On July 29, 1976, serial killer David Berkowitz – known as the Son of Sam – committed the first of his notorious murders in the outer boroughs of New York City. Over the next year, he would kill again five more times and injure at least seven along the way, despite being at the center of what became one of the largest manhunts in New York history.
Everything about the case was bizarre. Berkowitz wrote taunting, typo-ridden letters to the police and the press, seeming to relish in the terror that gripped the city in the wake of each attack. Because he was targeting primarily young women with dark hair, sales of wigs reportedly skyrocketed. Because his attacks happened at night, once-popular discos in Queens and the Bronx became ghost towns. His eventual capture, on August 10th, 1977, made headlines worldwide, as did the revelation that he’d told investigators he received instructions to kill from his neighbor’s dog.
Berkowitz didn’t represent the end of an era in the way Charles Manson did; he didn’t evade capture like the Zodiac Killer; he wasn’t as prolific as John Wayne Gacy. There aren’t many questions left about why a pudgy, deeply disturbed 23-year-old postal worker with abandonment issues terrorized the women of New York. But even so, the media frenzy surrounding the murders was unprecedented, particularly in the tabloids. If Watergate a few years earlier had built up any public good will toward journalists, the New York Post and Daily News had squandered most of it by the end of the Son of Sam trial. Of all the lasting effects of Berkowitz’s crimes, one of the more insidious repercussions was that they helped Rupert Murdoch find a foothold in the United States.
