Free 100 Most Infamous Criminals by Jo Durden Smith Page B

Bronx. He’d killed three people and wounded four, seemingly without any motive at all. New York City Mayor Abe Beame had held a press conference to announce: ‘We have a savage killer on the loose.’
    The first attack had come out of the blue on July 29th 1976 at about one o’clock in the morning, when two young women, one a medical technician, the other a student nurse, were sitting chatting in the front seats of an Oldsmobile parked on a Bronx street. A man had walked up to them, pulled a gun out of a paper bag and fired five shots, killing one of them and wounding the other in the thigh. Four months later, the same gun had been used, again after midnight, against two girls sitting outside a house in Queens. A man had walked up to them and asked directions; then he’d simply opened fire. Both young women had been badly wounded, and one of them, with a bullet lodged in her spine, paralysed.

    Berkowitz seemed to choose his victims at random
    In between these two shootings, there had been yet another one – it turned out later from forensic evidence – using the same .44. Another young couple had been sitting in front of a tavern – again at night and once more in Queens – when someone had fired shots through the back window. The man had been rushed to hospital, but had recovered; the woman had not been hit.
    The panic really began, though, with the mysterious killer’s fourth and fifth attacks. On March 8th 1977, a young Armenian student, Virginia Voskerichian, was shot in the face at close range only a few hundred yards from her home in Queens, and instantly killed. Forty days later, with the deaths of Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau and the discovery of the letter, it became clear that the killings weren’t going to stop. More than that, the killer now had a name – and it was a name to stir up nightmares.
‘I love to hunt. Prowling the streets, looking for fair game – tasty meat,’
    wrote the ‘Son of Sam’.
    Restaurants, bars and discos in Queens and the Bronx were by now closing early for lack of business. People stayed home and kept off the streets at night, despite the deployment of 100 extra patrolmen and the setting-up of a special squad of detectives. For no one had any idea when ‘the Son of Sam’ might strike again, and the nearest description the police had been able to come up with was that he was a ‘neurotic, schizophrenic and paranoid’ male, who probably believed himself possessed by demons…
    He could, from that description, be any man at all – that was what was so frightening. He could even be a policeman himself – which might explain why he’d proved so elusive. This idea began to take hold when he struck yet again in the early hours of a late-June morning, shooting through the windscreen of a car in Queens and wounding another young couple. All the police could do in response to the gathering panic was once more to beef up foot-patrols in anticipation of the anniversary of his first murder a year before.
    Nothing happened, though, on the night of July 29th 1977; and when he did strike again, it wasn’t in his usual hunting-ground at all – but in Brooklyn. In the early hours of July 31st, he fired through the windshield at a pair of young lovers sitting in their car near the sea-front at Coney Island. The woman died in hospital; the man recovered, but was blinded.
    This time, though, the ‘Son of Sam’ had made a mistake. For a woman out walking her dog at about the same time not far away saw two policemen ticketing a car parked near a fire hydrant and then, a few minutes later, a young man jumping into the car and driving off. As it happened only one car, a Ford Galaxie, was ticketed that night for parking at a hydrant – and it was registered to a David Berkowitz in Yonkers.
    When approached the next day by the police officer in charge of the search, Berkowitz instantly recognized him from the TV, and said,
‘Inspector Dowd? You finally got me.’
    As a figure