David Berkowitz: Crimes, Son of Sam Letters, and Sentence

David Berkowitz, known as the Son of Sam, is an American serial killer who shot thirteen people in New York City between April 1976 and July 1977, killing six and wounding seven. He pleaded guilty in 1978, received a sentence of 365 years, and remains at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County, New York, where the parole board denied his release for the twelfth time in May 2024.¹²

Who He Is and Where He Came From

Berkowitz was born Richard David Falco in Brooklyn on June 1, 1953. His biological mother, Betty Broder Falco, gave him up two weeks after birth. Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz, a Jewish-American couple in the Bronx, adopted him and renamed him David Richard Berkowitz.³

Teachers described him as moody. He bullied smaller children, set fires from around age twelve, and tortured animals. Pearl Berkowitz died of breast cancer in October 1967, when he was fourteen, and the loss hit him hard. His adoptive father remarried and moved to Florida in 1971, leaving him alone in New York. He enlisted in the Army that same year, became a skilled marksman, and left the service in 1974. Back in the city, he worked as a postal clerk and, according to his own diary, set roughly 1,500 fires during the mid-1970s.⁴

The .44-Caliber Shootings

Berkowitz carried a .44-caliber Charter Arms Bulldog revolver and attacked young people, often couples in parked cars, in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn.⁵ In June 2024, the NYPD formally acknowledged an earlier attack it had not previously connected to him: Wendy Savino, shot five times on April 9, 1976, on Boston Road in the Bronx. She survived, lost her right eye, and spent two months in intensive care. Her account was validated nearly fifty years later after a researcher located her original composite sketch in the file of his first murder victim.⁶

The attacks Berkowitz pleaded guilty to:

July 29, 1976, Pelham Bay, Bronx: Donna Lauria, 18, killed; Jody Valenti wounded.
October 23, 1976, Flushing, Queens: Carl Denaro and Rosemary Keenan, both wounded.
November 27, 1976, Floral Park, Queens: Donna DeMasi wounded; Joanne Lomino wounded and left paralyzed.
January 30, 1977, Flushing, Queens: Christine Freund, 26, killed; John Diel wounded.
March 8, 1977, Queens: Virginia Voskerichian, 19, killed.
April 17, 1977, Bronx: Valentina Suriani, 18, and Alexander Esau, 20, both killed.
June 26, 1977, Bayside, Queens: Judy Placido and Sal Lupo, both wounded.
July 31, 1977, Brooklyn: Stacy Moskowitz, 20, killed; Robert Violante wounded and partially blinded.

Six killed, seven wounded, over roughly thirteen months.⁷

The Son of Sam Letters

At the scene of the April 17, 1977, double murder of Suriani and Esau, Berkowitz left a handwritten letter signed “Son of Sam.” It was the first use of the name, and the letter claimed voices were ordering him to kill.⁷

A second letter went to New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin and ran on June 5, 1977. “Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood,” it opened. Berkowitz named Donna Lauria, warned that “Sam’s a thirsty lad,” and listed four cryptic nicknames for police to chase, including “John ‘Wheaties’ — rapist and suffocator of little girls.”⁸ In the same column, Breslin appealed directly to the shooter to turn himself in.⁹

How Police Caught Him

The break was a parking ticket. On the night of the final Brooklyn shooting on July 31, 1977, a woman named Cacilia Davis was walking her dog on Bay 17th Street around 2 a.m. when she saw a man moving stiffly with his right arm held rigid against his side. Minutes later she heard gunshots. When detectives interviewed her days later, she mentioned officers writing parking tickets nearby that night.¹⁰

Investigators pulled every ticket written near the crime scene. One had been issued to a David Berkowitz of 35 Pine Street, Yonkers, for a cream-colored 1970 Ford Galaxie parked too close to a fire hydrant. Yonkers police knew him as a local eccentric. Detectives spoke with neighbors who described threatening letters and a dog shooting, got a warrant, and staked out his car. When Berkowitz emerged and climbed into the Galaxie around 10:30 p.m. on August 10, 1977, officers surrounded him. The .44-caliber Bulldog revolver used in the killings was in a paper bag under the front seat.¹⁰¹¹

Guilty Plea and Sentence

After his arrest, Berkowitz told authorities that a demon living inside his neighbor Sam Carr’s black Labrador had ordered the killings. Psychiatrists initially found him unfit to stand trial and reported as much to State Supreme Court Justice Gerald Held on August 30, 1977.¹² By a second competency hearing in April 1978, doctors had reached consensus: a “psychopathic personality with malingering concomitant paranoid and hysterical traits,” IQ of 115, competent to proceed.³

On May 8, 1978, Berkowitz pleaded guilty to six counts of second-degree murder and all related charges before three State Supreme Court justices in Brooklyn, publicly confirming he was the Son of Sam.¹³³⁴

In a 1979 interview with FBI agent Robert Ressler, Berkowitz admitted the demon-dog story was fabricated to support an insanity defense. He attributed his real motives to resentment toward his mother and an inability to form relationships with women.³ He said the same thing in 1980 recordings made by reporter Jack Jones at Attica, calling the story a “ruse.”¹⁴

The Son of Sam Law

Publishers reportedly offered Berkowitz large sums for his story before his trial was over. New York responded by passing a statute that barred payments to a convicted criminal for a personal account of their crime and redirected any such proceeds to the victims. The law became known nationwide as the “Son of Sam” law.¹⁵

The U.S. Supreme Court struck the original statute down unanimously in Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Members of the New York State Crime Victims Board, decided December 10, 1991. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that the law imposed a content-based financial burden on speech in violation of the First Amendment. The case arose when the Crime Victims Board tried to seize payments made to admitted organized-crime figure Henry Hill for the book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi. The Court accepted that New York had a compelling interest in compensating crime victims but found the statute “not narrowly tailored” and “significantly overinclusive,” because it reached works that merely contained incidental recollections of a crime.¹⁶¹⁷

New York and other states rewrote their laws more narrowly after the ruling. Twenty-seven states keep some form of Son of Sam statute as of 2025, and every state operates a victim compensation fund that can receive forfeited criminal earnings.¹⁵ Current reform efforts focus on social media earnings and crowdfunding platforms that did not exist when most of the statutes were drafted.¹⁸

Berkowitz’s victims pursued him in civil court. In September 1984, his lawyers settled with twelve victims and family members. The roughly $90,000 in royalties he held from books based on interviews was distributed among them, and any future earnings up to a $20 million cap were pledged to the same group.¹⁹

Where He Is Now

Berkowitz has been in prison for more than four decades. He is held at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Ulster County, New York.² He says he became a born-again Christian in 1987 after a period of despair, is known inside as “Brother Dave,” and operates an online ministry through evangelical supporters.²⁰ He has repeatedly said he does not believe he should be freed and once wrote to then-Governor George Pataki asking not to be paroled. Retired NYPD Captain Joe Borrelli, among others, has questioned whether the conversion is genuine.

He first became eligible for parole in 2002. The board has denied him twelve times. The most recent hearing was on May 14, 2024.¹

Lingering Questions About Accomplices

The NYPD has consistently maintained that Berkowitz acted alone. He himself muddied that position in a 1997 interview, recanting parts of his original confession and claiming he had been a “lookout” for most of the attacks on behalf of a satanic cult. He named John and Michael Carr, sons of the Yonkers neighbor Sam Carr whose dog had been central to the original demon story, as co-conspirators.²¹

Both Carr brothers died soon after Berkowitz’s arrest. John Carr died in 1978 in North Dakota, reportedly by suicide, as police were arriving at his door. Michael Carr died in a 1979 car accident.²² Investigative journalist Maury Terry argued for decades that Berkowitz was part of a network, pointing to eyewitness descriptions that varied widely, police sketches that seemed to depict different men, and the “John Wheaties” reference in the Breslin letter, which he tied to John Carr’s nickname. Terry published his theories in The Ultimate Evil in 1987.²¹

The Yonkers Police Department opened a case in 1996 that, per a Freedom of Information response, “has not been closed to this day.” The Queens District Attorney’s office under John Santucci also kept the case open for a time before closing it without ever bringing the matter to a grand jury.²¹ No additional arrests have been made, and no forensic evidence has surfaced to confirm other shooters. Berkowitz himself added a further wrinkle in a brief 2024 interview included in the Netflix series Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes, insisting he was not the person who shot Wendy Savino in 1976, directly contradicting the NYPD’s 2024 acknowledgment of Savino as his first victim.¹⁴

1
CBS News. Son of Sam Denied Parole
2
NJ.com. Where Is David Berkowitz Now
3
Radford University. Berkowitz, David – Serial Killer Information Center
4
Britannica. David Berkowitz
5
Biography.com. Son of Sam Murder Case Timeline
6
NBC News. Son of Sam Killer’s First Victim Recalls Smiling Man, Gunfire
7
CBS News. Son of Sam Serial Killer David Berkowitz Victims and Timeline
8
The New York Times. Second Letter From .44 Slayer Has Police Chasing Four Nicknames
9
New York Daily News. Breslin to Son of Sam: End Your Torment and Give Yourself Up to Me
10
New York Daily News. Parking Ticket Was the Key to Catching Son of Sam
11
TIME. Son of Sam Arrest
12
The Washington Post. David Berkowitz Called Incapable of Standing Trial
13
The New York Times. Berkowitz Pleads Guilty to Six Son of Sam Killings
14
New York Post. Son of Sam Doc Director on NYC Serial Killer Unearthed Interview
15
National Conference of State Legislatures. Where True Crime Stories Don’t Pay
16
Cornell Law Institute. Simon and Schuster v. Members of New York State Crime Victims Board
17
Oyez. Simon and Schuster v. Members of New York State Crime Victims Board
18
NewsNation. Mackenzie Shirilla Case Revives Son of Sam Laws
19
The New York Times. Victims to Get Son of Sam Cash
20
People. Son of Sam David Berkowitz Prison Life Now
21
NBC News. Son of Sam: Case Not Closed
22
The Guardian. The Sons of Sam Netflix Docuseries