SUMMER OF FEAR, Part 4: Stacy Moskowitz, Robert Violante, and the $25 Parking Ticket That Caught Son of Sam

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher and this is Daily Crime and Justice for Thursday, July twenty third, twenty twenty six, Part four of five. This is Summer of Fear. Yesterday the lights went out over New York for twenty five hours, and the city tore itself apart in the dark. And when the power came back and the heat finally broke, eight million people started counting toward the twenty ninth of July because he had told a newspaper columnist in writing to ask what he had planned for that day. It was the anniversary of Donna Laia, So on the twenty ninth of July nineteen seventy seven, the New York City Police Department put every officer it had into the Bronx and into Queens, because that is where he shot people Pelham Bay, Forest Hills, Floral Park, Bayside, every single attack for a year in those two boroughs. The twenty ninth came, nothing happened. The thirtieth came, nothing happened. And I want you to hold two things in your head at the same time this morning, because they are the whole episode.

1:14 The first is that the police did exactly the right thing, and it worked. He drove to the Bronx that night, he has said, so he found it crawling with cops, and he turned around and went home. The second is that he read the papers the same as everybody else, and the papers had told him, and told the city, and told the world where every officer in New York was going to be standing. So he went to Brooklyn. Come with me. It's Saturday night. The one place nobody was watching Bathbeach is at the bottom of Brooklyn, down where the borough runs out into the water under the Verrizanto. It is a long way from Pelham Bay. It is a long way from Forest Hills.

1:54 It is more than ten miles from any place this man has ever fired a gun, and the people who live here have spent the whole summer reading about him the way you read about weather in another state. There is a service road along Shore Parkway, with a park beside it, and a playground in the park, and a street lamp over the service road. In nineteen seventy seven, this is a lover's lane, and everybody in the neighborhood knows it. And on a hot Saturday night, at the end of July. There are cars parked along it. In one of them, a nineteen year old mechanic named Tommy Zano is sitting with his girlfriend directly under that street lamp. He looks up at the light. He decides it is too bright, too obvious that anybody walking by can see straight into the car, so he starts the engine and moves up the road a few car lengths into the dark.

2:43 Remember that he moved because he did not like the light. A little while later, a brown Buick pulls into the spot Tommy Zano just left directly under the street lamp. And the two people in it are on their first date. Her name is Stacy Moskowitz. She is twenty years old. His name is Robert Violante. He is twenty years old. They have been to a movie. They are exactly as happy and as awkward as two twenty year olds on a first date are supposed to be. They get out and walk into the park and they sit on the swings and they talk. And while they are sitting there, Robert Violante notices a man standing not far off with his arms folded watching. He doesn't think much of it.

3:23 It's a park. There are always guys standing around in a park. Stacey Moskowitz does think much of it. Stacy Moskowitz gets uneasy, and she says she wants to go back to the car. They walk back, the man is gone. They sit in the front seat under the street lamp and they are talking. And it is two thirty five in the morning on the thirty first of July nineteen seventy seven. And that is where I stop taking you anywhere. He walked up to the passenger window from about three feet away and fired four times. Stacey Moskowitz was hit in the head. Robert Violante was hit in the head. The bullet destroyed his left eye and tore across his skull and took most of the sight in his right eye with it. He came to and could not see, and he could hear her breathing beside him, and he leaned on the horn and he got the door open and crawled out onto the road, and he was screaming for help without being able to see a single thing.

4:20 Tommy Zino, up the road in the dark where the light was not so bright, saw it happen in his mirror. He is the only person who watched this man shoot somebody and was not himself being shot at. If he had not moved the car, the shooting he witnessed would have been his own. Stacy Moskowitz never woke up. She died in a hospital bed in Brooklyn, and depending on which account you read, it was a few hours later or it was thirty eight hours later. And I have never been able to nail that down, and it does not change one thing about it. She was twenty years old and she was on a first date. Robert Violante lived. He said something later that I cannot get out of my head, which is that the doctors told him he was not going to make it and that Stacy would.

5:03 Now I need you to notice something. About Stacey Moskowitz, and I want to be careful about how I say it, because it is not about her. Stacy Moskowitz had short, curly blonde hair. Every other woman this man shot had long, dark hair. It was in every newspaper in the city. It was the reason a hundred thousand young women in New York went to a beauty parlor that summer, or sat in a kitchen chair while their mother worked bleached through their hair at the sink. It was the one piece of advice the city gave its daughters. Change what you look like and you will be safe. He shot a blonde in a burrow he had never worked on the one night everybody had decided he was finished. So let me be extremely clear about what that summer's advice was worth. Nothing. It was worth nothing.

5:51 It was never about her hair. It was never about anybody's hair. There was no rule you could follow, because he was not following one either, And telling a generation of young women that they could save themselves by cutting off their hair was not protection. It was a way for a city to feel like it was doing something while it did nothing at all. Coming up three hundred detectives, a twenty five dollars ticket, and a woman walking her dog just after two in the morning, about half an hour before the shooting, a forty nine year old woman named Cassilia Davis was dropped off near the park by a friend who had driven her home. It was a one way street, so she was watching for traffic before she got out, and while she was looking, she noticed a cream colored Ford Galaxy parked right up against a fire hydrant, which is illegal, and which is why a New York City police officer named Michael Cataneo had already stopped, end it up and tucked a twenty five dollars summons under the wiper. Missus Davis watched a young man walk over to that car and pull the ticket off the windshield.

7:09 Her friend pulled away a few minutes later, and the ford came up fast behind him and braked and leaned on the horn, and Missus Davis got a look at the driver, young, dark hair. Then she took her dog out for a walk. The dog's name was Snowball. And on the way home she passed a man in a denim jacket walking toward the parked cars along the service road, and he was holding his arm strangely, as though there were something up his sleeve, and he turned his head and looked at her, just looked, and she did not like it, and she walked faster, and she got inside her building, and a minute or two later she heard the shots. She knew standing in her own hallway. She knew, and she said nothing for days. Sources disagree about whether it was two days or four. It does not matter.

8:00 She was a forty nine year old woman who had just looked a man in the face and then heard him shoot two children in a city where that man had been mailing letters to newspapers for two months. And she was afraid that if she opened her mouth, he would come back and find her. And I would like to know exactly which one of us would have done better. She opened her mouth. Anyway, she called the police, and the police did not believe her because they had other witnesses that night, and those witnesses had described a fair haired man and a yellow Volkswagen tearing away from the neighborhood with its headlights off. That was the lead. That was the description going around a woman with a dog and a story about a parking ticket did not fit it. So missus Davis kept calling, Look, I'm gonna be honest with you. Nobody was paying attention to her, not the first time. She was a middle aged woman in Bathbeach with no badge and no theory, and there were three hundred detectives on this case, and she had to make herself a nuisance to a police department to get somebody to go and check the summonses. Eventually, somebody did.

9:03 A detective named James Justice went and pulled every parking ticket written in that neighborhood on the night of the thirtieth of July, and there were only a handful because it is Bath Beach at two in the morning, and there was one for twenty five dollars written against a hydrant on a car registered up in Yonkers. Justics said later that the thing that stopped him was the name on it, a Jewish surname on a car ticketed in a heavily Italian neighborhood at two in the morning, twenty miles from home. It did not sound right to him, that is all it was. A detective looked at a piece of paper and thought, that is strange. David Berkowitz, thirty five Pine Street, Yonkers, New York. So on the ninth of August, Justice picked up a telephone and called the Yonkers Police Department to ask them to help him set up an interview with this man. The dispatcher who answered that phone was named Wheat Car and when he said named David Berkowitz, she told him to hold on because she knew exactly who that was. He lived behind her family. He had been sending them anonymous letters. Somebody had thrown a fire bomb at their house, and a few months back somebody had shot her father's black Labrador retriever, and she was fairly sure who did it. Her father's name was Sam Carr, thirty five Pine Street. Wednesday, the tenth of August nineteen seventy seven, detectives went to Yonkers

10:34 and found the Galaxy parked on the street outside the building. Through the window of it, they could see a rifle lying on the back seat, which is all the problem cause anybody has ever needed. They opened the car. Inside was a Duffel bag with ammunition in it and maps of the crime scenes with notes on them, and a letter already written addressed to Inspector Timothy Dowd of the Omega Task Force. So now they know, and they are ending on a public street in Yonkers with no warrant yet, and they decide not to go up the stairs because the hallway is narrow and they do not want to fight a man with a revolver inside a building full of families. So they wait. They wait for hours, and at around ten o'clock at night, the door of the building opens and a stocky young man comes out and walks to the Galaxy and gets in behind the wheel. He is carrying a paper bag.

11:25 The gun is in the bag, a detective named John Fellowtiko put a service revolver against his head. And this is the part everybody knows, and the accounts of it differ, and they have differed since the night it happened, because there were a lot of cops there, and every one of them remembered a slightly different sentence in the version that has been repeated for fifty years. Berkowitz turned toward the gun at his temple and he smiled, and he said, well, you got me. How come it took you so long? He was twenty four years old, he worked for the post office. Yes, he had a paper bag on his lap. They took him to a precinct in Coney Island, and at one in the morning, the Mayor of New York came in and looked at him and did not say a word to him, and then went outside and told the press that the people of the city of New York could rest easy. He confessed in about thirty minutes, half an hour, six murders and eight shootings and a year of eight million people not sleeping. And it took him half an hour, and he was calm the entire time.

12:25 And the detectives in that room said afterward that what unsettled them was not that he was a monster, it was that he was nobody. He was polite, He answered the questions. He told them, without any particular emotion, that his neighbour's dog was possessed by a demon and had been demanding the blood of young girls. He told them he had been planning to go out to the Hamptons before the end of the summer because there would be a lot of people there. Now here's the arithmetic of this case, and I want to lay it out plainly, because it is the reason I have wanted to tell this story for twenty years. Three hundred detectives, the largest manhunt in the history of the largest city in America.

13:06 Fingerprint checks, gun registrations, tips by the tens of thousands, psychological profiles, composite sketches, a mayor, a commissioner, a task force with a Greek letter for a name. None of it caught him, not one piece of it. What caught him was a traffic cop doing the most boring job in the department at two in the morning, a twenty five dollars summons on a hydrant, a forty nine year old woman walking a small dog who saw almost nothing, who was frightened into silence for days, who was disbelieved when she finally spoke, and who kept calling anyway. A detective who thought a name looked out of place on a piece of paper, and a switchboard operator in Yonkers who happened to be Sam Carr's daughter. That is it, That is the whole thing, not genius paperwork. And a woman who would not let it go. On the eighth of May nineteen seventy eight, David Berkowitz pleaded guilty.

14:05 There was no trial. At a court appearance in that period, in front of the families, he began chanting about Stacey Moskowitz, saying something so vile about a dead twenty year old girl that I'm not going to repeat it into a microphone, and he had to be dragged out and the proceedings were put over. On the twelfth of June nineteen seventy eight, he was sentenced to twenty five years to life on each. Of the six murders. He is still serving it, he will die serving it. And there is one more thing. The State of New York did that summer before he was even convicted, because publishers were already circling him with checkbooks, and the idea of this man getting rich off Donna, Lauria and Stacy Moskowitz was more than the legislature could stand. They passed a law that let the state seese whatever a criminal earned from telling his story and hand it to his victims.

15:05 Every state in the country eventually copied it. They are still called Son of Sam laws. The one thing that man ever gave this country is a category of statute named after him. And in nineteen ninety one, the Supreme Court of the United States struck the New York law down unanimously on the First Amendment, and the states had to go back and write narrower ones. Which is the law working exactly as it should, and which is also, if you are Stacey Moskowitz's mother, a sentence in a newspaper that means a man who shot your daughter in the head has speech rights, and she has a grave to visit. Stacy's mother spent the rest of her life on this.

15:46 She was loud, and she was furious, and she never once let anybody forget her daughter's name. And shortly before she died in two thousand and six, she wrote David Berkowitz a letter, and in it she forgave him. I don't know what to do with that. I've never known what to do with that. I only know that she was allowed to and nobody else is tomorrow the last one fifty years the demon Dog. He later admitted he made up two brothers named Carr, who both died young, and strangely, a reporter who spent his life chasing a cult through this case, thirteen parole hearings, and in May of this year, a seventy two year old man in Ulster County who did not bother to attend his own hearing, and who wrote to a newspaper to say that he is already free and that his home is in heaven and not in the Bronx. And Robert Violante, sixty eight years old, mostly blind, answering him, that's tomorrow, before we go one more day. If you've been with me all week, thank you, And tell one person about it before Friday so they can hear the end of it with you, not a post a person. That's how this show grows.

16:56 And I would rather earn you than by you. If you're listening on spot, drop a comment. And today I want a specific one who is the Cacilia Davis in a story. You know, the person nobody listened to who turned out to be the only one who was right. I read every one of these. Follow Daily Crime and Justice wherever you're listening, and turn notifications on for tomorrow, because tomorrow he is alive and he is talking, and one of the people he shot has something to say back. 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 murder of Stacey Moskowitz and the shooting of Robert Violante on July thirty first, nineteen seventy seven, and the arrest, guilty plea, and sentencing of David Berkowitz.

17:44 It draws on. Contemporaneous reporting from the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and the New York Post, Brooklyn District Attorney, case files, New York City Police Department records, later interviews with Detective James Justice and with surviving victims, and public accounts of the case, along with AI assisted research. We do our best to get it right, but we are a podcast, not a court room. Notes on accuracy, sources, conflict on how long Stacey Moskowitz survived after the shooting, with accounts ranging from several hours to thirty eight hours, and we say so on air rather than pick one. Her age is given as twenty in most records, and is nineteen in some. Cacilia Davis's name is also rendered as Cecilia in some accounts, and the length of her silence before contacting police is reported as both two days and four. Detective James Justice's surname is spelled Justice in some records. Berkowitz's words at the moment of his arrest are reported in several conflicting versions, and we give the most commonly repeated one. The exact date of his courtroom outburst before sentencing is inconsistently reported. Sources also differ on whether his six sentences run concurrently or consecutively, with totals variously given as three hundred sixty five and five hundred and forty seven years separately. The New York state law seizing criminals proceeds was struck down in Simon and Schuster against the New York State Crime Victims Board in nineteen ninety one. Claims that Berkowitz did not act alone have

19:15 circulated since nineteen seventy seven and are addressed in tomorrow's episode. Nothing here should be read as an endorsement of them. This series discusses gun violence and the deaths of young people. If you are struggling, you can reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the United States by calling or texting nine to eight eight