June 1, 1953. Brooklyn. A married woman named Betty Broder Falco gives birth to a son who is not her husband's — the product of a years-long affair with a real estate dealer named Joseph Kleinman. The hospital records the baby as Richard David Falco. Within days, Betty hands him to a middle-aged Jewish couple in the Bronx — Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz — who have been trying to adopt for years. They rename him David Richard Berkowitz, inverting his first names and erasing his last. They raise him in a small Bronx apartment with complete devotion. They also tell him a single lie they will repeat for twenty-two years: that his real mother died giving birth to him. He believes it. And then in 1967, when he is fourteen, his adoptive mother Pearl finds a lump in her breast.

1967. The Bronx. Pearl Berkowitz — the only mother David has ever known — finds the lump in early summer. By August she is in the hospital. The cancer takes her lungs, then her liver, then her life by October. David is fourteen. After the funeral he refuses to speak for nearly three weeks. His father Nathan keeps the hardware store open and works longer hours because he does not know what else to do. David begins setting small fires in trash cans in the alley behind their building. He keeps a notebook. He records the date, the location, and the size of every fire he sets. By the time he leaves home, the notebook will contain 1,488 entries. He is also stealing, shoplifting, and walking the streets alone at night. In 1971, his father remarries. David does not get along with his new stepmother. He enlists in the U.S. Army within months — a place that asks no questions about why a boy might want to leave.

June 1971. Fort Knox, Kentucky. Private David Berkowitz, eighteen years old, completes basic training and scores in the upper percentiles on the M-16 marksmanship qualification — rated as a sharpshooter, the second-highest of three Army marksmanship tiers. His drill sergeants describe him as quiet, neat, and physically unremarkable. He is assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division and spends three years at Camp Casey in South Korea near the Demilitarised Zone. He is, by his own letters home, lonely. He smokes marijuana constantly. He spends most of his free hours alone in his bunk. He loses his religion. He briefly joins a small Christian missionary group on base, then loses interest in that too. He is honourably discharged in June 1974 and returns to the Bronx — a twenty-one-year-old veteran with no career, no family ties left, and a working knowledge of firearms. Then he opens his adoption records.

1975. The Bronx. David Berkowitz, twenty-two, requests a copy of his original birth certificate and sees the name Falco for the first time. He hires a private investigator. Within weeks he has located Betty Broder Falco — his biological mother — living in Coney Island, two subway transfers from his apartment. He arrives at her front door unannounced. Betty is startled but kind. She invites him in and introduces him to his half-sister Roslyn. They have several visits over the following months, but the visits grow increasingly awkward. Betty has a full family. She has not been waiting for him. He had imagined a missing piece and found a woman who had not been looking for him. He stops returning Roslyn's calls. He moves to Yonkers — apartment 7E at 35 Pine Street. He gets a job with the U.S. Postal Service. In late 1975, he begins to hear voices coming from behind the bedroom wall. On Christmas Eve, he leaves the apartment with a hunting knife and returns hours later with the blade wrapped in a soaked handkerchief.

1974 to 1977. New York City and Westchester County. Before, during, and between his shootings, David Berkowitz is setting fires — trash cans in alleys, newspaper bundles on stoops, abandoned cars, empty lots. He keeps a small spiral-bound notebook in his jacket pocket and for every fire he sets, he records the date, the address, and a one-line description. When the notebook is recovered from his apartment in 1977, investigators count 1,488 separate entries. He is, during those three years, the most prolific arsonist in the New York metropolitan area and nobody knows it. He keeps the fires small enough to avoid serious investigation. He picks locations with no cameras, no foot patrols, no witnesses. The fires are practice — how he learns to operate at night, how he learns to disappear before sirens arrive, how he learns to feel nothing when someone screams. By Christmas Eve 1975, he is ready to move from arson to something else. The first attempts will use a knife. He will hate the knife.

December 24, 1975. Co-Op City, the Bronx. Around 8 p.m., a fifteen-year-old girl named Michelle Forman is walking home from a friend's apartment when a young man approaches from behind and stabs her six times in the back, shoulders, and head with a hunting knife. She screams. Lights come on. He runs. Michelle survives. An hour later, a twenty-four-year-old woman in the same neighbourhood is attacked the same way. She also survives. Berkowitz writes about both attacks in his apartment journal that same night. He is disgusted — with himself, with the knife. He writes that the knife is too close, that he wants something at a distance. Over the next six months he travels twice to Houston, Texas. On the second trip he buys, legally, a Charter Arms Bulldog .44 caliber revolver — five-shot capacity, short barrel, unusual cartridge, easy to conceal. He brings it back to Yonkers and sits with it in his apartment for five months. Then on the night of July 29, 1976, he drives the gun across town to Pelham Bay.

July 29, 1976. 1:10 a.m. Buhre Avenue, Pelham Bay, the Bronx. Donna Lauria, eighteen — an emergency medical technician with dark hair who lives with her parents above a deli — is sitting in her best friend Jody Valenti's parked Oldsmobile outside her apartment building. They have just come back from a Manhattan disco. Donna's father has come outside to check on them, told them not to stay out too late, and walked back inside. Two minutes later, a young man approaches the passenger window carrying a brown paper bag. Donna sees him and says, "Now what is this —" He pulls a Charter Arms Bulldog .44 caliber revolver from the bag and fires five shots through the closed passenger window. Donna is hit in the neck and dies at the scene. Jody is hit in the thigh and survives. NYPD homicide detectives find five .44 caliber slugs in the vehicle — an unusual caliber — and tell each other quietly that if this happens again, they have a serial. It happened again three months later.

October 23, 1976. 2:00 a.m. Queens. Carl Denaro, twenty — an Air Force enlistee with longer hair than most of his friends — is sitting in his girlfriend's parked Volkswagen while she is inside a friend's apartment. A man walks up to the car, sees a young person from behind with shoulder-length hair, and fires four shots through the rear window. Carl is hit in the back of the head but survives — the bullet partially deflected by the headrest. NYPD ballistics matches the slug to the Donna Lauria murder. The press dubs him the .44 Caliber Killer. Then on November 27 he strikes again — Joanne Lomino, eighteen, is paralysed from the waist down and will never walk again; Donna DeMasi, seventeen, is wounded. By Christmas 1976 the NYPD has three confirmed attacks, two dead, four wounded, and no description of the killer that anybody can agree on. Witnesses said tall, short, dark hair, blonde. The killer was changing — or the witnesses were guessing.

January 1977. NYPD Chief of Detectives John Keenan creates the Omega Task Force — initially thirty detectives, growing to over three hundred officers across all five boroughs by May. Inspector Timothy Dowd, sixty-three, a World War II veteran and devout Catholic, is named to lead it from the 109th Precinct in Queens. Wall maps of every shooting. Pins for every witness statement. Composite sketches that contradict each other. Detectives are assigned to shadow dark-haired young women walking alone at night. Female officers in long dark wigs sit in unmarked cars as bait. Then on January 30, Christine Freund — twenty-six, engaged to be married — is shot dead in her boyfriend's car in Forest Hills. On March 8, Virginia Voskerichian — nineteen, a Barnard College student — is shot dead walking home from the subway in the same neighbourhood. Papers report that women across Queens are dyeing their hair blonde. Inspector Dowd holds a press conference and tells the city they don't know who the killer is or where he is, but they know he is going to do it again. Six weeks later he was right.

April 17, 1977. 3:00 a.m. Hutchinson River Parkway, the Bronx. Valentina Suriani, eighteen, and her boyfriend Alexander Esau, twenty, are sitting in his parked Mercury after a date. Berkowitz approaches the driver's side window and fires four shots. Both die at the scene. When NYPD officers arrive, they find a sealed envelope on the ground beside the car — addressed to Captain Joseph Borrelli of the homicide division. Inside, a four-page handwritten letter, rambling and apocalyptic, with strange capitalisation. He claims he has been ordered to kill by demons. He calls himself, for the first time in writing, the Son of Sam. He signs off as Mr. Monster. The handwriting is authenticated. By the next morning every newspaper in America has the name on the front page. Inspector Dowd had been hunting a ghost. He was now hunting a celebrity.

May 30, 1977. New York Daily News, 220 East 42nd Street, Manhattan. Jimmy Breslin — forty-seven, gruff, hard-drinking, the most-read columnist in New York — opens a hand-delivered envelope containing a long handwritten letter from the Son of Sam. It is more lucid than the Borrelli letter. The handwriting is the same. He thanks Breslin for his column on the case and asks Breslin to help him with his mission. He hints he will strike again soon. Breslin takes the letter to the NYPD before publishing. Inspector Dowd asks him not to print it in full, fearing copycat panic. Breslin and the editors compromise and publish excerpts on June 5. The issue sells over a million extra copies overnight. Newsstands across New York run out before noon. Every disco, restaurant, and parked-car spot in the city becomes a potential crime scene. And the man writing the letters was seventeen miles north — in Yonkers — sitting in apartment 7E reading his own clippings.

Episode 12 — "The Disco Couple" June 26, 1977. 3:00 a.m. Bayside, Queens. Outside the Elephas Disco. Sal Lupo, twenty, and Judy Placido, seventeen, have just left the club and are sitting in his car talking about the Son of Sam case. Judy says she doesn't think anything would happen out here. Three shots hit the windshield. Sal is hit in the right forearm. Judy is hit three times — in the right temple, right shoulder, and back of the neck. Both survive. Witnesses report a tall blond man running from the scene. Other witnesses report a short dark-haired man. Berkowitz, in his post-arrest confessions, would later say he had deliberately missed — that he had wanted to leave survivors, that he had wanted the case to continue. He was getting more comfortable. He was preserving the show. Five weeks later, for reasons even he could not explain, he changed locations entirely. He left Queens and the Bronx, drove across the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time, and parked his car beside a fire hydrant on a quiet residential street in Bensonhurst.

July 31, 1977. 2:35 a.m. Bay 17th Street, Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Stacy Moskowitz, twenty — a bank secretary, blonde, from a Brooklyn Italian-Jewish family — and Robert Violante, twenty — a clothing-store clerk — have just left a date at a Coney Island restaurant. They are parked under a streetlight, kissing. Berkowitz approaches the passenger window and fires four shots. Robert is hit twice in the face and permanently blinded. Stacy is hit once in the head and dies at Kings County Hospital thirty-eight hours later. Berkowitz walks back to his cream-coloured 1970 Ford Galaxie, parked one block away beside a fire hydrant. At 2:05 a.m. — thirty minutes before the shooting — NYPD Officer Michael Cataneo had walked his beat past the Galaxie and written a $25 parking ticket, tucking it under the windshield wiper. Berkowitz never noticed it. He drove home to Yonkers with it still flapping under the wiper blade. That ticket was about to do what three hundred detectives and a year of investigation had failed to do.

July 31, 1977. 2:30 a.m. Bay 17th Street, Bensonhurst. A forty-nine-year-old woman named Cacilia Davis is walking her white poodle Snowball before bed. She passes a young man on the sidewalk who is walking strangely — stiff, with one arm held tight against his body, as if hiding something up his sleeve. He looks directly into her face as he passes. She looks down at her dog and walks on. She also notices a uniformed officer writing a parking ticket on a cream-coloured Ford Galaxie beside a fire hydrant. She goes home. Five minutes later, from her apartment window, she hears four gunshots and the long wail of a car horn. The next morning she hears about the Moskowitz shooting on the news and calls the police. It takes detectives three days to follow up on her tip. When they finally come to her apartment, she tells them everything — the strange-walking man, the stiff arm, and the parking ticket she saw written twenty-five minutes before the shooting. Detective James Justus asked a clerk to pull every parking ticket written within four blocks of the scene between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. There were four.

August 4, 1977. NYPD 10th Homicide Zone, Brooklyn. Detective James Justus pulls four parking tickets written near the Moskowitz crime scene that night. Three are for Brooklyn-registered vehicles. The fourth is a $25 ticket for a 1970 Ford Galaxie — cream-coloured, plates registered to David Berkowitz, 35 Pine Street, Yonkers. Yonkers is twenty-five miles north of Bensonhurst. Justus asks the obvious question: what was someone from Yonkers doing parked beside a fire hydrant in Bensonhurst at 2:05 a.m. on a Sunday morning? He calls the Yonkers Police Department. The desk officer asks him to hold. Two minutes later a Yonkers detective named Pete Intervallo comes back on the line and says they know that name. Berkowitz had been the subject of multiple complaints — harassment, anonymous threatening letters, shooting at neighbours' dogs. One of the families he had been harassing was named Carr. Their German Shepherd was named Harvey. Justus drives to Yonkers with two other detectives that afternoon. They park across the street from 35 Pine Street and wait for the cream-coloured Galaxie to appear. They wait six days.

August 5 through August 10, 1977. 35 Pine Street, Yonkers. Detective Justus, Detective Edward Zigo, and other NYPD officers maintain rotating surveillance on apartment 7E for six days. They check the Galaxie. Through the rear windshield they can see a duffel bag in the back seat containing the wooden stock of a rifle. On the passenger seat, a stamped envelope addressed to Suffolk County police — the handwriting identical to the Borrelli and Breslin letters. They now have effective probable cause. On August 10 at approximately 10:00 p.m., Berkowitz walks out of 35 Pine Street and gets into his Galaxie. Detective Zigo approaches the driver's side window and pulls his service revolver. Berkowitz looks up at him. Zigo says he's got him and asks who he has. Berkowitz looks at him calmly, smiles, and says two words: "I'm Sam." Zigo opens the door and sees the Charter Arms Bulldog .44 caliber revolver sitting on the passenger seat in a brown paper bag. The thirteen-month manhunt is over.

August 10, 1977. 10:00 p.m. The back of an NYPD patrol car. Yonkers. David Berkowitz sits in handcuffs. He is calm. He is smiling. Inspector Timothy Dowd — flown in from Manhattan — sits beside him. Berkowitz looks at him and says two things: that they've got him, and then the question that becomes the most quoted phrase of his entire case — "What took you so long?" He is driven to NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza. The route is lined with reporters. Photographers capture, through the window, the image that will appear on every newspaper in America the next morning — the wide, satisfied, half-amused grin on a twenty-four-year-old postal worker's face. Inside his apartment, detectives find rambling handwritten notes covering the walls and ceiling, references to demons, coded messages. They also find his diary — 1,488 fires — and later, in a follow-up search of the Galaxie, the manuscript of a children's book he had been writing. The hero was a dog. The dog was named Harvey.

August 11, 1977. Bellevue Hospital, psychiatric ward. David Berkowitz, in his initial interviews with court-appointed psychiatrists, gives an explanation that almost nobody knows what to do with. He says he had been ordered to kill by demons who spoke to him through the body of a six-year-old black Labrador named Harvey, owned by his Yonkers neighbour Sam Carr. The demons told him, through the dog, when to leave the apartment and where to drive. The "Sam" in Son of Sam, he tells them, is Sam Carr — and he is Sam Carr's spiritual son. The letters had been dictated by the demons through the dog. Three court-appointed psychiatrists evaluate him. Two declare him competent to stand trial. One declares him insane. The court accepts the majority finding. He pleads guilty to six counts of second-degree murder on May 8, 1978. He is sentenced on June 12 to six consecutive twenty-five-years-to-life terms. He will not be eligible for parole until 2002. He has been denied twelve times since.

979. Yonkers and Manhattan. Maury Terry — an investigative reporter for the Gannett Westchester newspapers — begins independently investigating the Son of Sam shootings and notices things that troubled investigators at the time. Different witnesses had described very different shooters. The Moskowitz shooting sketches looked nothing like Berkowitz. Bullet trajectories at multiple scenes suggested more than one trigger man. Terry comes to believe Berkowitz was part of a satanic cult operating in Westchester County, and alleges the cult included the Carr brothers — sons of Sam Carr. John Carr was found dead in North Dakota in 1978, officially ruled a suicide; Terry called it a cult execution. Michael Carr was killed in a car accident in 1979; Terry called that suspicious too. Berkowitz himself, after converting to Christianity in 1987, supports Terry's theory and claims he was only the shooter in two of the attacks. The NYPD does not reopen the case. Terry dies in 2015 without ever proving the cult theory. His files are now in the New York Public Library. The Carr family has always denied any involvement.

1987. Sullivan Correctional Facility, upstate New York. David Berkowitz, thirty-four, converts to evangelical Christianity through the prison ministry and changes his outgoing mail signature from Son of Sam to Son of Hope. He gives interviews from prison. He refuses parole every time it is offered. He says the man who killed those six people in 1976 and 1977 no longer exists. He runs a prayer-correspondence ministry from his cell — thousands of letters per year. He has been transferred to Shawangunk Correctional Facility, where he still resides. He has been denied parole twelve times. He is seventy-two years old. Donna Lauria, eighteen. Christine Freund, twenty-six. Virginia Voskerichian, nineteen. Valentina Suriani, eighteen. Alexander Esau, twenty. Stacy Moskowitz, twenty. Six dead. Seven wounded. One paralysed. One blinded. One adopted boy from the Bronx who never quite met his real mother — and a $25 parking ticket beside a fire hydrant that ended the largest manhunt in NYPD history.