Very Scary People (2019–…): Season 2, Episode 1 - Son of Sam Part 1: The Duke of Death - full transcript

♪♪

♪♪

Berkowitz: I had made a pact with the devil,

and I felt these paranormal powers.

And I felt somehow invincible,

and I was slowly being led down a path of destruction.

♪♪

[Gunshot]

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪



Welcome to "Very Scary People." I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

He was known as the Son of Sam ...

a cold-eyed serial killer who terrorized New York City

and the nation.

David Berkowitz stalked his victims

across three different boroughs,

wounding seven people and killing six.

Berkowitz taunted police

and the seven million citizens of New York,

creating widespread hysteria in the city that never sleeps.

The final terrifying three months of his killing spree

would come to be known as the "Summer of Sam."

Why did this seemingly unassuming postal worker

commit these vicious attacks?



And how did he elude investigators for so long?

Here is part one of "Son Of Sam: the Duke of Death."

♪♪

[Siren wailing]

New York City in the mid-'70s

was discotheques, Studio 54.

Klausner: And in the midst of this...

suddenly, horrific acts occur.

♪♪

Jordan: In 1976, Donna Lauria

was an 18-year-old living in the Bronx.

She's out with her friend Jody Valenti.

They go out to play some backgammon.

Borrelli: They had returned.

They were sitting in the car in front of Donna's home.

Kamen: They had no idea that in moments to come,

a strange man would appear out of nowhere,

like something out of a nightmare.

He walks almost right up to the passenger window.

And Donna even says to her friend, "Who is this guy?

What does he want?"

He took the gun out of a paper bag.

Jordan: The man crouches...

and fires a big gun at them.

[Gunshots]

Kamen: Five times.

Put a bullet into the leg

of the woman who was behind the wheel.

She fell forward. Her body struck the horn.

He shot both people and then left.

Donna dies almost instantly, but Jody survives.

[Siren wailing]

The police come to the scene.

Jody gives a description of this person that she sees fleetingly.

Jordan: She can describe him in general terms, the shooter ...

an average white guy, kind of young, nondescript.

Who shoots at young women sitting in a car?

Hopkins: Their belief at the time

was it could have been a lover's quarrel.

[Gunshot]

Borrelli: They determined the caliber of the gun that was used

was a .44-caliber.

And there had been a boyfriend of Donna,

and he possessed a .44-caliber.

But ballistically, it was no match for the gun.

This was cold right at the beginning.

There was nothing to do.

Just one paper has it

that a girl is shot in the Bronx and killed.

And then for the public, it's lost.

[Siren wailing in distance]

The '70s in New York, crime was bad.

There was guns all over the place, shootings.

Kamen: Let's face it, in 1976,

there were 1,622 murders in the city of New York.

For a case to stand out,

it had to have some special characteristics.

♪♪

♪♪

The second shooting really begins the pattern.

Rosemary Keenan is out with her companion, Carl Denaro.

♪♪

Someone walks up behind the car.

♪♪

[Gunshot, glass shatters]

Borrelli: They both survived in that shooting.

But they really were not able to provide

any kind of definitive information about the person,

and that made it difficult.

There seemed to be no real apparent motive.

Borrelli: There really wasn't too much to go with.

The bullets were badly deformed.

Klausner: The kind of gun was pretty big. They knew that.

But the police don't have a theory.

Kamen: It took a while

before some of the smartest detectives

in the city of New York began to say, "Wait a minute.

We may have a serial killer at work."

♪♪

David Berkowitz was born June 1, 1953.

He was raised by Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz.

He seemed to have a relatively normal childhood at first,

but then behavioral issues started to bubble up.

Berkowitz: It goes back, really, to childhood

and the struggles I had as a child,

many psychological problems growing up.

I was so disruptive in school

and had so many emotional problems, behavioral problems,

that the school officials told my parents,

"You're gonna have to take him to a child psychologist."

I went for about two years, once a week.

I had very bad bouts of depression when I was a child.

I was very suicidal.

His parents took him to a rabbi, they took him to psychologists,

they took him to school counselors,

but none of them were able to help him in any way.

Berkowitz: I didn't get along all that well with my dad.

It was just my mean spirit towards him.

I don't know why that was.

I definitely mistreated him, and there were times

I wouldn't talk to him.

I was a very moody and spiteful child,

and there were so many walls between us.

I remember seeing my dad cry.

He said, "David, you're my son.

I love you so much, but you don't talk to me.

You walk out of the house without saying anything."

I don't know what was ... what the problem was.

I don't know why I was so mean.

♪♪

Glassman: So, in the summer of 1977,

my father moves into 35 Pine Street in Yonkers.

He didn't know what he was about to face.

Klausner: Craig Glassman worked as an auxiliary deputy sheriff

in Westchester County.

[Telephone rings]

Glassman: He started getting

threatening letters and phone calls.

He'd be asleep with the TV on,

and I guess he had it on too loud.

[Rings]

He'd get a phone call screaming at him to shut it off.

At first, wouldn't think anything of it.

He thought, "Well, okay. Well, someone has a temper.

I'll just try to be more respectful."

And then one night, he went to the door,

and he heard crackling.

[Fire crackling]

He opened his door and found a fire.

Glassman: It was trash that someone had put there,

put bullets in, and set it on fire,

hoping that my dad would open the door

and get hit by one of the bullets.

Jordan: Craig Glassman came to realize

that the man harassing him with these letters

and this fire was his upstairs neighbor...

...but he had no way of knowing it was the Son of Sam.

Nobody put it together. Nobody.

♪♪

♪♪

Klausner: November 27th, there is another attack.

Two young ladies, Joanne Lomino and Donna DeMasi,

go into Manhattan to see a movie.

It's about 11:45 in the evening.

They're walking back from the bus stop.

Jordan: Donna notices a man standing under a streetlight,

watching them.

They don't like it.

So they head directly to Joanne's house.

Clark: The worst thing about these ...

these girls did nothing to put themselves into harm's way.

He went after them as someone would go after prey.

Klausner: They reach Joanne's home

and are climbing up the steps.

They saw this fellow approach them.

Jordan: Joanne is fumbling for her keys.

♪♪

He crosses the street, coming directly towards them.

♪♪

The killer would pull out the gun, look at them...

[Gunshots]

...and then fire and fire and fire.

Both teens were shot but survived.

Lomino, however, would always be paralyzed from the waist down.

Police are confounded about who would do this

to these two young teenagers.

They simply weren't connecting the dots

to the other two shootings.

[Gunshot]

Hopkins: In order to make a comparison with a bullet,

it has to be intact.

If the bullet strikes a hard object,

even bones in a human body,

it could deform it.

Borrelli: We had three pieces of a bullet that looked like

from a very large-caliber weapon.

Hopkins: But if you don't have those characteristics

where you can match it up, it's of no value.

Hopkins: There was really no direction to go.

January 30th, it came around about 10 to 1:00

that there was a shooting.

I remember it was a cold night.

Little did I realize it would turn the city upside down.

The fourth shooting was with Christine Freund and John Diel.

The police come, and they begin questioning John.

All he remembers was...

[Gunshot]

...a loud noise, glass coming in.

And he looked at Christine, and she's covered with blood.

Diel: All of a sudden, there's a crash, and I turned.

And I seen Chris falling, like this, towards me, you know?

And I grabbed her, I started screaming,

"Chris, Chris, Chris!"

And then there was one more bang, you know?

Hopkins: He has not been hit, but she has.

She will die.

Borrelli: At the scene, there was a bullet

that had glanced off the windshield

and was laying on the dashboard.

Hopkins: It was an unusual bullet ... a large caliber,

.44 caliber.

And normally, you don't see that.

My father said that the .44-caliber gun

is only made for one thing only.

It's made for maiming and killing.

Borrelli: I was talking to one of the detectives, I said,

"That's a big bullet."

And he said, "You know, we had a shooting in our precinct

where the caliber of the bullet was large."

He said, "And there's something up in the Bronx."

And I said, "Hey, maybe we ought to look into it a little more."

Klausner: Now they're calling around.

"Does anything in your precinct sound the same

as what just happened?"

The pattern started to emerge.

You had female victims in every single case.

It's also the witnesses who saw certain things ...

the approach to the car,

to getting into a crouch position,

and shooting with two hands.

[Gunshot]

And he would get away very quickly.

The bells started going off.

There was a feeling that maybe this is the same gun.

Maybe it's the same guy pulling the gun.

Detectives are starting to wonder,

"What are we dealing with here?"

♪♪

Jordan: David Berkowitz had a complete fascination

with death and dying.

David's mother, Pearl, had a pet parakeet.

David had slowly poisoned the bird

with cleaning fluid to kill it,

because his mother paid too much attention to her pet

and not enough to him.

Collarini-Schlossberg: He got experience in being inhumane.

When you can start killing an animal,

the next step is to kill a person.

Berkowitz: They tried to help me, but that didn't work.

The problem was with me.

Kamen: The nightmare doesn't start to sprout full

onto the city until the next killing.

The fifth shooting, in Forest Hills,

was Virginia Voskerichian, a young girl coming from school.

She's a 19-year-old student at Barnard, studying Russian.

She's by herself in a quiet neighborhood.

A man coming in the opposite direction

walks towards her.

And he stops directly in front of her, pulls out a gun.

[Gunshot]

He fires one time,

right through the center of the schoolbooks

into her face, and she dies.

♪♪

Clark: It was such a brutal event.

That upset a lot of guys

because she was a beautiful young girl

who apparently did nothing.

Hopkins: When you have a woman shot on the street

for no apparent reason, everybody wants to know why.

It wasn't actually until after Voskerichian

that we were able to connect

the previous shootings in Queens and the Bronx.

Jordan: With the shooting of Virginia Voskerichian,

we now had five shooting episodes.

So, now, the bullet that was recovered

with that went to ballistics.

It all hinged on making the match between the bullets.

And ballistics, even though couldn't say definitively,

they felt very strongly that it was the same gun

that was used in each of those shootings.

The same person was doing the shootings.

Patrick: That's when they put it together

that there's a serial killer on the loose in New York.

Klausner: This is someone going out

and just destroying lives, and that's scary.

♪♪

Klausner: Mayor Abraham Beame

and then police commissioner Michael Codd

decide to hold a press conference.

McLoughlin: You owe something to the public.

Jordan: To warn them

that basically a killer was on the loose.

Kamen: What they essentially said was,

"We're looking for one guy,

using a large handgun, a .44-caliber revolver."

Although the description of the perpetrator was vague,

everyone agreed that it was a young white male

between 25 and 30 years old,

about 6 feet tall,

with a medium build and dark hair.

Hopkins: Very mobile, has a car.

And the M.O. was to surprise his victims,

usually who were in a car, mostly attractive young women,

at times making out with a boyfriend.

McLoughlin: So, the natural reaction

was to form a task force that would deal

with all the homicides connected to this person.

Man: We will catch this individual.

Our only hope is that we catch him before he does it again.

Wax: At that point, the public begins to feel,

"We've got a serial killer in our midst."

It got the city up in arms.

When it first came out in the newspapers,

they dubbed him as the .44-caliber killer.

It was everywhere. Everywhere.

And it was on the front page of every paper ...

The "Daily News," the "New York Post."

Everybody was afraid.

Collarini-Schlossberg: It's scary because

they really don't know where he's going to turn up next.

I won't walk home anymore in the dark.

It's just scary. It's frightening.

You don't know what's gonna happen.

Patrick: That's when alarms came to the house and locks

and "stay close to home."

Clark: At the time, there was the misconception

that these women that were being shot

all had the same similar characteristics.

Heller: They assumed that it was someone

that was going after brunette women.

One day, my secretary, Cynthia, came in,

and she had had long brown hair,

and she cut it short and made it blond.

And she said, "Everybody in the city who has long brown hair

is cutting it and bleaching it blond

so that they don't end up as one of the victims."

Reporter: Civilian patrols took to the streets.

Women were afraid to go out at night.

Teenagers stopped sitting in cars.

There was a lot of hysteria going on.

Heller: He really put a tremendous fear

in the city of New York.

He was, in my view,

the original terrorist that gripped the city.

Glassman: People weren't going out.

Clubs and venues weren't really making as much money.

Heller: That's when the Hamptons became popular.

Everybody left the city and went out to the Hamptons.

Justus: This was a horror we couldn't get away from.

Borrelli: After the fifth shooting,

I was being interviewed by a reporter from CBS News,

and I mentioned all our victims so far had been women,

so I guess he doesn't like women.

Klausner: One of the outcomes of this interview

was there were a lot of people listening.

What they didn't understand is the killer was listening.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Welcome back to "Very Scary People."

By March 1977, David Berkowitz had fatally gunned down

three women and injured four others,

escaping from each scene so quickly,

there were very few clues for detectives to go on...

until April 1977.

And while it would still be months

until this killer was caught,

at the scene of the sixth shooting,

he made an unusual move ...

reaching out to the very cops trying to bring him down.

♪♪

Collarini-Schlossberg: Investigators were hoping

that they could figure out who this killer was

before he would strike again.

But, unfortunately, they were not so lucky.

Klausner: On April 17, 1977,

there will be another attack.

Jordan: Valentina Suriani and her date, Alexander Esau,

pulled off the Hutchinson Parkway in the Bronx,

and they started making out.

♪♪

Then a man approached the car.

[Gunshots]

And four shots rang out.

He came, he did it, he left.

And they were dead.

Berkowitz: I knew it was wrong,

but when a mind is captured by Satan,

you can't look at things and evaluate things

in their right perspective.

Borrelli: I was up in the Bronx, at the scene.

The scene was similar, and yet there was a difference.

The difference was there was a letter found at the scene.

And that letter was addressed to me.

"Dear Captain Joseph Borrelli,

I am deeply hurt by your calling me a 'wemon' hater."

And he misspells "woman."

"I am not. But I am a monster."

And the killer names himself.

"I am...the Son of Sam."

[Gunshot]

Hopkins: "I feel like an outsider.

I am on a different wave length 'then' everybody else,

programmed 'too' kill."

Borrelli: "I say goodbye and goodnight, police.

Let me haunt you with these words;

I'll be back!

I'll be back!

To be interpreted as ... bang, bang, bang, bang."

"Yours in murder, Mr. Monster."

I still get a chill.

It's a pretty horrible kind of a letter.

Justus: A psycho.

Would a normal person do that? No.

Hopkins: The letter that was left for Borrelli

put a different slant on things.

Now it's become very, very personal.

Borrelli: When Berkowitz wrote that letter,

it was kind of like a taunt.

Jordan: In the history of serial killers, before these episodes,

we have a handful of examples of killers taunting the police.

But we really had not seen somebody writing a letter,

a detailed letter, directly to a police detective.

Hopkins: Now the news media picked up on this,

and everybody knew the shooter as Son of Sam.

That's when mass hysteria started.

Reporter #2: In Central Park, t-shirts went on sale ...

"Get Son of Sam before he gets you."

Klausner: The task force is now growing

because the mayor's getting a tremendous amount of pressure.

Hopkins: When we started to expand our task force,

we had the best of the best.

Jordan: It consisted of 200 to 300 officers

and basically every single patrol officer

looking out for clues.

Each murder, it grew.

This becomes the single biggest manhunt in the history

of the city of New York at the time.

Phones rang 24 hours a day.

It was bedlam.

Collarini-Schlossberg: At that point,

they were going on every possible lead

that they could get.

Justus: Every time we got a phone call,

that was a different lead that had to be investigated.

And there were thousands of phone calls coming in.

We had a lot of dead leads. [Chuckles]

A lot.

Jordan: There are a number of witnesses and survivors

in each of these episodes.

Over the next year, different drawings were made.

Clark: But each one was different from the other.

Because the shootings were at night

and it's very traumatizing to look up

and get shot almost immediately.

Reporter #3: Police blanketed Queens and the Bronx

with cops in unmarked cars.

Justus: The police got orders to chase everybody away

from lovers' lanes,

to do increased patrols around social areas.

We went to Alexander's, a department store.

And we got these mannequins,

and we put them in a car with a detective.

And then the guys themselves said, "No good.

If he's looking at us, he's got to realize right away

something's wrong because there's no movement."

So then we decided, "Well, we'll get some females."

We were turned down by police headquarters ... too risky.

Next thing we did, we went out and we got wigs.

So there would be a male detective

and an alleged female detective.

McLoughlin: There were guys going out

with kerchiefs on their head.

They were being used as decoys,

hoping to catch someone running away.

In 1976, my husband was asked to help the NYPD

to figure out the kind of person

who would commit the kinds of murders

that this killer was committing.

He is the founder of the NYPD Psychological Services Unit.

Borrelli: The profile of the individual

was he's in his late 20s,

maybe early 30s, lives alone.

Justus: A sexually inadequate male

who has access to a weapon.

Hopkins: The guy is paranoid, schizophrenic.

McLoughlin: Lived in a sloppy apartment,

not a well-adjusted person

in terms of his relationships with women,

possibly with his family.

A person who was relatively intelligent,

in all likelihood was not insane.

He knew what he was doing and was planful in his act.

And it proved to be right on the money

when eventually we arrested the perpetrator.

Klausner: But they don't really have anything to go on.

Collarini-Schlossberg: In a city of millions,

it's like finding a needle in a haystack.

Hopkins: So, what's your next step?

That's what we all kept on saying ...

"What do we do next?"

Because we had no real good leads.

Where do you go from here?

The police department was trying to capture a ghost.

♪♪

Kamen: So, who was this monster

that was stalking the city of New York?

Interviewer: You were adopted, right?

Berkowitz: Yes. I had great parents.

What went wrong there, do you think?

Well, no, with my parents, nothing at all.

As an infant, David was adopted by Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz.

Collarini-Schlossberg: He seemed to have

a relatively normal upbringing with the Berkowitz family.

His adoptive mother died of cancer when he was around 14.

What was that like for you?

Berkowitz: Completely devastating.

My mom was, at that time, the anchor of my life.

When I saw my mom, when I went into the hospital to see her,

I couldn't believe what I saw.

My heart was broken, but I was, back then, as a child,

I had trouble expressing my emotions.

I just kind of divorced myself from her,

realizing she was gonna die.

Jordan: He felt like his life had slipped away from him.

Without her, he had no sense of security.

Berkowitz: I couldn't deal with the loss.

I couldn't deal with the pain.

I didn't know what the future held.

I had nobody to really talk to.

The nurturing figure in his life is gone.

Max: He graduated from high school

and was perhaps a bit of a loner.

He joined the Army and he was stationed in Korea.

When he came back, he had a difficult time

adjusting in other ways, socially.

Berkowitz: I enrolled in community college.

Living where? In the Bronx.

I got my own apartment.

I had saved up some money from when I was in the service.

And I just wanted to start my life,

and friends had moved away, and I didn't know anyone.

How old were you?

21 at the time.

And were you dating girls?

Well, I was dating a little bit here and there,

just very, very casually.

I wouldn't really call it even a date.

He never really enjoyed

a boyfriend-girlfriend type of romantic relationship.

Jordan: His father remarried and, with his new wife,

moved to Florida,

leaving David on his own.

♪♪

♪♪

In June, out of the blue,

another letter is sent from the killer.

Only this one isn't sent to the cops. Oh, no.

This is sent to one of the most high-profile journalists

in America, named Jimmy Breslin.

Jimmy Breslin was a famous reporter for the "Daily News."

Patrick: It came to the "Daily News," to the newspaper,

and I believe my father was at home.

All I remember is him ... whew! Out the door.

"Hello from the gutters of New York City,

which are filled with dog manure,

vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood."

The first line in this proves that this guy's not stupid.

That was the first thing my father said,

"This guy knows punctuation."

"Hello from the cracks in the sidewalk of New York City,

and from the ants that dwell in these cracks

and feed on the dried blood of the dead.

Sam's a thirsty lad, and he won't let me stop killing

until he gets his fill of blood.

Mr. Breslin, sir,

don't think that because you haven't heard from me

for a while that I went to sleep.

No. Rather, I am still here, like a spirit roaming the night.

Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest,

anxious to please Sam.

I love my work.

Perhaps we shall meet face-to-face someday,

or perhaps I will be blown away by cops with smoking .38s.

Not knowing what the future holds, I shall say farewell,

and I will see you at the next job.

Or should I say, you will see my handiwork at the next job?

In their blood and from the gutter,

Sam's creation, .44."

And then, "Here are some names to help you along.

The Duke of Death.

The Wicked King Wicker.

John Wheaties.

PS: J.B., please inform all the detectives working the case

that I wish them the best of luck.

Keep them digging, drive on, think positive,

get off your butts, knock on coffins, et cetera.

Son of Sam."

That's a really scary letter.

It's disturbing.

There was something seriously wrong with him.

It scared the shit out of, you know,

7 million people that lived in the city.

My father didn't get rifled around much,

but I think he was scared.

Klausner: The Breslin letter is important on several levels.

First of all, it tells the police that he reads

Jimmy Breslin's column.

Jordan: He was reading about himself

and the investigation in the local papers.

He had a flair for publicity.

McLoughlin: If anybody gets to the point of writing letters...

...he wants to be caught.

He wants the attention or the credit for what he has done.

Hopkins: I think it was to taunt us a little bit.

It was to throw us off.

Clark: By sending the letters,

he took everything up to a new level.

You know, he made it very personal with the police

and made us want him that much more.

Hopkins: From the letters itself, we all tried to figure,

"What is the meaning of each of these phrases?"

Serial killers, you know,

they'll feed you little bits of information ...

sometimes to throw you off, sometimes not to throw you off.

But whatever it is, it's not enough to find that person.

Patrick: No one could figure out,

you know, where his name came from.

Jordan: It turns out, these letters would contain clues

as to who the killer really was.

And as later they will find out,

there is a Sam.

♪♪

Borrelli: Within a day or two,

they released the whole letter in the paper.

Max: When people living in the city

were able to see something

that came from the hand of the killer,

that had an impact.

It said, "There is a madman in our midst.

Who's next?"

Klausner: Now there was a frightening aspect

added to this cauldron of shootings,

of murders, of maimings.

Justus: You want to get this guy off the street

'cause every day that this person is on the street,

somebody else could die.

♪♪

♪♪

While the panic about the serial killer began to swallow up

New York City...

There's a strange thing happening

just north of the city, in Yonkers.

Jordan: In May, somebody threw a Molotov cocktail

into the backyard of a man named Sam Carr.

[Glass shatters, fire whooshes]

It was alarming because he was just an average Joe

in Yonkers, with his three kids,

who included a daughter named Wheat Carr.

Then, April 1977, he received an interesting letter in the mail.

Sam Carr had a dog named Harvey.

Glassman: The letter complained bitterly

about the dog's incessant barking

and told Sam he'd better do something about it.

[Barking]

The letter writer said it tormented him

and said that he would seek revenge on the dog's owner.

And on April 27th, Sam Carr's dog,

Harvey, was shot in the backyard.

The dog survived.

Clearly, Sam Carr knows someone is out to get him,

but he doesn't know who, and he doesn't know why.

In June, another family ...

Cassara family of New Rochelle ...

gets a card in the mail.

It's a get-well card.

But the interesting thing is that Mr. Cassara

isn't sick or ill at all.

And the card is signed by a Mr. Sam Carr.

But they don't know a Sam Carr.

And it disturbs them.

Jordan: The Cassara family looks up Sam Carr

in the phone book, and they get together

and they compare notes, literally.

Then the Cassara family remember that they had a tenant

the year before in their house, and he really hated dogs.

Glassman: The Cassaras said, "Oh, yeah.

He used to yell about our dog, too."

Jordan: His name was David Berkowitz.

Sam Carr then realizes

that David Berkowitz is a neighbor of his,

a man who lives right next to his home.

He has to be the person who is harassing them.

They take all of this evidence to the Yonkers police.

But nothing had gotten to the point where there was enough

to even bring David in for questioning.

Jordan: Then, once the Son of Sam letters are published

in the "New York Daily News,"

Sam Carr is convinced that the David Berkowitz

who he believes shot his dog could be a good suspect

in the Son of Sam killings.

After all, he is Sam Carr, and the guy is Son of Sam.

And now Sam Carr actually went to the task force.

Carr came down and wanted to talk to us about this,

what he described as this crazy guy up in Yonkers.

"Could be the killer."

He said, you know, "There's a fellow named David Berkowitz,

and I think he's the one that could be the Son of Sam."

He sounded like everybody else.

And he left.

Berkowitz had written a thing called "the Wicked King Wicker."

He had a thing about wicker.

The night that Berkowitz was caught, I went to the house,

and this fellow Carr lived on the corner,

and the trees rustled in the breeze,

and I saw the street sign said Wicker Street.

I actually went into tears.

I said, "If this guy had only said

that he lived on the corner of Wicker Street,

it would have just set off a fire alarm right there."

[Siren wailing]

Had the New York police seen the firebombing of Sam Carr,

the shooting of Sam Carr's dog,

they would've had a suspect to focus on.

But they didn't.

Jordan: They took down the information,

put it in a file to be followed up on later

and investigated, and there it sat.

And they didn't discount it, they just never acted on it.

"We'll get to it. We have other things."

I, like most of the guys who I knew who were covering this

or who were the detectives,

wanted to get my hands around his throat and kill him.

We got to get this guy and stop him, whatever that takes.

Klausner: The whole populace now is primed for the next act,

and it's going to happen, and it's going to be terrible.

[Gunshot]

Unless something happened where the killer made a mistake,

it was going to be very difficult to find this man.

Eventually, you're gonna make a mistake,

and we're gonna get you.

It will fall on a few detectives in a single precinct

who will actually capture the killer due to a fluke.

Inevitably, killers make mistakes,

and so did the Son of Sam.

I had always said, "If he comes to Brooklyn,

he's going to get caught."

And that's exactly what happened.

♪♪

With seven shootings in two different boroughs

and no real leads,

the investigators working this case were grasping at straws.

They desperately wanted to catch this monster

before he struck again, but it seemed impossible.

Ultimately, it would take some old-fashioned police grunt work

and a little bit of luck

to bring an end to the Summer of Sam".

The extraordinary story

of how David Berkowitz was brought down, next time

on part two of "Son of Sam."

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

Thanks for watching. Good night.