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00:00In 1980, I was a prison reporter at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.
00:19One morning when I came into my office, there was a letter there from Attica Prison and it had
00:27David Berkowitz's name penciled down over the top and I thought, is this a joke?
00:37So I showed the letter to my Metro editor at that time and he looked at it and said, holy
00:44shit.
00:48As a prison reporter, I had interviewed a number of murderers and some pretty bad people, but
00:54the son of Sam Keller, David Berkowitz, was a different wild card.
01:02He was a modern day Jack the Ripper character with a gun.
01:08This is some crazy motherfucker.
01:15The summer of 77 won't be easily forgotten by New Yorkers.
01:19There was a killer on the loose.
01:22The .44 caliber killer who has come to be known as the son of Sam.
01:27It was a killer roaming the streets, murdering at will, and nobody was safe.
01:35A psychopathic gunman has killed six people and wounded eight others, shot at very close
01:40range with a .44 caliber bulldog revolver.
01:44Son of Sam simply shot people for no reason whatsoever.
01:51The killer has taunted authorities by writing letters, signed, Son of Sam.
01:56Sam's a thirsty lad and he won't let me stop killing till he gets his fill of blood.
02:02Overnight, he hit again.
02:04The city was just horrified, terrified, in a frenzy of fear.
02:09I'm afraid to walk around here.
02:11You know, I'm afraid to be in this neighborhood.
02:13Yeah, it could be me.
02:14I don't want to be the next victim.
02:16He's really taunting the reporters.
02:19He's taunting the police.
02:21He's taunting all of New York.
02:23Like, yeah, try to catch me if you can.
02:25Working up to my first meeting with David Berkowitz, I think anybody would have been somewhat anxious.
02:34He was in the room when I entered, and Berkowitz just kind of bounds around this table he was
02:49sitting on the other side of.
02:53And to my astonishment, he sticks his hand out.
02:56Hi, I'm David.
02:57And big smile.
03:00It was, you know, totally disarming.
03:04He would be the last person you would suspect of being a serial killer.
03:11All I ask some people, you see, is to be open-minded.
03:15You know, let them hate me as much as they want, you see.
03:19But at the same time, be open-minded so that they can learn something from this.
03:27He was a dangerous enigma to me.
03:30And I always liked to kind of poke the snake.
03:33The line is just between thinking about it and doing it.
03:37But to cross the line, to me, it was frightening, you know.
03:41The feeling of power, I didn't enjoy it.
03:44I just needed to do it.
03:46I just wanted to talk about it, and, and it just could look a little bit, but...
03:59I didn't see her when she was murdered.
04:07No, no, no, no, no, no.
04:37City Hall, New York, once the seat of power, once, before the need for services so greatly
04:51outreached the city's ability to provide them.
04:57New York City in 1976 was in the middle of a financial crisis.
05:02We were struggling as a city.
05:03Graffiti was all over everywhere.
05:08Subways were a mess.
05:10There just seemed to be a general loss of control.
05:13It is with a sense of gravest urgency that I report to you today on the state of our city.
05:25Mayor Beam had asked President Gerald Ford for a bailout, a federal bailout, and the president
05:31was not keen on helping us.
05:33In fact, the famous Daily News headline of the day said, Ford to New York dropped dead.
05:40People once called New York Fun City.
05:46Now the police and firemen's unions in New York are calling it Fear City.
05:51The pamphlet says the city is so unsafe that visitors should stay home.
05:56The Fear City campaign is a protest by the unions against planned layoffs of thousands of policemen
06:01and firemen to ease New York's financial problems.
06:04They laid off police.
06:06There were less cops on patrol.
06:08Crime started to increase.
06:10At that time, I was the commanding officer of the Queens Homicide Squads.
06:14We were very busy in those days.
06:19It was nonstop.
06:20I mean, you would be running from call to call to call.
06:23Really, almost every call was shots fired, robbery in progress.
06:28It was the Wild West.
06:35There were so many forces of nature happening in New York City, and a lot of us were coming
06:40of age.
06:42I was 17 years old, getting ready for my senior year of high school, and we were in the
06:47middle of disco fever.
06:50People were going out to clubs.
06:53We still lived our lives.
06:56We still acted like young people.
07:00But we were in danger.
07:01On July 29, 1976, Donna Luria, 18 years old, had just gone to a disco just north of the
07:26Bronx with her friend, Jody Valente.
07:29Jody was a nursing student, and Donna was studying to be a city medic.
07:34They were in Jody's car outside Donna's house on Buer Avenue in the Bronx.
07:54And then all of a sudden, this guy, this strange guy, comes about eight feet from the car.
08:06They got a little confused.
08:07And he goes, who is this guy?
08:15Donna was hit in the back and killed pretty much instantly, and Jody was hit in the leg.
08:20She survived.
08:21Later, Jody is able to give a police artist an idea of what the perpetrator looks like,
08:32because they see him.
08:33They turn around, and they actually see him.
08:37He was white, five foot nine or ten, curly hair, and gives that sketch to the police artist.
08:47My father woke me up at seven o'clock in the morning and told me that Donna Luria died.
09:02She got killed.
09:04Somebody shot her.
09:06And I started bawling like a baby, crying.
09:09I, uh, was Donna Luria's boyfriend from 1971 till 1975.
09:23She lived two blocks away from me.
09:25It started out as puppy love, and then it became love.
09:29I took her to my prom.
09:31She was such a nice girl.
09:34I used to call a lady, my lady.
09:36She liked that.
09:43They opened the wake up August 1st.
09:46My father called me up out of the basement, and he goes,
09:49I don't think it's a good idea that you attend the wake.
09:53He felt that they were going to blame me for killing her.
09:58So I just, I just, and I went downstairs and cried again, because I couldn't go to the wake.
10:03And I started getting investigated by the police.
10:10Whenever there's a homicide, you always look close.
10:12That's where you start.
10:14And then you branch off from there.
10:17And so naturally, he's suspect number one.
10:19They would bring me down there, put me in a room like you see on TV, with a two-way mirror and a
10:29light and a table.
10:30I told them my story.
10:32I never diverted off my story.
10:36They investigated Donna's ex-boyfriend for months, but he had an alibi.
10:42And so that investigation went nowhere.
10:44You know, you can't put a square peg into a round hole.
10:47If something doesn't fit, it just doesn't fit.
10:51For the first six months after she passed, I was accused of murder.
10:56I was in disbelief.
10:58Nobody ever apologized to me.
11:00As time goes by, the case kind of peters out, and then there's no leads.
11:07And then it became a cold case.
11:11It was just one of many.
11:14I was a detective sergeant in a homicide squad in Brooklyn.
11:18Back then, there was over 1,600 homicides.
11:21The number of cases was overwhelming.
11:24The cops had no motive, no suspects, and they could think of no reason why these two kids were
11:31shot on the streets of New York City.
11:34They had no idea, really, what was going on.
11:45The murder rate was up.
11:55Crime was crazy.
11:57But we really didn't feel like it affected us, because it wasn't happening in our neighborhood.
12:03I lived in North Fleshing.
12:04Fleshing's very big.
12:06For the most part, Fleshing's a very good neighborhood, still is.
12:10You know, when you're 18, 19, 20 years old, you feel like you're invincible.
12:16I'd like to think of myself back then as a free spirit.
12:20Smoke pot, drink beer, chase girls.
12:23That was pretty much it.
12:28Friday night, a friend of mine picked me up and drove me to Peck's Bar & Grill.
12:33That was our hangout.
12:35And a bunch of girls were hanging out with us.
12:40And Roseberry Keenan was one of them.
12:42I knew her from college.
12:44I was friends with one of her sisters.
12:47I'm 20 years old.
12:48She's 21.
12:49One thing led to another, and it's like, you know, you want to get out of here?
12:52Sure, let's go.
12:54And we left.
13:00We find a dark spot to make out.
13:03We were parked, and I was in a passenger seat with long hair.
13:07Rosemary, she was in a driver's seat with short hair, so it's very easy to mistake me for a woman.
13:16I asked Rosemary if she wants the hit of a joint.
13:20She says, no, I'm sure I did, and took a swig of the Jack Daniels bottle that I had with me.
13:28And, um, we started making out.
13:34And next thing you know, my world changed.
13:37The side window was blown out.
13:50I had glass shorts all over my hands.
13:52I turned to Rosemary and said, you know, start the car up.
13:56Let's get out of here.
14:01We drove back to Pets.
14:03Believe it or not, I jumped out of the car and walked to the front door.
14:07The guy checking proof, and he says, Carl, you don't look good.
14:10And I say, I don't feel good.
14:13And he said, you better sit down.
14:15And when he sat me down, my head went down, and my hair was apparently holding in a ton of blood,
14:21and my shirt just turned blood red.
14:24He said, what happened?
14:25I said, I think the car blew up.
14:28Three of my friends drove me to Flushing Hospital.
14:31The policeman comes up to the vet and says, son, you were shot in the head.
14:40And that's, that's my first recollection of knowing I was shot.
14:44The bullet went through the roof of the Volkswagen and created a hole about that big,
14:50which obviously saved my life because it took the impact of the bullet.
14:55The bullet hit me in the back of the head and put a hole in it.
14:59The doctors inserted a metal plate in my head.
15:04Miraculously, Carl De Niro survived, and Rosemary escaped unscathed.
15:10I knew I was going to live, but you know, I'm struggling with who the hell shot me.
15:20I was assigned to the 15th Homicide Zone in Queens as a detective.
15:25I was the youngest guy on board, but I made my bones, solved a lot of homicides.
15:32That was the most interesting time of my life.
15:37I was in the office one night, and we got a phone call that a male was shot.
15:43Where was he shot? Shot in the head.
15:45So, I went to the emergency room, and there was Carl.
15:54They kept pounding me on, you know, who did this? Who did this? I said, I don't know.
15:59They kind of jumped to a conclusion of a drug deal.
16:02The squad thought maybe it was a drug thing because he looked like a druggie at the time.
16:11Detectors were totally unaware that this case was related to a previous case in the Bronx.
16:18At that time, there was very little communication between boroughs.
16:22We were like separate cities, no communication, no computerization.
16:26And then stranger-on-stranger crimes, they're very difficult because there was no motive.
16:32You don't know why this guy would decide to kill somebody.
16:38And in the case of Carl and Rosemary, there was no description, so there was nothing to go on.
16:46These were two really nice kids, and yet someone was seeking them out to destroy their lives.
16:52When I first encountered David Berkowitz, it was clear from the beginning that he wanted
17:18to use me to promote himself as a good guy who had learned from his horrible crimes.
17:27This is why sometimes I try so hard to say to society, well, you know, I'm not a mad person.
17:31I'm not that mad, but it's impossible for them to know all this.
17:35And sometimes it bothers me, but I realize there's nothing I could really, you know, do about it.
17:41I also had my agenda, which was to learn the full story.
17:44I wanted to work back to who he was as a human being and where he went off the rails,
17:53feeling within myself that it's as important to study these guys as it is to study cancer cells.
18:01The immediate events?
18:16Well, I'm not going to just go into detail about the crimes themselves.
18:20There's no need to, you know what I mean?
18:21I'm talking about the mental state leading up to the crimes.
18:27The day, the way they started out, you know.
18:30Well, that's, that's awful difficult.
18:34See, I don't know where to begin.
18:38He was on edge when we talked about the specific shootings.
18:42At first, he wrote out talking about them at all.
18:44If there was a technique in my getting David Berkowitz to open up, I think it was by showing
18:54a real interest in his childhood. In fact, he talked about it with more eagerness than I
19:02ever thought he would.
19:03I felt like I was always on, you know, on another planet.
19:08I never seemed to really fit in. It all stemmed from this, you see.
19:14David Berkowitz was blessed with this face of an angel.
19:26This cherubic, smiling, curly-haired child that everybody sort of turned on to, adored.
19:35His mother had given him up for adoption three days after his birth.
19:40He was adopted by this very loving Jewish couple who were childless and very much wanted a child.
19:51World War II veterans, both of them, patriotic, caring people.
19:55World War II, the mother and father were decent, fair, kind, loving, everything positive.
20:06My mother used to tell me, you know, she used to tuck me in at night, every night.
20:09You know, kiss my forehead when I was a child.
20:13And she used to say, God be with you, angels be with you, pleasant dreams.
20:17You used to say that every night, you know?
20:24For some reason, his father, his adoptive father, Nathan Berkowitz, just decided one day when Berkowitz
20:31was in elementary school to drop the bomb on him that not only was he adopted, but that his mother
20:38died during childbirth and that his father was in too much grief to keep him. So that's why he ended up
20:44being adopted. My whole life, I was wrackly gilded. I walked around with his death wish,
20:51because I felt like now I had to pay for our debt. And that somewhere, I thought that there was a man
20:57out there that hated me and was possibly going to try to kill me, you see, for causing the death of his
21:03wife. I didn't really belong in the world.
21:08And so this created a definite shock to the system with Berkowitz. It created a hole inside of him.
21:18All of a sudden, he doesn't have a clue who he is, where he comes from. And by all accounts,
21:25he changed a little bit after that. He became a little darker, a little bit more quiet.
21:30That's when his true antisocial acts started.
21:38Pearl Berkowitz, she was so happy to have a child. So she would overlook these horrible things he
21:45would do.
21:53And she would, like, rip up her clothes or something, you know, tear a hole in her blouse or something.
21:59If she had lipstick or something, she used to turn up the thing so all the lipstick comes out,
22:05you know, her favorite lipstick. Then I'd break off the lipstick and turn it back down,
22:09there'd be nothing in there. And when she went to use the lipstick, there'd be nothing there.
22:13I was very vicious and mean towards her, and she didn't understand it, because I wouldn't stop.
22:20She was such a decent person, and here I was, a more mean guy.
22:28Like, I used to go off alone and just do acts of vandalism and things.
22:35Nobody would ever suspect me, because I don't seem the type.
22:37My whole life was set around punishment.
22:47I got to a point where I'd do something wrong solely to be punished, you know,
22:52instead of firing. This was sure a thing on punishment, you know.
23:00Did you set a fire for something like that?
23:02Well, yeah, but not anything that really caused any damage.
23:08Just the firemen would have to come, and it's the extent we should fire, you know.
23:17At some point, seven, eight, nine years old, his antisocial behaviors became something that
23:23parents could not ignore. So they looked up a psychologist and brought him in for sessions
23:33to find out what was going on to, uh, to make him do these mischievous things he was doing.
23:39In the process of interviewing David Berkowitz, the therapist introduced toy soldiers
23:55that he could use for a symbolically reenact his interrelationships with other children that he
24:02had problems with.
24:03David Berkowitz, who is that you're shooting?
24:13I mentioned that that was the person I was angry at that day.
24:16I said, well, that's Jeffrey, you know, I'm shooting at.
24:21So an adult, for maybe the right reasons, gave him the wrong message.
24:41A gun to target his enemies or take out something which caused him mental disturbance.
24:51Which was exactly the wrong thing you want
24:53to do with a kid like David Berkowitz.
25:09On November 27th of 1976, which was Thanksgiving weekend, very close to my home in Floral Park,
25:18Queens. There were two girls that had just come home, Joanne Lamino and Donna DeMassi.
25:28They had gone to the movies and they were standing outside Joanne Lamino's house
25:33and they were just chatting on the stoop.
25:37And then this strange guy approaches asking for directions.
25:48And then all of a sudden, opens fire.
26:06I was home sleeping. I heard the shots go off. And soon after that I heard my mother
26:12kind of getting hysterical. So I got up and I saw that, you know, they had some kind of accident on the porch.
26:22There was blood. Donna was bleeding pretty good. She got shot in the neck.
26:27And my sister was basically curled up in front of the front door. And she couldn't move.
26:32And that was the beginning of, you know, the horrible night.
26:42We were trying to get her to the hospital as soon as possible to get the attention she needed.
26:48She was in pretty bad shape that night.
26:51She couldn't feel her legs. She couldn't feel from the waist down.
26:55My parents and I were afraid she was going to die.
26:57My sister was, uh, two years and four months older than me.
27:06We were, uh, pretty tight. We were a pretty, pretty close family.
27:11She, uh, got in a little bit of trouble with my mom and dad from time to time.
27:15Uh, but, uh, you know, that was how it was in Queens back then.
27:21She was 18 years old when it happened.
27:24She loved to dance. She really loved to dance.
27:26She had a lot of friends and they really loved her.
27:30You know, she was anxious to get to the next phase of her life.
27:35Donna DeMassi, remarkably, she survived and did well with her recovery.
27:40But Joanne Lamino got shot in the back and she was paralyzed.
27:48When we found out that she was never going to walk again, it was, it was pretty devastating to the family.
27:52She was very depressed. She couldn't walk. She couldn't do any of the things she loved to do,
28:01dance or anything. The initial wounds from the shooting, she healed from those. But she still had
28:09permanent problems with her health. And, and some of those health issues became pretty severe as her life
28:16went on. And ultimately that's how she passed away. She was in the prime of her life when she got
28:24shot and she's just suffered the rest of her life.
28:27They only lived six blocks from where I lived and one of them was paralyzed. That stood out to me.
28:40I was aware of the Flushing shooting and that had only happened a month before.
28:45So I started getting a little bit nervous. These young people in pairs are getting shot. Why? What's
28:52going on? It is a middle class neighborhood, quiet and family oriented. There's not much crime here,
28:58especially violent crime. And this happened late at night, right at the steps of the Lamina household.
29:04The two young girls were saying goodnight to each other when they observed an unidentified male white,
29:09approximately 30 years old. The man all of a sudden started firing. He fired approximately five shots.
29:18At this point, we now have three shootings and still the police have not linked anything together.
29:27And since there's no perpetrator that they even have in mind, they're on the back burner.
29:33People assume because you worked in a detective division in New York City,
29:38you automatically were aware of the circumstances of other cases. But the volume of cases and the
29:44fact that the city was five boroughs, it was very difficult to coordinate cases. So at that point,
29:51the department is unaware that there was a pattern developing.
29:54We were freaked out. He was going to working class neighborhoods and he was shooting two at a time.
30:05The way he operated scared us so much.
30:17The way he was going to work, he was going to work, he was going to work, he was going to work.
30:26You've got to understand that there was no one thing that led up to this, you know?
30:31People are, are apt to, uh, just find some, like, one superficial reason and say,
30:38well, that was probably his motive, you know? This wasn't the case at all.
30:42It might have been two or three months total when we were meeting on a regular basis.
30:49I actually took vacation from the paper and went into the prison on weekends on my own time.
30:57Little by little, we actually formed, I guess you might call it, a mutual regard for one another.
31:04It's hard for me to even relive this because I haven't told anybody about, you know, these things.
31:09David was 14 when his mother, Pearl, had a recurrence of breast cancer.
31:20My father told me that my mom was, was sick, that she's in the hospital undergoing tests.
31:27And then after about a month, I found out she had cancer and she was going to die.
31:31She was everything for him. She was his world. And she gets cancer and dies. So his world collapses.
31:45Yeah, because there was so many times when I was angry.
31:48I used to curse her out and say, I hope you die. I hope you die.
31:53And then one day she never came back.
31:55It caused him to retreat within to himself. Here he is, having love. He loves this woman.
32:04And then all of a sudden, she's just ripped from him.
32:08Did you continue to live alone with your father after she died?
32:11Yep. But it's me and him.
32:16And then we went to Co-op City.
32:18The big house, a big modern housing development in North Cross.
32:22And Co-op City, David did develop a small group of friends, but he's continued to maintain,
32:31you know, his aloofness. And at this time, he was a master of deceiving almost anybody.
32:43As a child, a lot of David's problems related to aggression.
32:47He'd been practicing that act of keeping that horrible side of himself all inside.
32:59He had a nice face. He could always fool people with his face and his smile. It hid the inner demons.
33:07He says that he wanted, above all else, a woman to love. He wanted a woman to have a
33:29normal sexual relationship with. But he never found that woman.
33:36I was going with this girl, Iris.
33:41Then my friend told me that he saw her in the park, making out with this guy, Gary or something.
33:48And after that, we broke up. She went with him.
33:56Did you feel like, uh, hurting her? Hurting him?
34:00Yeah, but you see, at that time, I was always Mr. You know, control. I never, like, you know,
34:06think of, like, I thought of it, but I never did it.
34:09This was when you were in high school?
34:11Yeah.
34:15Found out later she played around a lot on a lot of guts.
34:17She wasn't that, uh, sweet and innocent.
34:22I should have yelled at her good or something, and then smacked this guy in the head.
34:26And they both had it coming, you know.
34:30He was incredibly sensitive to the least slight against him, his fragile ego.
34:39Everything was internal, and the internal kept on growing and growing and growing.
34:47When he actually tries to have a relationship, they're not interested.
34:55He got deeper and deeper into this morass of me against women.
35:01His desire, his loathing of them, his fear of them, and he saw them as the enemy.
35:14I still didn't forgive them, you understand?
35:17They might have thought that because I just shrugged it off and just went on my way.
35:22But they just stayed inside.
35:36It was close to midnight, and over the radio, shots fired.
35:55We got a female shot, got a male injured.
35:57The location was in a very exclusive area of Queens, Forest Hills. Looks pretty bad.
36:07I arrived at the scene. There was a car parked at the curb.
36:13There was a uniformed police officer, radio cars covering the area.
36:17The female victim, Christine Foyne, was sent to the hospital immediately.
36:23She was still alive.
36:25John Deal, the fellow Christine was with, he had blood all over him.
36:29I spoke to him, and he was distraught. He was crying.
36:35The girl in the car was his girlfriend, and they were talking about getting married very shortly.
36:44So they were out that night. They were in a wine bar, and they went to the movies.
36:50And they were on their way home, and they got in the car, and he fired right into the car.
36:58I revved the engine once or twice, and then all of a sudden, there was a crash.
37:03You know, I turned, and I seen Chris falling towards me, you know?
37:06And I grabbed. I started screaming, Chris, Chris, Chris.
37:09And I heard one more bang, and then I pulled it towards me.
37:15Looking in the car, there was blood on the window, blood on the seat, on the steering wheel.
37:22It was scattered throughout the front of the car.
37:28Looking in the car, on the dashboard, there was this fragment.
37:32And I said, boy, that's a big hunk of lead.
37:34It was a very large lead bullet. It was larger than I've ever experienced before, which was very unusual.
37:44And that's when Detective Bernie Judge come over. He had one of the cases in Queens,
37:50and Bernie said, you know, we had a similar shooting, and we had a big hunk of lead there, too.
37:56He then mentioned they had another prior shooting in Queens in a different precinct.
38:04And he said he thinks there was a homicide up in the Bronx with a big hunk of lead.
38:10That's when I became aware that there might have been other incidents.
38:18Christine Fruin was taken to the hospital.
38:21I went to see if I could talk to her, see if she saw anything.
38:27When I arrived at the hospital, I spoke to the nurse.
38:31She said, she's not going to make it. Christine died.
38:39She was 26 years old. Beautiful woman.
38:43There was nobody that had a disparaging remark about her.
38:47I learned an awful lot about her from the family.
38:52And that's what gives us the drive to go beyond.
39:00Christine Fruin, 26 years old, soon to be married, is dead in a shooting that has no apparent motive.
39:08He got into the papers about the shootings, particularly in Forest Hills, because that's a
39:13upscale neighborhood, and it raises a lot of eyebrows.
39:16And for it to happen so soon after these other shootings that had happened in Queens, people were starting to get really nervous.
39:24When something like this happens, you don't really know what to think, what's going on.
39:28This is supposed to be a very quiet, low crime area.
39:33I thought so too. It's really a lovely area to live, and I enjoy it here.
39:38The following days were quite busy.
39:42It was a matter of speaking to people that were in the neighborhood at the time of the shooting.
39:48We needed some leads, and we had no leads.
39:51You're looking for witnesses, and you'd like to establish a motive.
39:56In this case, the absence of a motive is what triggered everything.
40:01This is the second time in the last few months that an incident like this has happened in Queens.
40:06We have had an incident in another precinct in Queens that we're looking into.
40:11Whether there's any connection, we can't really say at this time.
40:15You said you weren't the kind of person people would suspect of doing that sort of thing.
40:18Yeah.
40:19I feel like, ah, I'm putting another one over on the stupid vest, didn't you?
40:23Yeah, I admit that.
40:29The next day when I went into work, I went to my borough commander.
40:33I said, it's strange, there was a couple of shootings.
40:36I said, you know, I'd like to get the couple of detectives together who had the cases.
40:40I'd like to work on it as a group.
40:46With Joe Borelli, we all gravitated to him because he was a seasoned guy.
40:50He knew his men and he knew how to treat detectives.
40:55He knew how to use them.
40:59We sat around in the office and we kicked it around.
41:04Big question was, had ballistics compared to bullets?
41:08And at that time, they hadn't done it.
41:10We had the four shootings, Donna Lauria, Carl DeNaro, Donna DeMacy, and Christine Freund.
41:23Bullet A, B, C, and D.
41:26The ballistics detectives were able to determine from the fragments the make of the gun.
41:33Because of the striations, each gun has its own signature.
41:38They determined it was a Charter Arms .44 caliber bulldog.
41:44The .44 is a big gun with a big kick.
41:47To fire it, you hold on tight with two hands and brace yourself or it could knock you down.
41:51The .44 bullet is big, nearly twice as big as the conventional .38 caliber police handgun ammunition.
41:57The .44 is designed, they say, to kill.
42:00The .44 will take off your arm.
42:03It'll take half of your head off.
42:05That's how powerful the size of this bullet and cartridge is.
42:11It was a rare gun.
42:12There were only 28,000 of them in the United States.
42:16A very unusual gun.
42:18I belong to a gun club.
42:20I shoot all the time.
42:22And I've never seen anybody with a .44 before that.
42:27It started to build so much that we all started to realize that we may have a serial killer.
42:46Sometime in 1975, Berkowitz is left alone in the big city.
42:51His father remarries, moves to Florida.
42:54And like most people, he wants to become a part of something.
42:58He wants to feel like he has a center.
43:00So he decides that he's going to go out and try to find his birth father.
43:06So he goes to these meetings called ALMA.
43:09It's an organization where they help you find your biological parents.
43:13At that time, I was 22 years old.
43:19There were about, you know, 20 people in there or so around these big tables.
43:25And I said, well, my mother died while giving birth to me.
43:29And I tried to locate him.
43:31And they all started to kind of like laugh.
43:33You know, like, and I was like shocked.
43:38I said, well, you know, what are you laughing at, you know?
43:41And they say, well, we were all told the same thing.
43:45And then somebody said, yeah, they're probably dead.
43:47She's not dead.
43:51So it penetrates.
43:52He's like, wait, my mother might still be alive.
43:54He has no idea who he really is.
43:57He's searching for his identity.
43:59This guy goes on a hunt for his biological mother.
44:03And from that day on, I launched an all-out campaign to find her.
44:07I made it my business to find her.
44:14He found from his own birth records
44:18that when he was born, he wasn't named David Berkowitz.
44:22He was named Richard Falco.
44:24He starts this search where he's going to public libraries.
44:30He's looking in phone books.
44:33He's cross-referencing different addresses to different phone books from different years
44:39until finally he comes across the right person, Betty Falco.
44:44His biological mother, who he had always been told died giving birth to him,
44:49was still alive and living somewhere in the New York City area.
44:54And he leaves a letter in her post box.
45:01And so she ends up calling him a couple days later.
45:05And he goes out to Queens and meets his biological mother.
45:10When I first met her, I saw a short, fat woman, you know, stringy hair,
45:27and all this old room and makeup from like 20 years ago, you know, sitting there, you know,
45:33holding a dress, still-fitting dress.
45:37I was kind of confused.
45:39It wasn't what I pictured, you know.
45:41I was hoping maybe a more attractive mother, you know.
45:48I don't know.
45:48She tries to be kind of, kind of phony, you know, homely on the outside.
45:55But inside, she was very, I don't know.
45:58She wanted something.
45:59Unfortunately, he finds that even though she's the biological mother,
46:06the father was married to another woman.
46:09This was an out-of-wedlock pregnancy.
46:12And he became utterly disgusted and totally wrote off his mother as,
46:19you know, a hopeless, horrible person.
46:23It just brings me back to the idea of women, you know, young girls and having sex in a car
46:29with guys, carelessness, you know.
46:33It's kind of like degrading to me to know that I was an accident, you see.
46:37You know, I had to be honest with myself and admit that I was a accident.
46:42So now anger took over to replace the guilt.
46:46It's something that just built up uncontrolled.
46:50It's like a volcano erupting.
46:55This inferno of rage, men and women having sex in cars, creating unwanted children.
47:03Children evil like me who should not be born.
47:07And he began middle of the night, long drive with a gun,
47:15looking for stand-ins for his horrible mother and father.
47:21When he couldn't find the ideal target, he would randomly select targets.
47:26Women who reminded him in some way of his mother at a younger age.
47:31The first one was hard because it was the first one.
47:35And I was finally doing the act that I had been wanting to do for so long.
47:46Felt like this was what I had to do.
47:48Like I felt I was getting revenge.
47:50That was about 50 feet past the last one.
48:17I was probably not that neighborhood.
48:22I was there for about an hour just walking around.
48:25And I saw her and I just did it.
48:36She wasn't sitting in a car, she was walking home.
48:38Virginia Voskerichian, been walking on Dartmouth Street, police say around 7.45 in the evening.
48:45A 19-year-old college girl a block and a half from her home.
48:49Suddenly, a shot was fired at point-blank range.
48:53He shoots her right in the face.
48:56We destroyed her face with that bullet.
49:01About a foot away.
49:02Just a few seconds before that, but it was too late.
49:15She had her books in her hands.
49:17So she put her books up here.
49:19And that's when he shot.
49:20And it went right through the book.
49:23And that was it.
49:24She's laying there, very pretty young girl.
49:29My oldest daughter was just maybe a year or two younger.
49:32So I'm looking down at the body and it really, it affected me, you know.
49:38The image that will always stay with me is the caramel colored boots that she was wearing.
49:44And she stretched out on the sidewalk and her life is over.
49:47This was not an isolated, out-of-the-way spot.
49:52This was a brazen shooting.
49:54So this indicates that something is unraveling in this guy's brain.
50:01When Virginia was shot, that bullet was a .44 caliber.
50:09Okay, it's game on.
50:13Mayor Beam came out to the 112th Precinct in Queens
50:16for a first-hand briefing.
50:17This following Tuesday's killing of 20-year-old Virginia Voskerikian in Forest Hills.
50:23That's when the case blew sky high.
50:26The mayor and police commissioner, Michael Codd,
50:29they knew they had to notify the public.
50:31And that's when it was first stated that these series of shootings
50:35that had started in July of 1976, they were all related.
50:40We have determined that there has been a .44 caliber revolver used in every one of them.
50:45The acknowledgement was made, we have a problem.
50:48We have a serial killer on our hands.
50:50Up until that point, there were no other serial killers in New York City getting the attention that he was.
50:57And they were dealing with a lone gunman randomly shooting really the middle-class
51:03youth of New York City, which was unheard of.
51:06The general description that we have is of a male, white, 25 to 30 years of age,
51:125 feet, 10 inches to 6 feet in height.
51:16Putting that information out there, that it was a .44 caliber,
51:20I'm not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
51:22Maybe giving out too much information.
51:25Maybe he'll stop for a while.
51:27Maybe he will change his MO.
51:30Maybe he will change his gun, which is not what we want.
51:36We had no idea who he was, where he was, what he was up to next, other than creating carnage.
51:43I had so much anger that one attack against society wasn't going to just extinguish it or quench it.
51:54It makes you want to go out and find this guy really bad.
51:57It's just what we keep on rekindling.
52:02It's not going to stop.
52:03The only way we stop him, we get him.
52:13Let's go.
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