New York City in the 1970s was already on edge. The city teetered on financial ruin, the streets were grimy, and crime was at an all-time high. But something darker lurked in the shadows.
For 13 months, a faceless gunman targeted and gunned down young women and couples at random, often while they sat in their cars.
The killer left handwritten letters at some of the crime scenes, taunting the New York Police Department and the media, calling himself “Son of Sam” and promising the bloodshed would continue.
David Berkowitz, later revealed to be the killer, didn’t just murder six people and injure seven others. He hijacked the city’s sense of safety, leaving behind a legacy of fear and a media storm unlike anything New York had seen before.
Nearly five decades later, a chilling new Netflix docuseries, Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes, takes a new look at the case with never-before-heard prison audio from Berkowitz himself, archival footage, and raw, first-person recollections.
One of those is Mary Murphy, who was only 17 and preparing for her senior year of high school, when the first attacks began in the summer of 1976. Son of Sam shaped more than just her teenage memories, he shaped her career.
Between July 1976 and August 1977, Berkowitz, a postal worker from Yonkers, prowled working-class neighborhoods in the Bronx, Queens, and later, Brooklyn, looking for people to shoot.
His first victims were 19-year-old Jody Valenti and 18-year-old Donna Lauria. In July 1976, they were sitting in Valenti’s double-parked Oldsmobile in the the Pelham Bay area of the Bronx when a man approached the car and fired his gun.
Lauria was killed instantly. Valenti was shot in the leg and able to give a description of the attacker. But it wouldn’t be until the fifth attack, in March 1977, that police put the pattern together.
As time went on and the attacks continued, instead of fretting over grades or what to wear to the disco, Murphy, along with many other girls and women in the area, focused on pinning her dark shoulder-length hair into a bun or ponytail before going out for the night.
The female victims had dark shoulder-length hair and the local girls feared theirs would make them a target.
Every time Murphy returned to her home in Floral Park, on the border of Queens and Long Island, she would practically leap from the car and sprint into the safety of her home.
“When I went out on dates or out with friends, I would run so fast from the car to the house when I got home,” Murphy told The Independent .
“We still went out and had fun,” she added. “But we were in danger.”
Even Murphy’s love life suffered.
“I was dating then, but I have to tell you, this all just impacted my dating habits,” she said. “I was a nervous wreck about even going on these dates.”
Then the attacks hit even closer to home. Just six blocks away in fact.
In November 1976, Donna DeMasi, 16, and Joanne Lomino, 18, had just arrived at Lomino’s home in Queens when they were approached on the street by a man with a gun.
Both women were shot. DeMasi survived and recovered from her injuries. Lomino, however, was shot in the back and paralyzed.
“We were freaked out,” Murphy admitted. “He was going to working class neighborhoods and shooting two at a time. The way he operated scared us so much.”
Despite the fear, Murphy, who would later become an Emmy-winning journalist for her investigative crime reporting, craved any morsel of information on the attacks.
Her father, who was a bus driver, always brought home a copy of the Daily News.
“I’d devour everything that had to do with this case,” she said. “I followed the developments so closely and was very interested in the police work involved, so I would say this case was the first case that inspired me to become a reporter.”
For Murphy, the memories of the fear at that time are crystal clear.
One memory, in particular, still haunts her: a photograph shown in the news of one of the murdered women – 19-year-old Virginia Voskerichian.
Her body was sprawled on the sidewalk.
“Something that will always stay with me is the caramel-colored boots she was wearing,” Murphy recalled. “And how she was stretched out on the sidewalk… her life was over.”
Just days after Voskerichian was shot and killed coming home from college classes in March 1977, police announced at a press conference that they had strongly suspected the same .44 Bulldog revolver had been used in all the attacks.
When it came time for Murphy to attend her senior prom in May 1977, she told The Independent that she was relieved when it was moved to the Rainbow Room in Manhattan.
“It was a borough that hadn’t been touched by the killer,” she said. “So we felt safer.”
The series also digs into Berkowitz’s troubled childhood, his adoption, his growing rage, and his descent into violence. But it also reopens a chilling question that has never quite gone away: Was he working alone?
The doc explores those questions using newly unearthed 1980 audio recordings between Berkowitz and journalist Jack Jones, a Rochester journalist who once described him as “a modern-day Jack the Ripper with a gun…a crazy motherf*****.”
In the tapes, Berkowitz sounds disturbingly calm, offering chilling insight into his mindset while denying full responsibility for all the murders.
Back when Berkowitz struck for an eighth and final time, he surprised everyone by carrying out his attack in a different borough – Brooklyn – and a different target – a woman with blonde hair.
Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante were on a first date in Bath Beach when Berkowitz shot them in their car. Moskowitz died. Violante was blinded in one eye.
Murphy, who was visiting her grandparents in Ireland at the time, saw reports of the attack on the TV news. “I didn’t want to go back to New York,” she said.
Eleven days later, Murphy was in a restaurant, still in Ireland, when it was announced that Berkowitz had been arrested.
“I watched the capture on a television set and everyone clapped,” she said. “I felt safe to go home.”
For more than a year, the NYPD had chased leads, speculated about multiple suspects, and combed neighborhoods. It wasn’t until a parking ticket near the scene of the final murder led police to Berkowitz’s car that the case broke open.
On August 10, 1977, Berkowitz was arrested outside his Yonkers apartment.
Inside his car, police found maps, ammunition, and a rifle. He confessed to the killings and claimed he was obeying a demon who spoke to him through his neighbor’s dog.
Berkowitz was sentenced in 1978 to six terms of 25 years to life for each of the six slayings.
He has since claimed to be a born-again Christian and expressed remorse for his crimes. He has been denied parole repeatedly.
Now 72, he remains incarcerated at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in upstate New York.
Berkowitz’s reign of terror was over, but the city was forever changed.
When Murphy began her career as a television journalist in 1981, just four years after Berkowitz was captured, her fascination with the story never wavered.
“It made me want to be a crime reporter,” she said.
Over the years, Murphy won numerous awards for her investigative reporting with PIX11 News and CBS2. She continues to breaks news and provide updates on her biggest cases on her website, MaryMurphyOfficial.com.
Recently, she wrote about another big story she had been covering for years: the case of Rex Heuermann, who was arrested in July 2023 and accused of being the Long Island (Gilgo Beach) Serial Killer, known as LISK. His alleged killings date back to the 1990s.
Murphy compares the two cases, pointing out that many of the investigative tools used to identify Heuermann didn’t exist back in the 1970s when Berkowitz was arrested.
Throughout her career, Murphy continued to cover Berkowitz on anniversaries and when updates emerged, Finally, she got the chance to meet him behind bars.
“I remember his gleaming blue eyes, and he was very mild mannered,” she said. They spoke, but he declined to do an on camera interview.
“But one thing I remember – is that I did not feel afraid when I met him,” she added.
Not like the fear she felt during the 13 months he terrorized her city, the place she calls home.
“I never forgot how scared I was that summer,” she says. “And I never forgot those victims. That’s why I kept following the story. It wasn’t just a huge crime – it was our city, our lives.”
