David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam who invented his own myth and still lives inside it

David Berkowitz

Photo: David Berkowitz from New York, NY, USA / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 1, 1953 Brooklyn, New York, USA
Occupation	Serial killer
Known for	The Killing of America

The night the NYPD caught David Berkowitz, they found a duffel bag in his car containing a Commando Mark III carbine, ammunition, and a map marked with future targets. What they did not find was a possessed dog. The demon, Berkowitz announced at arraignment, had left.

This was 1977. The story he had been feeding the city — through taunting letters left at crime scenes and one addressed directly to newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin — told of a man commanded by his neighbor’s black Labrador retriever to kill young women in parked cars. The city believed it, or found it compelling enough to print. The murders were almost secondary to the narrative architecture he had built around them.

Born Richard David Falco on June 1, 1953, in Brooklyn, Berkowitz was adopted shortly after birth by Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz, Jewish merchants from the Bronx. He served three years in the U.S. Army, received an honorable discharge in June 1974, worked as a postal clerk, and moved to a one-bedroom apartment in Yonkers. Nothing in the public record of his early life obviously explains what followed.

Between July 1976 and July 1977, he killed six people and wounded seven others across four New York City boroughs — all shot in or near parked cars, most late at night. His victims included Donna Lauria in the Bronx, Christine Freund and Virginia Voskerichian in Queens, Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau in the Bronx again, and Stacy Moskowitz in Brooklyn. The city sealed itself. Young women stopped going out after dark, or dyed their hair lighter, on the theory he targeted dark-haired women. The summer of 1977 became, in collective memory, the summer a parking ticket finally ended it: on August 10, investigators traced a ticket issued near his last crime scene to his Ford Galaxie. He pleaded guilty to all charges in May 1978 and received six consecutive 25-year-to-life sentences — 365 years total.

The detail that has never quite left the cultural record is that the demon dog was a lie. Berkowitz admitted in prison that he had invented the story — the neighbor Sam Carr, the black Labrador named Harvey, the demonic commands — specifically to confuse investigators and the press. It worked more durably than he intended. The admission came and went without dislodging the mythology. Spike Lee made a 1999 film, Summer of Sam, in which the killer’s psychology is ambient, peripheral, almost decorative. In 2021, Netflix released The Sons of Sam: A Descent Into Darkness, a docuseries built around journalist Maury Terry’s four-decade investigation into an alleged satanic cult he believed coordinated the murders. Terry’s evidence remains uncorroborated, and law enforcement has never endorsed his conclusions. Berkowitz, in prison interviews and letters, has at various points confirmed and denied elements of the conspiracy theory. He appears comfortable letting the ambiguity circulate.

In 1987, ten years into his sentence, he announced a religious conversion to evangelical Christianity, later identifying as a Messianic Jew. He requested to be called “Son of Hope” rather than “Son of Sam.” He has worked as an aide for impaired prisoners, spoken at faith events via correspondence, and published a book of prison journals, Son of Hope (2006). He does not collect royalties from publications, citing legal restrictions. At every parole hearing since his eligibility began, he has stated that he deserves to remain incarcerated. His most recent hearing was denied in May 2024. The next was scheduled for May 2026.

In July 2025, Netflix released Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes, a three-part docuseries by Joe Berlinger featuring previously unheard audio recordings made by journalist Jack Jones at Attica Correctional Facility in 1980. In the recordings, Berkowitz — then 27, three years into his sentence — can be heard building the demon-dog narrative he had not yet publicly dismantled. The series is the latest in a cultural industry that has, for nearly five decades, found him useful: as monster, as redeemed sinner, as conspiracy node, as institutional failure. He is now 73 years old, incarcerated at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County, New York, and shows no sign of wanting to leave any of these roles behind.

Tags: actors, true crime, serial killers, David Berkowitz, spike lee, Conversations with a Killer

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