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In the summers of 1976 and 1977, one of the most infamous serial killers was ruling the streets of New York with something that can infect anyone: fear. Now, the newest addition to Netflix’s hit docuseries franchise, Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes is taking an inside look at how a young postal worker named David Berkowitz captured the city’s interest — and ignited terror — during his infamous shooting spree.
Also known as the Son of Sam — named for the signature that ended his taunting letters to police — Berkowitz, then 24, targeted people with a .44 caliber Bulldog revolver, shooting young couples and women parked in their cars. The murders were eventually picked up by tabloids —particularly the Daily News and the New York Post —which increased fear around the randomness of the targets. The shock and interest around the cases were also stoked by the rambling handwritten and misspelled letters Berkowitz sent to police, claiming he was being led by the order of a bloodthirsty demon (or dog) named Sam who demanded more death and chaos. But when Berkowitz was arrested on Aug. 10, 1977, he stunned New Yorkers by appearing almost laughably normal.
“It was totally disarming,” former crime reporter Jack D. Jones says in the new Netflix series, which combines interviews with reporters, police, and survivors with some never-before-heard recordings from Jones’ 1980 interviews with Berkowitz at Attica prison. “He would be the last person you’d suspect of being a serial killer. He was a dangerous enigma to me, and I always liked to poke the snake.”
Conversations With A Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes is the fourth installment in the docuseries helmed by Oscar-nominated director Joe Berlinger, which uses real-life interview tapes from convicted serial killers to chart their rise in American canon and explore how infamous murderers developed. Previous iterations include Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer. “At the heart of Conversations with a Killer lies a commitment to unraveling the complex minds of notorious criminals while providing a space for those closest to the crimes to find closure,” Berlinger said in a release announcing the series. “These rare tapes reveal unnerving insights into [Berkowitz’s] psyche, shedding light on the intricate details of the case and the pervasive fear that gripped the city. Through these tapes, we hope to not only revisit history, but to bring clarity and depth to a narrative that has long intrigued and unsettled the public.”
Here are four things we learned from Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes.
Berkowitz was first introduced to the idea of shooting people by a child psychologist
In one of his interviews with Jones, Berkowitz said that much of his initial anger came from complicated feelings around his birth. Berkowitz was put up for adoption three days after his birth and adopted by Jewish couple Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz. Berkowitz said they were “decent, fair, kind, loving, everything positive,” but said that his behavior took a turn after his adopted father told him that his birth mother died in childbirth. “My whole life I was wracked with guilt,” Berkowitz says in an interview. “I’d walk around with this death wish because I felt I now had to pay for her death.”
After learning this, Berkowitz said, his demeanor changed drastically. He began treating his mother rudely, ruining her clothing and makeup, getting into fights, setting fires, and developing antisocial behavior with other children. His parents sent him to a child psychologist who encouraged him to talk through his emotions and relationships with other kids by playing with toy soldiers. The toy figures he was shooting out became people he was upset at, with Berkowitz saying the psychologist encouraged him to tell her who he was shooting at and why. “An adult, for maybe the right reasons, gave him the wrong message,” Jones says in the docuseries. “A gun, to target his enemies, or take out something which caused him mental disturbance, which was exactly the wrong thing you want to do with a kid like David Berkowitz.”
Berkowitz was obsessed with the true-crime
According to Berkowitz, an obsession with true crime entertainment helped develop his homicidal tendencies. After building a rapport with Jones during their interview sessions, the convicted killer revealed that prior to starting his murder spree, he was consuming a heavy amount of content about famous fictional and real life murderers —especially those who murdered to relieve some kind of internal anger.
Berkowitz read stories, checked out library books, and watched movies on everything from the Boston Strangler to the Zodiac Killer and Jack the Ripper. Because he patterned his actions on famous killers — in an entertainment vein — Jones believes that this compartmentalization helped him complete the killings and then go about his business. In between murders, he was a seemingly helpful addition to his job, a friendly co-worker and personable neighbor. According to Jones, it was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
A couple escaped being Berkowitz’s next victims by asking him for help
During his time with Jones, Berkowitz said multiple times that his murder made him feel better because he would imagine his victims as people he was angry at. But that mentality made it much harder for him to target people when he was reminded that they hadn’t done anything to him. “At that time, as angry as I was feeling, I had reduced them to just objects of my anger, hatred or whatever,” Berkowitz says. “If I put myself in a position where I saw that they were really humans — like if I engage them in conversation or something — then immediately I would lose everything I psyched myself up for.”
One night, as Berkowitz was walking around looking for two targets, a loaded gun in his pocket, he came upon a couple who had gotten their car stuck on a snowbank. When he came up, the two asked Berkowitz for help digging their car out of the snow. He helped — and then went on his way. When Jones asked Berkowitz if he ever thought about shooting them after they pushed the car free, he said didn’t want to. “Even for that brief second, I looked at their faces,” he says. “And I said to myself, ‘Oh, thank God, I mean something to somebody, even if it’s just for a second. I’m called upon to help.’” He let the couple drive away, and then shot his next victims: Valentina Suriani, 18, and Alexander Esau, 20.
Berkowitz believes he arranged for himself to be arrested
It took police over a year for Berkowitz to finally be identified as a suspect and arrested — a period of intense fear for young couples all over New York City. The stress was also exacerbated by Berkowitz’s changing targets. People assumed that he was only shooting women with dark hair, only to be shocked when he shot and killed Stacy Moskowitz, a blonde, 20-year-old secretary and partially blinded her date, Robert Violante.
As tensions skyrocketed, both the media and police fixated on the Son of Sam case. During one press conference, New York Police Commissioner Michael Codd told reporters that authorities would find the serial killer when he made a silly mistake, like getting a parking ticket.
According to Berkowitz, after hearing that interview, he chose to get a parking ticket to help the police investigation and his initial arrest move faster. Berkowitz told Jones he noticed cops in one area, parked his car and waited until he was given a ticket. About 45 minutes later, he shot Moskowitz and Violante in the area.
When police connected him to the case and approached him, Berkowitz reportedly smiled and said, “Finally! What took you so long?”
