by Colin Wilson
After the terror he had aroused, the Son of Sam was something of an anticlimax, a pudgy little man with a beaming smile, and a tendency to look like a slightly moronic child who has been caught stealing sweets.
He proved to be a paranoid schizophrenic who lived alone in a room lit by a naked light bulb, sleeping on a bare mattress. The floor was covered with empty milk cartons and bottles. On the walls he had scrawled messages such as: ‘In this hole lives the wicked king.’ ‘Kill for my Master.’ ‘I turn children into killers.’
His father, who had run a hardware store in the Bronx, had retired to Florida after being robbed. Nat Berkowitz was not the Son of Sam’s real father. David Berkowitz, born 1 June 1953, was illegitimate, and his mother had offered him up for adoption. He had felt rejected from the beginning, and longed to find his real mother.
He reacted to his poor self-image by boasting and lying—particularly about his sexual prowess. In reality, he was afraid of women. He told the police that demons began telling him to kill in 1974. Living alone in apartments that he allowed to degenerate into pigsties, kept awake at night by the sound of trucks or barking dogs, he slipped into paranoia, telling his father in a letter that people hated him and spat at him as he walked down the street. ‘The girls call me ugly, and they bother me the most.’ On Christmas Eve 1975, he began his attempt at revenge on women by taking a knife and attacking two of them. The first one screamed and he ran away. The second, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, was badly cut and had one lung punctured, but recovered. The blood disturbed him, which is why he travelled to Texas to buy a gun. Seven months later, he used it in his first murder.
The name Sam seems to have been taken from a neighbour called Sam Carr, whose black Labrador sometimes kept Berkowitz awake. He wrote Carr anonymous letters, and on 27 April 1977, shot the dog—which recovered. He also wrote anonymous letters to people he believed to be persecuting him. He had been reported to the police on a number of occasions as a ‘nut’, but no one suspected that he might be the Son of Sam.
Berkowitz was judged legally sane, and was arraigned on 23 August 1977. He pleaded guilty, saving New York the cost of a trial. He was sentenced to 365 years in prison.
The aftermath is worth describing. His Yonkers apartment building became a place of pilgrimage for sensation-seekers. They stole doorknobs, cut out pieces of carpet, even chipped pieces of paint from Berkowitz’s door. In the middle of the night, people shouted, ‘David, come out,’ from the street. Berkowitz’s apartment remained empty, and a quarter of the building’s tenants moved out, even though the landlord changed its number from 25 to 42 Pine Street to try to mislead the souvenir hunters.
Even after Berkowitz was arrested, most Americans found the crimes incomprehensible. One psychiatrist who interviewed him was convinced that his story of ‘voices’ was an attempt to establish a defence of insanity. On the other hand, journalist Maury Terry became convinced that Berkowitz had not acted alone, but that he was a member of a satanic cult who committed some of the murders attributed to Berkowitz, and filmed the shootings to sell as ‘snuff movies’.
Two years after Berkowitz’s arrest, Ressler and Douglas went to interview him—three times. As usual, they prepared by learning everything about Berkowitz that was on record. One important discovery was that Berkowitz was an arsonist, and that he had set at least 1,488 fires in New York, which are documented in his diary. He had also triggered hundreds of false alarms. For a long time now, arson has been recognised as basically a sex crime—many arsonists masturbate as they watch the flames. This helped confirm Ressler’s suspicions that the Son of Sam shootings were sexual in origin.
Ressler found Berkowitz to be shy, reserved, polite, and low key, and that he spoke only when spoken to. When Ressler tried to touch on the possible sexual aspect of the murders. Berkowitz flatly denied that they had any, claiming that he had had a normal sex life, with girlfriends, and that the murders were just shootings. This, Ressler discovered, was an attempt to mislead. Berkowitz had never had girlfriends, and this was the root of his trouble. In that respect he resembled Harvey Glatman, feeling that he lacked the physical attractiveness to appeal to women.
Where Glatman attempted to satisfy his desires through kidnapping and rape, Berkowitz was far too shy and withdrawn to attempt anything so ambitious. He lacked the aggression to be a true predator. So every evening he went out with a .44, looking for lone women or girls, or couples necking in cars. As he stalked them and then shot them, he admitted, he became sexually excited, and would masturbate afterwards.
The men were shot simply because they happened to be with the young women, the true targets.
On the nights when he couldn’t find a victim, he told them, he would drive to the scenes of earlier murders and replay them in his imagination. If there were still bloodstains visible on the pavement, he would sit in his car and masturbate.
Ressler was pleased that he had made another discovery: that it was true that murderers returned to the scene of their crimes, so offering the manhunters a chance to catch them.
It gave support to another of Ressler’s theories: that aberrant behaviour is an extension of normal behaviour. Teenaged boys ride their bicycles past the homes of teenaged girls, or hang around them and ‘engage in impetuous spontaneous behaviour’. Mark Twain had observed the same thing in the scene where Tom Sawyer sets out to attract the attention of Becky Thatcher in the school playground—and we have already noted that Harvey Glatman did the same thing at school, and how the playful snatching of purses developed into armed robbery, and then rape.
Berkowitz would have liked to attend the funerals of his victims, but was afraid of being spotted. But he stayed away from work on the day of the funeral, and hung around diners near police stations hoping to hear cops discussing his crimes. (He never succeeded.)
In all, it seems clear that Berkowitz belonged to a class of killers who are basically ‘wannabes’. While most people attempt to achieve a sense of value or worth by doing something that their fellows regard as admirable or useful, people whose self-esteem is irretrievably low daydream of shocking or outraging them, so that they can at least regard themselves as mavericks or rebel outsiders. Berkowitz told Ressler how, as a teenager, he wanted to get to Vietnam, daydreaming of receiving medals and ‘being recognised as an important individual, and thereby fashioning an identity for himself’. It was not to be. His army career—in Korea—was undistinguished and a visit to a prostitute resulted in syphilis.
Back in New York, he began trying to trace his natural mother, Betty Falco, and finally succeeded through an old telephone directory. There was an emotional reunion at her home in Coney Island in May 1975. He also met his half-sister Roslyn, 37, who welcomed him to her home.
But although he was glad to have found his family, it was too late. He was too frustrated and unfulfilled to find satisfaction in his new role as a son and brother. He began suffering from frequent headaches. And on Christmas Eve 1975, he took a hickory-handled hunting knife and went out in search of a woman to stab. On Co-Op City Boulevard he doubleparked and followed a woman who came out of a supermarket. She was wearing a long, heavy coat, and he raised the knife and brought it down on her back. The knife failed to penetrate the thick material, but the woman turned, saw a man with his arm raised to strike again, and began to scream. Berkowitz turned and ran away.
He wandered around until he saw another female approaching; this was a 15-year-old schoolgirl named Michelle Forman. He followed her across a pedestrian bridge, and stabbed her in the head, and then the upper body. As she turned he saw she was pretty; she lashed out at him, and then fell down. When she tried to grab his leg, he ran off.
As he began to describe the attacks and murders, Berkowitz started to repeat the story he had told to psychiatrists: that he killed because Sam Carr’s dog, possessed by a 3,000-year-old demon, had barked orders at him. Douglas called his bluff. ‘Hey David, knock off the bullshit. The dog has nothing to do with it.’ When Berkowitz pers
isted, they told him the interview was over. ‘We want the factual basis for these crimes.’ As they started to leave, Berkowitz laughed and admitted that the demon dog story was false, designed to back his defence of insanity.
The real motive, it seemed, was the desire to become known, to become notorious. There was a sense of potency in holding a whole city to ransom, in seeing the crowds who bought the newspapers that described the latest shooting. That is why he began communicating with the police, and with journalist Jimmy Breslin. Ressler has some harsh words to say about the journalists who kept feeding the media frenzy, even when there were no new developments to write about. They, he believed, simply encouraged Berkowitz to continue, like a child who enjoys attention.
Yet what emerged from these interviews is that Berkowitz was not simply a nonentity looking for action to give him a sense of identity. There had been a touch of sadism in his make-up since childhood, when he had poured ammonia into his adoptive mother’s fish tank to kill the fish, and killed her pet bird with rat poison, getting pleasure from watching it die slowly. He enjoyed torturing mice and moths. In adolescence, his masturbation fantasies were mixed with violence. And when he graduated to arson, he enjoyed watching bodies being carried out of burning buildings.
As to the stories about the evil spirits in his head that told him to kill, these were, he admitted, an invention. His insistence that he had been enslaved by demonic voices—which would become the basis of the standard book on the case, Son of Sam by Lawrence D. Klausner (1981)—was designed to achieve the effect it did, in fact, achieve, to allow him to plead guilty to second-degree murder, with the eventual possibility of parole.
At the end of the interview, Berkowitz told them that if he had been able to settle into a relationship with a good woman who would fulfil his fantasies, he would not have committed the killings. Ressler comments that he does not believe it for a moment. Berkowitz’s problem was that he felt inadequate and compensated with violent fantasies, which made him incapable of the give and take of a relationship. Ressler concludes: ‘Like so many of the criminals I interviewed, he had grown up to murder.’
The psychologist Dorothy Otnow Lewis had once made the controversial remark that she felt some criminals were just ‘born bad’. Ressler seemed to be saying the same thing in a different way.
Chapter Six
‘Developing an Instinct’
What Ressler was learning was that once you had talked to enough killers, you began to develop an instinct about what kind of person would commit a particular crime.
In early 1978 he used it to help a colleague, homicide detective Russ Vorpagel, in Sacramento, California.
On 23 January, an intruder walked into the house of newly married Teresa Wallin, 22, in the Watt Avenue area of Sacramento, shot her three times, and then mutilated the body with a knife. There was no sign of rape, but there was evidence that the killer had drained some of her blood into a yoghurt cup and drank it.
In his profile of the killer, Ressler said:
White male, aged 25-27 years; thin, undernourished appearance. Residence will be extremely slovenly and unkempt and evidence of the crime will be found at the residence. History of mental illness, and will have been involved in use of drugs. Will be a loner who does not associate with either males or females, and will probably spend a great deal of time in his own home, where he lives alone. Unemployed. Possibly receives some form of disability money. If residing with anyone, it would be with his parents; however, this is unlikely. No prior military record; high school or college dropout. Probably suffering from one or more forms of paranoid psychosis.
Ressler explains:
I had plenty of reasons for making such a precise description of the probable offender. Though profiling was still in its infancy, we had reviewed enough cases of murder to know that sexual homicide—for that’s the category into which this crime fit, even if there was no evidence of a sex act committed at the scene—is usually perpetrated by males, and is usually an intraracial crime, white against white, or black against black. The greatest number of sexual killers are white males in their twenties and thirties; this simple fact allows us to eliminate whole segments of the population when first trying to determine what sort of person has perpetrated one of these heinous crimes. Since this was a white residential area, I felt even more certain that the slayer was a white male.
Now I made a guess along a great division line that we in the Behavioral Sciences Unit were beginning to formulate, the distinction between killers who displayed a certain logic in what they had done and those whose mental processes were, by ordinary standards, not apparently logical—‘organized’ versus ‘disorganized’ criminals. Looking at the crime-scene photographs and the police reports, it was apparent to me that this was not a crime committed by an ‘organized’ killer who stalked his victims, was methodical in how he went about his crimes, and took care to avoid leaving clues to his own identity. No, from the appearance of the crime scene, it was obvious to me that we were dealing with a ‘disorganized’ killer, a person who had a full-blown and serious mental illness. To become as crazy as the man who ripped up the body of Terry Wallin is not something that happens overnight. It takes eight to ten years to develop the depth of psychosis that would surface in this apparently senseless killing. Paranoid schizophrenia is usually first manifested in the teenage years. Adding ten years to an inception-of-illness age of about fifteen would put the slayer in the mid-twenties age group. I felt that he wouldn’t be much older, for two reasons. First, most sexual killers are under the age of thirty-five. Second, if he was older than late twenties, the illness would have been so overwhelming that it would already have resulted in a string of bizarre and unsolved homicides. Nothing as wild as this had been reported anywhere nearby, and the absence of other notable homicides was a clue that this was the first killing for this man, that the killer had probably never taken a human life before. The other details of the probable killer’s appearance followed logically from my guess that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, and from my study of psychology.
For instance, I thought this person would be thin. I made this guess because I knew of the studies of Dr Ernest Kretchmer of Germany and Dr William Sheldon of Columbia University, both dealing with body types. Both men believed there was a high degree of correlation between body type and mental temperament. Kretchmer found that men with slight body builds (asthenics) tended toward introverted forms of schizophrenia; Sheldon’s categories were similar, and I thought that on his terms, the killer would be an ectomorph [i.e. thin, intellectual type]. These body-type theories are out of favour with today’s psychologists—they’re fifty years old and more—but I find, more often than not, that they prove to be correct, at least in terms of being helpful in suggesting the probable body type of a psychopathic serial killer.
So that’s why I thought this was bound to be a thin and scrawny guy. It was all logical. Introverted schizophrenics don’t eat well, don’t think in terms of nourishment, and skip meals. They similarly disregard their appearance, not caring at all about cleanliness or neatness. No one would want to live with such a person, so the killer would have to be single. This line of reasoning also allowed me to postulate that his domicile would be a mess, and also to guess that he would not have been in the military, because he would have been too disordered for the military to have accepted him as a recruit in the first place. Similarly, he would not have been able to stay in college, though he might well have completed high school before he disintegrated. This was an introverted individual with problems dating back to his pubescent years. If he had a job at all, it would be a menial one, a janitor perhaps, or someone who picked up papers in a park; he’d be too introverted even to handle the tasks of a deliveryman. Most likely he’d be a recluse living on a disability check.
I didn’t include some other opinions in the profile, but I did believe that if this slayer had a car, it, too, would be a wreck, with fast-food wrappers in the back, rust throughout, and a
n appearance similar to what I expected to be found in the home. I also thought it likely that the slayer lived in the area near the victim, because he would probably be too disordered to drive somewhere, commit such a stunning crime, and get himself back home. More likely, he had walked to and from the crime scene. My guess was that he had been let out of a psychiatric-care facility in the recent past, not much more than a year earlier, and had been building up to this level of violent behaviour.
Sherlock Holmes could not have explained his methods better. Using this profile, cops on the beat began questioning people in the area. Around that time, many of them had reported seeing a dirty, dishevelled man in an orange jacket, who sometimes knocked on doors and made incomprehensible demands.
Four days later, 38-year-old Evelyn Miroth, the mother of three sons, was found shot and mutilated on her bed, and a boyfriend, Danny Meredith, was found shot dead in the next room. One of her sons, six-year-old Jason, had also been shot. A 22-month-old baby, David Ferreira, whom the victim had been babysitting, was missing. Evelyn Miroth’s other two sons were away from home at the time. The postmortem showed that Evelyn had been sodomised.
Again, there was evidence that the killer had drunk some of his victim’s blood.
Finally, Ressler’s profile paid off. A woman named Nancy Holden thought she recognised it, and told the police about an encounter she had had with a man named Richard Chase on the day of the Wallin murder. Chase, who had been at school with her, had accosted her in a store and tried to persuade her to give him a lift. Worried by his wild appearance, she had made some excuse.