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Son of Sam: Based on the Authorized Transcription of the Tapes, Official Documents and Diaries of David Berkowitz
Drawing on more than three hundred tape recordings of conversations David Berkowitz had with police, lawyers, and psychiatrists and his handwritten notes and diaries, Klausner presents the full story of the notorious killer
430 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 1980
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 19, 2010
I snatched this from my parents' book shelf when I was, like, seven. Whenever my folks get to wondering: "what happened?" I remind them to point their fingers back on themselves.
February 10, 2018
David Berkowitz (aka “Son of Sam” or “.44 Caliber Killer”) was a serial killer who terrorized New York, when I was a teenager in Queens. I remember hearing about a woman, (Donna DeMasi) who went to the same high school as I did, (Martin Van Buren High School) who was shot, but fortunately survived. Her friend Joanne Lomino, who was also shot when she was with DeMasi, became a paraplegic. I didn’t know the victims. I was living home with my parents and rarely stayed out too late in 1976-1977, unless I were babysitting for neighbors, whose parents often drove me home. I remember the newspapers had numerous articles about the mysterious Son of Sam/.44 Caliber Killer, and it became sensational news. No one knew when or where this killer would strike again. He did, however, seem to aim towards young women, or young couples as his victims. I wasn’t fearful as in retrospect I probably should have been, but many young people have a feeling of invincibility.
This book gives a fabulous history as to more details on the year that David Berkowitz threatened the safety of the citizens of New York. It is very detailed and interesting as it describes Berkowitz’s need to kill, based on his illusions that demons told him to do it. He often struck in the evenings as he actually worked and paid rent like a normal person. His coworkers did not notice anything particularly weird about Berkowitz. He was quiet and often stayed to himself. However, he was also an arsonist and shot a neighbor’s dog. Dog barking would disturb him and he felt that dogs were demons.
He didn’t have any remorse for his killings. In fact, he saw nothing wrong with them. The book describes the police and detectives’ frustrated and long search for their killer. Today, it might have been harder for him to get away with as many killings and for as long as he did, since cameras seem to be everywhere, off buildings, and on smartphones. Back the 1970s, witnesses and survivors had police draw pictures based on their memories of the “Son of Sam,” but each were different and in retrospect, none were entirely adequate.
The book reads like a crime novel, in the sense that the author goes back and forth using Berkowitz’s words from interviews of how he describes each killing and how he felt about them before and after. The author describes the last shootings in the most detail, as there were several eye witnesses. The victims, Stacy Moskowitz died in the hospital from her head wounds, and Robert Violante, survived, but had eye injuries and was declared legally blind. It was horrifying also to read what the parents went through with these victims and others. Berkowitz changed the lives of so many in just a matter of seconds.
Soon after his capture, Berkowitz admitted to his crimes and is spending his life in prison. Although brought up Jewish, Berkowitz became a born again Christian in prison and seems overall content and has adjusted well to prison life. New York did not have the death penalty; but his harsh penalty is six life sentences.
In reading this book, I felt compassion for the victims and their families, and friends. I also felt compassion for the police and detectives who as this book describes, went through a tremendous amount of stress trying to locate and arrest the serial killer, who turned out to be David Berkowitz, a sad, lonely, mentally ill man from Brooklyn.
This book gives a fabulous history as to more details on the year that David Berkowitz threatened the safety of the citizens of New York. It is very detailed and interesting as it describes Berkowitz’s need to kill, based on his illusions that demons told him to do it. He often struck in the evenings as he actually worked and paid rent like a normal person. His coworkers did not notice anything particularly weird about Berkowitz. He was quiet and often stayed to himself. However, he was also an arsonist and shot a neighbor’s dog. Dog barking would disturb him and he felt that dogs were demons.
He didn’t have any remorse for his killings. In fact, he saw nothing wrong with them. The book describes the police and detectives’ frustrated and long search for their killer. Today, it might have been harder for him to get away with as many killings and for as long as he did, since cameras seem to be everywhere, off buildings, and on smartphones. Back the 1970s, witnesses and survivors had police draw pictures based on their memories of the “Son of Sam,” but each were different and in retrospect, none were entirely adequate.
The book reads like a crime novel, in the sense that the author goes back and forth using Berkowitz’s words from interviews of how he describes each killing and how he felt about them before and after. The author describes the last shootings in the most detail, as there were several eye witnesses. The victims, Stacy Moskowitz died in the hospital from her head wounds, and Robert Violante, survived, but had eye injuries and was declared legally blind. It was horrifying also to read what the parents went through with these victims and others. Berkowitz changed the lives of so many in just a matter of seconds.
Soon after his capture, Berkowitz admitted to his crimes and is spending his life in prison. Although brought up Jewish, Berkowitz became a born again Christian in prison and seems overall content and has adjusted well to prison life. New York did not have the death penalty; but his harsh penalty is six life sentences.
In reading this book, I felt compassion for the victims and their families, and friends. I also felt compassion for the police and detectives who as this book describes, went through a tremendous amount of stress trying to locate and arrest the serial killer, who turned out to be David Berkowitz, a sad, lonely, mentally ill man from Brooklyn.
Read
August 30, 2017Well-written and kept my interest. Often, books will have a section that drags, and I find myself needing to power through it until it gets good again. This book did not drag. I enjoy true crime and police procedurals. This book did a good job of staying neutral and reporting the occurrences from both the police and the perpetrator's point of view. Learning about what drove Berkowitz to do what he did made me rethink my definition of insanity and how complicated it can be. This was a man who was very mentally ill, yet he also knew exactly what he was doing. An interesting read.
May 17, 2014
The poignant story of a young man's struggle with his religious identity.
April 30, 2024
By the end of the 1970s, New York was the most dangerous city in America, if not the whole world. Adding to the climate of fear, violence and crime was a lone serial killer striking out at random times and random places. Police knew every time he struck because the bullets recovered from the scenes all came from the same gun a .44 caliber pistol that was a rare make and model with a powerful kick that could most likely only be handled by an experienced shooter. That man was later revealed to be David Berkozwitz. Lawrence B. Klausner, in Son of Sam, tells the story primarily from the police force’s point of view.
Roughly half the book is dedicated to telling the story of NYPD’s detective task force put together specifically to catch the elusive murderer. Klausner does this for good reason. His intention is to celebrate the heroic manhunt conducted by that crack team of investigators, called Operation Omega, without overly emphasizing the sick details of Berkowitz’s long term killing spree. But this approach only goes so far. A lot of Operation Omega’s work leads to dead ends and faulty conclusions that result in nothing but frustration. Actually it is the Yonkers police who do the most to put the pieces of the puzzle together when they begin noticing the strange behavior of Berkowitz who lives in a Yonker’s apartment building up until his capture. This may be an accurate way to portray police detective work, but you have to consider that most people don’t read this book for information on law enforcement procedures.
Klausner also makes a slight and similar lapse of judgment in his handling of the murder victims and their family’s reactions. He mostly handles this sensitive part of the story well and in good taste. It is obvious where his sympathies lie and he shows us how violent crime does not only effect the people who get shot, but also their families and the surrounding communities too. But Klausner goes a little too far with this. After the shooting of Berkowitz’s last victims, Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante who were out on their first date, the author tracks their families into the hospitals where they are taken. The problem is that this part of the book is overwrought and maudlin, descending into melodrama that over-sensationalizes and over-sentimentalizes the situation to the point where the author subverts his own intentions by trying too hard to show us the distress of the families. He wants us to see the gravity of the crimes, but turns it into a soap opera instead. We can forgive Klausner for this error simply because we know his good intentions, though.
And finally there is the story of David Berkowitz, the .44 Caliber Killer and the Son of Sam himself. Berkowitz is an adopted child who had trouble making and maintaining friendships during his childhood. Shy and awkward, he always fails to fit in even though people think he seems like a good guy, at least on the surface. He makes it through the military, becoming an expert sharpshooter, then returns to New York City, living alone and holding down various jobs. At some point in his life he begins hearing howling dogs that he believes to be the voices of demons telling him to kill so they can drink the victims’ blood. Only Berkowitz’s attempts at murder make the auditory hallucinations stop. And these hallucinations do stop anytime he goes to work. On the days he has off, the howling dogs start to harass him. Unable to sleep, he tucks his gun into his pants and goes out to kill in the outer boroughs of Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.
Berkowitz writes letter to the police, some of which end up in the newspapers. With prose that sounds like something out of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, he gives details of his crimes and explains his situation. He believes his neighbor in Yonkers, a man named Sam Carr who owns a dog that barks at night, is actually Satan and Berkowitz believes that Sam is commanding him to kill in order to prevent bigger disasters like earthquakes or tornadoes from happening, hence the self-given name of Son of Sam. The letters at first appear to be taunting the police, but in a sense they may be Berkowitz’s way of saying he wants to be caught. After they do arrest him, Berkowitz expresses relief because he doesn’t like the job of killing and feels he has no choice but to obey the voices in his head. It becomes clear early on in the book that David Berkowitz suffers from schizophrenia, but a schizophrenia that is difficult for outsiders to detect because his episodes only happen when he is tormented by loneliness. The degree of his disordered thinking is easy to spot early on when he thinks that his fist murder victim will marry him after she dies. His thoughts become more nonsensical from there.
Son of Sam is an interesting book, even if it is a little clumsy, uneven, and amateurish. The over-emphasis of the police department’s manhunt takes a little too much focus off of David Berkowitz to really make the story work entirely. But the biggest flaw is that a more in-depth psychological profile of the killer is never given. We get the details of his crimes and his mental illness, but the deeper psychology of how Berkowitz’s mind drives him to do what he does and how he came to be a killer when he didn’t want to be is never explored. His mental illness is the most colorful and interesting part of his biography and without a bigger examination of his mental processes, this book ends up being simply just a combination of police thriller and slasher horror story. Still the descriptions and atmospherics are well-done, and we do get enough of a taste of Berkowitz’s psychology to keep the story interesting.
Son of Sam is worth reading if you simply want the story of David Berkowitz’s crimes. In the end you may even feel an ounce of sympathy for the man who struggles with uncontrolled mental illness that drives him to commit crimes he doesn’t want to commit. Mind you, an ounce of sympathy is not a large amount and it is obvious that the victims deserves infinitely more sympathy than he does. Klausner does an adequate job of making this obvious fact clear enough.
Since he pleaded guilty and got sentenced to life imprisonment, Berkowitz has become a model prisoner and, every time he goes up for parole, he says he doesn’t deserve to be released because his crimes were so terrible. The story of his redemption is not covered in this book, but it is almost as provocative as the story of his serial killing spree. Is Son of Sam the American version of Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment? That will be for future generations to decide. But there is no doubt, were Doestoevsky alive today, he would find David Berkowitz to be a fascinating character he could relate to.
Roughly half the book is dedicated to telling the story of NYPD’s detective task force put together specifically to catch the elusive murderer. Klausner does this for good reason. His intention is to celebrate the heroic manhunt conducted by that crack team of investigators, called Operation Omega, without overly emphasizing the sick details of Berkowitz’s long term killing spree. But this approach only goes so far. A lot of Operation Omega’s work leads to dead ends and faulty conclusions that result in nothing but frustration. Actually it is the Yonkers police who do the most to put the pieces of the puzzle together when they begin noticing the strange behavior of Berkowitz who lives in a Yonker’s apartment building up until his capture. This may be an accurate way to portray police detective work, but you have to consider that most people don’t read this book for information on law enforcement procedures.
Klausner also makes a slight and similar lapse of judgment in his handling of the murder victims and their family’s reactions. He mostly handles this sensitive part of the story well and in good taste. It is obvious where his sympathies lie and he shows us how violent crime does not only effect the people who get shot, but also their families and the surrounding communities too. But Klausner goes a little too far with this. After the shooting of Berkowitz’s last victims, Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante who were out on their first date, the author tracks their families into the hospitals where they are taken. The problem is that this part of the book is overwrought and maudlin, descending into melodrama that over-sensationalizes and over-sentimentalizes the situation to the point where the author subverts his own intentions by trying too hard to show us the distress of the families. He wants us to see the gravity of the crimes, but turns it into a soap opera instead. We can forgive Klausner for this error simply because we know his good intentions, though.
And finally there is the story of David Berkowitz, the .44 Caliber Killer and the Son of Sam himself. Berkowitz is an adopted child who had trouble making and maintaining friendships during his childhood. Shy and awkward, he always fails to fit in even though people think he seems like a good guy, at least on the surface. He makes it through the military, becoming an expert sharpshooter, then returns to New York City, living alone and holding down various jobs. At some point in his life he begins hearing howling dogs that he believes to be the voices of demons telling him to kill so they can drink the victims’ blood. Only Berkowitz’s attempts at murder make the auditory hallucinations stop. And these hallucinations do stop anytime he goes to work. On the days he has off, the howling dogs start to harass him. Unable to sleep, he tucks his gun into his pants and goes out to kill in the outer boroughs of Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.
Berkowitz writes letter to the police, some of which end up in the newspapers. With prose that sounds like something out of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, he gives details of his crimes and explains his situation. He believes his neighbor in Yonkers, a man named Sam Carr who owns a dog that barks at night, is actually Satan and Berkowitz believes that Sam is commanding him to kill in order to prevent bigger disasters like earthquakes or tornadoes from happening, hence the self-given name of Son of Sam. The letters at first appear to be taunting the police, but in a sense they may be Berkowitz’s way of saying he wants to be caught. After they do arrest him, Berkowitz expresses relief because he doesn’t like the job of killing and feels he has no choice but to obey the voices in his head. It becomes clear early on in the book that David Berkowitz suffers from schizophrenia, but a schizophrenia that is difficult for outsiders to detect because his episodes only happen when he is tormented by loneliness. The degree of his disordered thinking is easy to spot early on when he thinks that his fist murder victim will marry him after she dies. His thoughts become more nonsensical from there.
Son of Sam is an interesting book, even if it is a little clumsy, uneven, and amateurish. The over-emphasis of the police department’s manhunt takes a little too much focus off of David Berkowitz to really make the story work entirely. But the biggest flaw is that a more in-depth psychological profile of the killer is never given. We get the details of his crimes and his mental illness, but the deeper psychology of how Berkowitz’s mind drives him to do what he does and how he came to be a killer when he didn’t want to be is never explored. His mental illness is the most colorful and interesting part of his biography and without a bigger examination of his mental processes, this book ends up being simply just a combination of police thriller and slasher horror story. Still the descriptions and atmospherics are well-done, and we do get enough of a taste of Berkowitz’s psychology to keep the story interesting.
Son of Sam is worth reading if you simply want the story of David Berkowitz’s crimes. In the end you may even feel an ounce of sympathy for the man who struggles with uncontrolled mental illness that drives him to commit crimes he doesn’t want to commit. Mind you, an ounce of sympathy is not a large amount and it is obvious that the victims deserves infinitely more sympathy than he does. Klausner does an adequate job of making this obvious fact clear enough.
Since he pleaded guilty and got sentenced to life imprisonment, Berkowitz has become a model prisoner and, every time he goes up for parole, he says he doesn’t deserve to be released because his crimes were so terrible. The story of his redemption is not covered in this book, but it is almost as provocative as the story of his serial killing spree. Is Son of Sam the American version of Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment? That will be for future generations to decide. But there is no doubt, were Doestoevsky alive today, he would find David Berkowitz to be a fascinating character he could relate to.
February 3, 2019
This book is in need of a lot of editing, imho.
August 29, 2019
I was fascinated by this book, particularly the way the police finally caught this guy. Great read!!
July 13, 2011
Unfortunately I have to say this book is not well written. It seems overly dramatic at times and also a bit choppy. The book attempted but failed to capture the essence of the era. Particularly segments of the book were very interesting and the use of documents and direct quotes provides great insight into the case. However, the books is peppered with awkward dramatic sections that either needed to be fleshed out better or just completely discarded. I got the feeling that quotes by major players in the investigation were used in substitution of full character development.
February 8, 2018
At first I thought this was going to be a dry read, but instead it keeps you fully interested in the case by having multiple quotes from Berkowitz, families of the victims, and all the police that were involved. The whole time I was asking myself: Is Berkowitz crazy or is he just plain evil? In the end I still don't know, but you still can come up with several theories about him. In short, this had an intimate amount of detail and research. Very impressive.
August 20, 2016
This was an OK read, pretty informative and more reality-based than some of the other books out there on the Son of Sam.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews