Son of Sam: How a parking ticket ended David Berkowitz's year-long killing spree in New York
David Berkowitz, known as "Son of Sam," killed six people and wounded seven across New York City between 1976 and 1977. His arrest on 10 August 1977 came thanks to a parking ticket issued near his final crime scene.
The parking ticket that brought down New York's most feared serial killer
Forty years after his arrest, silive.com recalls how David Berkowitz — the serial killer who called himself "Son of Sam" — was captured outside his home in Yonkers on 10 August 1977, ending a year-long campaign of terror that paralysed New York City.
Berkowitz, a 24-year-old postal worker, killed six people and wounded seven others between the summer of 1976 and the summer of 1977. Armed with a .44-calibre Charter Arms Bulldog revolver, he stalked young women parked with their boyfriends in the city's lovers' lanes, targeting couples in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Taunting notes and a city gripped by fear
As the death toll climbed, Berkowitz taunted investigators with handwritten notes sent to then-Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin. Each letter sharpened the tension across the city. Police formed a task force of more than 200 detectives, yet the killer remained at large.
His last attack came on 31 July 1977, in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn. Stacy Moskowitz, 20, was shot and killed while sitting in a parked car. Her companion, Robert Violante, was shot in the eye and permanently blinded. Witnesses reported seeing a man walk calmly away from the scene.
The clue that broke the case
The breakthrough came from an unlikely source: a parking ticket. On the night of the Moskowitz killing, NYPD officers — including Officer Michael Cataneo of Great Kills, Staten Island — had issued a ticket for a vehicle parked near the scene. Staten Island detective Joseph Strano spent hours with a witness, persuading her to describe her encounter with the suspect. It was her account of watching officers write that ticket which focused the investigation on Berkowitz's car.
Ballistics tests confirmed that a loaded .44-calibre revolver found under the driver's seat of Berkowitz's vehicle matched the weapon used to kill Moskowitz and blind Violante. On the evening of 10 August 1977, officers arrested Berkowitz as he sat in his car outside his Yonkers home. He offered no resistance.
A judge overruled calls for bail
In court the following day, Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown — then serving as the supervising Brooklyn judge in the arraignment — rejected a court assessment that rated Berkowitz as "low risk." Officials had initially recommended he be released on bail. Brown refused, citing the six killings and seven woundings attributed to the defendant, the majority of them young women sitting in parked cars.
The front pages and the aftermath
New York's tabloids led with the arrest on 11 August 1977. The New York Post and the Daily News both carried banner headlines the morning after police took Berkowitz into custody, reflecting the scale of relief across the city.
Berkowitz was convicted and sentenced to six consecutive life terms. He has remained incarcerated at Sullivan Correctional Facility. As recently as 2009, New Brighton resident Patricia Amis received a written reply from him after writing to ask about her step-grandmother, who had worked as a prison evangelist — an indication that Berkowitz, now decades into his sentence, continues to correspond from behind bars.
The shadow of the Zodiac
The anniversary of the arrest resurfaced in the context of a broader question posed in the original silive.com report: whether the near-simultaneous infamy of the Zodiac Killer — the still-unidentified figure who terrorised California, claimed 37 victims and sent coded letters to law enforcement — constituted a genuine series of connected murders or something more ambiguous. Unlike the Son of Sam case, the Zodiac investigation has never produced a confirmed suspect, and the killer's true body count remains disputed by investigators and researchers alike.
Berkowitz's case stands in stark contrast: a named perpetrator, a confirmed weapon, forensic evidence and a conviction. The parking ticket issued by two officers on a Brooklyn street remains one of the more singular details in the history of American criminal investigation — a mundane administrative act that closed the most frightening chapter in the city's modern crime history.
Source: The Sun