Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth (17 page)
He lay on the stretcher wearing one sock, his shirt with the little red dot, torn open. The entrance wound, now clear to see, was tiny still. There just had to be more blood, I thought, for a man to die. But the fact remained unchanged: The man was dead. I didn’t yet have an understanding of internal bleeding or of how bullets, as they slow, chew up human tissue. When, in a daze, I left to go to work, I noticed it was still a beautiful day. The world had not stopped turning. Yet everything was different.
I never knew the dead man’s name. I suppose I might have known it for a brief time and forgotten. There were posters put up around the neighborhood by his family and the cops. But the posters faded and frayed and fell off the telephone poles like the ones for missing pets or the guy who’ll rake your yard for ten bucks. To the best of my knowledge, the murderer’s never been apprehended.
Near the conclusion of my novel
The James Deans
, the protagonist-P.I., Moe Prager, having learned the truth about a thirty-year-old murder, goes to reveal that truth to the victim’s long-suffering mother. But as he steps out of his car to confront the dead boy’s parent with the truth, he stops himself and returns to his car. For at that moment, Moe learns the lesson I learned over thirty years ago.
In my writing, I try always to keep that day in mind. Whenever the urge strikes me to get too flippant or fanciful about murder, I remember. I remember that this nameless man had a family, and that for them his loss is nothing like the extended absence of a vaguely known kid from junior high. For them there is no such thing as arm’s length or closure or justice. Serious crime is not about glamour or fame or gangsters with funny nicknames. Murder is about pain and loss. Murder is no roses for Bubbeh.
T
he Bogeyman came to life in New York City in 1977. The fiend was born in Brooklyn in 1953, an unwanted child who was put up for adoption because his biological father—a well-off Long Island businessman screwing around with a Brooklyn housewife—would have nothing to do with this unwanted progeny. The kid’s penniless mother had no choice but to dump him on a family that wanted a child but were unable to conceive. Little did the couple know that the bundle full of joy they took out of Brooklyn was a monster.
The Furies must have been full of wicked humor as they walked the halls of that Brooklyn hospital on June 1, 1953. As soon as the Bogeyman was born he was taken out of Brooklyn. The Bronx and later Queens would have to deal with him as he morphed into a psychopath. In 1976 and ’77, as the evil started to cut short the lives of young kids from Queens and the Bronx, the people of Brooklyn thought they had dodged a bullet.
“Son of Sam is too scared to come into Brooklyn,” was a common boast of young Brooklyn men.
But like the Bogeyman of legend, he waited until everyone figured they were safe. Then he sneaked in during his last stages of malevolence and broke out his final act of wrath. And there have been rumors that Berkowitz’s killing in Bensonhurst may have been recorded and made into a snuff film.
* * *
David Berkowitz, a.k.a. “Son of Sam,” appeared in 1977 New York City as the place was at its nadir. His killing spree added to the woes of a seemingly dying metropolis. It was a city that was told to—in a famous
Daily News
headline—“Drop Dead” by President Ford. The coffers of the treasury were empty. Crime was rampant and the city’s answer was to lay off cops. Arson became pandemic, and with the ruined budget new firemen couldn’t be hired to help already overworked smoke eaters. If you were in New York in 1977, you knew murder and mayhem. Not much scared you, because if it did you would have moved out.
In fact, between 1970 and 1980 the population of New York dropped by 800,000 people. Many left, few moved in. New York was not a choice destination in those days. In 1976, when the Bogeyman started to come alive, he killed one person. Others, full of passion, jealousy, viciousness, evil, poverty, and anger killed another 1,621 people in New York that year. In 1977, the Bogeyman killed five and other killers came up with 1,548 murders. In those two years, 3,175 people were murdered in New York, yet it was the Bogeyman’s six killings that made the headlines. People couldn’t get enough of the story once it broke in the daily papers.
Everyone knew about muggings, shoot-outs, and drug wars. But for someone to come out of the shadows at night and gun down innocent girls and boys, well, that was beyond even a New Yorker’s ken. In the Big Apple, you’re usually killed for a reason, not just randomly picked out by a madman and slaughtered.
The origin of the word Bogeyman is hard to trace. In the southern regions of America, he is called
Boogerman
—elsewhere the standard appellation of Bogeyman applies. Some think it came out of Indonesia where the word
bugis
means pirates. Pirates were known to steal children and take them away from their homes to work on their ships. So parents would warn their children to be good or the Bugis would get them.
The Bogeyman’s legend has lasted and thrived for hundreds of years. Sam Raimi, the director of
Spider-Man
and one of the classic horror films of all time,
The Evil Dead
, is fascinated by the Bogeyman. Raimi once said, “He’s a mythical character that is the stuff of stories of generations. He is a horrible creature that consumes human beings …”
William Safire, the noted wordsmith for the
New York
Times
, traced the oldest form of the word Bogeyman to thirteenth-century France. The word they used was
Bugibu
. In the later Middle Ages, Satan became known as
Old Bogey
. Safire suggests that there is a link between Satan and the Bogeyman. And some people—including Berkowitz himself—believe that Satan and the Son of Sam are also connected.
Safire explains how in Iceland the Bogeyman is
puki
, in Scotland he is called
boggart
, and in Germany he is
Boggelmann
. He also has theorized that the scarifier
Boo
comes from Bogeyman.
Writer Sharon K. West once did an essay on the fiend. “Bogeymen have no distinct habitat and can appear out of nowhere,” she concluded.
Well, New York had its own Bogeyman. No one knew where he lived and he did appear out of nowhere.
It was on April 17, 1977, that the Son of Sam came out of his lonely and twisted closet to show all of New York City just who they were going to have to deal with.
On that early Sunday morning at 3 a.m., a young couple, Alex Esau and Valentina Suriani, coming home from a date in Manhattan, were parked in a Mercury Montego along the lonely service road of the Hutchinson River Parkway in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx. As the couple hugged and kissed, David Berkowitz sneaked up to the car and shot them through the passenger-side window, killing them both.
He walked away and dropped a note addressed to NYPD Captain Joe Borrelli. In simple block letters, the message read:
I am the “Son of Sam” … I am the “monster”—“Beelzebub”—
the “chubby behemoth” … I am on a different
wavelength then
[sic]
everybody else—programmed to kill
… to stop me you must kill me … I’ll be back! I’ll be
back!After thirty years he has never really gone away.
In the summer of 1976, I started hearing some disturbing rumors about Satanic cults operating in the wooded sections of Orchard Beach in the Bronx and up in Untermyer Park in Yonkers. After Son of Sam’s arrest, it was revealed that his home address was a short walk from Untermyer Park.
I was employed that summer as a parkie at Orchard Beach, and one day as I was raking sand, a fellow worker said, “Yo, man, stay out of those backwoods here, they’re dangerous! Especially at night. There’s some sick shit going on out there with these devil-worshipping dudes. I think they kill dogs and drink the blood.”
I had been going to Orchard Beach since I was a kid and I couldn’t see devil-worshipping going down there. It was a place my father called the Bronx’s Riviera. The beach had seen racial wars, when whites would wander into what the Puerto Ricans had claimed as their section, or vice versa. But it is a big leap from stupid territorial brawls to Satanism.
Even so, I could believe it was happening up in Untermyer Park. That was in the suburbs and home to most of the heavy metal heads in the metropolitan area, including many who were interested in the occult. Back then I thought New York City kids were just too jaded to be into Satan. God has trouble drawing an audience in New York, never mind a second-rate deity like Old Scratch.
Untermyer was a weird park, though, and a lot of Bronx kids would go up there to cop marijuana or acid. The park was a former rich man’s sprawling estate located above the Hudson River. There were old, creepy Gothic towers with gargoyles on top and abandoned stone buildings throughout the grounds. It was thick with overgrown brambles, gardens, and woods. I could imagine, in the more secluded sections of the park, a band of hooded Satanists sacrificing dogs on nights when the moon was full.
Satanism did seem to be
in
back in those days. The movie
The Exorcist
was in rerelease (this was before video) and one of the most popular films of the summer in 1976 was
The Omen.
I was having a hard enough time just getting by in 1976. Teenage years are tough everywhere, but in New York they can be particularly brutal. And one of the things I had never seen in New York was devil worship, so I was a bit intrigued. Every morning before work I would think about my Orchard Beach coworker’s warning, “Stay out of those woods, man.”
I would look into those foreboding trees on the other end of the beach and wonder. Then I would forget about it. Until one July 1976 morning when the night watchman at Orchard Beach was getting off duty and called me over to his car. He told me that at midnight he had seen a bunch of people on the beach wearing hooded black robes standing in a circle. He moved closer and heard them chanting and staring up at the full moon. He ran back to the parkie house, locked himself in, and called the cops. The figures were gone by the time the police arrived. We both shook our heads and I swore I’d never let the sun set on my ass at Orchard Beach.
On July 30, 1976, I was on a break from my parkie job. I sat in the shade of a locker room sipping a coffee and reading the
New York Post.
One story on the front page caught my eye. A mile from Orchard Beach, in a neighborhood known as Pelham Bay, two young girls, Jody Valenti and Donna Lauria, had been shot the night before while sitting in a 1974 Oldsmobile Cutlass. They were talking about their night at a New Rochelle disco when a lone gunman sneaked up on them and started shooting. He killed Lauria and badly wounded Valenti. She later recovered.
Wild story
, I remember thinking. I finished the article and cynically thought it was a mistaken mob hit. The Pelham Bay neighborhood was no stranger to Mafia shootings. I figured the long-haired girls had been mistaken for some hippy drug dealers working the forbidden zone of a good Italian neighborhood.
The only problem with that theory was that when the mob boys hit, everyone dies. There are no witnesses left. In this shooting, only one girl died. Jody Valenti was able to give the police a good eyewitness sketch of the gunman.
After a day or two all the local dailies dropped the story. There were nearly twenty thousand murders in America in 1976. Poor and dead Donna Lauria was forgotten. (Though not by her father, who publicly threatened to kill Berkowitz in 2006, years after he was convicted of the murder.) What no one knew then was that the girls would later become immortalized as the Son of Sam’s first victims.
In 1953, Son of Sam was given the name David Richard Berkowitz. He was born Richard David Falco, and on his Brooklyn birth certificate, Anthony Falco was listed as his father. His birth mother, Betty Broder Falco, later claimed that his real father was one Joseph Kleinman, her lover who refused to have a baby with her. They remained lovers until Kleinman died of cancer in 1965.
The baby’s mother gave up the infant for adoption to Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz, a childless middle-aged couple living in the East Bronx. They switched the birth names around and called him David. Baby David was raised on Stratford Avenue in the Bronx. Nathan Berkowitz owned a hardware store and Pearl was a housewife. David was to be their only child.
In an attempt to interview David Berkowitz, I wrote him a letter and sent it to the prison where he is being housed. He answered.
Dear Mr. Sullivan,
I received a letter from you informing me that you are
planning on doing a story about my life. I was very saddened
to learn this because, first of all, you do not know me at all.
Second, so much has changed within the past years.I am unable to grant you an interview at this time.
I cannot stop you from writing anything. However, if
you would like to know my opinion about the case and
many things related to it I am enclosing some pamphlets
I wrote. Today, thanks to God, I am living with a lot of
hope.God bless you!
Sincerely,
David Berkowitz
David Berkowitz was, by all reports, a normal kid growing up in the Bronx. A number of his friends have stated that he was very good baseball player. His adoptive mother died in 1967 from breast cancer. In 1969, David moved with his father to Co-op City in the Bronx. They were a widowed father and son living together like in the TV show of that time
The Courtship
of Eddie’s Father
.
Berkowitz volunteered for the army in 1971 because he wanted to fight in the Vietnam War. He passed all his medical and psychiatric tests. In a typical illustration of government inefficiency, he was not sent to Vietnam, but to Korea. In June of 1974, he received an honorable discharge.