Case File: David Berkowitz

David Berkowitz was born Richard David Falco in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1953 and was adopted shortly after birth by Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz, a middle-class Jewish couple. While the household seemed outwardly stable, Berkowitz had a difficult childhood. Intelligent but troubled, Berkowitz was prone to bullying and emotional outbursts, and he expressed feelings of abandonment. Teachers and neighbors would later describe him as an awkward and insecure man who found it difficult to form connections with others or develop close relationships. The death of Berkwitz’s adoptive mother when he was a teen devastated him, leaving him increasingly adrift.  

Berkowitz joined the U.S. Army and served in South Korea before being honorably discharged in 1974. He returned home to New York City, living alone in neighboring Yorktown and working as a mail sorter for the U.S. Post Office in the Bronx. Neighbors later described him as quiet and unremarkable, with no clear indication of the violence that would follow. But his mental condition worsened, and he became increasingly reclusive and obsessed with the occult.

If Berkowitz was in crisis, so was his hometown. By the mid-1970s, New York City seemed to be on the brink. The city was facing possible bankruptcy, with widespread budget cuts that gutted essential public services. Poverty and crime were skyrocketing and hitting historic highs, and a sense of lawlessness was rampant, particularly in the boroughs outside Manhattan. This sense of instability was fertile ground for the sense of terror and paranoia that struck once the first murders began. For many, the Son of Sam murders weren’t isolated acts of violence; they were a psychological assault on the city itself. 

The first attack occurred on July 29, 1976, in the Bronx, when 18-year-old Donna Lauria was shot and killed while sitting in a parked car with her friend Jody Valenti, who was wounded. That fall, two more attacks occurred in Queens, leaving four more people wounded. At this point, investigators had no evidence that the crimes were linked, but suspicions were heightened by the fourth attack, also in Queens. In January 1977, Christine Freund and her fiancé were shot while sitting in a car. Freund was the first of Berkowitz’s victims to die, and police noted several similarities with the earlier cases; they involved young women with long, dark hair, often accompanied by male companions, shot at close range with a .44 caliber revolver. Two months later, Columbia University student Virginia Voskerichian was killed in Queens. 

In April 1977, Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau were killed while sitting in a car in the Bronx. This time, the murderer left a clue for investigators: a handwritten letter addressed to a New York City Police Department captain in which he warned of more violence to come. He ominously signed the letter “Son of Sam.” The letter was leaked to the press, and its bizarre and worrying tone led to a media frenzy filled with sensational headlines. One month later, another letter was sent, this time to prominent New York City reporter Jimmy Breslin, who published it in the New York Daily News. Fear and paranoia increased, with reports of women dying or cutting their hair to avoid resemblance to earlier victims and couples avoiding parked cars. 

In June, two people survived another attack in Bayside, Queens and were able to provide investigators with a physical description of their attacker. Berkowitz struck for the final time on July 31, shooting two people in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, leading to the death of Robert Violante. 

The hunt for the “Son of Sam” was one of the largest and complex cases in NYPD history. Known as “Operation Omega,” 300 detectives in multiple precincts across the city struggled to find connections between the attacks until ballistics testing after Voskerichian‘s death linked several of the murders to the same weapon, a Charter Arms .44 caliber revolver. But the killer's randomness (unrelated victims in different boroughs) left them scrambling for answers.

A crucial breakthrough came in late July 1977. Witnesses in the area near the final shooting in Brooklyn described a suspicious man seen near a parked Ford Galaxie. A parking ticket issued that night to a car matching the description led detectives to Berkowitz’s residence in Yonkers, N.Y. When authorities arrived, they found a rifle, ammunition and a handwritten letter similar to those sent by the “Son of Sam.” Upon his arrest, Berkowitz told investigators, “Well, you got me.”

Berkowitz quickly confessed to the crimes, claiming he had been commanded to kill by a demonic spirit communicating with him through his neighbor’s Labrador retriever, a dog named Harvey. He was charged with six counts of second-degree murder and seven counts of attempted second-degree murder. Because of his bizarre confession, investigators were uncertain if Berkowitz would be found competent to stand trial, but after psychiatric evaluations by mental health experts, Berkowitz was declared legally competent.

In May 1978, Berkowitz pleaded guilty to all six murders, bypassing a lengthy trial. Throughout the proceedings, he continued to make eerie, cryptic remarks about the “voices” that had forced him to commit the crimes. That June, Berkowitz was sentenced to six consecutive 25-year-to-life terms, one for each murder he committed. He was up for parole after serving 25 years, but as of May 2024, Berkowitz was denied parole for the 12th time.

Berkowitz later recanted his story about demonic possession, saying he’d been part of a satanic cult that had led him down a path of violence. He became a born-again Christian, referring to himself as the “Son of Hope.” The case influenced how serial killers were investigated, marking a shift toward criminal profiling and broader law enforcement investigative cooperation. 

Shortly after his imprisonment, Berkowitz was approached by publishers and filmmakers interested in buying the rights to his story. Although no deal was made, the possibility that he might profit from his crimes outraged both the public and the victim’s families. In response, the New York State Legislature passed a law in 1977, known as the Son of Sam Law, that allowed the state government to seize monies earned by a criminal telling their stories in any form of media, and to hold those funds for possible financial reimbursement to the victims’ families. The law was challenged on claims that it violated the free speech protections of the First Amendment, and a 1991 Supreme Court case struck it down. But in the decades since, New York and other states have passed modified versions of the Son of Sam Law, reflecting the significant legal and cultural impact of the case.

The case also shed light on the role of the media in criminal cases. Throughout the killing spree, local and national newspapers reported daily on the case, including some speculative reporting that fanned public fears and complicated the investigation. Decades later, Berkowitz’s crime regularly appears throughout pop culture, including books, television series, documentaries and films like Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam, a 1999 movie that tries to recreate that dark period in New York City’s history.