SUMMER OF FEAR, Part 2: Son of Sam Names Himself — the Ballistics Match, Christine Freund, and Virginia Voskerichian

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher, and this is Daily Crime and Justice for Tuesday, July twenty first, twenty twenty six, Part two of five. This is Summer of Fear. Yesterday I took you into a city that was broken burning, a city that had laid off five thousand police officers because it could not make payroll. A city whose own police union printed a survival pamphlet with a skull on the cover and called the place Fear City. And into that city. On the twenty ninth of July nineteen seventy six, twenty five days after six million people stood on the river bank and watched the tall ships come in for the bi centennial, walked a man with a paper bag. Donna Lauria, eighteen years old, died in a parked car outside her own building in Pelham Bay.

0:55 Jody Valenti was shot in the leg and lived three months later. In Queen Carl Denaro took a bullet in the head and lived and would need a metal plate in his skull to do it. Rosemary Keenan drove the car to safety a month after that on a front porch and floral park. Donna Demasi was shot in the neck and lived, and Joanne Lomino was shot in the back and never walked again. Eighteen years old. Five people shot, one dead, one paralyzed, and not a single detective in the city of New York had connected any of it to any of the rest of it. Because the burros did not talk to each other, and the precincts did not talk to each other, and there were sixteen hundred and twenty two murders in that city in that year.

1:40 Today that ends. Today the city finds out. And I need to tell you before we start that finding out did not save anybody. It made it worse. That's the thing about this story that nobody wants to sit with. The moment New York learned that a monster was hunting it, the hunting got easier because he read the paper. Two Come with me. It's January Station Square. It is cold, and forest hills queens in a way that gets into the seams of a coat. This is the good part of the borough, and everybody knows it. Tudor rooflines, brick and slate streets that curve instead of running straight, laid out by somebody with an idea about what a neighborhood should feel like. There is a train station here, the Long Island Railroad, and the little plaza in front of it is called Station Square, and across from it stands the Forest Hills Inn with its arch, and on a winter night, the whole thing looks like a postcard from a city that is not currently on fire. This is not a place where anything happens. That is the entire point of it. That is what people pay for. It's a Saturday night going into Sunday morning. Down on Austin Street.

2:52 The restaurants are still lit. Everybody in America right now is going to see the same movie, a movie about a nobody club fighter from Philadelphia who gets one shot. And it came out six weeks ago and it is still selling out, and a lot of people are walking out of theaters this winter feeling like maybe the year is going to be different. Two of those people are sitting in a car at one Station Square just after midnight on the thirtieth of January nineteen seventy seven. They have seen the movie, They have had dinner at a wine bar up on Austin They are going dancing next and they are talking about the rest of the night, and it is cold enough that they have the windows rolled all the way up. Her name is Christine Freund.

3:36 She is twenty six years old and she lives in Ridgewood. Beside her is her fiance. His name is John Deel and he is thirty, and they are going to be married. And I have to stop taking you anywhere now. Neither of them ever saw the man. Nobody has ever been able to say with certainty how long he had been watching them, or where he stood. What is known is that three rounds from a forty four caliber revolver came through the closed passenger window at close range, and two of them hit Christine Freud. John Deal was not seriously hurt. Accounts differ about the next sixty seconds. Some say he laid her down across the seat and ran into the street, trying to flag a car. Some say he drove panicked until he found people who would help. Both versions and the same way. She was taken to a hospital and she died a few hours later on the morning of the thirtieth of January. And she was twenty six years old, and she was buried in Linden Hill Cemetery. They had been engaged a matter of weeks. That is the detail I keep coming back to. Twenty six years old, a ring on her hand, knew enough that she was probably still catching it out of the corner of her eye, a wedding somewhere out in front of her, and a Saturday night in January that was supposed to end at a dance hall. There was no argument, there was no history, there was no reason. There was a man on a sidewalk in the best neighborhood in Queen and a closed window and a gun. John Deele lived another thirty odd years.

5:05 He told people later that he could not sit in a car with a woman with long, dark hair, not for a long time, maybe not ever. Think about what that means. Not that he was afraid of the dark, or of queens, or of guns. He was afraid of the shape of the thing he loved. Now Here is where the New York City Police Department finally does something. And I want to give them their credit, because they get very little of it in this story. The bullets came out of a forty four caliber Charter Arms Bulldog. That is not a common gun. It is a snub nosed five shot revolver, a big, ugly cartridge in a small frame, and it is not what people shoot each other with. In New York in nineteen seventy seven, and somebody in that department went back to a filing cabinet and pulled the Laurier case out of it. Pelham Bay, six months earlier, forty four caliber parked car, closed window, young woman with long, dark hair. For the first time publicly, the police acknowledged that these shootings looked alike. They were careful about it. They said they were probably looking for more than one suspect because the witness descriptions did not line up, and the witness descriptions did not line up because the witnesses had been terrified, and it had been dark, and one of them had seen a blonde man who did not exist, but the door was open. Somebody had said the word out loud, coming up a nineteen year old walking home from school with an armful of books

6:35 and a bullet that finally proved what a filing cabinet could not the ballistics lab. Virginia was nineteen years old. She was born in Bulgaria into an Armenian family that got out in the late nineteen fifties. The way a lot of families got out of a lot of places in those years, which is to say, with almost nothing and with enormous nerve. They landed in Forest Hills. She was an honor student at Barnard College up in Manhattan, and she took the train in and the train back, and on the evening of Tuesday, the eighth of March nineteen seventy seven, at around half past seven, she was walking home from her classes on Dartmouth Street, carrying her books.

7:28 Her house was minutes away, her brother was inside it. She was half a block from the spot where Christine Freud had been shot thirty seven days earlier. A man came toward her on the sidewalk. He took out a revolver, and Virginia, in the last second of her life, did the only thing there was to do, which was to lift the books in her arms and put them between her face and the gun. He fired. Once the bullet went through the books, she died there on the sidewalk of a street with a name like a college, four hundred yards from her mother's kitchen. Nobody saw it happen. A neighbor saw a heavyset kid and a cap running away, and the police wrote him down as a witness, not a suspect, and for months the city would chase that boy in its imagination and he would turn out to be nothing at all. Her brother has said in the years since that he knew, he heard it, and he knew whose it was. Now. The bullet it was in bad shape, the way bullets are that go through a book and a skull, but there was enough of it left, and in a police ballistics lab somebody put it under a comparison microscope next to the bullet that had been taken out of Donna Laia in the Bronx eight months before, and turned the barrel of the scope and lined up the striations, and the two halves of the field of view matched same gun, same man, Bronx and queens, two dead women and three shot survivors, and a city that had been told for eight months that these were unrelated events.

8:57 On the tenth of March nineteen seven seven, the police Commissioner of the City of New York, a man named Michael Cod, stood in front of the press alongside Mayor Abraham Beam and told the truth. The same forty four caliber revolver, he said, had been used in every one of them Beam, who was the mayor of a bankruptcity and who was going to lose his job over all of this called the man a savage killer loose in New York. And that is the day the city changed, not the day Donna Lauria died, the day the city was told the papers had him by the afternoon. They needed something to put in seventy two point type, and he had not yet given them anything. So they built a name out of the only fact anybody had, which was the gun, the forty four caliber killer. It ran on the front pages of a city where two million people bought a newspaper every single day, and it ran above photographs of two dead young women, and every reader in New York looked at the photographs and noticed the same thing at the same moment, which is that both of them had long, dark hair. There were girls and queens that March who stood in front of a bathroom mirror and looked at their own hair and thought about it.

10:12 Not many, not yet. That comes later, and it comes all at once. But it started in March, in the space between a press conference and a headline, And it is the first sign of the thing that is going to swallow this city hole by August. He did not have to be anywhere near you to change how you lived. He only had to be in the paper. They built a task force for it. They called it Operation Omega Omega, the last letter the end. It was put under a deputy inspector named Timothy Dowd, who was sixty one years old born in Ireland, a man who had studied Latin and English at City College, and who was, by every account of him, the least likely looking homicide commander in the department and the most relentless. It started with something like fifty detectives. Within months, it would have close to three hundred, and it would be the largest manhunt in the history of New York City. Three hundred cops in a department that had fired five thousand of them nineteen months earlier. Look, I'm gonna be honest with you. This is what always happens. There is never money for the thing that prevents it, and there is always money for the thing that comes after. You cannot staff a precinct, but you can staff a task force. Because a task force is a story and a precinct is a line item.

11:29 Nobody was paying attention to Donn Louria in July. In March, with two dead women and queens and a newspaper on every stoop, everybody was paying attention. It didn't help. He shot two more people six weeks later, coming up Easter weekend in the Bronx, a car parked on a service road and a white envelope lying in the street. Valentina Suriani was eighteen. She wanted to act, she wanted to model.

12:13 She lived in the Baychester section of the Bronx, and on the night of the sixteenth of April nineteen seventy seven, going into the morning of the seventeenth, she was in a car with a young man named Alexander Esau, who was twenty and who drove a tow truck. It was his brother's car. They were parked on the service road of the Hutchinson River Parkway, a couple of blocks from where Valentina lived and about the same distance from the building where Donna Lauria had died nine months earlier. It was around three in the morning, it was Easter weekend. They were each shot twice. Valentina Surianni died where she sat. Alexander Esau was carried to a hospital and lived a few hours and died there. And he never regained enough consciousness to describe the person who did it. Neither of them ever saw a thing. The first officer who reached the scene found a white envelope lying in the roadway near the car. It was addressed by hand to a police captain named Joseph Barelli, whose name had been in the newspapers for weeks because he was the man in front of the microphones. Eight different police officers handled that envelope before anyone understood what it was. There were fingerprints on it, but nothing usable, and it turned out later that he had only ever touched it with the tips of his fingers. And I want you to notice that, because it is the single competent thing this man ever did.

13:35 Inside was a long handwritten letter, and it was addressed to Brelli directly, sir, and all like a schoolboy writing to a principle. He objected to being called a woman hater. He misspelled the word women. He said he was not a woman hater, and then in the very next breath he wrote this, I am a monster. I am the son of sam Hell. He explained in a way that explained nothing to anybody reading it. In April of nineteen seventy seven, that Sam was his father, and that his father got drunk, and that when his father got drunk, he got mean and beat the family and tied him up behind the house and locked him in the garage.

14:16 He wrote that Sam loved to drink blood. He wished the people of Queen's a happy Easter. He told the police to let those words haunt them. He promised he would be back, and he signed it. Mister monster, Now put yourself in that squad room. You have been chasing a phantom for nine months. You have three hundred detectives and no suspect. And this piece of paper lands on your desk, and it is, on its face insane. There is no Sam, there is no father who drinks blood. It reads like a bad ghost story written by somebody who has never met a human being. The police decided not to release it, and I understand why. You do not hand a lunatic a stage. You do not confirm to a man who wants to be famous that it is working. There were also perfectly good investigative reasons, because a withheld detail is how you sort the real confession from the forty thousand fake ones. And there would be fake ones. But here is what that decision means. On the seventeenth of April nineteen seventy seven, the name Son of Sam existed. It existed on a piece of paper sitting in an evidence room in the Bronx. And for the next seven weeks, the eight million people that name was written about did not know it. They did not know he had a name for himself. They did not know he was writing letters. They did not know he had promised in writing to come back. Valentina Suriani eighteen, Alexander Esau twenty in a borrowed car on a service

15:49 road two blocks from home on Easter weekend. Christine Freund twenty six, who wanted to get married, Virginia nineteen, who put her books up in front of her face for dead now and the count is not close to finished, and the city still does not know his name because his name is in a Manila envelope in a police station. Tomorrow that ends too, because in May he stops writing to the police, and he starts writing to a newspaper columnist. And when a New York City tabloid gets its hands on a letter from a serial killer in the summer of nineteen seventy seven, in the middle of a circulation war with a young Australian named Rupert Murdoch who has just bought the New York Post and is looking for a way to bury the Daily News. What happens next is not journalism. It is something else. Tomorrow the letter to Jimmy Breslin, the summer, the disco's emptied out, and a Wednesday night in July when the lights went out over the entire city of New York for twenty five hours and he was still out there in all that dark.

16:49 That's tomorrow before we go. If you came in on part two, go back and start with yesterday. It's the city episode and none of this means anything without it, and listen. Do me a favor. If this series is landing for you, tell one person, just one, text them the link, say hey, this is a good one, and go about your day. Word of mouth is how a show like this one survives. And I would rather earn you than by you. If you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment. I want to hear from anybody who was there, or whose parents were there, or who grew up hearing about that summer at a kitchen table. I read them all.

17:31 Follow Daily Crime and Justice wherever you're listening, and turn your notifications on because tomorrow is the biggest episode of this week. I'm Garrett Fisher. Until tomorrow, Do better. Daily Crime and Justice is an independent podcast produced by Caliroga Shark Media. This episode covers the murders of Christine Freund, Virginia Voscarichian, Valentina Suriani, and Alexander Esau by David Berkowitz, known as Son of Sam and as the forty four caliber killer, who pleaded guilty in nineteen seventy eight and remains incarcerated at Shaowanngank Correctional Facility in New York. It draws on contemporaneous reporting from the New York Times, The New York Daily News, and the New York Post, New York City Police Department records and press conference footage, and published accounts of the case, along with AI assisted research.

18:22 We do our best to get it right, but we are a podcast, not a courtroom. Notes on accuracy. Virginia Voscarichian's age at death is reported variously as nineteen twenty and twenty one across otherwise reliable sources we use nineteen, which matches most contemporaneous reporting. She is described in some accounts as a Columbia University student and in others as a Barnard College student. Barnard is the correct affiliation. Accounts also differ on whether John Deel ran for help or drove for help after Christine Freud was shot, and on the precise launch date. An initial size of the Operation Omega task Force, which was announced in March nineteen seventy seven, and which sources placed it anywhere from fifty to three hundred officers, depending on the date measure. The letter left at the Suriani and Esau scene is quoted here only in brief. Berkowitz's account of his own motives has changed repeatedly across five decades, and the demonic material in that letter was later disavowed by him. We will take that up in full on Friday. Nothing here should be read as an endorsement of any explanation he has offered. This series discusses gun violence and the deaths of young people.

19:31 If you are struggling, you can reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the United States by calling or texting nine eight eight