Son of Sam
True Crime
20 Episodes
Six dead. Seven wounded. One paralysed. One blinded. Thirteen months of citywide terror triggered by a pudgy, soft-spoken postal worker from Yonkers who sat in parked cars on residential streets and shot strangers through their windows with a .44 caliber Bulldog revolver he bought legally in Texas. Son of Sam traces the life and crimes of David Richard Berkowitz — born Richard David Falco, handed to strangers within days of his birth, raised believing his biological mother was dead, orphaned by cancer at fourteen, and quietly setting fires across New York by fifteen. Told entirely through narration across twenty episodes, this micro-drama series follows Berkowitz from a Brooklyn hospital where a married woman gave away her affair's child, through a lonely Army posting in South Korea, a failed reunion with the mother who had never been looking for him, and a one-bedroom Yonkers apartment where he covered the walls in handwritten messages to demons and listened through the plaster for orders from a neighbour's dog. Unlike the methodical hunters in this series, Berkowitz killed at random — no type, no ritual, no signature beyond the weapon itself. He shot couples in parked cars and women walking home alone across five boroughs, then drove back to apartment 7E and went to sleep. He wrote two rambling letters that gave the case its name and the tabloids their biggest sales day since the Kennedy assassination. He was not caught by the three-hundred-officer task force that hunted him, or by the female decoys in dark wigs who sat in unmarked cars as bait, or by the composite sketches that never matched each other. He was caught by a forty-nine-year-old woman walking her white poodle, a beat cop writing a twenty-five-dollar parking ticket beside a fire hydrant, and a Yonkers detective who said four words when Brooklyn called: "We know that name."
Son of Sam
True Crime
20 Episodes
Six dead. Seven wounded. One paralysed. One blinded. Thirteen months of citywide terror triggered by a pudgy, soft-spoken postal worker from Yonkers who sat in parked cars on residential streets and shot strangers through their windows with a .44 caliber Bulldog revolver he bought legally in Texas. Son of Sam traces the life and crimes of David Richard Berkowitz — born Richard David Falco, handed to strangers within days of his birth, raised believing his biological mother was dead, orphaned by cancer at fourteen, and quietly setting fires across New York by fifteen. Told entirely through narration across twenty episodes, this micro-drama series follows Berkowitz from a Brooklyn hospital where a married woman gave away her affair's child, through a lonely Army posting in South Korea, a failed reunion with the mother who had never been looking for him, and a one-bedroom Yonkers apartment where he covered the walls in handwritten messages to demons and listened through the plaster for orders from a neighbour's dog. Unlike the methodical hunters in this series, Berkowitz killed at random — no type, no ritual, no signature beyond the weapon itself. He shot couples in parked cars and women walking home alone across five boroughs, then drove back to apartment 7E and went to sleep. He wrote two rambling letters that gave the case its name and the tabloids their biggest sales day since the Kennedy assassination. He was not caught by the three-hundred-officer task force that hunted him, or by the female decoys in dark wigs who sat in unmarked cars as bait, or by the composite sketches that never matched each other. He was caught by a forty-nine-year-old woman walking her white poodle, a beat cop writing a twenty-five-dollar parking ticket beside a fire hydrant, and a Yonkers detective who said four words when Brooklyn called: "We know that name."