SUMMER OF FEAR, Part 5: Son of Sam at 73 — the Parole Hearing He Skipped, the Demon Dog He Admitted He Invented, and the Man He Blinded

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher, and this is Daily Crime Injustice for Friday, July twenty fourth, twenty twenty six, Part five of five. This is the last day of Summer of Fear. All week, I've been putting you on a street in a city that does not exist anymore, a bankrupt New York, a burning New York. Five thousand police officers laid off garbage in the street, sixteen hundred and twenty two murders in a single year, and a pamphlet with a skull on the cover that the cops handed to tourists at the airport. Today, I'm not taking you anywhere today. It is the present tense for real.

0:48 And we are going to Ulster County, New York, about sixty miles north of the city, to a maximum security prison called Shaowan Gung. There is a room in there where the parole board meets. This past May, that board was scheduled to consider the case of an inmate named David Berkowitz for the thirteenth time since he became eligible in two thousand and two, and on the day of the hearing he did not come. He sent an email to a reporter at the New York Post. Instead, he said he had opted not to attend. He said he had other things to do that he considered more meaningful. He said that he is already free, and that Jesus set him free, and that the only place he is looking forward to going is heaven. Here is the sentence.

1:34 My home is in Heaven, not in the bronx. He is seventy three years old. He has been in prison for forty nine years. And one of the people he shot in the head read that in the newspaper the dog was a lie. Let's deal with the dog when they took him into the precinct in Coney Island on the night of the tenth of August nineteen seventy seven, and he sat down and confessed to everything inside of half an hour. What he told them was that his his neighbour's black Labrador retriever, was inhabited by a demon six thousand years old, and that the demon spoke to him through the dog, and that it demanded the blood of pretty young women, and that the neighbor, a man named Sam Carr, was the vessel for it. Son of Sam.

2:17 That is what the name meant. A man in yonkers who owned a dog, and the world went completely insane over it. It is the reason this case is a legend and not just a tragedy. A demon dog. It went into every newspaper on earth. It went into books and movies and one hundred cheap paperbacks. Court appointed psychiatrists fought about it. Some of them thought he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Some of them thought he was faking. He was ruled competent, and he pleaded guilty, and it never got tested in front of a jury because there was never a trial. And then a couple of years later he told a psychiatrist that he had made the whole thing up. He has said it many time since, in many rooms, to many people. He has set it on tape.

3:05 The demon was an invention. The dog was an invention. He constructed it because he wanted to confuse the police, and because he thought it might get him into a hospital instead of a prison, and because I think some part of a deeply unremarkable young man understood that a demon is a much better story than the truth, because the truth, by his own eventual account, is boring. He was rejected by everyone he ever approached. He was full of a rage he could not aim. He set fires, hundreds of them, more than fourteen hundred by the count in his own notebooks, because a fire is what you do when you want to be enormous and you are nothing.

3:45 And then he bought a revolver and started shooting girls who did not know he existed. And he wrote it all down, and he waited for the newspapers to tell him he was real. There is no demon, there is no dog. There is a man who could not get a woman to look at him and decided the correct response was to kill six of them. Look, I'm gonna be honest with you. This is the part of every one of these stories that people do not want. They want the six thousand year old demon. They want the possession, the coven, the sign, the pattern, the thing behind the thing, because if there is a demon in it, then this is a story about evil, and evil is at least interesting, And if there is no demon in it, then it is a story about a lonely postal worker with a gun and about a city so worn down that it could not connect four shootings across two boroughs for eight months.

4:38 And nobody wants that story because that story implicates the rest of us. In nineteen eighty seven, ten years in he became a born again Christian. He calls himself the Son of Hope. Now he runs a congregation inside that prison. He counsels inmates, He has written books and does not take a dollar from them, partly out of conviction and partly because the law they named after him would not let him anyway. And I want to be careful here, and I am going to be because this is the part where I am supposed to tell you what to think, and I am not going to I don't know if he means it. Neither do you. Nobody alive knows what is happening inside that man, and the people who are most certain about it in both directions are the ones I trust the least. What I know is that a conversion does not undo anything. It does not give Joanne Lomino her legs back, It does not give Robert Violante his eyes. Forgiveness, if it is coming, is not mine to hand out, and it is not yours. There is exactly one category of person on this earth who has standing to forgive David Berkowitz, and every one of them earned that standing in the worst way. There is coming up, two brothers named Carr, both dead inside of two years, and a reporter who spent the rest of his life on it. I have to tell you about the other

6:13 theory because it has been alive for almost fifty years, and because you will go looking for it the moment this episode ends. Start with what is actually strange, because some of it genuinely is. The composite sketches from the different shootings did not look like each other, and several of them do not look much like David Berkowitz. Witnesses described a fair haired man on the night Stacey Moskowitz was killed. More than one person reported a yellow Volkswagen tearing out of the neighborhood with its lights off, driven by a man who did not match the person the police arrested. Ten days later. Casilia Davis told the Brooklyn District Attorney what she saw. The Volkswagen was in the file.

6:53 It was all in the file, and the Brooklyn District Attorney took a guilty plea in about eight months and closed the biggest case in the history of that office without asking a single one of those questions in open court. Then, in February of nineteen seventy eight, six months after the arrest, a young man named John Carr was found shot dead in an apartment in mine at North Dakota. He was one of Sam Carr's sons. It was ruled a suicide, and people have argued about that ruling ever since. Twenty months later, his brother Michael Carr died when his car went into a street light on the West Side Highway. Both sons of the man Berkowitz named himself after both dead inside of two years of his arrest, both young.

7:35 An investigative reporter named Mary Terry looked at all of that and could not let go of it, and he spent the next four decades of his life on it. He published a book called The Ultimate Evil. His theory was that Berkowitz was one member of a satanic cult that carried out the shootings together, that the car brothers were in it, that different people pulled the trigger on different nights, and that the thing ran far wider than New York. And starting in the nineteen nineties, Berkowitz himself began saying, yes, yes there was a cult, Yes he was there, but somebody else fired at Christine Freund. Yes, a man came in from North Dakota to shoot Stacy Moskowitz. He named the car brothers. He gave nicknames for the others.

8:16 Now Here is where I put my cards on the table, and I want you to notice exactly what I am doing, because I'm going to give you both halves, and i am not going to pretend the second half is smaller than it is. In fifty years, not one other person has ever been charging connection with any of these shootings, not one. No physical evidence has ever tied another human being to a single one of them. Nobody has ever produced a body of proof, only a body of coincidence, and the sole source for the cult, the single well spring of the entire theory, is the testimony of a man who confessed to all eight shootings in half an hour, and who then told the world a demon dog made him do it, and who then admitted he invented the demon dogs specifically in order to manipulate the police and the press, and who then, once that was no longer useful to him, produced a cult. That's not a witness.

9:14 That is a man who has learned that the story is the only power he has left, and who has now changed it three times, and who gets a visitor and a headline every time he does. Two young men with drug problems dying young in nineteen seventy eight and nineteen seventy nine in this country is not evidence of a conspiracy. It is a Tuesday eye witness. Composites that contradict each other are not evidence of multiple shooters. They are evidenced that terrified people at night are bad at faces, which is the single most replicated finding in the study of criminal evidence, and which has put more innocent men in prison than any lay a defendant ever told. So, no, I don't believe it. I have read Terry's book, and I have watched the documentaries, and I understand and exactly why it grips people. And I don't believe it. But I will tell you what I do believe, and it is worse, and it is the reason I have never been able to dismiss Morey Terry the way people expect me to. The Brooklyn District Attorney had Casilia Davis's statement, He had the Volkswagen, he had John Carr's name on his desk before Berkowitz ever pleaded, and he did not chase any of it, not because a cult got to him.

10:27 Because the city of New York had been on its knees for a year, and a man was in custody, and he had confessed, and every question anybody asked from that point forward was a question that might unmake the answer. Nobody wanted more questions. They wanted the summer to end. That's not a mistake. That's a choice. And it is the same choice this city made in nineteen seventy five when it decided it could do without five thousand police officers, and the same one it made every time it told a nineteen year old girl to go cut her hair. You do the cheap thing that lets everybody feel finished. Mary Terry died in twenty fifteen. He was sixty nine years old. He spent his life on this and he was, in my judgment, wrong about the cult and right about the cowardice. And that is a terrible thing to be and I would not wish it on anyone. Two things did change, and I'll give the city both of them.

11:20 James Justice, the detective who sat down with a stack of parking tickets, said years later that after this case, the precincts started talking to each other. The Burrows started talking to each other, the thing that let a man shoot five people in three attacks across two burrows without anybody noticing, got fixed slowly because of him. That is real, and it is the only good thing in this entire week. And that November Abraham Beam lost the mayor of the broke city. The man who stood in the wreckage of the blackout was finished, and a congressman named Ed Coch became Mayor of New York, having run like every single person in that race, on fear. And the murder rate did not go down. It went up. It kept going up for another thirteen years after they put David Berkowitz in a cell, and it peaked in nineteen ninety at more than twoy two hundred human beings in a single year in one American city, twenty two hundred. None of them got a nickname, none of them got three hundred detectives, none of them got a week of anybody's podcast. There's a playbook for this. We give a monster a name and a task force, and we let the ordinary dying go on in the dark, because the ordinary dying does not sell a newspaper coming up. A man who is already free and a man who cannot see David Berkowitz

12:59 has been eligible for paroles since two thousand and two. He has gone in front of that board twelve times and been refused twelve times, and for most of those years he has told them plainly that he does not want it and does not deserve it, which the board has always found sincere and has never found relevant. This May would have been the thirteenth he didn't go. He wrote to a newspaper instead on the sixteenth of May and said his work is inside the prison with the men God has confined there, that they need guidance, that he is an elder and this is his calling. He said he was already free. My home is in heaven, not in the bronx. On the nineteenth of May. Three days later, a reporter went and asked Robert Violante what he thought of that. Robert Violante is sixty eight years old.

13:47 He worked most of his life at a post office in Brooklyn, and he has retired now and about ninety percent of his sight is gone and has been gone since he was twenty. He lost the left eye entirely. He has spent forty nine years. Asked how he feels about David Berkowitz and what he said in substance is that it took some nerve for that man to say a thing like that, that he sincerely doubts David Berkowitz is going anywhere near Heaven, that there is exactly one destination waiting for him, and that he should count himself lucky he has not arrived there yet. I'm not going to editorialize on top of that. He earned every word of it in a parked car in Bath Beach at two thirty five in the morning, while a girl he had known for one evening died beside him. But I want to sit with the shape of it, because that is what this whole week has been about. One man is in a prison in Ulster County, at peace by his own account, with a congregation, telling reporters he is already free. The other man is in Brooklyn. He cannot see.

14:47 He has never had one day off from this. He did not choose to be part of this story, and he cannot leave it. And every couple of years a newspaper calls him up to ask him how he feels about the man who blinded him, and he answers every time time, because if he stops answering, then the only voice left in the story is the one that fired the gun. Robert Violante has said that he carries the guilt of it, that if he had left the park five minutes earlier, Stacy might be alive fifty years. And the man who did it is the one who says he is free. So let's finish the way we should have started. Donna Lauria was eighteen years old. She was an emergency medical technician. She was killed on the twenty ninth of July nineteen seventy six in a car parked outside her own building while her father was upstairs waiting for her to come in. Christine Freud was twenty six.

15:37 She had been engaged for a matter of weeks. She was killed on the thirtieth of January nineteen seventy seven, on her way to a dance. Virginia was nineteen. She was born in Bulgaria and her family got out with almost nothing. She was an honor student. She was killed on the eighth of March nineteen seventy seven, four hundred yards from her mother's kitchen, holding her school books up in front of her face. Valentina Seriani was eighteen. She wanted to be an actress Alexander Esau was twenty. He drove a tow truck. They were killed together on the seventeenth of April nineteen seventy seven, two blocks from her house on Easter weekend. Stacey Moskowitz was twenty years old and she was on a first date and she was killed on the thirty first of July nineteen seventy seven.

16:22 And she was the last. And they are not all of it. Michelle Foreman was fifteen, Jody Valenti was nineteen, Carl Denaro was twenty and carries a plate in his skull. Rosemary Keenan was eighteen and drove the car. Donna Demasi was sixteen. Joanne Lomino was eighteen and has not walked since nineteen seventy six. Judy Placido was seventeen and said nothing for twenty two years. Salvatore Lupo was twenty, Robert Violante was twenty and cannot see. That is the whole of it. That is what a summer of fear costs. And it is not a move, and it is not a decade, and it is not a city. It is fifteen young people and the fifty years that came after next Wednesday is the twenty ninth of July. On that morning, it will be exactly fifty years since a man walked across a street in Pelham Bay with a paper bag in his hand, and since Donna Lourie's father came down the stairs. Everybody remembers the killer. That is the thing I said to you on Monday, and it is the thing I will say to you on the way out.

17:28 Everybody remembers the killer. So on Wednesday, don't before we go. That's Summer of Fear, five days, one story. Thank you for staying with me on all of it. And if it did something for you, tell one person, not a post, a person, send them Monday's episode and let them start where you started in an airport in nineteen seventy five with a pamphlet and a skull on the cover. That is how a show like this one grows. And I would rather earn you than by you. If you're listening on spot, drop a comment, say one of their names. That's all. Pick one and write it down where other people can see it, because it cost you nothing and it is the only thing any of us can still do for them. Follow Daily Crime and Justice wherever you're listening and turn notifications on. Production is back from vacation, and we are back to the courts and the trials and the people of the system forgets. I'm Garrett Fisher.

18:24 Wednesday is the twenty ninth Say Her Name until Tomorrow, Do Better. Daily Crime and Justice is an independent podcast produced by Calaroga Shark Media. This episode covers David Berkowitz, known as Son of Sam, who pleaded guilty in nineteen seventy eight to six counts of second degree murder and seven counts of attempted murder and is incarcerated at SHAWANNGNK Correctional Facility in Ulster County, New York. It draws on contemporaneous reporting from The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and The New York Post, New York State Board of Parole records, published accounts by David Abrahamson and Mary Terry, later documentary interviews with Berkowitz and with surviving victims an AI assisted research. We do our best to get it right, but we are a podcast, not a court room. Notes on accuracy, Berkowitz's statements about declining his May twenty twenty six parole hearing, and Robert Violante's response to them were reported by The New York Post following an email exchange dated May sixteenth, twenty twenty six, and an interview on May nineteenth, twenty twenty six, and have not, to our knowledge, been independently confirmed by a wire service.

19:37 It is not clear from that reporting whether the board issued a formal determination in his absence. Ages given for Berkowitz and for mister Violante follow that reporting and Berkowitz's stated date of birth. Sources differ on the number of people wounded across the full series of attacks, with counts ranging from seven to eleven, and on whether Berkowitz's six sentences run concurrently or consecutively. Regarding the claim that Berkowitz did not act alone, no person other than David Berkowitz has ever been charged in connection with any of these shootings, and no physical evidence has ever linked another person to any of them. Berkowitz confessed to all eight shootings, later stated that his account of demonic possession was fabricated, and later still asserted the involvement of others. Those accounts contradict one another. John Carr's nineteen seventy eight death was ruled a suicide and Michael Carr's nineteen seventy nine death was ruled a traffic accident. The theories advanced by the late Maury Terry are described in this episode for context and are not endorsed by this program. Our criticism is directed at the conduct of the prosecution, not at any individual defendant beyond the one who pleaded guilty. 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 eight eight