Word: killers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After the capture, the twisted killer's life unfolds...
...David Berkowitz, 24, a U.S. mail sorter, who was captured by police and identified as the lone gunman who had terrified much of New York in a yearlong series of eight nighttime attacks in quiet residential neighborhoods. But as the city's most massive manhunt ended, the killer of six young people (seven others survived their wounds) did not fulfill public expectations of the type of man who would automatically arouse suspicion, fear and hate...
...then that twisted side of the mild-mannered killer's mentality exposed itself. Why, why had he murdered? "It was a command," he said in a soft, nonaggressive voice. "I had a sign and I followed it. Sam told me what to do and I did it." Again: "Sam told me to do it. Sam sent me on an assignment. I had to do what I had to do. I had my orders. Sam sent me." Who is Sam? Berkowitz said Sam is at the moment a neighbor of his named Sam Carr, but "really...
...question of how the once unremarkable Berkowitz acquired his demonic delusions will, of course, be the object of intense psychiatric study. Born Rich ard David Falco, but given up for adoption by his mother at birth, the killer was raised by Nathan Berkowitz, a respected owner of a small hardware store in The Bronx. His first wife pampered David, but one family friend recalls that the boy sometimes would "curse her because he knew he was adopted." Nevertheless, when she died of cancer in 1967, her teen-age son sobbed openly at the funeral; no body could remember his crying...
Meanwhile the lone killer was forcing a huge city's young women to shun their usual dating places, to roll up their long hair, to travel only in groups. All this provided another painful reminder of a mass society's vulnerability to the whims and torments of the oddballs in its midst...