The arrest of David Berkowitz on 10 August 1977 brought to an end the largest manhunt yet in the New York City police department’s (NYPD) history and the city’s notorious “summer of fear”.
The city was at the mercy of the so-called Son of Sam serial killer who terrorized the city with random shootings over the course of a year – six dead, seven wounded, all with a .44 caliber revolver and mostly while parked in dark “lover’s lanes”. The 24-year-old postal worker confessed to the string of brutal crimes furiously discussed in the press, which published taunting, deranged letters from the killer and metabolized widespread public anxiety and fear. News footage from the time, replayed in the new Netflix docuseries The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness, shows women in salons getting rid of the long brown hair believed to be preferred by the killer; Berkowitz’s booking took place amid a flurry of press and a leering, raucous crowd.
“For anybody who grew up in New York City, this is the case,” the series’ director, Joshua Zeman, told the Guardian. And as far as New York City police were concerned, the case was closed: Berkowitz was the Son of Sam, a man who claimed to receive orders from a 6,000-year-old demon within his neighbor’s dog, an infamous and highly publicized serial killer who further inflamed the Satanic Panic of the early 1970s, and who acted alone.
The Sons of Sam, a four-part series which jumps off from the panic of summer 1977, argues that Berkowitz probably did not act alone, based primarily on the work of the late investigator Maury Terry, whose zeal for solving the case spiraled from grounded skepticism to manic obsession over the course of several decades. Terry, who died at 69 in 2015, was initially skeptical of the NYPD’s explanation for the case, not least because the department was under enormous public pressure to capture the killer and lock up the investigation. Although Berkowitz eventually claimed, from prison for six consecutive life sentences, that he acted in concert with others as part of a satanic cult, the official narrative remained that Berkowitz was the sole culprit.
Over four meticulous hours, Sons of Sam descends into the maze of explanations, conspiracy theories, and mostly circumstantial evidence amassed by “this original armchair detective who tried to change the narrative of one of the greatest crimes in New York City history”, said Zeman. Terry “had a preponderance of evidence but no one would believe him”, which prompted the longtime true crime film-maker to wonder “what that must be like, and how that drives you crazy”.
At the time of the murders, Terry was working as an IBM employee, and skeptical that Berkowitz, reportedly mild-mannered and unremarkable, was a sadistic sociopath who alone sought out random citizens at the the behest of a demonic dog, taunted police with satanic references and claimed he was Beelzebub. For one thing, Berkowitz, chubby and with short dark hair, didn’t at all resemble some police sketches from eyewitness statements. As he launched his own private investigation, Terry found more tantalizing clues: Berkowitz associated with John and Michael Carr – the two actual sons of Sam Carr, owner of the allegedly possessed dog – the former of which had a nickname, “Wheaties” echoed (“John Wheaties”), in one of the killers’ letters to police. The trio were known to hang around Untermyer Park in Terry and Berkowitz’s shared home town of Yonkers, New York, which held an abandoned well pump, colloquially called the “Devil’s Cave”, that was marked like a horror film set in blood and demonic symbols. Mutilated animal corpses had been found nearby, purportedly for sacrificial rituals.
Between the park’s creepiness and John Carr’s uncanny resemblance to one of the eyewitness sketches, Terry grew increasingly convinced the three were not only accomplices, but members of a larger satanic cult known as “the Children”, with murky ties to Charles Manson. Terry’s suspicions were only heightened when both Carr sons met untimely ends shortly after Berkowitz’s arrest – John Carr died by a reported suicide as police knocked on his door in North Dakota in 1978, and Michael Carr in a car accident the following year.
While police vigorously denied any accomplices, Terry burrowed further down the path of satanic conspiracy, eventually compiling his research and theorizing into a book, The Ultimate Evil, published in 1988. The book “honestly scared the shit out of me”, said Zeman. “It was creepy. It was suburban. New York City sex, sin, horror creepy. It had a Manson vibe to it going down with a New York flair.” Zeman got in touch with Terry, who by that point was in failing health and looking to pass his investigation into a film-maker’s hands. Zeman remained unconvinced that Berkowitz worked with accomplices until, weeks after Terry’s death, he received three boxes in the mail containing the journalist’s files, notes and interviews he conducted with Berkowitz for New York’s Inside Edition in 1993.
The series combs through Terry’s evidence in exhaustive detail, but its most thorough conclusion is the dark thicket of mania and isolation bred by Terry’s obsession with the case, which led to his divorce, disconnection with other priorities, and declining health. “I want people to understand what really happened in the Son of Sam case, and I wanted to give Maury Terry his due,” Zeman said, “but I also wanted to say to people, look be careful of going down that rabbit hole. Maury Terry went down a rabbit hole for 40 years and never got back out.”
Zeman sees the series as a “cautionary tale of a guy who was right and wrong”. The first part of Terry’s investigation, which interrogated the police’s dubious official narrative of a single killer, was “right on”, said Zeman, “but he was called a crackpot, so he doubled down. He makes this kind of deal with the devil, and it ruins his credibility.” Terry went on to publish numerous highly read dispatches on the case’s holes in Gannett newspapers, and in later years, peddled increasingly complex and unhinged satanic conspiracy theories on tabloid programs such as Inside Edition and Geraldo Rivera’s talkshow.
“There was a preponderance of evidence to show that the case was not closed properly,” said Zeman, who suggested the case should be reopened. But the series, he said, plumbs the uncomfortable, ungrounded fog that can fester when distrust and urgency whip into conspiratorial thinking. “That’s what happens when you have original narratives that aren’t transparent,” said Zeman. “If the police were transparent in the beginning, then I think he wouldn’t have gone there.
“Transparency is what allows people not to go down rabbit holes,” he said. Some of Terry’s more implausible claims – that Berkowitz and the Carrs were part of a national network of satanic worship, with pedophilic cabals uncovered by mainstream media – will clearly recall the insidious disinformation of the modern QAnon conspiracy movement online. Such discomfort is worth sitting with, Zeman said, the connection a warning of the perils of obsession and metastasized skepticism. “It is a fine line, and that is the tragedy of Maury Terry and a lot of true crime.”
Terry is a “cautionary tale for today”, he said, “for all these people who go down these rabbit holes and they can’t pull themselves back out”.
The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness is now available on Netflix