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365 Years, One Parking Ticket: The Arrest That Ended NYC's Terror
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The .44 caliber killer terrorized New York City for thirteen months — and was brought down by a single parking ticket and one witness who almost didn't come forward. This chapter traces how ordinary bureaucracy accomplished what one of the city's largest task forces could not.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before you know who David Berkowitz is, New York in the summer of nineteen seventy-seven looks like a city losing its mind. Women cutting off their hair.
To understand how the arrest happened, you have to understand what the city had been living through. It started on July twenty-ninth, nineteen seventy-six.
On July thirty-first, nineteen seventy-seven, the killer struck again. This time in Brooklyn, which was a departure from his usual geography.
A parking ticket is a bureaucratic object. It records a license plate, a location, a time.
David Berkowitz was twenty-four years old at the time of his arrest. He'd been born Richard David Falco in nineteen fifty-three, given up for adoption, and raised in the Bronx by Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz.
Berkowitz initially entered an insanity plea. Psychiatric evaluations were conducted.
The transformation that came later is either the most interesting part of the story or the most contested, depending on your vantage point. Berkowitz, in prison, became a born-again Christian.
The case left marks that extended well beyond the courtroom. Spike Lee's nineteen ninety-nine film "Summer of Sam" captured something real about the atmosphere of that year, even as it filtered the story through drama.
Step back from the timeline for a moment. The case is often remembered for the letters, for the demonic dog narrative, for the tabloid hysteria.
David Berkowitz remains incarcerated. He's attended parole hearings he didn't have to attend and declined release he didn't have to decline.
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