Mindhunter (20 page)

We interviewed Berkowitz in Attica State Prison, where he was serving twenty-five years to life for each of six killings after pleading guilty, though he later came to deny his crimes. He had been the victim of a near-fatal attack in prison in 1979, when his throat had been slashed from behind. The wound had required fifty-six stitches and the attacker was never identified. So we came to him unannounced, not wanting to place him in further jeopardy. With the warden’s cooperation, we had filled out most of our written questionnaire in advance, so we were well prepped.

For this particular encounter, I brought along some visual aids. As I mentioned, my father had been a pressman in New York and head of the printers’ union in Long Island and had supplied me with tabloids proclaiming the Son of Sam’s exploits in large headlines.

I hold up the New York
Daily News,
then pass it across the table to him as I say, "David, a hundred years from now no one is going to remember Bob Ressler or John Douglas, but they will remember the Son of Sam. In fact, right now there’s a case in Wichita, Kansas, a guy who’s killed about half a dozen women and calling himself the BTK Strangler. That’s ’bind, torture, kill.’ And you know, he’s writing letters and he’s talking about you in those letters. He talks about David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam. He wants to be like you because you have this power. I wouldn’t even be surprised if he writes you a letter in jail here."

Berkowitz is not what I would call a charismatic guy, and he was always searching for some bit of recognition or personal achievement. He had bright blues eyes that were always trying to pick out if someone was genuinely interested, or laughing at him. When he heard what I had to say, his eyes lit up.

"Now you never had a chance to testify in court," I continue, "so all the public knows about you is that you’re one bad son of a bitch. But from doing these interviews, we know that there must be another side, a sensitive side, a side that was affected by your background. And we want you to have the opportunity to tell us about that."

He’s pretty emotionally undemonstrative, but he speaks to us with little hesitation. He admits having started more than two thousand fires in the Brooklyn-Queens area, which he documented in meticulous diary notes. That’s one way he resembles an assassin personality—a loner who indulges in this obsessive journal writing. Another is that he doesn’t want to have any physical contact with the victim. He’s not a rapist or fetishist. He’s not looking for souvenirs. Whatever sexual charge he’s getting is from the act of shooting itself.

The fires he set were mainly of the nuisance variety, such as in trash cans or abandoned buildings. Like a lot of arsonists, he would masturbate while watching the flames, then again when the fire department came to put them out. The fire-starting also fits in with the other two elements of the "homicidal triad": bed-wetting and cruelty to animals.

I always thought of the prison interviews as like panning for gold. The vast majority of what you get is going to be worthless pebbles, but if you get one real nugget out of it, the effort has been well worth it. And that was certainly the case with David Berkowitz.

What’s very, very interesting to us is that as he’s stalking these lovers’ lane areas, rather than go to the driver’s side of the car—most frequently the male side—which would represent the greater threat, he shifts around to the passenger side. This tells us that, as he’s firing into that vehicle in a typical police stance, his hatred, his anger, is directed at the woman. The multiple shots, like multiple stab wounds, indicate the degree of that anger. The male is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. There’s probably never any eye contact between attacker and victim. Everything is done from a distance. He could possess his fantasy woman without ever having to personalize her.

Equally interesting, another golden nugget that has become part of our general awareness of serial killers, is that Berkowitz told us he was on the hunt nightly. When he could not find a victim of opportunity, a victim who was going to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, he would go back to areas where he’d been successful in the past. He would go back to a crime-scene area (many of the others went back to body-disposal areas), and the grave sites, and symbolically roll in the dirt and relive that fantasy over and over again.

This is the same reason why other serial killers take photographs or make videotapes of their crimes. Once the victim is dead and the body has been disposed of, they want to be able to relive the thrill, continue acting out the fantasy, do it again and again. Berkowitz didn’t need the jewelry or the underwear or the body parts or any other souvenir. He told us that just going back was enough for him. He would then go back home, masturbate, and relive the fantasy.

We would use this insight to great effect. People in law enforcement had always speculated that killers returned to the scenes of their crimes, but couldn’t prove it or explain exactly why they did. From subjects like Berkowitz, we were starting to discover that the speculation was true, though not always for the reasons we might have suspected. Remorse can certainly be one of them. But as Berkowitz showed us, there can be others. Once you understand why a particular type of criminal might revisit the scene, you can begin planning strategies to deal with him.

The Son of Sam name came from a crudely written note addressed to police captain Joseph Borelli, who later went on to become NYPD chief of detectives. It was found near the car of victims Alexander Esau and Valentina Suriani in the Bronx. Like the others, both were killed from point-blank range. The note read:

I am deeply hurt by your calling me a weman-hater. I am not. But i am a monster. I am the "son of Sam." I am a little brat.

When father Sam gets drunk he gets mean. He beats his family. Sometimes he ties me up to the back of the house. Other times he locks me in the garage. Sam loves to drink blood.

"Go out and kill," commands father Sam.

Behind our house some rest. Mostly young—raped and slaughtered—their blood drained—just bones now.

Pap Sam keeps me locked in the attic too. I can’t get out but I look out the attic window and watch the world go by.

I feel like an outsider. I am on a different wavelength then everybody else—programmed too kill.

However, to stop me you must kill me. Attention all police: Shoot me first—shoot to kill or else keep out of my way or you will die!

Papa Sam is old now. He needs some blood to preserve his youth. He has had too many heart attacks. "Ugh, me hoot, it hurts, sonny boy."

I miss my pretty princess most of all. She’s resting in our ladies house. But i’ll see her soon.

I am the "monster"—"Beelzebub"—the chubby behemouth.

I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game—tasty meat. The wemon of Queens are prettyist of all. I must be the water they drink. I live for the hunt—my life. Blood for papa.

Mr. Borelli, sir, I don’t want to kill any more. No sur, no more but I must, "honour thy father."

I want to make love to the world. I love people. I don’t belong on earth. Return me to yahoos.

To the people of Queens, I love you. And i want to wish all of you a happy Easter. May God bless you in this life and in the next. And for now I say goodbye and goodnight.

POLICE: Let me haunt you with these words:

I’ll be back!

I’ll be back!

To be interrpreted as—bang, bang, bang, bang—ugh!!

Yours in murder

Mr. Monster.

This insignificant nobody had become a national celebrity. More than a hundred detectives joined what came to be known as Task Force Omega. The wild, raving communications continued, including letters to newspapers and journalists such as columnist Jimmy Breslin. The city was in terror. At the post office, he told us, he got a real thrill overhearing people talking about the Son of Sam and not knowing they were in the same room with him.

The next attack took place in Bayside, Queens, but both the man and woman survived. Five days later, a couple in Brooklyn were not so lucky. Stacy Moskowitz was killed instantly. Robert Violante survived, but lost his sight from his wounds.

The Son of Sam was finally caught because he parked his Ford Galaxy too close to a fire hydrant the night of the final murder. A witness in the area remembered seeing an officer writing up a ticket, and when it was traced, it led to David Berkowitz. When confronted by police, he said simply, "Well, you got me."

After his arrest, Berkowitz explained that "Sam" referred to his neighbor, Sam Carr, whose black Labrador retriever, Harvey, was apparently a three-thousand-year-old demon who commanded David to kill. At one point, he actually shot the dog with a .22 pistol, but it survived. He was instantly labeled a paranoid schizophrenic by much of the psychiatric community, with all sorts of interpretations being given to his various letters. The "pretty princess" of his first letter was apparently one of his victims, Donna Lauria, whose soul Sam had promised him after her death.

What was most significant to me about the letters, more than any of the content, is the way his handwriting changes. In the first letter, it is neat and orderly, then progressively degrades until it is almost illegible. The misspellings become more and more common. It is as if two different people had been writing the letters. I showed this to him. He hadn’t even realized it. If I were profiling him, as soon as I saw the degradation of the handwriting, I would know he was vulnerable, prime to slip up, to make some petty mistake, like parking in front of a fire hydrant, that would help police catch him. That vulnerable point would be the time to launch some sort of proactive strategy.

The reason Berkowitz opened up to us, I believe, was because of the extensive homework we’d done on the case. Early on in the interview, we came to the topic of this three-thousand-year-old dog that made him do it. The psychiatric community had accepted the story as gospel and thought it explained his motivation. But I knew that that story hadn’t actually emerged until after his arrest. It was his way out. So when he started spouting about this dog, I said simply, "Hey, David, knock off the bullshit. The dog had nothing to do with it."

He laughed and nodded and admitted I was right. We’d read several long psychological dissertations on the letters. One compared him to the character of Jerry in Edward Albee’s play
The Zoo Story.
Another tried to pick up his psychopathology by analyzing the writing word by word. But David was throwing them all a curve, which they swung at and missed.

The simple fact is that David Berkowitz was angry about how he had been treated by his mother and other women in his life and felt inadequate around them. His fantasy of possessing them blossomed into a deadly reality. The important things to us were the details.

With Bob Ressler’s skillful administration of the NIJ grant and Ann Burgess’s compilation of the interviews, by 1983 we had completed a detailed study of thirty-six individuals. We also collected data from 118 of their victims, primarily women.

Out of the study came a system to better understand and classify violent offenders. For the first time, we could really begin to link what was going on in a perpetrator’s mind to the evidence he left at a crime scene. That, in turn, helped us to hunt them more efficiently and catch and prosecute them more effectively. It began to address some of the age-old questions about insanity and "what type of person could do such a thing?"

In 1988, we expanded our conclusions into a book, entitled
Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives,
published by Lexington Books. At this writing, it is in its seventh printing. But regardless of how much we learned, as we admitted in our conclusion, "this study raises far more questions than it answers."

The journey into the mind of the violent offender remains an ongoing quest of discovery. Serial killers are, by definition, "successful" killers, who learn from their experience. We’ve just got to make sure we keep learning faster than they do.

The Killer Will Have a Speech Impediment

Sometime in 1980 I saw an article in my local paper about an elderly woman who was sexually assaulted and severely beaten by an unknown intruder and left for dead, along with her two dogs, which had been stabbed to death. It looked to the police as though the offender had spent a fair amount of time at the scene. The community was stunned and outraged.

A couple of months later, coming back from a road trip, I happened to ask Pam if there had been any news on that case. She told me there hadn’t been, and that there were no strong suspects. I commented that that was too bad, because from what I’d read and heard, it sounded like a solvable case. It wasn’t a federal jurisdiction, and we hadn’t been asked in, but just as a local resident, I decided to see if there was anything I could do.

I went down to the police station, introduced myself, told the chief what I did, and asked if I could talk to the detectives working the case. He accepted my offer graciously.

The lead detective’s name was Dean Martin. I can’t remember if I refrained from any Jerry Lewis jokes, but I probably didn’t. He showed me the case files, including the crime-scene photos. This woman had really been pummeled. And as I studied the materials, I started getting a clear mental picture of the offender and the dynamics of the crime.

"Okay," I said to the detectives, who were politely, if somewhat skeptically, listening to me, "here’s what I think." It’s a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old high school kid. Whenever we see an old victim of a sexual assault, we look for a young offender, someone unsure of himself, without much or any experience. A victim any younger, stronger, or more challenging would be too intimidating to him. He’ll be disheveled-looking, he’ll have scruffy hair, generally poorly groomed. Now what happened on this particular night was his mother or father kicked him out of the house and he had no place to go. He’s not going to go too far in this situation. Instead, he’s going to look for the closest and easiest shelter he can find. He doesn’t have the kind of relationship with any girl or other guys that he can just crash at their house until the storm at home blows over. But as he’s out wandering, feeling miserable, powerless, and angry about it, he comes to this lady’s house. He knows she lives alone, he’s worked there in the past or done some odd jobs for her. He knows she isn’t much of a threat.