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Summer of Fear: How NYC's .44 Caliber Killer Rewrote a City's Psyche
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
David Berkowitz, the .44 Caliber Killer, turned New York City's already-fractured summer of 1977 into a year of collective terror — reshaping behavior, tabloid culture, and criminal profiling forever. From the first shot in the Bronx to the parking ticket that brought him down, this is how Son of Sam hunted a city.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before you know who David Berkowitz is, New York City in nineteen seventy-seven looks like a place teetering on the edge of something irreversible. After you know, it looks like the only possible backdrop for what happened.
The first shot came on July twenty-ninth, nineteen seventy-six. Donna Lauria, eighteen years old, was sitting in a parked car in the Bronx.
By spring of nineteen seventy-seven, the story had a new dimension. Berkowitz started writing.
By April of nineteen seventy-seven, the NYPD had assembled a task force of seventy detectives working full-time on the Son of Sam investigation. They brought in psychiatrists to build a criminal profile, one of the earlier formal applications of that discipline in American law enforcement.
The interrogation produced details that widened the already large frame around the case. Berkowitz didn't just confess to the six murders.
To understand the summer of nineteen seventy-seven properly, you have to hold both realities at once. There was the disco summer.
Berkowitz's early years in prison were violent. He was stabbed by another inmate, which earned him the nickname "Berserkowitz" among the tabloids.
The Son of Sam case is often filed under true crime mythology, and the mythology is real. The letters, the dog, the name, the city in crisis, the parking ticket.
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