I AM DEEPLY HURT BY YOUR CALLING
ME A WEMON HATER. I AM NOT.
BUT I AM A MONSTER
I AM THE “SON OF SAM.”
And so it began on April 17, 1977. A new chapter. Two more are dead. Bullets and victims are no longer enough. Now there was this block-printed, four-page letter left in an envelope in the car where his latest two victims had been kissing when the killer found them and fired three shots through the glass of the driver’s side window. Now there was another blood-splashed love. Now there was another dead brunette, and this time a dead boyfriend. And now the killer had a name: “Son of Sam.” And police had a clue.
Breslin had been writing. The police had been circulating their sketches, and they had announced that the task force had expanded and was now canvassing two sections of the city—the Bronx and Queens. The best detective commanders in the department, Captain Joseph Borelli and Inspector Timothy Dowd, were in charge.
Sam had been reading.
MR. BORELLI, SIR
I DONT WANT TO KILL ANYMORE
NO SIR, NO MORE BUT I
MUST, “HONOUR THY FATHER.”
At the time it was called a taunt. It certainly directly addressed the police captain. It certainly explained the twisted logic of this demon.
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
“He wanted, he wanted the recognition,” said Bill Clark, a lead detective on the case. “It wasn’t just the killing itself. He wanted to get the recognition.” Letter-writing and killing, that was how he would get it.
The double homicide occurred at about 3:00 A.M. Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau were leaning into each other, kissing, in a car parked on a Bronx street paralleling the Hutchison River Parkway—that meant more privacy for the young couple, as there were houses only on one side. It meant more privacy for the killer.
I LOVE TO HUNT. PROWLING
THE STREETS LOOKING FOR
FAIR GAME—TASTY MEAT
“Fair game.” Clever prose, it would seem.
Suriani, 18, was hit by two slugs and died immediately. Esau, 20, hung on at Jacobi Hospital for a couple of hours, while his father, Rudolf, kept a bedside vigil in the intensive care unit, the Daily News reported.
By now, the ballistic evidence was already in. All the past murders and shootings had been linked to the same gun. Serial number 212922, it would turn out.
On Tuesday, April 19, the News printed an article by William Federici, their matinee idol-handsome star police reporter, and Paul Meskil, a top rewrite man who had some very odd habits, including at one point the wearing of yellow leather pants with bright red suspenders.
A handwritten note, taunting the police and warning that “I’ll do it again,” was left by the psychopathic .44 caliber killer in the car in which he murdered his latest victims.
It was found on the front seat of the auto in which Valentina Suriani, 18, and her boyfriend, Alexander Esau, 20, were fatally wounded early Sunday a block from the girl’s Bronx home.
The couple had parked in front of 1878 Hutchinson River Parkway. The killer apparently leaped in front of the 1969 maroon Mercury Montego and, without warning, fired four shots through the windshield, hitting Miss Suriano once in the head and Esau three times in the head. Then the gunman tossed his previously prepared letter through the car window.
Detectives said yesterday that ballistics tests indicated that the .44-caliber bullet used to shoot the couple had come from [the] . . . gun that killed three young women and wounded four others in Forest Hills and Floral Park, Queens and in the Bronx.
The demon prowling the streets was without a doubt targeting young women. Daughters were locked in as securely as if in a medieval convent.
Two young women dead in the Bronx. Two dead in Queens. One dead young tow truck driver, Esau. Two young women badly wounded; one would become a paraplegic. One young man with a plate in his head.
I SAY GOODBYE AND
GOODNIGHT.
POLICE—LET ME
HAUNT YOU WITH THESE WORDS;
I’LL BE BACK!
I’ll BE BACK!
TO BE INTERRPRETED
AS BANG, BANG, BANG,
BANG, BANG—UGH!!
YOURS IN
MURDER
MR. MONSTER
His spelling wasn’t much. Soon, his use of the semicolon in a second letter would be noted as pretty impressive. It seemed Sam could write. Five bangs. Five bullets. One gun. There were no longer any doubts.
Still later, with thirty years’ worth of storytelling behind him, Breslin would use his gift of compression to retell the collection of the ballistic evidence prior to the shooting of Virginia Voskerichian this way:
And all day over in Police Headquarters there was a guy hunched over a machine. And he had one slug here on a spoke and one slug here and he turned it slowly . . . He did it all day.
Late in the day finally he said he had a match. You could look and see that the lines on the shells from the barrel of the gun when they were shot matched. They came from the same gun.
And now you know you had trouble—you had a serial killer.
This was how Breslin wrote about crime. He likely would have had to have been in Queens, with the detective at the crime scene, and in Manhattan with a lab technician who had a bullet on a spoke with Breslin over his shoulder. Could he put in all that shoe leather in one day, and then get back to a desk to sit down and write it? If any reporter could, it would be Breslin. Even his most passionate critics—often his colleagues and cops—would not disagree. The facts? The truth? Breslin would always use the former, heavily and well, but use regularly the prerogative that came with a black-lined box that separated the columnist from news coverage to allow him to get to the latter.
Some would call this the heart of the New Journalism. Not Breslin. Breslin described it as the old journalism, saying that the only thing he and his colleague Tom Wolfe had discovered was that storytelling had been lost in journalism. Runyon. Westbrook Pegler. He identified these as prelapsarian examples. He was modest for once. What he did. What Wolfe did. What Gay Talese did. They told human stories.
“Any movement, group, poetry, program, philosophy or theory that goes under a name with “New” in it is just begging for trouble. The garbage barge of history is already full of them,” Tom Wolfe wrote in Esquire magazine in 1972. “Nevertheless, the New Journalism was the term that caught on eventually.”