MADNESS, SEX, SERIAL KILLER: A Disturbing Collection of True Crime Cases by Two Masters of the Genre

by Phelps, M. William

  That’s what happened. We have to be careful what we say to people we ostensibly love.

  Whatever the case, by the time we were ready to haul ass out of town, I was wishing we had left days earlier.

  And then that call came. My source was ready to give up the goods. She obviously didn’t want us to leave the city without hearing her story—which, as things would turn out, left us with our jaws on the ground.

  Chapter 7

  SHE WAS YOUNG. IN HER TWENTIES, I’ll say, and leave it there. She was dressed in a hoodie and clean clothes. She wore makeup, smelled good, and had a smile only someone with a length of sobriety could manage. She had been off the streets and sober for over a year. In fact, the night before we met, she had gone out to see her first concert.

  “I couldn’t have done that if I was using,” she said.

  She was scared, for sure. Terrified that the story she was going to tell would endanger her life more than it had already. But she proceeded to explain to me how she came to be with Kim Raffo the night before Kim was murdered. This was a startling revelation, given that it had never been reported.

  I had no reason not to believe her. She was sincere. She didn’t want the fame of being on television, I could tell. She didn’t want her name to be used, although we know who she is. And she wasn’t looking for anything other than the truth to be put out. She had tried once before to tell this story and it fell on deaf ears.

  As context, I need to explain that as a production begins, we have all sorts of people coming forward, each wanting to tell us a story related to a case we are covering. I get calls from people who claim to have all sorts of insider information about cases. We, as production crew filming a nonfiction television series, need to assess the credibility of each source we interview on camera. We don’t, in other words, just take anybody off the street to speak about a case on-air. We take our work seriously. I treat this series and the way I conduct myself in the same way as I do when I research a book. I am a journalist first. I am trained to question people and their motives.

  My source said she was partying that night and met up with Kim at a motel. They had been picked up at different times by two black guys in a van and driven to a seedy motel room on the White Horse Pike (not the Golden Key, which is located on the Black Horse Pike) under the lure of all the free drugs they wanted to do. When they arrived, there was a third john, a white guy, waiting for them.

  The white dude was sketchy and wired. He acted strangely from the moment my source entered the room.

  But walking in, she saw someone else.

  Kim Raffo.

  Kim looked terrified. Bugged out. The white guy was a freak, acting weird and smoking crack and putting his hands around Kim’s neck. He and the other men said derogatory things to all the girls, calling them “whores” and “sluts.”

  My source was frightened for her life, she claimed.

  “What else did you see when you arrived at that motel room?” I asked. This was the money question, I had been told. This girl, such a brave soul, had supposedly seen two of the other girls whose bodies were later found along the drainage ditch—but they were allegedly dead at the time. That is the story I wanted to hear about.

  Kim Raffo sat on one bed in the motel room. On the other bed were two “bodies,” my source said.

  Bodies?

  “They were lying still on their backs, and they had a cover [a sheet]… covering them. The whole time we were there, they never moved.”

  Kim was pretty much frightened out of her mind. My source asked Kim what in the hell was going on.

  “I don’t know,” Kim said. “They weren’t there when I went to sleep.” Kim had obviously passed out or spent the night in the room with the white guy. But after she awoke, she noticed that there were two bodies in the bed next to hers, both covered by a sheet, only their hair sticking out.

  I asked my source who she believed those bodies were.

  “Barbara [Breidor] and Tracy [Ann Roberts].”

  She was certain of it.

  I asked her about the white guy. How was he acting strange? What type of sex did he want?

  “… [T]o massage your feet...” she said.

  After a time, the guys decided that the party was going to move to another motel. One of the black guys stayed behind with the alleged dead girls in the other bed.

  “And the rest of us,” my source explained, “… we went in the van and we went and got another room.”

  From that first motel room, they (my source and Kim, the white guy and one of the black guys) traveled to a motel on the Black Horse Pike. The Golden Key.

  When they arrived, the white guy said, “I need to leave and take care of something.”

  He took off.

  A while later, he returned.

  “And that’s when,” my source explained, “it started to become a really scary situation.”

  Chapter 8

  FOR THOSE WHO HAVE SURVIVED THE ATTACK of a serial killer, at least the ones I have ever interviewed, the same scenario is described when that violent moment comes and the attacker unleashes his fury. They talk about how this person becomes a different human being all together. Not just in the way he acts, or his vocal patterns, but his face and the look on it changes entirely. He is in the kill zone, now somebody else, able, willing and ready to do the unthinkable.

  Effectively, he is someone else.

  I asked my source what happened inside that motel room—at the Golden Key—next.

  “This glaze came over him [the white male] and he just kept repeating, ‘I did something in my past... I did something in my past.’”

  After things became physical, with the men treating the women roughly, groping them, and saying harsh and degrading things, my source grabbed her things and convinced the men to let her leave.

  Kim Raffo stayed behind.

  Her dead body was found within the next twenty-four hours in back of that same motel.

  My source said that she went to the police, told her story, and gave them the names of the men she and Kim were with that night.

  The police told her they checked it out and released the men because they didn’t have any evidence to hold them. The police, according to her, believed those three men had nothing to do with the four dead women. This was, incidentally, around the same time period when John Doe was in custody, my source pointed out. In fact, as my source was being taken from one police station to another after giving her statement, she claims the cop driving her called her a liar and, naming John Doe specifically, said, “We got our man!”

  All I can do is report what I find. My source told me several more things about the police that I don’t feel comfortable enough to include. They are serious accusations that go beyond the scope of what I do. But I believe her. The look on her face, the tears in her eyes, her body shaking as she told me this story, with her gaze never once looking away, told me she was scared for her life. She had no reason—and nothing to gain—from coming forward to tell me this story. She wouldn’t give me the names of the cops she dealt with, so her motivation wasn’t to get back at them.

  Given all of this, what do I think?

  Rewinding a bit, going back to the beginning of our production, I believe we came face to face with one of these guys while we were shooting along The Track early in the week. As we sat in our rented black Suburban waiting for information, with the doors wide open facing the sidewalk, a guy walked by and gave my female producer a look that scared her to the core. This dude was serious. He had a girl with him that he was manhandling in a “come on, let’s get out of here” kind of way. He was black and fit a description I was given by my source, off-camera, of one of the guys she was with that night.

  Do I think my source spent part of her night with the killers in this case?

  I do. I also believe that after Kim Raffo’s body was uncovered, these guys left town, started dumping bodies at another location, or wound up in jail on drug charges. (I heard that they might ha
ve taken off to the Midwest somewhere.) The idea that these guys are the same perpetrators dumping bodies in Long Island has been played in the press and even 13 has mentioned this as a theory on the episode of “Dark Minds” we produced for this case.

  I believe the Long Island theory is possible, but not highly probable. I don’t know enough about Long Island to make a professional comment/judgment. (The Long Island case, by the way, is a possibility for season two of “Dark Minds.”)

  What I can say is that there are people involved in this case that know more. But for some reason, they refuse to open up.

  Epilogue

  This case, like most of those I profile on “Dark Minds,” is solvable. A major part of what I do in the series is akin to John Walsh’s “America’s Most Wanted.” I need people to come forward if they know something. My job is not to solve cases. I am not a cop. This is about information-gathering for me. It doesn’t matter how insignificant or significant you think the information you might have is. Let the cops sort it out. These girls matter. They had lives before the devil’s claws hooked into them. Their lives were not disposable. Help the authorities solve this case. Give these families some peace and allow the victims what they deserve.

  Justice.

  If you want more information about “Dark Minds” (or you have any tips for this case), please go to the Investigation Discovery website: http://investigation.discovery.com/ or visit the “Dark Minds” Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dark-Minds/192493800815468?skip_nax_wizard=true

  NOTHING THIS EVIL EVER DIES

  The Letters Son of Sam

  Never Wanted You to See

  by M. William Phelps

  Introduction

  SON OF SAM, DAVID BERKOWITZ, HAS FOUND GOD and claimed to be remorseful for his crimes. He’s recently talked quite openly about how Jesus saved him many years ago. In August 2011, Sam wrote a two-page letter to Fox News, in which he claimed to have “no interest” in seeking parole any longer thanks to being totally forgiven by Jesus Christ. Sam was fifty-eight when he wrote that letter last year. He has been denied parole, by the most recent tally, five times.

  “I have no interest in parole and no plans to seek release,” he wrote. “If you could understand this, I am already a ‘free man.’ I am not saying this jokingly. I really am. Jesus Christ has already forgiven and pardoned me, and I believe this.”

  On his official website home page, the convicted serial killer once explained how being locked up for the past two decades has weighed on him.

  “My criminal case,” he begins, “is well known and was called the Son of Sam shootings.”

  As if we didn’t know.

  Then, this vicious, narcissistic serial killer (a man that loves attention and thrives on the spotlight being shone upon him) goes on to say that while he was “living in a cold and lonely prison cell,” God grabbed hold of his life and set him on the path to righteousness. He said his story—or, rather, that holy path toward righteousness—has become an example of “hope.”

  This webpage message was written in 1999. The date is important to what you are about to read. Because my book, Every Move You Make, where I first published excerpts from several letters Son of Sam wrote to a fellow serial killer, was published five years later, in 2005.

  In this exclusive ebook that you are about to read, I’m going deeper into those letters, exposing another layer of understanding into the mind to this vicious, cruel serial killer we’ve come to know as Son of Sam.

  Today, as we have seen from the Fox News letter he wrote, Son of Sam claims to be “free” from the confines of prison. He says Jesus Christ has led him to the light of a new way. He calls his personal webpage “Forgiven for Life.”

  This ebook is about the real Son of Sam, not the façade Mr. Berkowitz wishes to perpetrate in his letters to news agencies and web readers. I understand forgiveness and people finding Jesus Christ and changing their lives. I respect it greatly. I don’t judge—unless, that is, a serial killer makes this claim and I have evidence proving the contrary.

  This ebook is about the true personality of David Berkowitz, the same man who murdered six people and tormented and terrorized a city. As for prison life, Berko says his days and nights behind bars are a constant “struggle,” and that he’s had his “share of problems, hassles and fights.” He claims another inmate cut his throat once and he almost died.

  Ah, the life of a serial killer on the inside.

  One rather high profile serial killer just recently told me during a phone call, “In prison, you’re either someone other inmates fear or want to kill.”

  “Yet all through this,” Son of Sam says, “and I did not realize it until later, God had His loving hands on me.”

  Further along into his website writings, Berko says that while he was “reading Psalm 34” one night, he “began to pour out [his] heart to God.” He says this moment of clarity, when God entered his soul, took place in 1987; he gives no specific date, just the year. “Everything seemed to hit me at once,” he claims. “The guilt from what I did ...the disgust at what I had become ...” And then, he says, he “got down on [his] knees and... began to cry out to Jesus Christ.”

  This revelation—a word I hesitate to use here—by a sadistic killer is a complete fabrication. Pay close attention to the date Sam gives us—1987—as you read this ebook. For when you get to the lost Son of Sam letter excerpts I quote, you’ll have a hard time believing God’s hand was resting on the shoulders of this maniac.

  I do not believe remorse, sorrow or empathy is possible for a serial killer. They cannot experience it. It’s not in their DNA. Forgiveness by God is absolute and entirely possible. I am a man of faith myself. I believe in forgiveness and mercy. I have not lived a life of purity. Far from it, actually. But true forgiveness, I also believe, is between the man and his maker—and not for public consumption or the local press, and especially not a website. That is all grandiosity. It’s Sam’s ego dictating to him what to do. He cannot help who he is. The demon inside him exposes itself at will.

  In this ebook, you’ll see the true mind of the serial killer at play, so you can decide if Sam’s current redemptive and colloquial conversion and dedication to Christ is legit.

  Chapter 1

  SERIAL KILLERS ARE MY LIFE. That obsession, if you’ll allow me the term, began with my first book, Perfect Poison. It went into overdrive while I was working on and finishing a second serial killer book, and I was introduced to an aspect of Son of Sam’s life and character I thought I’d never, for the life of me, find inside a cardboard box left collecting dust in an upstate New York basement.

  It started on one of those cold New England winter mornings. If you’re from here, you know what I’m talking about: it’s so cold you feel as if your bones will snap like twigs. I was at my desk working on a new book, Every Move You Make. I received what I presumed then to be a mildly irritating telephone call. (Every Move You Make, which is an important part of the ebook you’re reading, chronicles the life of serial killer Gary Charles Evans, and a relationship—friendship is perhaps a more fair word—Evans had with the investigator who eventually caught him, James Horton. Think Silence of the Lambs meets Catch Me If You Can. That’s Every Move You Make.)

  As I picked up the phone, I had no idea this seemingly annoying call would change the entire scope of my book. Or better yet, introduce me to a side of David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz no researcher or writer had ever seen.

  Why had this call come across as such an annoyance at the time? For one, I was ten months into the writing process of my book; I felt I had finished the research. In a few months, my editors were expecting a manuscript. In addition to that, I get calls all the time from people who want to be included in one of my books, but when push comes to shove, they generally have nothing of substance to offer or add to the background of the book.

  “Mr. Phelps, my husband would like to speak to you about Gary Evans,” said this gentle sounding woman’s voice. She s
eemed kind, sincere. I was taken right away by her affect.

  “Oh... in what context?” I asked, believing then that I had uncovered all there was to know about Gary Evans. Knowing now (after writing 23 books) what I didn’t then, it always happens: someone, somewhere, as soon as you’re ready to hand in a manuscript, comes up with what they feel is groundbreaking information about your subject. You’re obligated, if you have any journalistic integrity, to at least listen to this person and hear them out.

  “Bill went to grammar school with Gary Evans,” the woman explained.

  My interest was at first piqued, but then fizzled out. Rolling my eyes, I’m thinking, Grammar school? What in the world could this guy tell me about my serial killer that happened to them in grammar school?

  “Okay, put him on the phone,” I said.

  As Bill and I talked, I realized I’d heard of this man before, but believed he was one more in a long list of “friends” my serial killer had early in life that knew very little about him personally. You know, one of those casual acquaintances we all have in life. Yeah, I went to school with him... didn’t know him that well, though.

  We spoke for a minute.