Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 8, 1993 TAG: 9311080076
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: New York Daily News
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The thick steel door slides shut behind him with a menacing clang and the stocky, powerfully built inmate strides confidently across the prison visiting room.
He clutches a Bible in his left hand and offers a firm handshake with the other.
His eyes are clear and direct behind stylish, tortoise-shell aviator glasses, and he has the faint beginnings of a mustache. His short, neatly trimmed hair is graying at the temples and shows an uneven tonsure of baldness. His self-assurance is understated. He bears a striking resemblance to actor Richard Dreyfuss.
He is one of the world's most notorious killers - David Berkowitz, known as the Son of Sam.
At age 40, Berkowitz, inmate No. 78A-1976, Sullivan (County, N.Y.) Correctional Facility, does not resemble Mr. Monster, the Chubby Behemoth, the .44-Caliber Killer, the Son of Sam - the pudgy, grinning enigma he was 16 years ago when all New York was a fragile toy squeezed in the grip of his terror.
Today, Berkowitz is a mild-mannered, mop-carrying jailhouse janitor and born-again prison preacher.
Prison officials describe Berkowitz as a model inmate. He has moved from Attica (N.Y.) prison, to Clinton (N.Y.) prison, and now to the Sullivan Correctional Facility, working as a prison janitor and porter, taking classes and serving as a catcher on cellblock softball teams.
He makes 16 cents an hour in his day job as a janitor and 10 cents an hour in a night job as a porter.
He lives in a 6-by-9-foot cell with a steel-framed bed bolted to the floor and the wall. He recently repainted the cell. The walls are white. There is a toilet, a sink and table.
In 1988, he claims, a fellow inmate gave him a Bible and changed his life.
He will claim that as he was reading in his cell after lights out the words seemed very real, as if God were talking to him.
He will say that God delivered him from all his fears.
Two years ago, Berkowitz, who uses his prison pay to buy Bibles to send overseas, volunteered to live in a cell-block with emotionally disturbed inmates.
He keeps fit by lifting weights. He is a baseball fan and watched the World Series on television.
A jagged red scar stretches from his Adam's apple to just below his left ear - souvenir of a near-fatal encounter with a shiv-wielding inmate at Attica prison in 1979.
Though Berkowitz has molded his honor to the prison code - he never divulged his attacker's name - he has not adapted the style of a hardened jailbird.
The man known as the Son of Sam has become a son of God and in a dramatic series of prison interviews to be broadcast on the television show "Inside Edition" at 7:30 p.m ET Monday, Berkowitz breaks his silence in the hope, he claims, of turning young people from the trail of tragedy that ruined his life and led to six bloody murders.
In a calm, measured voice, Berkowitz will express remorse for his rampage and, for the first time publicly, offer a version of the terror that contradicts his confession and police findings.
He agreed to the interview with writer Maury Terry, and producer Wayne Darwen after a year-long correspondence with Terry. Berkowitz' version is a tale in which he claims three of the killings were carried out by members of a Satanic cabal while he stood guard.
He names two of the other supposed trigger men, fellow Satanists Michael and John Carr, and claims that an unnamed woman and an ex-Yonkers cop also committed some of the murders. He provides no specifics.
Berkowitz will say he offers no excuse for his actions. He will admit he took some lives and claim he is very sorry for that.
Citing reams of evidence, police don't believe Berkowitz' new version of the killing spree.
It was in 1977. It was the year Jimmy Carter became president and Elvis died, when Ed Koch won the mayoralty and the city was plunged into its second devastating blackout.
But most New Yorkers remember 1977 as a year of fear - 13 months with a madman on the prowl, stalking women with a .44-caliber Charter Arms revolver, striking 13 times, killing six and wounding seven. Two intended victims escaped unharmed.
It was a year in which fearful parents forbade their daughters to go out at night. Long-tressed young women - the killer's prime target - cut their hair short and never walked alone.
The rampage began at 1:10 a.m. on July 29, 1976, as Donna Lauria, an 18-year-old medical technician, sat in a car with her friend Jody Valenti, a 19-year-old student nurse, outside Lauria's apartment in the Bronx after spending the evening at a Westchester disco.
Three shots shattered the passenger-side window. Lauria was killed instantly by a bullet in the back. Valenti was wounded in the thigh. Police, baffled by the shooting, recovered .44-caliber slugs at the scene.
Three months later, on Oct. 23, Carl Denaro, a 20-year-old sales clerk about to join the Air Force, was wounded in the head in another apparently motiveless shooting as he sat with friend Rosemary Keenan, 18, on a quiet Flushing, Queens, street.
The bullets were .44-caliber.
After two more shootings - resulting in two deaths and one wounding - the pattern suddenly became clear. A similar method of operation and the same caliber gun had been used in all the shootings. Ballistics evidence indicated that the same model weapon - a Charter Arms Bulldog revolver - was used in at least two, possibly three, of the attacks.
Then, on March 10, 1977, two days after the .44-caliber slaying of Columbia University student Virginia Voskerichian, 19, on a Forest Hills street, Mayor Abe Beame announced the existence of a lone, stalking gunman: the .44-caliber killer.
Police released sketches showing suspects of varying descriptions. They insist evidence, and Berkowitz' confession, prove there was but one trigger man.
What do they know, Berkowitz will say. Then he will shake his head with a rueful smile as he spins his tale of a cult of devil-worshiping killers sharing a single gun.
As a media frenzy continued to feed the city's fear, Valentina Suriani, 18 and Alexander Esau, 20, were shot dead on April 17 as they sat in a darkened lovers lane on a service road of the Hutchinson River Parkway in the Bronx.
The gun was .44-caliber, and this time the killer left a calling card - a letter to Queens Detective Cmdr. Joseph Borrelli. "I am a monster," it said. "I am the Son of Sam."
By June 26, when Judy Placido, 17, and Sal Lupo, 20, were wounded outside Elephas, a Queens disco, the Son of Sam task force had grown to 300 detectives, police phone lines were overwhelmed with tips, and psychics from all over the world had horned in on the probe.
The killer feasted on the attention.
"Hello from the gutters," he wrote to then-Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin. "What will you have for July 29th?" It was a reference to the anniversary of the first killing. As the date approached, the city held its breath.
The day came and went, then another day and another. At 2:35 a.m., July 31, a gunman emerged from the darkness of Brooklyn's Dyker Beach Park. Again shots rang out from a .44-caliber Bulldog. Stacy Moskowitz, 20, was killed. Her date, Robert Violante, 30, was blinded.
And then it was over.
Ten days later, Berkowitz, who had eluded the widest police dragnet in city history for over a year, was tripped up by a parking ticket he received near the scene of the Moskowitz killing.
Arrested outside his apartment on Pine St. in Yonkers in Aug. 10, 1977, Berkowitz confessed to all the killings.
The pudgy, 24-year-old postal letter sorter grinned as he told detectives: "I had to do what I had to do. I had my orders. Sam sent me."
Sam, he told them, was Sam Carr, his neighbor "who lived 6,000 years ago. . . . I got the messages through his dog. He told me to kill."
A .44-caliber revolver found in his car matched the one used in the shootings. Berkowitz pleaded guilty. There was no trial. He was sentenced to six consecutive 25-years-to-life sentences. He will not become eligible for parole until 2002.
Sometimes, he gazes wistfully through the barred prison windows, fences and razor wire to the rolling Catskills countryside.
He doesn't expect ever to leave prison.
by CNB