they might help. But so far they hadn’t and the investigation was not making much headway.