Thomas Adcock - Brooklyn Noir 3 - Nothing but the Truth

I headed up North Broadway to Untermyer Park, where Berkowitz has claimed his Satanic cult held black masses. I made my way into a walled garden, and saw a sign that forbade photos being taken without a permit. I ambled around the gardens but stayed on the beaten paths. In a white stone gazebo there was a tiled floor with the face of a cherub in the middle. Someone had dug the tiles out of the angel’s eyes, leaving him blind.

I slid over to a long trail of stairs that led down into the thick woods. An unleashed Labrador retriever ran by me, its owner nowhere in sight. A brisk river wind kicked up and the late winter sun was setting over the banks of the Hudson. I hurried back to my car.

For a time, Berkowitz laid low. Then around 3 o’clock in the morning of June 26, 1977, a kid named Sal Lupo left a Queens disco, Elephas, with a pretty girl named Judy Placido. As they got into a red Cadillac, Berkowitz sneaked up and shot Placido three times. The windows exploded and Lupo ran back to the disco to get help. Placido survived.

The only thing bigger than the Son of Sam story that July was the citywide blackout on the 13th. New York went dark and looters went wild. More than three thousand people were arrested. Sam was momentarily forgotten.

Berkowitz took out his pen again and promised New York he would strike on July 29, to mark the anniversary of his first killing. That night, most city streets were deserted. No one wanted to tempt the Bogeyman. Cops sat in cars with female mannequins hoping to lure him into an attack. The night passed without incident and that somehow made things worse. We all knew it was coming.

On July 31, Berkowitz returned to the borough of his birth, Brooklyn. He drove around the neighborhoods of Gravesend and Bensonhurst as Stacy Moskowitz and Bobby Violante had their first date. They had gone to see the Robert De Niro/ Liza Minnelli flick, New York, New York , before driving back to Bensonhurst and parking on a quiet street. As they kissed, Berkowitz opened fire, hitting Moskowitz once in the head and Violante twice in the face. The Violante boy survived, but Stacy Moskowitz died a day later.

The Son of Sam had now killed six people.

There has been a rumor circulating for years that the Moskowitz killing was filmed, and has been watched ritually by “snuff” fanatics. Snuff films constituted a 1970s urban legend, movies that supposedly caught actual killings on tape. No credible source for such films has ever stepped forward, nor have any ever been found. Law enforcement officials claim that snuff films do not exist. Still, in Bronx bars and in the blogosphere, some swear Berkowitz’s crew of Satanists filmed the killing.

In a 1994 article on snuff films, Rider McDowell writes that journalist Maury Terry told him, “It is believed Berkowitz filmed his murders to circulate within the Church of Satan. On the night of the Stacy Moskowitz killing, there was a VW van parked across the street from the murder site under a bright sodium streetlamp.”

Terry believed a crew was in that van making a snuff film of the death of the twenty-year-old Brooklyn woman.

What finally brought David Berkowitz down was the bane of the average Brooklynite: a parking ticket. He received one that night, two blocks from the shooting.

On August 10, 1977, four NYPD detectives nabbed him as he approached his 1970 Ford Galaxy in Yonkers. His .44 caliber gun was sitting on the front seat. Berkowitz allegedly told the cops, “You got me. What took you so long?”

Sid Horowitz, a former court officer captain in Queens Supreme Court, went to Kings County Hospital with a judge to arraign Berkowitz for his Queens shootings. He told me his impressions of the Son of Sam.

“I am standing there with the judge and Berkowitz comes out with his head down. I remember saying to myself, ‘This is it? This is the Son of Sam?’ I couldn’t believe what a little twerp he was. He was a nothing. He just stared straight ahead with this blank look on his face. I left there shaking my head that this meek little nothing had killed six people.”

I went to Brooklyn Supreme Court to talk with J.B. Fitzgerald, a retired court officer who had worked security for all of Berkowitz’s Brooklyn court appearances.

Fitzgerald smiled at the memory. He and other Brooklyn court officers had been exuberant because they thought they were going to make a ton of money in overtime when the case went to trial. Also, since it was the biggest case to hit Kings County in decades, the courts were swarming with media and the officers were looking to become stars.

Fitzgerald was one of ten officers who escorted Berkowitz down a long hallway of 360 Adams Street on the seventh floor for a pretrial hearing. As they reached the back door to the courtroom, Berkowitz suddenly broke away from the officers and tried to throw himself out of a window. It didn’t work. All the courthouse windows have strong steel mesh reinforcing the glass. Security wrestled the wild Berkowitz to the ground. He bit one of the officers, then started to foam at the mouth.

Fitzgerald: “So we bring him into the major’s office to calm him down. I mean, ten guys are restraining him. One guy on one arm, one guy on the other arm, one guy on a leg — like that. After about fifteen minutes, he starts to calm down. We look around the room and it’s just Berkowitz and us. Then one of the guys says, ‘Maybe this flake really is a dog. After all, he bit Murphy.’ One by one we start letting go of him, and just let him lay there on the couch. I remember one guy lit a cigarette, and another said to open the window because it’s getting stuffy in here. I started to laugh, ’cause you gotta remember this nut just tried to throw himself out the window.”

The next day Fitzgerald was assigned to watch the rail between Berkowitz and the victims’ families.

“So Berkowitz walks up to the defendant’s table and he’s looking right at me,” said Fitzgerald. “Then he starts yelling, ‘Stacy’s a whore! Stacy’s a whore!’ I’m thinking he’s talking to me. Then I realize Stacy’s mother, Mrs. Moskowitz, was right behind me. The crowd went wild and rushed the bench yelling they were going to kill him.”

They hustled Berkowitz out of the courtroom and tried again the next day. Fitzgerald was assigned to watch the victims’ families in plainclothes. As soon as Berkowitz came into the courtroom, someone from the Moskowitz family jumped up on a bench and made a dive for him. Fitzgerald caught the guy in midair and wrestled him to the ground.

While awaiting trial in Brooklyn, Berkowitz caught a brutal jailhouse beating from another inmate in the Brooklyn House of Detention, causing his eyes to hemorrhage. Brooklynite doctor David Klein worked on his injuries.

Previously, in July 1977, Dr. Klein had operated on Bobby Violante’s eyes, saving his life, after Berkowitz had shot him in the head.

Klein told the Sun-Herald that he looked at Berkowitz and said, “I’m your doctor. I operated on one of your victims and now I am going to treat you.” Klein recalled his mixed feelings: “In the back of your mind you want to strangle him. But you have to respect your oath.”

Maybe the beating in Brooklyn did some good. On May 8, 1978, David Berkowitz pled guilty to all charges. In June he was sentenced to 365 years in prison. But his trouble in jail didn’t end. In 1979, an inmate slashed his throat. It took fifty-six stitches to close his neck wound, but Berkowitz survived.

Berkowitz may have pled guilty to all charges, but he now claims that he only carried out two of the shootings and that members of a Satanic cult he was involved with committed the others. Did he commit all the crimes he was charged with? There are two prominent theories about the Son of Sam case. One is that Berkowitz was a type of Manchurian Candidate assassin who, on some unknown command, was sent out to randomly kill. For proof they offer that one of his letters reads, I am programmed to kill .