July 21, 2026

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

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

In Part 2 of the five-part series Summer of Fear, the city finds out. On January 30, 1977, Christine Freund, twenty-six, and her fiancé John Diel leave a screening of Rocky in Forest Hills and never make it to the dance; Christine dies that morning, weeks after their engagement. Thirty-seven days later and half a block away, a nineteen-year-old Barnard College honor student named Virginia Voskerichian is killed walking home from the train with her books in her arms. Then a technician in a police ballistics lab lays two bullets side by side — one from Virginia, one taken from Donna Lauria in the Bronx eight months earlier — and the striations line up. On March 10, 1977, Police Commissioner Michael Codd and Mayor Abraham Beame tell eight million people that one man with one revolver has been hunting them. Six weeks later, on Easter weekend, Valentina Suriani, eighteen, and Alexander Esau, twenty, are shot in a parked car in the Bronx, and a white envelope is found lying in the street beside them. Inside, the killer gives himself a name. Garret Fisher on the ballistics match, the largest manhunt in New York City history, and the seven weeks the city didn't know what he called himself.

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WEBVTT

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Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher, and this

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is Daily Crime and Justice for Tuesday, July twenty first,

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twenty twenty six, Part two of five. This is Summer

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of Fear. Yesterday I took you into a city that

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was broken burning, a city that had laid off five

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thousand police officers because it could not make payroll. A

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city whose own police union printed a survival pamphlet with

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a skull on the cover and called the place Fear City.

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And into that city. On the twenty ninth of July

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nineteen seventy six, twenty five days after six million people

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stood on the river bank and watched the tall ships

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come in for the bi centennial, walked a man with

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a paper bag. Donna Lauria, eighteen years old, died in

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a parked car outside her own building in Pelham Bay.

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Jody Valenti was shot in the leg and lived three

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months later. In Queen Carl Denaro took a bullet in

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the head and lived and would need a metal plate

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in his skull to do it. Rosemary Keenan drove the

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car to safety a month after that on a front

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porch and floral park. Donna Demasi was shot in the

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neck and lived, and Joanne Lomino was shot in the

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back and never walked again. Eighteen years old. Five people shot,

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one dead, one paralyzed, and not a single detective in

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the city of New York had connected any of it

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to any of the rest of it. Because the burros

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did not talk to each other, and the precincts did

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not talk to each other, and there were sixteen hundred

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and twenty two murders in that city in that year.

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Today that ends. Today the city finds out. And I

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need to tell you before we start that finding out

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did not save anybody. It made it worse. That's the

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thing about this story that nobody wants to sit with.

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The moment New York learned that a monster was hunting it,

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the hunting got easier because he read the paper. Two

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Come with me. It's January Station Square. It is cold,

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and forest hills queens in a way that gets into

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the seams of a coat. This is the good part

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of the borough, and everybody knows it. Tudor rooflines, brick

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and slate streets that curve instead of running straight, laid

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out by somebody with an idea about what a neighborhood

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should feel like. There is a train station here, the

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Long Island Railroad, and the little plaza in front of

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it is called Station Square, and across from it stands

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the Forest Hills Inn with its arch, and on a

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winter night, the whole thing looks like a postcard from

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a city that is not currently on fire. This is

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not a place where anything happens. That is the entire

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point of it. That is what people pay for. It's

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a Saturday night going into Sunday morning. Down on Austin Street.

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The restaurants are still lit. Everybody in America right now

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is going to see the same movie, a movie about

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a nobody club fighter from Philadelphia who gets one shot.

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And it came out six weeks ago and it is

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still selling out, and a lot of people are walking

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out of theaters this winter feeling like maybe the year

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is going to be different. Two of those people are

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sitting in a car at one Station Square just after

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midnight on the thirtieth of January nineteen seventy seven. They

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have seen the movie, They have had dinner at a

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wine bar up on Austin They are going dancing next

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and they are talking about the rest of the night,

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and it is cold enough that they have the windows

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rolled all the way up. Her name is Christine Freund.

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She is twenty six years old and she lives in Ridgewood.

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Beside her is her fiance. His name is John Deel

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and he is thirty, and they are going to be married.

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And I have to stop taking you anywhere now. Neither

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of them ever saw the man. Nobody has ever been

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able to say with certainty how long he had been

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watching them, or where he stood. What is known is

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that three rounds from a forty four caliber revolver came

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through the closed passenger window at close range, and two

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of them hit Christine Freud. John Deal was not seriously hurt.

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Accounts differ about the next sixty seconds. Some say he

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laid her down across the seat and ran into the street,

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trying to flag a car. Some say he drove panicked

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until he found people who would help. Both versions and

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the same way. She was taken to a hospital and

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she died a few hours later on the morning of

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the thirtieth of January. And she was twenty six years old,

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and she was buried in Linden Hill Cemetery. They had

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been engaged a matter of weeks. That is the detail

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I keep coming back to. Twenty six years old, a

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ring on her hand, knew enough that she was probably

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still catching it out of the corner of her eye,

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a wedding somewhere out in front of her, and a

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Saturday night in January that was supposed to end at

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a dance hall. There was no argument, there was no history,

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there was no reason. There was a man on a

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sidewalk in the best neighborhood in Queen and a closed

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window and a gun. John Deele lived another thirty odd years.

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He told people later that he could not sit in

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a car with a woman with long, dark hair, not

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for a long time, maybe not ever. Think about what

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that means. Not that he was afraid of the dark,

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or of queens, or of guns. He was afraid of

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the shape of the thing he loved. Now Here is

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where the New York City Police Department finally does something.

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And I want to give them their credit, because they

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get very little of it in this story. The bullets

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came out of a forty four caliber Charter Arms Bulldog.

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That is not a common gun. It is a snub

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nosed five shot revolver, a big, ugly cartridge in a

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small frame, and it is not what people shoot each

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other with. In New York in nineteen seventy seven, and

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somebody in that department went back to a filing cabinet

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and pulled the Laurier case out of it. Pelham Bay,

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six months earlier, forty four caliber parked car, closed window,

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young woman with long, dark hair. For the first time publicly,

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the police acknowledged that these shootings looked alike. They were

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careful about it. They said they were probably looking for

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more than one suspect because the witness descriptions did not

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line up, and the witness descriptions did not line up

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because the witnesses had been terrified, and it had been dark,

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and one of them had seen a blonde man who

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did not exist, but the door was open. Somebody had

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said the word out loud, coming up a nineteen year

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old walking home from school with an armful of books

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and a bullet that finally proved what a filing cabinet

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could not the ballistics lab. Virginia was nineteen years old.

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She was born in Bulgaria into an Armenian family that

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got out in the late nineteen fifties. The way a

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lot of families got out of a lot of places

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in those years, which is to say, with almost nothing

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and with enormous nerve. They landed in Forest Hills. She

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was an honor student at Barnard College up in Manhattan,

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and she took the train in and the train back,

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and on the evening of Tuesday, the eighth of March

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nineteen seventy seven, at around half past seven, she was

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walking home from her classes on Dartmouth Street, carrying her books.

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Her house was minutes away, her brother was inside it.

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She was half a block from the spot where Christine

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Freud had been shot thirty seven days earlier. A man

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came toward her on the sidewalk. He took out a revolver,

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and Virginia, in the last second of her life, did

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the only thing there was to do, which was to

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lift the books in her arms and put them between

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her face and the gun. He fired. Once the bullet

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went through the books, she died there on the sidewalk

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of a street with a name like a college, four

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hundred yards from her mother's kitchen. Nobody saw it happen.

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A neighbor saw a heavyset kid and a cap running away,

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and the police wrote him down as a witness, not

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a suspect, and for months the city would chase that

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boy in its imagination and he would turn out to

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be nothing at all. Her brother has said in the

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years since that he knew, he heard it, and he

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knew whose it was. Now. The bullet it was in

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bad shape, the way bullets are that go through a

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book and a skull, but there was enough of it left,

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and in a police ballistics lab somebody put it under

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a comparison microscope next to the bullet that had been

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taken out of Donna Laia in the Bronx eight months before,

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and turned the barrel of the scope and lined up

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the striations, and the two halves of the field of

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view matched same gun, same man, Bronx and queens, two

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dead women and three shot survivors, and a city that

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had been told for eight months that these were unrelated events.

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On the tenth of March nineteen seven seven, the police

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Commissioner of the City of New York, a man named

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Michael Cod, stood in front of the press alongside Mayor

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Abraham Beam and told the truth. The same forty four

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caliber revolver, he said, had been used in every one

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of them Beam, who was the mayor of a bankruptcity

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and who was going to lose his job over all

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of this called the man a savage killer loose in

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New York. And that is the day the city changed,

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not the day Donna Lauria died, the day the city

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was told the papers had him by the afternoon. They

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needed something to put in seventy two point type, and

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he had not yet given them anything. So they built

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a name out of the only fact anybody had, which

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was the gun, the forty four caliber killer. It ran

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on the front pages of a city where two million

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people bought a newspaper every single day, and it ran

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above photographs of two dead young women, and every reader

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in New York looked at the photographs and noticed the

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same thing at the same moment, which is that both

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of them had long, dark hair. There were girls and

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queens that March who stood in front of a bathroom

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mirror and looked at their own hair and thought about it.

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Not many, not yet. That comes later, and it comes

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all at once. But it started in March, in the

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space between a press conference and a headline, And it

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is the first sign of the thing that is going

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to swallow this city hole by August. He did not

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have to be anywhere near you to change how you lived.

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He only had to be in the paper. They built

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a task force for it. They called it Operation Omega Omega,

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the last letter the end. It was put under a

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deputy inspector named Timothy Dowd, who was sixty one years

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old born in Ireland, a man who had studied Latin

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and English at City College, and who was, by every

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account of him, the least likely looking homicide commander in

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the department and the most relentless. It started with something

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like fifty detectives. Within months, it would have close to

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three hundred, and it would be the largest manhunt in

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the history of New York City. Three hundred cops in

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a department that had fired five thousand of them nineteen

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months earlier. Look, I'm gonna be honest with you. This

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is what always happens. There is never money for the

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thing that prevents it, and there is always money for

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the thing that comes after. You cannot staff a precinct,

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but you can staff a task force. Because a task

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force is a story and a precinct is a line item.

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Nobody was paying attention to Donn Louria in July. In March,

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with two dead women and queens and a newspaper on

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every stoop, everybody was paying attention. It didn't help. He

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shot two more people six weeks later, coming up Easter

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weekend in the Bronx, a car parked on a service

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road and a white envelope lying in the street. Valentina

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Suriani was eighteen. She wanted to act, she wanted to model.

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She lived in the Baychester section of the Bronx, and

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on the night of the sixteenth of April nineteen seventy seven,

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going into the morning of the seventeenth, she was in

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a car with a young man named Alexander Esau, who

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was twenty and who drove a tow truck. It was

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his brother's car. They were parked on the service road

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of the Hutchinson River Parkway, a couple of blocks from

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where Valentina lived and about the same distance from the

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building where Donna Lauria had died nine months earlier. It

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was around three in the morning, it was Easter weekend.

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They were each shot twice. Valentina Surianni died where she sat.

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Alexander Esau was carried to a hospital and lived a

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few hours and died there. And he never regained enough

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consciousness to describe the person who did it. Neither of

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them ever saw a thing. The first officer who reached

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the scene found a white envelope lying in the roadway

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near the car. It was addressed by hand to a

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police captain named Joseph Barelli, whose name had been in

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the newspapers for weeks because he was the man in

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front of the microphones. Eight different police officers handled that

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envelope before anyone understood what it was. There were fingerprints

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on it, but nothing usable, and it turned out later

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that he had only ever touched it with the tips

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of his fingers. And I want you to notice that,

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because it is the single competent thing this man ever did.

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Inside was a long handwritten letter, and it was addressed

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to Brelli directly, sir, and all like a schoolboy writing

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to a principle. He objected to being called a woman hater.

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He misspelled the word women. He said he was not

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a woman hater, and then in the very next breath

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he wrote this, I am a monster. I am the

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son of sam Hell. He explained in a way that

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explained nothing to anybody reading it. In April of nineteen

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seventy seven, that Sam was his father, and that his

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father got drunk, and that when his father got drunk,

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he got mean and beat the family and tied him

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up behind the house and locked him in the garage.

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He wrote that Sam loved to drink blood. He wished

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the people of Queen's a happy Easter. He told the

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police to let those words haunt them. He promised he

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would be back, and he signed it. Mister monster, Now

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put yourself in that squad room. You have been chasing

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a phantom for nine months. You have three hundred detectives

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and no suspect. And this piece of paper lands on

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your desk, and it is, on its face insane. There

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is no Sam, there is no father who drinks blood.

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It reads like a bad ghost story written by somebody

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who has never met a human being. The police decided

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not to release it, and I understand why. You do

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not hand a lunatic a stage. You do not confirm

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to a man who wants to be famous that it

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is working. There were also perfectly good investigative reasons, because

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a withheld detail is how you sort the real confession

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from the forty thousand fake ones. And there would be

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fake ones. But here is what that decision means. On

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the seventeenth of April nineteen seventy seven, the name Son

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of Sam existed. It existed on a piece of paper

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sitting in an evidence room in the Bronx. And for

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the next seven weeks, the eight million people that name

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was written about did not know it. They did not

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know he had a name for himself. They did not

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know he was writing letters. They did not know he

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had promised in writing to come back. Valentina Suriani eighteen,

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Alexander Esau twenty in a borrowed car on a service

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road two blocks from home on Easter weekend. Christine Freund

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twenty six, who wanted to get married, Virginia nineteen, who

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put her books up in front of her face for

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dead now and the count is not close to finished,

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and the city still does not know his name because

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his name is in a Manila envelope in a police station.

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Tomorrow that ends too, because in May he stops writing

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to the police, and he starts writing to a newspaper columnist.

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And when a New York City tabloid gets its hands

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on a letter from a serial killer in the summer

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of nineteen seventy seven, in the middle of a circulation

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war with a young Australian named Rupert Murdoch who has

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just bought the New York Post and is looking for

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a way to bury the Daily News. What happens next

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is not journalism. It is something else. Tomorrow the letter

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to Jimmy Breslin, the summer, the disco's emptied out, and

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a Wednesday night in July when the lights went out

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over the entire city of New York for twenty five

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hours and he was still out there in all that dark.

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That's tomorrow before we go. If you came in on

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part two, go back and start with yesterday. It's the

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city episode and none of this means anything without it,

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and listen. Do me a favor. If this series is

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landing for you, tell one person, just one, text them

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the link, say hey, this is a good one, and

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go about your day. Word of mouth is how a

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show like this one survives. And I would rather earn

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you than by you. If you're listening on Spotify, drop

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a comment. I want to hear from anybody who was there,

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or whose parents were there, or who grew up hearing

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about that summer at a kitchen table. I read them all.

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Follow Daily Crime and Justice wherever you're listening, and turn

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your notifications on because tomorrow is the biggest episode of

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this week. I'm Garrett Fisher. Until tomorrow, Do better. Daily

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Crime and Justice is an independent podcast produced by Caliroga

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Shark Media. This episode covers the murders of Christine Freund,

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Virginia Voscarichian, Valentina Suriani, and Alexander Esau by David Berkowitz,

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known as Son of Sam and as the forty four

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caliber killer, who pleaded guilty in nineteen seventy eight and

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remains incarcerated at Shaowanngank Correctional Facility in New York. It

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draws on contemporaneous reporting from the New York Times, The

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New York Daily News, and the New York Post, New

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York City Police Department records and press conference footage, and

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published accounts of the case, along with AI assisted research.

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We do our best to get it right, but we

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are a podcast, not a courtroom. Notes on accuracy. Virginia

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Voscarichian's age at death is reported variously as nineteen twenty

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and twenty one across otherwise reliable sources we use nineteen,

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which matches most contemporaneous reporting. She is described in some

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accounts as a Columbia University student and in others as

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a Barnard College student. Barnard is the correct affiliation. Accounts

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also differ on whether John Deel ran for help or

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drove for help after Christine Freud was shot, and on

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the precise launch date. An initial size of the Operation

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Omega task Force, which was announced in March nineteen seventy seven,

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and which sources placed it anywhere from fifty to three

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hundred officers, depending on the date measure. The letter left

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at the Suriani and Esau scene is quoted here only

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in brief. Berkowitz's account of his own motives has changed

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repeatedly across five decades, and the demonic material in that

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letter was later disavowed by him. We will take that

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up in full on Friday. Nothing here should be read

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as an endorsement of any explanation he has offered. This

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series discusses gun violence and the deaths of young people.

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If you are struggling, you can reach the Suicide and

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Crisis Lifeline in the United States by calling or texting

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nine eight eight