Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Seventeen-year-old Bronx schoolgirl Judy Placido went to the same school as Valentina Suriani and had been to her funeral. Three weeks after the Breslin letter appeared, on 25 June, she celebrated her graduation from high school at a discotheque called Elephas in Queens. There she met a handsome young man called Salvatore Lupo, who worked in a petrol station. They hit it off immediately and went outside to a car for some privacy. As Salvatore slipped his arm around Judy’s shoulders, they discussed the Son of Sam killings. At that moment, their lurid speculation turned into murderous reality. A .44 bullet smashed through the passenger window, passed through Salvatore’s wrist and into Judy’s neck. A second bullet hit her in the head, but miraculously failed to penetrate her skull. A third bullet entered her right shoulder. Terrified, Salvatore threw open the car door and ran back to the discotheque for help. But it was too late. The shooting was over and the attacker had fled. Although she had been hit three times, Judy was quite unaware that she had been shot. She was shocked to see in the rear-view mirror that her face was covered with blood. She too jumped out of the car and headed for the disco, but she only made it a few yards before she collapsed. Salvatore suffered a shattered wrist and cuts from the flying glass. And in hospital, it was found that Judy had unbelievably escaped without serious injury.

  Nevertheless, the city was in panic. Takings at discotheques and restaurants – particularly in Queens – fell off, while newspaper circulations soared. Not only did they have the gory details of the latest shooting to relay, they could speculate about the next killing.

  In the Son of Sam’s letter to Jimmy Breslin, he had written: ‘TELL ME JIM, WHAT WILL YOU HAVE FOR JULY TWENTY-NINTH?’ That was the date of the first murder. Was he planning to celebrate the killing of Donna Lauria with another murder? New York’s English-born Mayor Abraham Beame could not wait to find out. He was running for re-election. He quickly announced that even more officers were being seconded to the Omega investigation. Overnight it became the largest single operation in the history of the New York Police Department. Two hundred men were on the case. They recruited from precincts in every borough of the city. The investigation cost more than $90,000 a day to run. Volunteers like Donna Lauria’s father, Mike, manned special Son of Sam patrols and the number of calls to Omega’s hotline, which started at 250 a day, peaked at 5,000 a day. A team of psychiatrists tried to come up with some sort of profile of the killer. The best they could come up with was that he was ‘neurotic, schizophrenic and paranoid’. This description was duly released by the police. It did not help anyone to identify the gunman.

  Fortunately, 29 July passed without incident. But two days later, with a sense of relief, two sisters from Brooklyn, 15-year-old Ricki Moskowitz and 20-year-old Stacy, decided to go out. In a Brooklyn restaurant, they were approached by a handsome young man who introduced himself as Bobby Violante. The next day, Bobby and Stacy went to see the film New York, New York. Afterwards, they went to dinner, then headed off to a quiet place where they could be alone. They drove to a secluded spot on Shore Parkway near Coney Island, South Brooklyn, which was used as an urban lovers’ lane. They felt safe enough there. So far there had been no Son-of-Sam killings in the borough of Brooklyn and the nearest shooting had taken place 22 miles away in Queens. What they did not know was that, a week before, a man claiming to be the Son of Sam had phoned the Coney Island Precinct and said that he would strike next in that area. Extra patrol cars were assigned to Brooklyn and Coney Island. Shore Parkway was being patrolled regularly.

  Bobby Violante and Stacy Moskowitz pulled up under a street lamp, the only available parking spot. And there was a full moon that night. It was not dark enough for what they had in mind, so the two of them went for a walk in the park nearby. They walked over a bridge and spent a few minutes playing on the swings. Near the public toilets they noticed a man in jeans, who they described as a ‘hippy type’, leaning against a wall. He was not there when they walked back to the car. Back in the car, they kissed. Stacy suggested that they move on, but Bobby wanted one more kiss. It was a mistake. While they were embracing, Bobby Violante took two bullets in the face, blinding him and exploding his eardrums. He could neither see nor hear, but he felt Stacy jerk violently in his arms, then collapse forward. He feared she was dead. Bobby threw himself against the car horn, fumbled at the car door, cried for help, then collapsed on the pavement.

  In the car in front, Tommy Zaino had seen the shooting in his rear-view mirror. He had watched as a man approached the car from behind and pull out a gun. From a crouching position, he had fired four shots through the open passenger window. When his girlfriend, Debbie Crescendo, heard the shooting, she said ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Get down,’ he said. ‘I think it’s the Son of Sam.’

  Zaino watched as the gunman ran towards the park. He looked at his watch. It was exactly 2.35 a.m. A patrol car was just five blocks away at the time.

  Stacy Moskowitz was still conscious when the ambulance arrived. One bullet had grazed her scalp, but the other had lodged in the back of her brain. She died 38 hours later. Bobby Violante survived, but his sight could not be restored.

  Tommy Zaino gave a good description of the killer. He was stocky with stringy, fair hair. This matched the description given by Donna DeMasi and Joanne Lomino, but not the one of the dark curly-haired man described by Jody Valente and the neighbour in the DeMasi/Lomino case. The police wondered whether he was wearing a wig. A beautician and her boyfriend were seated by the entrance to the park when they heard the shots. They saw a man wearing a denim jacket and what they took to be a cheap nylon wig. He jumped into a light-coloured car and drove off, as if he had just robbed a bank. A young girl on a bicycle identified the car as a yellow Volkswagen. A nurse who looked out of the window when she heard the shots, also said that she had seen a yellow VW. It almost collided with another car at the first intersection and the driver was so incensed that he gave chase, only to lose the car after a couple of blocks. The yellow VW’s driver, he said, had stringy brown hair.

  But an even more vital witness took a little longer to come forward. She was Mrs Cacilia Davis, a 49-year-old widow, who had been out with a male friend. They had returned to her apartment, two blocks from the park, at around 2 a.m. They sat and talked for a few minutes but, as they had been forced to double park, they kept an eye open for other cars. A little way ahead, Mrs Davis saw a police car and two patrolmen writing out parking tickets. Some way behind was a yellow Ford Galaxie. It was parked by a fire hydrant and a few minutes before an officer from the patrol car had given it a ticket. A young man with dark hair walked up to the Galaxie and irritably pulled the parking ticket from the windscreen.

  Mrs Davis invited her friend in for coffee. He declined, saying that it was 2.20 a.m. already. At that moment, the police car pulled off. So did the Galaxie, but it could not get past Mrs Davis’ friend’s car. The man in the Galaxie impatiently honked the horn. Mrs Davis hurriedly got out and her friend pulled off. The Galaxie followed, passing him quickly and speeding after the police car. Minutes later, Mrs Davis went out to take her dog for a walk in the park. She noticed Tommy Zaino’s car, Bobby Violante’s car and a VW van. On her way home, she saw a man with dark hair and a blue denim jacket striding across the road from the cars. He glared at her and he was walking with his right arm stiff, as if something was concealed up his sleeve. He also looked rather like the man with the Ford Galaxie she had seen earlier. Mrs Davis did not come forward with this information immediately though. She realised that if the man she had seen was the Son of Sam, she was in danger. He could easily identify her and he knew where she lived. Two days after the shooting, Mrs Davis told two close friends what she had seen. They realised that she might have a vital clue and urged her to call the police. Eventually, her friends called the police on her behalf. Detective Joseph Strano visited her and took her statement. It caused hardly a ripple. Tommy Zaino, the best witness to the shooting, had seen a man with fair hair, not dark. And the driver of the
Ford Galaxie had left the scene of the crime before the shooting.

  But Mrs Davis now felt that she had risked her life to come forward and would not be ignored. She threatened to go, anonymously, to the newspapers with her story. To humour her, Detective Strano interviewed her again, bringing along a police artist to make a sketch of the man. He also took her on a shopping expedition to see if she could pick out a similar denim jacket. But still nothing got done. The problem with her story was that the local police had not issued any parking tickets in that area that night. But the police cars patrolling the area had been seconded in from other boroughs. It was ten days before four missing tickets turned up. Three of the cars were quickly eliminated. The fourth, a yellow Galaxie, number 561-XLB, belonged to a David Berkowitz of 35 Pine Street , Yonkers, a suburban area just north of the Bronx. Detective James Justus called Yonkers police headquarters. Switchboard operator Wheat Carr answered. Justus said that he was working on the Son-of-Sam case and that he was checking on David Berkowitz. The woman shouted, ‘Oh, no.’

  Not only did she know David Berkowitz, she had suspected that he was the Son of Sam for some time.

  It had begun the previous year when her father began to receive anonymous letters complaining about his dog. In October, a petrol bomb had been thrown through the window of the Carr’s house at 316 Warburton Avenue, Yonkers. A neighbour had also been receiving anonymous letters and abusive phone calls and on Christmas Eve 1976, someone had fired a number of shots through their window and killed their Alsatian. Then on 27 April 1977, someone entered the Carr’s backyard and shot their black labrador, Harvey. On 10 June 1977, Wheat’s father Sam Carr had received a phone call from a man named Jack Cassaras who lived in New Rochelle, out on Long Island Sound. Mr Cassaras wanted to know why Mr Carr had sent him a get well card. The card said that Mr Cassaras had fallen off a roof but he had never even been on a roof. Mr Carr had no explanation and invited Mr Cassaras over to discuss the matter. The drive took about twenty minutes. Sam Carr examined the card. Strangely, it had a picture of an Alsatian on it and Mr Carr told Cassaras about the bizarre things that had been happening. Mr Cassaras drove home even more puzzled, but his son thought that he had the answer. The year before, the Cassaras family had rented out a room above their garage to a David Berkowitz. He had complained about the Cassarases’ Alsatian. After a few weeks, he had left suddenly without collecting the deposit of $200. When Mrs Cassaras looked David Berkowitz up in the telephone directory, she found that he now lived at 35 Pine Street, Yonkers. She rang Sam Carr and asked him whether Pine Street was near them. It was right around the corner. Mr Carr was convinced that David Berkowitz was responsible for the harassment they had suffered and went to the police. However, the police explained that they could take the matter no further without more concrete evidence.

  Another of Berkowitz’s neighbours, Craig Glassman, had also been receiving abusive letters. He lived in the apartment underneath Berkowitz. But he was a police officer and when, a week after the Moskowitz murder, rubbish was piled against Glassman’s front door and set on fire, he reported it. That was 6 August 1977. He also showed detectives two anonymous letters he had received. They accused Glassman of being a spy planted there by Sam Carr. Glassman and the Carrs were part of a black magic sect out to get him, the author alleged. The detective who examined the letters recognised the handwriting. It belonged to another man he was investigating – David Berkowitz.

  However, Berkowitz was not the only suspect in the Son-of-Sam slayings. New York has a rich supply of paranoid schizophrenics. Besides, Berkowitz did not fit the description given by Tommy Zaino. Nor did he drive a yellow VW. So it was not until 10 August 1977 that Omega detectives John Longo and Ed Zigo went to Yonkers to check Berkowitz out. Zigo spotted Berkowitz’s Ford Galaxie parked outside the apartment block in Pine Street. There was a bag on the back seat with a rifle butt protruding from it. In New York, possessing a rifle did not even require a licence. Nevertheless, Zigo forced open the car. Inside he found another, more formidable weapon, a Commando Mark III semi-automatic. Then in the glove compartment, he found a letter addressed to the head of Operation Omega, Deputy Inspector Timothy Dowd. It said that the next shooting would be in Long Island. Detective Zigo phoned into Operation Omega and told Sergeant James Shea, ‘I think we’ve got him.’

  Police from all over the city were brought in. They staked out the car for six hours until Berkowitz turned up. He was a stocky man with a round cherubic face and dark hair. When he got into the driver’s seat, he found himself looking down the barrel of a police revolver.

  ‘Freeze!’ yelled Detective William Gardella. ‘Police!’

  Berkowitz simply smiled.

  Detective John Falotico opened the passenger door, held his .38 to Berkowitz’s head and told him to get out. When he put his hands on the roof, Falotico asked, ‘Who are you?’ Berkowitz answered, ‘I am Sam.’

  At One Police Plaza Berkowitz confessed to the shootings and the anonymous letters. He also admitted that his crime spree had begun on Christmas Eve 1975. About seven o’clock he had driven to the Co-op City in the Bronx, where his adoptive father lived. He saw a young Hispanic woman leaving a store and followed her. He pulled a knife and stabbed her in the back. She did not realise what had happened, turned, screamed and grabbed his wrist. He ran away. But on his way home, he followed 15-year-old Michelle Forman and stabbed her in the back and head. She fell screaming on the sidewalk. Again Berkowitz fled. Somehow she managed to stagger to the apartment block where her parents lived. They rushed her to hospital where they found that she had a collapsed lung. Her other injuries were superficial and she only spent a week in hospital. His first victim did not even report the attack and was never identified. These early attacks convinced Berkowitz that he needed a gun. A friend called Billy Dan Parka bought him a .44 Bulldog revolver in Houston, Texas, for $130. Under interrogation, Berkowitz explained that he had been ordered to commit the murders by Sam Carr, via Carr’s demon dog Harvey. Other demon voices accompanied him when he was stalking his victims. Berkowitz was so forthcoming that his complete confession took only half an hour.

  Further enquiries revealed that Richard David Berkowitz had been an illegitimate child who had been given up for adoption as a baby. His natural mother, Betty Broder, was Jewish. At 19, she married Tony Falco, an Italian-American. He left her for another woman six years later. She began an affair with real estate agent Joseph Kleinman, a married man, in 1947. She got pregnant by him, but when she told him that she was going to have a child, he said she had better get rid of it, if she wanted to go on seeing him. The child was born on 1 June 1953 and was adopted immediately by a Jewish couple, Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz, who were unable to have children of their own. They named him David. But in 1967, when David was just 14, Pearl Berkowitz succumbed to cancer. He was deeply upset at this new loss.

  Two years later, Nathan decided to move to Co-op City in the Bronx, a middle-class suburb. But the area was deteriorating and gangs of youths soon began terrorising the neighbourhood. David’s school grades plunged and he seemed to lose any sense of direction. He was shy and found himself a victim of bullying, though others saw him as spoilt and something of a bully himself. He was big for his age, strong and an excellent baseball player. But he liked to play with kids younger than himself. His biggest problem was with girls. One friend remembers Berkowitz asking him if he wanted to join the ‘girl-haters club’. He only ever dated one girl in Co-op City, Iris Gerhardt. She liked his warm and obliging nature, but the relationship was never consummated. While Berkowitz remained chaste, almost everyone else seemed to be at it. This provided his motive.

  ‘After a while, at Co-op City, there wasn’t one girl who was a virgin,’ he said resentfully.

  In prison, Berkowitz wrote: ‘I must slay women for revenge purposes to get back at them for all the suffering they caused me.’

  His friends also started smoking marijuana but, again, Berkowitz was too inhibited to join in.


  Things got worse in 1971 when his father remarried. Berkowitz resented his stepmother and stepsister, and decided to join the army. But that did not last long. Home again in 1974, Berkowitz had rejected Judaism and become a Baptist. Nathan Berkowitz remembers his son standing in front of the mirror beating his head with his fists. Things became so uncomfortable in the Berkowitz household that David moved out to take a drab one-room apartment at 2151 Barnes Avenue in the Bronx. By this time Nathan became convinced that his son needed psychiatric help. But Nathan and his new family were moving to Florida and nothing was done. With his father gone, another door closed for Berkowitz.

  He had known from the age of seven that he had been adopted. Isolated, he tried to trace his real family. It took a year. Through the Bureau of Records, he discovered that his real name was Richard Falco and he came from Brooklyn. Using an old telephone directory, he managed to trace his mother and an elder sister. He dropped a card in his mother’s mailbox and, a few days later, she called him. The reunion was emotional. He also met his 37-year-old sister and became a regular visitor to the house where she lived with her husband and children. At last, he had found a family and, at last, Berkowitz was happy. Or so it seemed.

  In the first half of 1976, his visits to his real mother and sister became increasingly rare. He complained of headaches. In February, he moved into the room above the Cassarases’ garage out in New Rochelle. Two months later, he moved suddenly to Pine Street, Yonkers. And in July, he killed Donna Lauria.