August 10, 1977 – Son of Sam CAPTURED!

NEW YORK – Approximately 20 minutes before Yankees reliever Dick Tidrow induced Oakland pinch-hitter Willie Crawford to ground out to finish off a 6-3 victory at Yankee Stadium, something big was occurring over in Yonkers.

New York City police detective John Falotico pointed a gun at the head of David Berkowitz, who proceeded to smile broadly and say, “Well, you’ve got me.”

Falotico replied, “Now that I’ve got you, who have I got?”

“You know.”

“No,” Falotico said. “I don’t. You tell me.”

“I’m Sam.”

“You’re Sam? Sam who?”

“Sam. David Berkowitz.”

And so it ended, one of the most terrifying killing sprees in United States history. Berkowitz, also known as the .44-Caliber Killer and the Son of Sam, was finally caught, and New York City breathed a sigh of relief powerful enough to create surf-worthy waves on the Hudson and East rivers.

“I’ve never seen fear grip an entire city as much as that,” news anchor Rolland Smith told the Hackensack (N.J.) Record several years ago. “I recall it being our lead story literally every night. And we did a lot of sidebar stories about people in the areas where Berkowitz was operating. The fear was just all-consuming, pervasive. You had no idea where this Son of Sam might appear.”

There had been four murders committed in the Bronx and Queens dating back to July 29, 1976, but it wasn’t until Virginia Voskerichian - a 20-year-old Barnard College honors student - was shot in the head and killed with a .44-caliber handgun while walking home in Queens on March 8, 1977 that New York City police realized this shooting was related to the others and that a serial killer was on the loose.

And once that news hit the streets, the citizens of all the boroughs, not just the Bronx and Queens, were on high alert, living in fear that they would be the lunatic’s next victim. New Yorkers are a tough breed, but this scared the populace like nothing ever had before.

Because all of the female victims had long, brunette or dark hair, scores of teenage and young women either cut their hair short or dyed it blonde in the hopes they would be ignored. Because a few of the victims had been shot while parked in cars with their boyfriends or dates, couples went inside to make out. The hot discos, in a summer where that music genre was exploding, noticed a sharp decline in business, club-goers fearing the killer would be waiting for them when they left to go home. Parents feared whenever their children went out of the house as they never had before.

The Voskerichian slaying ratcheted up the fear, and then Berkowitz struck again on April 17. Alexander Esau, 20, and Valentina Suriani, 18, were sitting in her car in the Bronx when they were each shot twice and eventually died. This time, Berkowitz left a note near the bodies addressed to NYPD Capt. Joseph Borrelli, leader of a task force that had been formed to solve the crimes. It read:

On May 30, New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin received a hand-written letter, allegedly from Berkowitz, a weird, rambling diatribe that police initially did not think was from the killer but from someone who was merely familiar with the shootings. Indeed, it was eventually confirmed to have come from the killer. It was published in the Daily News a week later, and more than 1.1 million copies were sold that day, the largest-selling edition in the paper’s history.

“The day his letter came in was disturbing,” Breslin, the late Pulitzer Prize winner, told the Record. “She (his assistant) said, ‘I don’t like this letter.’ I’ve always had nuts write me. But she didn’t even want to read this one to me because it was so ugly. He had killed two people within four blocks of my house in Queens. And now, he wrote me a note. And I had to assume - correctly, I later found out - that he knew everything about me.”

On June 26, Berkowitz attacked again, this time in Queens, but neither Sal Lupo nor Judy Placido, who were parked in a car after leaving a disco, died. What proved to be the final strike occurred on July 31. Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante, both 20, were in Violante’s car, in the Bath Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn. Four shots were fired, Moskowitz died several hours later in the hospital, while Violante survived, though he lost one eye and most of his vision in his other eye.

Incredibly, it was a parking ticket that ultimately brought Berkowitz down. His cream-colored Ford Galaxie had been ticketed on the night of the Moskowitz murder. Investigators pored through information and found that the owner of the vehicle, Berkowitz, had been named by a tipster as someone who could be a person of interest.

On Aug. 10, Falotico and fellow detectives Ed Zigo and John Longo went to 35 Pine Street in Yonkers, located the car, peered inside, and saw a rifle sticking out of a duffel bag. Rather than raid his apartment, they waited until Berkowitz came out, and when he did, as soon as he entered the vehicle, they pounced. Berkowitz had been carrying a paper bag which he tossed on the passenger seat. Inside that bag was the .44 caliber revolver he had used throughout his killing binge.

Six dead (five women), seven wounded in the course of a year, all at the hands of the former postal worker who today remains incarcerated for life.

At the big ballpark in the Bronx, where a sparse gathering of 16,440 would go home to learn the good news of Berkowitz’s capture, Ron Guidry pitched four-hit ball through seven innings, striking out eight, a far better night than that of Oakland’s Vida Blue. The A’s aging ace gave up five runs while getting just one out in the first inning, the shortest outing of his career. Cliff Johnson’s two-run double, and RBI singles by Reggie Jackson and Lou Piniella were the big hits.

The daily baseball report

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