Serial Killer of the Month: David Berkowitz

History takes the memories of many people and, by a kind of nostalgic superimposition, blows them up into great devils or gods. Being responsible for the largest manhunt in New York history, being one of the most obviously insane. Oddly enough, one of the most non-sexual serial killers, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam murderer, has grown from absolute obscurity to terrible immortality. He did this by prowling the streets of New York — not just Manhattan, but all five boroughs — by approaching parked cars in which were seated brunettes with long hair, by shooting them point-blank, before disappearing into the night. He mur­dered to appease the voices in his head; the voices in his head, he said, were, among other sources, a dog owned by his neighbor. The dog was, in Berkowitz’s mind, inhabited by an ancient demon named Sam.

David Berkowitz began life as a nobody, the son of an abandoned but industrious woman named Betty Falco who was the mistress of a married businessman, Joe Kleinmann. Her pregnancy angered Kleinmann, and the child was adopted by a loving couple, the Berkowitzes. To tell of an average childhood is to tell the story of young David. In his own head, however, David felt persecuted by girls, keeping insults and embarrassing incidents involving slights and rejections from females fresh in his mind many years after the fact. And, although he joined the army and was stationed in Korea during the Vietnam War, where he says he slept with the local prostitutes, David probably never had sex with anyone except his own right hand. In this, he is a very strange serial killer.

Serial killers are defined by experts as being slayers who kill three or more victims, often with cooling-off periods in between. The killings are more often than not sexually motivated, and usually the victim is used as a sadistic outlet for the killer. It is for this reason that almost all serial killers are male. Berkowitz certainly killed women who resembled a type, but particularly, long brunette hair attracted Berkowitz’s attention. Later he’d share that it was brunette women who mocked and rejected him, but ultimately, Berkowitz never actually spent enough time to get close enough to the victims, let alone sexually abuse them. He was a shy killer, and a very sick man.

To go back one step in the growth of serial killers, the “Macdonald Triad” is a popular theory that refers to a common set of pathologies that potentially violent people share. As children, almost all such killers practice bedwetting (even into their teens), cruelty to animals, and arson – creating the “Macdonald Triad.” When they caught Berkowitz, he had kept a copious journal of his arson, listing over 3,000 fires in the New York City area, the time of day, the weather, and the method of ignition. Some of these fires resulted in major buildings being destroyed. Indeed, if Berkowitz hadn’t been captured and convicted of murder, he could have had many lifetimes of prison sentences for his accumulated crimes.

Cutting to the chase, the story becomes particularly interesting; on March 3rd, 1975, when, having dropped out of any society and having finally begun to slip into schizophrenic mad­ness, he took a newly acquired shotgun out and drew a bead on a muzzled German Shepherd, killing it. Nonetheless, the voices in his head remained – they wanted human blood. He’d scrawled messages like “I have several children I’m turning into killers” and “My name is Mr. Williams, I live in this hole” scribbled around a missing chunk of plaster from his wall.

The screaming voices in his head finally had their day on Christmas Eve of 1975. According to his own account, he approached a woman on a bridge and stabbed her in the neck, but she didn’t react. He then tried to stab her in the chest, where she saw the knife and screamed. When his attempts at stabbing weren’t working and the woman remained standing, he ran away into the night. No victim ever came forward for this attack, and it is likely that Berkowitz was simply too incompetent to use a knife to complete a murder.

His second attempt also involved a knife, and this victim, 15-year-old Michelle Foreman, wasn’t so lucky. She suffered a collapsed lung, ultimately surviving the attack with lifelong injury and trauma. Berkowitz ate a huge meal after the attempt, where the voices in his head tortured him for not providing them with the blood they desired.

Berkowitz later got a job as a postal sorter shortly after this second attempt, renting a new apartment and almost immediately identifying himself as a madman. Focusing on his landlord’s German Shepherd as the cause of the noises in his head, Berkowitz convinced himself that there was a network of demons that were out to get him, manned by his landlord and the dog. Within weeks, Berkowitz had arranged a demon-filled cosmology where Jack Cassaras, renamed General Jack Cosmo, was the commander of the dog demon army set to prosecute young David. Berkowitz recounted, “I thought they were members of the human race, but they weren’t.”

Having run to escape his torment, he moved to Yonkers, leaving Jack Cosmo far away. But in his new apartment, he found that the neighbor, Sam Carr, was a sub-general for Cassaras – and Carr’s Black Labrador Retriever was torturing David with “psychic noises”. Not to mention, next door lived a prince of darkness known as the Duke of Death. The next door down at 22 Wicker Street was the home of evil John Wheaties, who ran a hostel of sorts for the demons who tortured Berkowitz. Demons and evil spirits from all over the world came here to rest and to torture David.

When he killed, he said the demons would come and take the spirits from the dying, take them to the hostel, where they would have sadistic sex with them for all eternity.

To make a long, disturbing story short, Berkowitz killed six people in their cars with a forty-five caliber pistol. He was caught after writing bizarre and threatening letters to most of the major demons – the New York Daily News’s Jimmy Breslin. On the day he was caught, he had prepared to complete a mass slaying, but the rainy weather made it a bad day for killing. Denied insanity as a plea, he pled guilty and received six consecutive terms of 25­ to-life. He has remained a “model prisoner” ever since.

Read more Serial Killer of the Month from the archives:
Serial Killer of the Month: Jerome Henry Brudos
Serial Killer of the Month: Ed Gein

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