David berkowitz who is sam

He linked the Son of Sam murders to occult-related crimes and other acts of violence committed around the U. Write to Mahita Gajanan at mahita. By Mahita Gajanan. A scene from 'The Sons of Sam'. Investigative journalist Maury Terry. Related Stories. A few months later, Berkowitz was at it again. Spotting a couple in yet another parked car, he fired at them, resulting in a massive injury to the man's skull.

That November, Berkowitz also shot at two teen girls walking home together and left one paraplegic. Police around this time had yet to put these shooting incidents together to realize they were related. But all that changed in January when Berkowitz attacked another couple in a parked car. Because Berkowitz used the same. That March, Berkowitz murdered college student Virginia Voskerichian as she was walking home from class. As a result, the media coverage of his crimes was widespread and Berkowitz relished the spotlight.

All the while, New Yorkers lived in fear of being his next victim. Berkowitz's final hit happened in the early hours of July 31, , in Brooklyn. He shot Stacy Moskowitz and Bobby Violante. Moskowitz later died, and Violante was blinded in one eye and lost most of the vision in the other from his injuries. Fortunately for the police, a witness noticed something at the scene that helped in cracking the case.

At the scene of the Moskowitz-Violante shootings, a witness saw a man getting away in a car that had a parking ticket on it. Only a handful of tickets were given out that day, and one of them was for Berkowitz. On August 10, , authorities arrested him.

In Berkowitz pled guilty to the six killings, as well as nearly 1, fires he had set in and around New York City. He received years-to-life for each murder. The city was at the mercy of the so-called Son of Sam serial killer who terrorized the city with random shootings over the course of a year — six dead, seven wounded, all with a. The year-old postal worker confessed to the string of brutal crimes furiously discussed in the press, which published taunting, deranged letters from the killer and metabolized widespread public anxiety and fear.

The Sons of Sam, a four-part series which jumps off from the panic of summer , argues that Berkowitz probably did not act alone, based primarily on the work of the late investigator Maury Terry, whose zeal for solving the case spiraled from grounded skepticism to manic obsession over the course of several decades.

Although Berkowitz eventually claimed, from prison for six consecutive life sentences, that he acted in concert with others as part of a satanic cult, the official narrative remained that Berkowitz was the sole culprit. At the time of the murders, Terry was working as an IBM employee, and skeptical that Berkowitz, reportedly mild-mannered and unremarkable, was a sadistic sociopath who alone sought out random citizens at the the behest of a demonic dog, taunted police with satanic references and claimed he was Beelzebub.

Mutilated animal corpses had been found nearby, purportedly for sacrificial rituals.