Criminal Minds

by Jeff Mariotte

  Berkowitz ordinarily hunted late at night or early in the morning, but his next murder took place on March 8, 1977, at 7:30 p.m., not far from where he had shot Freund. He was on foot and saw Virginia Voskerichian, a nineteen-year-old student, walking toward him. He pulled his .44. Voskerichian held her books up to shield herself, and Berkowitz shot her in the face.

  Two days later, Mayor Abe Beame joined the NYPD brass for a press conference, at which they announced the formation of the Operation Omega task force. Its only goal was to find the man or men doing these shootings.

  About a month later, a letter was delivered to Sam Carr, a retired municipal worker who lived in Yonkers in a house behind the apartment building where Berkowitz lived. The letter complained about Carr’s dog, Harvey, a black Labrador that was constantly barking. The importance of this communication wouldn’t become known until much later.

  The next incident, on April 17, was the occasion on which Berkowitz left the first “Mr. Monster” letter for Captain Borrelli. Berkowitz left behind the dead body of Valentina Suriani, eighteen. Her companion, Alexander Esau, twenty, held on for almost a day before he died.

  Two days later, Carr received another letter that complained about his apparent unwillingness to control Harvey. “Your selfish, Mr. Carr,” the letter said. “My life is destroyed now. I have nothing to lose anymore. I can see that there shall be no peace in my life, or my families life until I end yours.”

  On April 29, someone shot Harvey. Carr rushed the dog to a vet, who was able to save its life. Because the Borrelli letter had not yet been made public, Carr had no way to connect his own letters to the .44 Caliber Killer.

  The existence of the Borrelli letter was not a secret for long. Columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote about it, noting that the writer—the so-called Son of Sam—habitually spelled women “wemon.” The letter also referred to “father Sam,” who got mean when he was drunk. There would be much more talk about Sam in the weeks to come.

  For his attention, Breslin got a note directly from Berkowitz, who wrote the following:

  Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of NYC and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed in the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks.

  Hello from the gutters of NYC, which is filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood. Hello from the sewers of NYC which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks.

  Don’t think because you haven’t heard for a while that I went to sleep. No, rather, I am still here. Like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest; anxious to please Sam.

  The publicity sold newspapers. Because Berkowitz preyed on brunettes, blond wigs sold out at stores all across New York. Thousands of worthless tips swamped the task force.

  Berkowitz reached out by mail again in early June, when a New Rochelle man named Jack Cassara received a get-well note, ostensibly from Sam and Francis Carr in Yonkers. The note included a picture of a German shepherd and referred to Cassara’s fall from a roof.

  Cassara found this strange. He didn’t know the Carrs, and he had not fallen from a roof. He found out that the Carrs were real people and gave them a call. Jack Cassara and his wife, Nann, and their son Stephen met the Carrs at the latter’s home, where the Carrs described what had happened to Harvey and to a neighborhood German shepherd, which had also been shot. The Carrs’ daughter, Wheat, a dispatcher for the Yonkers police, summoned officers Peter Intervallo and Thomas Chamberlain to look into things.

  Something about the situation reminded Stephen Cassara of a strange man who had rented a room in the Cassaras’ house in 1976. The man, David Berkowitz, had never liked the Cassaras’ German shepherd, and he had moved out abruptly, never coming back for his two-hundred-dollar security deposit. Nann Cassara became convinced that Berkowitz was the Son of Sam but couldn’t get the police to take her seriously.

  Then another strange letter—this one to a deputy sheriff named Craig Glassman, a neighbor of Berkowitz’s in the same apartment building—described a “demon group” that included Glassman, the Carrs, and the Cassaras. Intervallo and Chamberlain decided to check out this Berkowitz character. They found his current address, learned the registration number of his Ford Galaxie, and discovered that his driver’s license had recently been suspended. That was as far as their investigation went, for the moment.

  On the morning of June 26, 1977, Judy Placido, seventeen, had just left the Elephas disco with her date, twenty-year-old Sal Lupo. They were sitting in Lupo’s car when the Son of Sam fired three shots into the car. Neither was seriously injured. Witnesses reported two people leaving the scene: a tall, stocky dark-haired man running and a blond man with a mustache driving a car without headlights.

  The anniversary of Berkowitz’s first killing (July 29) came and went without incident, but on July 31, he attacked Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante, both twenty. They were making out in Violante’s car in a city park when Berkowitz opened fire. Moskowitz died in the hospital, and Violante lost one eye and most of his vision in the other.

  There were several witnesses to this assault, but their stories were contradictory. Cacilia Davis, who had not seen the shooting, lived in the area, and two days later she told the police that she had seen an angry young man who resembled witness descriptions of the shooter take a parking ticket off the windshield of his car, a Ford Galaxie, which was parked too close to a fire hydrant. NYPD detectives didn’t put much stock in her tale, but they accepted that the ticketed party might have been a witness. After a week, they finally reached out to the Yonkers police for help in locating the person who had been ticketed, and they were surprised when dispatcher Wheat Carr said that Berkowitz just might be the Son of Sam.

  Officers Intervallo and Chamberlain had been busy. They had talked to Berkowitz’s landlord and learned that Berkowitz had once been a security guard and had thus come into contact with guns. Chamberlain had responded to an arson report on Berkowitz’s building filed by Deputy Sheriff Glassman. Someone had started a fire outside Glassman’s apartment door and dropped two .22 rounds into the flames. Glassman showed Chamberlain the letters he had received from Berkowitz, who lived in the apartment above his, including one that said, “True, I am the killer, but Craig, the killings are at your command.”

  Meanwhile, Sam Carr had grown tired of the lack of police response to his complaints. He went to the headquarters of Operation Omega and gave them Berkowitz’s name.

  Finally the task force detectives decided to pay Berkowitz a visit. They had heard about his strange behavior from various cops in Yonkers. His presence near the Moskowitz and Violante shootings had been documented, and now they were hearing about him from Sam Carr.

  On August 10, detectives saw Berkowitz’s car sitting outside his apartment building. Inside the car they found a bag with a rifle sticking out of it and a letter addressed to one of the task force members promising more killings. They had their man, and they arrested him when he emerged from the building.

  His story didn’t end with his arrest, however. Berkowitz confessed to the killings in such detail that they knew he had really pulled them off. He told the story of his early life: born Richard David Falco on June 1, 1953, he was unwanted by his mother’s married boyfriend, so his mother put him up for adoption before his birth. He was adopted by Nat and Pearl Berkowitz, but he was often a terror, bullying other kids, gripped by dark depressions, and threatening suicide. It all became worse after Pearl died. Nat and his new wife moved to Florida when David was eighteen, leaving him alone in the city.

  He joined the army and became a proficient marksman. During his posting in South Korea, he had his one and only sexual encounter with a woman, a Korean prostitute, who gave him gonorrhea. He later wrote, “I think that if I were to have a good, mature sexual relationship with a woman I wouldn’t have killed.”

  Berkowitz agreed to plead guilty to the murders in exchange for a sentence of life in prison instead of the death p
enalty.

  Once in custody, he told stranger stories. The Cassaras’ German shepherd, a noisy dog who howled a lot, was a demon. Other neighborhood dogs were, too—when they howled back, they were demons talking to one another, and to him. They wanted blood. Berkowitz wrote, “When I moved in the Cassaras seemed very nice and quiet. But they tricked me. They lied. I thought they were members of the human race. They weren’t! Suddenly the Cassaras began to show up with the demons. They began to howl and cry out. ‘Blood and death!’ They called out the names of the masters! The Blood Monster, John Wheaties, General Jack Cosmo.”

  General Jack Cosmo, commander of New York’s devil dogs, was Jack Cassara. Berkowitz fled that house and moved into a building near the Carrs, but that was no better. They had Harvey, the black Lab. This meant that the Carrs, and especially Sam Carr, were also demons. The “Sam” in Berkowitz’s notes was Sam Carr. Sam, he sometimes believed, was Satan himself, and he, Berkowitz, was the Son of Sam. All of the murders that Berkowitz committed were commanded by these demons, particularly Sam Carr and Harvey.

  Later, Berkowitz claimed to have been part of a satanic cult that included John and Michael Carr, Sam Carr’s two sons. Both Carr brothers died within two years of Berkowitz’s arrest. There were, he said, about two dozen people in the cult, whom he called the twenty-two disciples of hell. Police have found some evidence of cult activity in the area Berkowitz described, reported as early as five years before the first murder. That activity included pedophilia and child pornography, as he claimed, and also the ritual sacrifice of German shepherds. Witness reports described other people at and around some of the Son of Sam murder scenes, and some of the descriptions matched people who Berkowitz said were in the cult. He admitted that he was present at all of the murders, but he insisted that some had been carried out by other cult members. Yonkers officials were convinced enough to reopen the case, and it remains officially open to this day.

  Still later, interviewed by FBI profilers Robert K. Ressler and John Douglas, Berkowitz admitted that the story about devil dogs had been fabricated in an effort to claim an insanity defense. The main motivation behind the murders was sexual after all. He hunted most nights, but on nights when he couldn’t find an appropriate victim, he would return to the scenes of earlier shootings, then go home and masturbate.

  Berkowitz named himself the Son of Sam well before his arrest, and his bizarre letters hinted at demonic cults. So was he a visionary killer, sent on missions of murder by a demonic dog? Or was he just a common lust killer? As so often happens with these people, the truth is probably somewhere in between.

  Whatever the truth, Berkowitz was sentenced to six consecutive life terms in jail, and he refuses to be considered for parole. He remains incarcerated at the Sullivan Correctional Facility in upstate New York. He has converted to Christianity and claims to be repentant. He still sometimes blames demons for everything.

  Berkowitz is, in many ways, a classic serial killer. He went out into the night hunting, determined to kill and looking for the right opportunity. He was organized enough to hold a job and keep his own apartment. Once he killed, the fantasy he had been building up to was satisfied for the moment, and he went through a cooling-off period while it built again. There was a similarity to his victims: people in parked cars, always with a young woman present, even if he also had to shoot a man at the scene.

  Just as George Foyet’s impact on Boston could be reminiscent of the Son of Sam’s impact on New York, his relationship with Hotchner is reminiscent of the one Gary Charles Evans, a serial killer who befriended David Berkowitz in prison, had with a police detective named James Horton. It was not as violent as the fictional one, but for years Horton knew Evans, thought he was a small-time burglar, and even used him as an informant, without being aware of Evans’s serial murders (including that of a former partner in crime named Michael Falco—coincidentally, the same last name Berkowitz had at birth). Evans, his biographer, M. William Phelps, says, was “a master escape and disguise artist.”

  IT’S UNLIKELY THAT there’s ever been a living serial murderer with Frank Breitkopf’s combination of folksy but sophisticated charm, his brilliant mind and vast knowledge of history and culture, and his cold-blooded, sadistic nature. The character, a psychopathic sexual sadist, may have killed hundreds of people from coast to coast in a thirty-year period.

  A record like that brings to mind only one U.S. serial killer—at least, according to his own confessions. For his efforts, Henry Lee Lucas has been mentioned on the air a couple of times throughout the five seasons of Criminal Minds, in the very first episode and again in “Soul Mates” (412).

  If Henry Lee Lucas, known as the One-Eyed Drifter, is to be believed—and he rarely is—then his early childhood seems to have been custom-made to create a serial killer. Even if one is skeptical of his reports of the facts of his youth, there are witnesses and other testimony that support at least the broad facts. He was born on August 23, 1936, in Blacksburg, Virginia, in a log cabin without plumbing or electricity. His childhood home was described in a report from the site of Lucas’s first incarceration, the Beaumont Training School for boys, as a place that was “furnished with only necessities and is not clean or neat. There are four rooms, one of which houses two goats that belong to a roomer who is a half-witted man who owns a half interest in the house.”

  Lucas was the last of nine children. It’s unlikely that even his mother, Viola Dison Wall Lucas, knew who his real father was, but the person he called his father was Anderson Lucas, who lived in the cabin with Viola. She told Henry that Anderson was not his real father; on one occasion, in town, she pointed out a stranger and claimed that he was Henry’s father. That was most likely a lie meant to torture the boy.

  Viola was a prostitute, and by all accounts she was a vicious, hateful woman. She forced Anderson and Henry to watch her having sex with clients. She beat them both with sticks and broom handles. Anderson, bereft after watching her entertain a client, got drunk, staggered out into the snow, and fell down on a railroad track. A passing train severed both of his legs, earning him the nickname No Legs and ensuring Viola’s ability to control him. What little income he derived came from a still, which he taught Henry to operate, as well as to drink from, at the tender age of ten. Anderson also begged and sold pencils on the street. Still, compared to Viola, he was an angel, even sharing nickels and dimes with his son on occasion.

  Viola, on the other hand, let her pimp, Bernie, live in the cabin with the family. She cooked for herself and Bernie but refused to feed the others. What they did manage to scrounge, they had to eat on the dirt floor.

  Lucas described his childhood this way: “I hated all my life. I hated everybody. When I first grew up and can remember, I was dressed as a girl by my mother. And I stayed that way for two or three years. And after that I was treated like what I call the dog of the family. I was beaten; I was made to do things that no human bein’ would want to do. I’ve had to steal, make bootleg liquor; I’ve had to eat out of a garbage can. I grew up and watched prostitution like that with my mother till I was fourteen years old.” Viola did, in fact, send Henry to his first day of school dressed as a girl, with his long blond hair in curls. His teacher cut his hair and found some boys’ clothing for him. Later that teacher fixed him the only hot meals he’d ever had and provided him with his first pair of shoes.

  Everything young Henry loved, Viola destroyed. He claimed that he once had a mule. His mother asked if he liked it; when he said yes, she went inside, got her shotgun (which she had once used to shoot a client in the leg, spattering blood on young Henry), and shot the mule. Then she beat Henry for causing her the trouble and expense of having it hauled away.

  Lucas’s favorite relatives were his sister Opal and his older brother Andrew. It was Andrew who accidentally stabbed Lucas in the eye, severing most of the optic nerve. A local doctor partly repaired the damage, but then a teacher accidentally swung her hand into Lucas’s head and knocked the eye out.
This time, he lost the eye altogether and had to get a glass one. The work wasn’t done well, however, and the eye socket drained pus, which, along with Lucas’s dirty clothes, poor manners, and bad smell, made Lucas a pariah at school.

  His mother hit him with a two-by-four on one occasion, so hard that he was unconscious for thirty-six hours, until Bernie, the pimp, fearing a police visit, took the boy to a hospital. That and other head injuries, most inflicted by Viola, might have contributed to permanent neurological damage. To add psychological scarring to the physical, Viola told Lucas that he was no good and predicted that he would die in prison. On that count, at least, she was right.

  A half-brother taught Lucas the “pleasures” of having sex with dead animals. This, along with his mother’s horrific example, surely destroyed any chance that Lucas might have a normal sex life. In fact, he committed his first murder at fifteen. Wanting to know what sex with a human was like, he grabbed a seventeen-year-old girl at a bus stop and tried to rape her. She screamed and struggled, and he strangled her to death.

  In 1952, Anderson Lucas caught pneumonia after spending a drunken night outdoors, and died. Almost immediately, Andrew left to join the navy. Now Viola’s rages were directed almost entirely at Lucas. He took to spending as much time as possible away from the cabin and was soon arrested for breaking and entering. He was sent to the Beaumont Training School, the first of many institutions that Lucas would grace with his presence. At Beaumont, for the first time in his life, he had regular meals, indoor plumbing, electricity, and television.

  After a year at Beaumont, he did odd jobs, then was arrested and sentenced to four years in jail in Virginia. He served two and escaped from a chain gang. He fled to Ohio, where he got in trouble again and served thirteen months on a federal charge. Released from that prison, he went to live in Michigan with Opal. He had met a woman named Stella and planned to marry her, but then Viola showed up. According to Lucas, his mother couldn’t stand to see her son happy or in love, so she drove Stella off. In the midst of a drunken fight, Lucas stabbed Viola and fled. By the time Opal came home, it was too late to save Viola; she was dead.