The Ultimate Evil: The Search for the Sons of Sam

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I first sat down with Maury in the fall of 2010, in a cramped attic apartment in Yonkers. Maury wore an oxygen mask as he battled acute pneumonia, in no small part due to decades of incessant smoking. He refused to leave his apartment so instead I brought him tuna sandwiches. As we ate, he would regale me with stories—not just about Son of Sam, but of other unsolved crimes that echoed through New York City lore. It was then that I realized I had found something special: a knowledgeable mentor and an unreliable narrator woven into one.

A compilation of this research regarding the possible connections between John and David was published, which did prompt the Queens District Attorney’s Office to open the case. While in jail, David had also written to Maury, and in one of his letters, he mentioned that others were involved in the killings and that he was not the one who shot all six of the Son of Sam victims. He claimed that it was some other members of a satanic cult that he was a part of. Piecing together rumors of this so-called Son of Sam cult, I soon found a local reporter who could confirm a few errant facts—a name, a date, a local house that the police had looked into. He passed me on to an eccentric lawyer who only added credence to my growing list of clues. Finally, I found a truly credible source: a veteran detective from the NYPD’s Cold Case Squad, a man who had been trained to compile evidence, not conjecture. After much prodding, the detective agreed to tell me the source of these rumors. One night, he sat me down with two other detectives as they revealed a secret, one that had swirled through the squad rooms of the NYPD for decades: David Berkowitz, the infamous Son of Sam, did not act alone.From a "how seriously should I take this guy" perspective, I should probably also note that if the transcripts of the interviews Terry and his associates conducted with Berkowitz are accurate, they are at times very leading and allow Berkowitz to make non-committal responses that could be interpreted as supporting Terry's theories. Terry also claims to have found and removed evidence from a crime scene, which confused and dismayed me.

Terry draws a line from Berkowitz to alleged friends of his named the Carrs who were involved in some sort of cult (and were murdered shortly after the Son of Sam murders) all the way to places as far-flung as North Dakota, Los Angeles and Houston - as well as Long Island, New York. This was actually a little better than I expected. The author makes a pretty good case that Berkowitz was not the sole killer involved with the "Son of Sam" killings, and that he had connections to people who were possibly involved in all manner of shadiness, primarily drug dealing. I'm willing to buy that, and I'm willing to buy that Berkowitz put in some effort to appear crazier than he actually was prior to getting caught. The book is written in a compelling way and should have been a novel, since the vast majority of it is fiction (as far as I understand the police investigation). Even if we overlook the blatant fabrication of facts and stories about the crime scenes and murders in New York, the book takes a nosedive in credibility as it goes into California. There's simply nothing to connect these two different murder sprees, no matter how much Terry tries to do it. The Arliss Perry case, that made such a chilling opening to the novel, was resolved and it was proven via DNA who was the perpetrator of such a crime. Don't get me started on Manson 2...

Right as we were starting, yeah. We were like, "Oh my God, I can't believe this is happening." Well, I was pitching the doc still. And suddenly, it became part of the why now. There's clues, there's a crazy amount of clues in the letters that we unfortunately did not get into in the series, but we do in the podcast. There's an accompanying podcast, which literally is just like all the granular evidence of the letters and the eyewitness accounts and the aliases and maps that Maury Terry uncovered. It's literally just all the hardcore clues. Many people believe that the letters were written by two different people. The first one was written by David Berkowitz and the second one was written by the Carrs [ The Carrs were two brothers who Terry alleges were in the satanic cult based in Yonkers with Berkowitz and carried out some of the Son of Sam shootings.].