Thomas Adcock - Brooklyn Noir 3 - Nothing but the Truth

Even so, I could believe it was happening up in Untermyer Park. That was in the suburbs and home to most of the heavy metal heads in the metropolitan area, including many who were interested in the occult. Back then I thought New York City kids were just too jaded to be into Satan. God has trouble drawing an audience in New York, never mind a second-rate deity like Old Scratch.

Untermyer was a weird park, though, and a lot of Bronx kids would go up there to cop marijuana or acid. The park was a former rich man’s sprawling estate located above the Hudson River. There were old, creepy Gothic towers with gargoyles on top and abandoned stone buildings throughout the grounds. It was thick with overgrown brambles, gardens, and woods. I could imagine, in the more secluded sections of the park, a band of hooded Satanists sacrificing dogs on nights when the moon was full.

Satanism did seem to be in back in those days. The movie The Exorcist was in rerelease (this was before video) and one of the most popular films of the summer in 1976 was The Omen.

I was having a hard enough time just getting by in 1976. Teenage years are tough everywhere, but in New York they can be particularly brutal. And one of the things I had never seen in New York was devil worship, so I was a bit intrigued. Every morning before work I would think about my Orchard Beach coworker’s warning, “Stay out of those woods, man.”

I would look into those foreboding trees on the other end of the beach and wonder. Then I would forget about it. Until one July 1976 morning when the night watchman at Orchard Beach was getting off duty and called me over to his car. He told me that at midnight he had seen a bunch of people on the beach wearing hooded black robes standing in a circle. He moved closer and heard them chanting and staring up at the full moon. He ran back to the parkie house, locked himself in, and called the cops. The figures were gone by the time the police arrived. We both shook our heads and I swore I’d never let the sun set on my ass at Orchard Beach.

On July 30, 1976, I was on a break from my parkie job. I sat in the shade of a locker room sipping a coffee and reading the New York Post.

One story on the front page caught my eye. A mile from Orchard Beach, in a neighborhood known as Pelham Bay, two young girls, Jody Valenti and Donna Lauria, had been shot the night before while sitting in a 1974 Oldsmobile Cutlass. They were talking about their night at a New Rochelle disco when a lone gunman sneaked up on them and started shooting. He killed Lauria and badly wounded Valenti. She later recovered.

Wild story , I remember thinking. I finished the article and cynically thought it was a mistaken mob hit. The Pelham Bay neighborhood was no stranger to Mafia shootings. I figured the long-haired girls had been mistaken for some hippy drug dealers working the forbidden zone of a good Italian neighborhood.

The only problem with that theory was that when the mob boys hit, everyone dies. There are no witnesses left. In this shooting, only one girl died. Jody Valenti was able to give the police a good eyewitness sketch of the gunman.

After a day or two all the local dailies dropped the story. There were nearly twenty thousand murders in America in 1976. Poor and dead Donna Lauria was forgotten. (Though not by her father, who publicly threatened to kill Berkowitz in 2006, years after he was convicted of the murder.) What no one knew then was that the girls would later become immortalized as the Son of Sam’s first victims.

In 1953, Son of Sam was given the name David Richard Berkowitz. He was born Richard David Falco, and on his Brooklyn birth certificate, Anthony Falco was listed as his father. His birth mother, Betty Broder Falco, later claimed that his real father was one Joseph Kleinman, her lover who refused to have a baby with her. They remained lovers until Kleinman died of cancer in 1965.

The baby’s mother gave up the infant for adoption to Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz, a childless middle-aged couple living in the East Bronx. They switched the birth names around and called him David. Baby David was raised on Stratford Avenue in the Bronx. Nathan Berkowitz owned a hardware store and Pearl was a housewife. David was to be their only child.

In an attempt to interview David Berkowitz, I wrote him a letter and sent it to the prison where he is being housed. He answered.

Dear Mr. Sullivan,

I received a letter from you informing me that you are planning on doing a story about my life. I was very saddened to learn this because, first of all, you do not know me at all. Second, so much has changed within the past years.

I am unable to grant you an interview at this time. I cannot stop you from writing anything. However, if you would like to know my opinion about the case and many things related to it I am enclosing some pamphlets I wrote. Today, thanks to God, I am living with a lot of hope.

God bless you!

Sincerely,

David Berkowitz was, by all reports, a normal kid growing up in the Bronx. A number of his friends have stated that he was very good baseball player. His adoptive mother died in 1967 from breast cancer. In 1969, David moved with his father to Co-op City in the Bronx. They were a widowed father and son living together like in the TV show of that time The Courtship of Eddie’s Father .

Berkowitz volunteered for the army in 1971 because he wanted to fight in the Vietnam War. He passed all his medical and psychiatric tests. In a typical illustration of government inefficiency, he was not sent to Vietnam, but to Korea. In June of 1974, he received an honorable discharge.

Berkowitz came back to the Bronx and got a job as a security guard, then left that position to become a cab driver. In 1975, after an armed robbery at his hardware store, Nathan Berkowitz left New York for Florida and gave the Co-Op City apartment to his son. Berkowitz soon lost that and then moved to New Rochelle and, finally, to Pine Street in Yonkers.

After moving to Yonkers he started working at a post office in the Bronx, pretty much finalizing the background requirements for a serial killer: got his army weapons training, did the rent-a-cop thing, a bid as a cabby, and now he was a full-fledged post office employee about to go postal.

One of the small pamphlets that Berkowitz wrote in prison and sent me was called: SON OF SAMhain [an ancient druid name for the highest-ranking demon] The Incredible True Story of David Berkowitz .

He explained that his cult members were “sons of sam... sons of satan!” He claimed that he became heavily involved with the occult and witchcraft in 1975.

I recall a force that would drive me into the darkened streets... I roamed the streets like an alley cat in the darkness... Thoughts of suicide plagued me continually... I was so depressed and haunted... I was so wild, mixed-up and crazy that I could barely hang on to my sanity... I was overwhelmed with thoughts about dying... Books about witchcraft seemed to pop up all around me. Everywhere I looked there appeared a sign... pointing me to Satan... To someone who has never been involved in the occult, this could be hard to understand... The power leading me could not be resisted... I had no defense against the devil.

None of his victims had any defense against .44 caliber bullets.

After Berkowitz’s July hit in the Bronx, he went out to Queens on October 23, 1976. There, he hunted down a man and a woman. The woman was the daughter of a New York detective. He found them in a red Volkswagen, on 160th Street in Flushing. Several rounds were fired into the car, shattering the windows. The woman was able to put the vehicle into gear and escape unharmed. The man suffered a head wound, but eventually recovered.