SUMMER OF FEAR, Part 1: Son of Sam and the Bankrupt New York That Let David Berkowitz Start Killing

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, I'm Garrett Fisher, and this is Daily Crime and Justice for Monday, July twentieth, twenty twenty six. Welcome to Fear City. It's the middle of June nineteen seventy five and you have just come off a plane at Kennedy Airport and a New York City Police officer is standing in the terminal handing you a pamphlet. There is a hooded skull on the cover of it. Inside there are nine rules, and the rules are for staying alive. Do not walk anywhere, Do not take the subway ever for any reason. Do not leave the Midtown area.

0:43 Do not go out after six o'clock in the evening. And across the top in block letters is the title the Police Union of the City of New York chose for the City of New York Welcome to Fear City, a survival guide for visitors. They printed a million of them a million because the city had run out of money and five thousand of those officers were going to be fired on the first of July. And this was the last idea they had, which was to stand at an arrivals gate and tell the entire world that the place they had sworn to protect could not be survived. Hold on to that pamphlet. We are going to need it now, come forward with me. Thirteen months it's July in New York and the city is still broke, not tight, not struggling, broke, fourteen billion dollars in debt, six billion of it due right now, and no bank on Earth willing to lend it a nickel. Last October, the mayor went to Washington with his hat in his hand, and the President of the United States told him no. The Daily News printed it on the front page in letters you can read from clear across a subway car forward to city drop dead. People still have that page taped up in bars. So the city cuts it cuts everything daycare, your centers, libraries, hospitals, firehouses, which is a detail I want you to hold on to. For about ninety seconds.

2:07 And those five thousand cops went exactly as promised, and they did not come back, And the pamphlet turned out to be right. The garbage men walk off the job that same month, in ninety degree heat, twenty eight thousand tons a day sitting on the curb. The subway cars are covered wall to wall in spray paint, half of them without working fans, and the announcements about crime come so often that people stop hearing them. Up in the South Bronx landlords have run the math and figured out that a burned building pays better than a rented one, so they hire people to set the fires. And the firehouses that would have answered those calls are the same ones that got closed. Whole blocks come down, then they stay down, and people walk past the rubble on the way to the train the way you would walk past weather.

2:52 There will be one thousand, six hundred and twenty two murders in New York City in nineteen seventy six, sixteen hundred and twenty two in one year in one city, and nobody is coming to help, because by nineteen seventy six, a large part of America has quietly decided that New York got exactly what it had coming. And then for one day, the whole country looks at it anyway, because it is nineteen seventy six and America is turning two hundred years old, and somebody decided that the biggest party for the biggest birthday should happen in the biggest city. They call it Operation Sale. On the fourth of July, more than two hundred vessels come up through the narrows and into the harbor, sixteen of them tall ships under full canvas, square rig school ships from more than fifty countries, banner snapping, and the Coastguard Cutter Eagle out front leading the whole parade up the Hudson. Six million people line the shores. Thirty thousand pleasure boats crowd the water. It is by most counts, the largest crowd in the history of New York. They close the Henry Hudson Parkway and people stand on the highway to watch. It drizzles in the morning and nobody leaves. And standing on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Forstall taking a twenty one gun salute as the ship's pass in review is President Gerald Ford. He rings the ship's bell thirteen times, once for each of the original colonies, twenty months after

4:25 he let this city go down. I'm not going to pretend that's a scandal. It's just one of those pictures that tells you what a country is. A president saluting from a warship in the harbor of a city he would not lend money to, while forty blocks north. The fire trucks are not coming because there aren't any. But it's a beautiful day, it really is, And for one afternoon in July, six million New Yorkers stand on a riverbank and feel like they live somewhere that matters. Twenty five days later, it's the twenty eighth of July, a Wednesday night going into Thursday morning, and it is too hot to sit in an apartment with no air conditioning. So people do what people in this city have always done in July. They go outside. They sit on stoops, They double park and put the windows down and turn on the radio and they talk because it is cooler in the car than it is upstairs, and because you are twenty years old and the night is not over yet.

5:19 In Pelham Bay, in the northeast corner of the Bronx, a blue Oldsmobile is double parked outside an apartment building. Behind the wheel is a nineteen year old student nurse named Jody Valenti. In the passenger seat is her friend. They've just come back from a discotheque up in New Rochelle. It's after one in the morning. The friend's father has already leaned out and told her twice to come upstairs. Her name is Donna Lauria. She is eighteen years old. She works as an emergency medical technician, which means that on any other night, she is the person who runs toward the sound you are running away from. She reaches for the door handle and she sees a man coming across the street toward the car carrying a paper bag.

6:01 And that is where I stopped taking you anywhere. Fifty years Donna Louria died in that car. She was eighteen years old, and it was about ten minutes past one in the morning on the twenty ninth of July nineteen seventy six. That was fifty years ago, not fifty years ago in the abstract, fifty years ago, nine days from today. I'm Garrett Fisher. Production is on vacation this week, and it is just me and a microphone and five days to tell you one story. This is Summer of Fear. I did not come up with that title. The Police Union of the City of New York came up with it in the summer of nineteen seventy five and printed it a million times on the cover of a pamphlet with a skull on it. Thirteen months before this man ever fired a shot. They were talking about the budget.

6:50 They had no idea what they were naming. Because everybody remembers the killer, almost nobody remembers the city. And you cannot understand the one with the other. And that is the entire reason I am spending a week of your life on this five episodes. Today, the city and the four young people nobody connected to anything. Tomorrow, the gun and the ballistics lab that finally connected them Wednesday. The summer it all came apart, including one night in July when the lights went out over eight million people, Thursday a parking ticket, and Friday, the fifty years since, and a seventy two year old man in a maximum security prison in Ulster County who still has things he would like to say. Six people are going to die, seven more are going to be hit and live, one of them from a wheelchair she will use for the rest of her life. The newspapers are going to call him the forty four caliber killer, and then he is going to name himself. And the name he picks is the one you already know, son of Sam. But nobody knows any of that yet. It's July of nineteen seventy six, and there is a man crossing the street toward a blue Oldsmobile with a paper bag in his hand. And inside that car two young women are talking, and neither of them has looked up. Jody Valenti later told police

8:23 that Donna had cracked her door open to get out, saw the man approaching fast, and was more annoyed than afraid. Her last words, as best as anyone has ever been able to reconstruct them, were three of them. Now what is this? The man pulled a revolver out of the paper bag. He dropped into a crouch, braced one elbow on his knee, took the gun in both hands the way you are taught to on a range, and fired three times through the passenger window. One bullet hit Donna Lauria and killed her where she sat. One went into Jody Valenti's thigh. The third missed. He stood up, turned around and walked away. He did not run. Jody Valenti lived.

9:05 She was able to describe him a white man, maybe in his thirties, fair, about five foot eight, around two hundred pounds, with short, dark curly hair. Almost none of that was right. Donna's father, who came down the stairs into the worst moment of his life. Said he had noticed a man sitting in a yellow compact car parked nearby. Neighbors said the same yellow car had been cruising the block for hours. Detectives had a body, a wounded woman, three shell casings worth of damage, and a bullet that came out of a forty four caliber revolver, which was an unusual gun for a New York street crime, and which meant approximately nothing to anyone. In the summer of nineteen seventy six. There was no robbery, There was no boyfriend, There was no argument, no debt, no drugs, no reason.

9:53 Two young women were talking in a parked car and a stranger walked up and shot them both. The case went into a draw. Now let me back you up seven months, because he had already started and nobody knew that either. Christmas Eve nineteen seventy five, co Op City in the North Bronx thirty five buildings of it, one of the largest housing developments in the world. That night, according to what he told police years later, a twenty two year old man went out with a hunting knife and stabbed two women within a few minutes of each other. The first was never identified. She never came forward whoever she was. She survived, and she has spent fifty years knowing something the rest of us do not. The second was fifteen years old. Her name was Michelle Foreman. She was a sophomore at Truman High School. He stabbed her six times on a footbridge near her home, and she was hurt badly enough to spend a week in a hospital bed, and she lived. He was never charged for that night. Everything we know about it comes from his own mouth years afterward, and I want you to keep that in your head because it is going to matter enormously by the time we get to Friday. What he said was that the knife disappointed him. It was close, it was messy, It took effort, and it took nerve, and it did not feel the way he had imagined it would feel. So he decided he needed distance. He needed a gun. He was twenty three years old that July.

11:17 He had been born in Brooklyn under a different name, given up within days, and adopted by a childless couple in the Bronx who ran a hardware store. His adoptive mother died of cancer when he was fourteen, and the home he had came apart. He joined the army after high school, served at Fort Knox and in Korea, and got an honorable discharge in nineteen seventy four. Then he went looking for the woman who gave birth to him, and found her and learned the real circumstances of how he came into the world, and something in him that had been badly cracked for a long time finally broke all the way through. He took some classes at Bronx Community College. He drove a cab. He moved into a small apartment up in yonkers On at called Pine, and he started setting fires and writing them down in sonographers notebooks.

12:05 His name was David Berkowitz. Nobody in this story knows that. Yet nobody will know it for another thirteen months. And I want to be careful right here, because there is a version of this story where he is the fascinating one, where we sit around and turn him over in our hands and marvel at him. I have no interest in that version. He was not a genius, He was not a mastermind. He was a lonely, resentful, deeply cowardly young man who could not look a human being in the face. So we shot at them through car windows in the dark, and then went home and wrote about it. That is the whole of him. There is nothing else in there worth your time. Donna Lauria is worth your time. She was eighteen. She was an emt. Her father, Mike Lauria, would spend the rest of his life talking about her to anybody who would listen. And he would keep talking about her long after the city had moved on, long after the reporter stopped calling, because that is what is left to you when somebody takes your child in a parked car outside your own front door. Nobody was paying attention to her, not yet. In the summer of nineteen seventy six, she was one of one thousand, six hundred and twenty two coming up. Four more young people shot in two more attacks in a borough where nobody was looking.

13:25 The ones nobody connected. October twenty third, nineteen seventy six, Flushing, Queens, on a quiet residential street beside Bone Park. Carl Denaro was twenty. He worked security at a bank, and he was weeks away from leaving for the Air Force. Rosemary Keenan was eighteen, a student at Queen's College. They were sitting in her parked car when the windows blew apart around them. Carl Denaro said later that it felt like the car itself had exploded. Rosemary Keenan did the only thing there was to do. She got the car started and drove fast, looking for help, and neither of them understood in that moment that anyone had been shooting at them.

14:19 Carl Denaro was bleeding from his head. He would eventually need a metal plate to replace part of his skull. He was twenty years old and had shoulder length hair, and investigators would later come to believe that the man who shot him thought he was shooting a woman. The bullets pulled out of that car were forty four caliber. They were also so badly deformed that ballistics thought there was little chance of ever matching them to a specific weapon. Rosemary Keenan's father was a New York City detective with twenty years on the job, which meant this case got pushed harder than most cases got pushed. It went nowhere now same caliber, same gun, as it happens, same kind of victim, in the same kind of parked car, in the middle of the night, with no motive of any kind.

15:05 Three months after Pelham Bay. Nobody connected them. Different burrough different precinct, different detectives, different filing cabinet. November twenty seventh, nineteen seventy six, Floral Park, Queens, Just after midnight, two teenagers were standing on a front porch, finishing a conversation the way you do when you have had a good night, and neither of you wants to be the one to go inside. Donna Demasi was sixteen, Joanne Lomino was eighteen. It was her porch. They had walked home from the movies. A young man came up the path. He was dressed in military fatigues. In a strange, high voice, he asked them for directions. Can you tell me how to get he said, And he never finished the sentence because he pulled out a revolver and shot each of them once, and then as the two girls fell, he kept firing.

15:57 The rest of the rounds went into the front of the house. Donna Demasi was hit in the neck and survived. Joanne Lomino was hit in the back. She was eighteen years old, and she never walked again. A neighborhoard the shots, ran outside and saw a man sprinting past with a pistol in his left hand. He described him as blonde. David Berkowitz was not blonde. So now the police in this city have two composite sketches of two completely different men, and a sergeant is telling reporters that they are probably looking for more than one suspect. And every witness in every case has given a description that contradicts the last one. And that is the part of this that gets under my skin, not his cunning, he had none. It is that in the winter of nineteen seventy six, one man with one revolver shot five people in three attacks across two burrows of the same city, and the police department of that city could not put its own paperwork in the same room because the precincts didn't talk, because the burrows didn't talk, because the detective squads were carrying case files stacked to the ceiling in a year with sixteen hundred and twenty two murders in it, and because five thousand cops had been shown the door eighteen months earlier by a city that could not make payroll. There's a playbook for this, and the playbook is called austerity, and somebody always pays for it, and it is never the people who wrote it. So nineteen seventy six ends, and on the last night of that year, in an apartment

17:29 in Yonkers, a twenty three year old postal worker in waiting sits with a forty four caliber Charter Arms, Bulldog revolver and a stack of notebooks. And he is not finished, and he is not even close to finished, and not one person in the eight million around him knows that he exists. Say their names, because in nineteen seventy six, nobody did. Michelle Foreman fifteen, Donna Lauria eighteen, Jody Valenti nineteen, Carl Denaro twenty, Rosemary Keenan eighteen, Donna Demasi sixteen, Joanne Lomino eighteen. Tomorrow, it's January of nineteen seventy seven, and a young woman named Christine Freud gets into a car with the man she is going to marry outside a Queen's Movie theater. And after that, a technician in a police ballistics lab finally looks at two bullets side by side, and New York City finds out what has been walking around inside it. That's tomorrow, before we go. If this is your first time with us, we do this every single day Crime courts and the people the system forgets.

18:32 And if you're enjoying this series, do me a favor and tell somebody. Text it to one person who likes a good story and a real one. Word of mouth is the entire ballgame for a show like ours, and I would rather earn you than buy you. If you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment. I want to know what you remember about nineteen seventy seven, or what your parents told you, or what your city was like when you were twenty years old and the news said stay home. I read them. Follow Daily Crime and Justice wherever you're listening, and turn notifications on so you catch the rest of this series. Five days, one story, and it gets darker before it gets anywhere near light. I'm Garrett Fisher until tomorrow, Do Better. Daily Crime and Justice is an independent podcast produced by Calaroga Shark Media. This episode covers the crimes of David Berkowitz, known as Son of Sam and as the forty four caliber killer, who pleaded guilty in nineteen seventy eight to six counts of second degree murder and seven counts of attempted murder, and who is currently incarcerated at shawung Gunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County, New York.

19:40 This episode draws on contemporaneous reporting from the New York Times and the New York Daily News, New York City Police Department records, published accounts by David Abrahamson, Lawrence Klausner, and Maury Terry, an AI assisted research. We do our best to get it right, but we are a podcast, not a court room. Several notes it's on accuracy. The Christmas Eve nineteen seventy five stabbings of Michelle Foreman and an unidentified woman were never charged and are known only from Berkowitz's own statements to police and psychiatrists years later. The first woman has never been publicly identified. Sources differ on the number of people wounded across the full series of attacks, with counts ranging from seven to eleven depending on whether the nineteen seventy five stabbings and injuries from broken glass are included. Contemporaneous crowd estimates for the bisentennial Operation Sale parade on July fourth, nineteen seventy six ranged from six million to seven million people. Witness descriptions of the shooter conflicted sharply at the time, and those conflicts have since become the basis for a decade's old theory that Berkowitz did not act alone. We will examine that theory and Berkowitz's own shifting accounts in Friday's episode. Nothing in this episode should be taken as an endorsement of it.

20:59 This series discusses gun violence and the deaths of young people. If you are struggling, you can reach the Suicide in Crisis Lifeline in the United States by calling or texting nine eight eight