killer. a parking ticket. david berkowitz drove this cream-colored ford galaxie from his home in bensonhurst, brooklyn. then police say he went to stalk his 12th and 13th victims. but in the place he parked was a fire hydrant, and police had the lead they needed. when we get him and i interrogate him, my attitude at this time, i want to take him and throw him out the window. this guy was so pathetic. it was like talking to a zucchini. never blinked. constant smile on his face. so after a while i start to feel sorry for the guy. you know, he s gone. right? i feel great. i think the people of our city will feel great relief. praise the lord. it s over. we re very, very happy. that was the first thing we heard this morning. it was fantastic. it was great. serial killers tend to be cunning. that allows them to stay at large. when they get caught it s usually because of luck. good luck for us. bad luck for them. when we caught him we
there was this belief that he was only killing women with long, dark hair. i know the .44 killer is after girls with long brown hair. so when i go out, me and my friends go out at night, we put our hair up. my hair is down to my shoulder. it was about this length. i cut it short because of the .44 caliber killer. well, his last victim was actually blond. a 20-year-old new york city girl died this evening a day and a half after she and her companion were shot by the son of sam. he s the nighttime killer who has stalked new york residential boroughs for a year. a postal worker walked out of his yonkers apartment last night, turned the ignition key in his car, and found himself surrounded by police. well, he said, you got me. police say those words ended the biggest manhunt in new york city history with the capture of son of sam. and this is what they say tripped up the .44 caliber
19 72 when the bronx had 430 homicides. in the 70s, the bronx looked like berlin after world war ii. literally looked like berlin. 1.5 million people live in this borough. once that smoke on the horizon signified industry, progress, jobs. now it means someone is burning down a building. it has become the arson capital of the world. it happens 30 times a day, and the flames are the signal of a national disaster. is there anything that can change the situation? the bronx, my own estimation, is doomed with a capital d. a lot of gritty stuff went down in new york, and when you think of new york in the 70s you, of course, think of the son of sam murders. christine freund, 26 years old, soon to be married, is dead today. dead in a shooting that has no apparent motive. the end of 1976, they transferred me to queens homicide. and the first victim that i came across was a woman named
i think it was just the sheer randomness of it. the fact you could be doing something as simple as sitting in a car talking to a friend, and someone would come behind you and open fire. it was pretty terrifying. it was frightening. i was in charge of the nighttime operation. the task force that wanted to shoot him on sight. that was our job. take him out on the street. we flooded the streets of new york. there s people dying, and we re trying to stop it, okay? it s everybody. it s not you. it s everybody. that s all we re trying to do. okay. in terms of the victim count, that doesn t place him at the top of the list in terms of the most deadly serial killers, but it was new york city. what happens in new york city, well, that s international news. good evening. harry is on vacation. here are our top stories. 100 more police join the hunt for the son of sam killer in new york. the search continues for the .44-caliber killer who has come to be known as the son of sam.
christine freund, who was sitting in a parked car with her boyfriend coming from a movie and she got her head blown off. this was a series of random shootings, and the ballistic comparison determined that there was indeed the same killer using the same gun, a .44 caliber weapon on these homicides. therefore, the police nicknamed it the .44 caliber killer. he struck april 17th at 3:00 in the morning, killing 18-year-old valentina suriani, and her fiance, 20-year-old alexander esau as they sat in a parked car in the baychester section of the bronx. we got the shooting back in the bronx. a girl named valentina suriani. but at that scene where that shooting occurred left a note addressed to my supervisor, and he called himself the son of sam. well, he talks about being possessed by a man he refers to as sam, the man he refers to as his father. and he says that his father requires blood. this got people s attention.