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The .44 Killer's Origin: Berkowitz Before the Shootings
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before David Berkowitz became the .44 Caliber Killer, there was a boy shaped by adoption secrets, a mother's death, and a father who left. This episode traces the roots of Son of Sam — the childhood, the Army years, and the Yonkers postal worker nobody noticed.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
He didn't become Son of Sam overnight. That's the part people skip.
David Berkowitz was born on June first, nineteen fifty-three, in Brooklyn, New York. His birth mother was Betty Broder, a woman who had already been through one failed relationship and was involved with a married man named Joseph Kleinman when she became pregnant.
School didn't go well for Berkowitz. Teachers remembered him as hyperactive, disruptive, and difficult to manage.
Berkowitz found out he was adopted as a teenager. The exact circumstances have been described differently across different accounts, but the discovery hit him hard.
In nineteen seventy-one, Berkowitz enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was eighteen years old.
The city David Berkowitz returned to wasn't the city of movies and postcards. New York in the mid-nineteen seventies was in genuine crisis.
At some point in this period, Berkowitz attempted to locate his biological family. He found his birth mother, Betty Broder, and made contact.
Here's something that gets less attention than it deserves. Before Berkowitz ever pointed a gun at anyone, he was setting fires.
Berkowitz later claimed that demonic voices guided him. That a demon communicated through his neighbor's dog, a black Labrador owned by a man named Sam Carr.
By the summer of nineteen seventy-six, David Berkowitz was twenty-three years old. He was living alone in a small apartment in Yonkers.
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