Angry Young Man | 2

00:00
Speaker 1
This series contains adult language and depictions of graphic violence. Listener discretion is advised. There's a place in the world for the angry young man with his working class ties and his radical plans. He refuses to bend, he refuses to crawl he's always at home with his back to the wall and he's proud of his scars and the battles he's lost and he struggles and bleeds as he hangs on his cross and he likes to be known as the angry young man. In the summer of 1950, Elizabeth Broder was alone. It had been nearly a decade since her husband Tony had left her for another woman after only four years of marriage, a turn of events that she hadn't fully moved on from. In fact, she still went by her married name, Elizabeth Falco.

00:58
Speaker 1
Betty, to her friends, grew up poor in a jewish community in Brooklyn. And when she married the handsome young italian man, Tony Falco, she knew her fortunes had changed, and she was right for a while. Unfortunately, Tony had a wandering eye and a very casual relationship with monogamy, and the marriage sadly ended. Betty, still young, attractive, and full of life, was on her own and became a waitress to make ends meet. It was in August of 1950 that she noticed a man, a regular customer in the diner where she worked. This man had begun to linger at the counter, make comments on how pretty she looked, even surprise her with a gift here and there. It wasn't long before this man, Joseph Kleinman, was his name. It wasn't long before Joe asked Betty on a date, and she said yes.

01:57
Speaker 1
They hit it off right away, and Betty felt something she hadn't felt in years, happiness. She envisioned a future with Joe. He was handsome, successful in business on Long island, and his affections seemed genuine. However, not long after they started dating, Mr. Kleinman admitted a secret he'd been hiding from Betty. He was married, and further, he had no intention of leaving his wife. Betty knew that she should move on and find someone who could fully commit to her. But she had fallen in love with Joe and allowed the relationship to continue. She didn't mind that almost every time they became intimate happened to be in the back of Joe's 1950 Buick roadmaster. It wasn't ideal, but again, Betty loved Joe and secretly hoped that she would one day win him over and they could be together properly.

02:59
Speaker 1
It would be one of these trysts in Joe's Buick sometime in the late summer of 1952 that in the spring of the following year would produce a child. While Betty was overjoyed, Joseph Kleinman was less so. Kleinman would disavow any connection to the child and threatened Betty not with violence, but abandonment if she decided to force the issue. The prospect of being alone again was enough to convince Betty Broder to acquiesce to Joe's demands. The baby's name at birth wasn't Broder, and it certainly wasn't Kleinman. Instead, the healthy baby boy was given the last name of Falco, a decidedly italian name. Although both birth parents were jewish, the exact reasons Betty chose Falco instead of Broder aren't entirely clear, but the reasons for what she did next are obvious.

03:59
Speaker 1
In a desperate attempt to keep her boyfriend happy and to keep his affections intact, Betty agreed to give her newborn son up for adoption. He was three days old. His name was Richard David Falka. Welcome back to the devil. Within a season in hell. You're listening to episode two, angry young man. Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz were a childless, middle aged couple from the Bronx. They owned a mom and pop hardware store where Nathan worked six days a week. They were by no means wealthy, but the hardware business afforded the Berkowitzes a lifestyle that allowed for children. But none came. Both Nathan and Pearl felt something missing from their lives, a void that they knew a family, a child in particular, would fill. They decided on adoption.

05:05
Speaker 1
The idea of adoption in the United States in any organized and regulated way began with Reverend Charles Brace in the 1850s. The good Reverend would gather as many homeless, parentless, basically feral children he could in the five points neighborhood of Manhattan, load them onto a train and head into the Pennsylvania farm country. The local farmers would be notified in advance of the incoming train, and once arrived, the children would step up onto a platform for inspection and, if desired, would be claimed by a local farming family. This is where the term put up for adoption came from. If a child wasn't selected, they would get back on the train and head to the next town. The children would be cared for and taught the ways of the farm.

05:56
Speaker 1
There were, however, no legal ties between the families and these children, which the farmers eventually realized would become an issue when the time came for inheritance. The Massachusetts Adoption act solved this issue with instituting the process of requiring court approval for adoptions, and it effectively redefined the term parent to extend beyond blood kinship and encouraged the building of families where adoptive parents assumed the financial responsibility as well as the emotional responsibility of natural parents. And it's a good thing, because often Reverend Brace took things way too far with his train rides into the country. Many children were so desperate to escape the slums of New York that they would follow Brace to the train station without informing their parents and just disappear forever. And Brace was aware of this. He knew that many of the children he placed with farming families weren't orphans.

07:01
Speaker 1
They just wanted out. Brace's organization required notification of birth parents, but the adoption laws that would be enacted by 25 states in the 1850s alone put in some much needed guardrails. The mid 1940s, just after World War II ended, began a time in the United States that would be called the baby scoop era. This era was characterized by an increased rate of premarital pregnancies, along with a higher rate of newborn adoptions. A major goal of social work in this time was to decrease the number of children institutions and increase the number of children placed in adoptive families. Michelle Cahan of the University of Massachusetts wrote in her history of 20th century adoption practices. Quote, adoption increased dramatically during this period, tripling between 1937 and 1945 and then doubling again by 1955. For the first time, adopted children outnumbered institutionalized youth.

08:10
Speaker 1
The reasons for this shift were twofold. First, illegitimate births increased significantly during the period, from some 130,000 children in 1948 to over 200,000 in 1958. With social bonds loosened by wartime illegitimacy, rates began to soar. At the same time, the demand for children to adopt grew as a result of the baby boom's rising marriage rates during and after the war. Parenthood was hailed as a patriotic duty, childless couples were shunned, and record numbers sought adoption. As such, adoption agencies were inundated with requests for children. New medical treatments also enabled doctors to diagnose infertility earlier, leading couples seeking children to move on to adoption much more quickly. Wartime prosperity also contributed to this trend of increased interest in adoption. The paper continues.

09:13
Speaker 1
The postwar increase in the popularity of adoption came about because it solved a particular social problem, the rise in white, middle class illegitimacy during the, quote, permissive society of the 1950s. The paper goes on, typical adoptive parents were white, married for the first time in their mid 30s, infertile for a physical reason, active in their church, close to their families, psychologically well adjusted, and consisted of mothers who planned to stay home with the child, and parents who shared the adoptees religion. The adoption agencies and their social workers were involved in actively shaping families according to the ideal norm of the day. This work encompassed, quote, perhaps the most ambitious program of social engineering seen in 20th century America. But looking back, there were some problems with these programs, problems that would manifest in tragic ways.

10:18
Speaker 2
You're making an argument against secrets, so there's a problem when you are told a narrative that's totally untrue. And then you are raised a certain way, believing the world looks a certain way, believing that your world was a certain way, and then finding out that not only is it not true, but the people who raised you were the ones who were complicit in this lie. And so your whole fundamental world starts to shift. It starts to break apart this whole idea of safety. Hi, I'm Seth Manakam. I am a psychotherapist in Los Angeles. I run a group called the Monocham Psychotherapy group. The way I would approach it is the way I approach anything in therapy, which is I really don't care what my opinion is. I have no views on the way people should make decisions in their life.

11:06
Speaker 2
My only job is to help them resolve their own conflicts and make sense of their life in their own ways.

11:14
Speaker 1
Efforts to maintain secrecy in the adoption process became paramount, ostensibly to protect the identity of, quote, broken women or unwed mothers who, if exposed, could face societal shame and potential ruin. There was also the advent of psychoanalytic theory. Freud's oedipus complex has been cited as justification for denying birth mothers access to information regarding adoptive parents.

11:42
Speaker 2
For example, I will tell you my personal belief, which is probably the same sort of way that I look at things psychologically, which is I believe in a very open communication in households, and these things aren't secrets. Secrets already is implying that there's something wrong with what happened, that there is something to be ashamed of.

12:04
Speaker 1
Early psychoanalytic theory depicted these mothers as, at best neurotic and at worst, psychotic. In her paper, Cahan contends that sometimes these mothers became pregnant in order to escape into a fantasy life. Now, that could easily be argued in the case of Betty Broder. She was in love with a married man and hoped to start a family with him despite his strenuous objections. The secrecy, some argued, went too far, and that even the adoptee, years later, would be prevented from gaining access to information about their own lives. It would be up to the adoptive parents and them alone to decide whether or not to reveal the truth.

12:47
Speaker 2
Traumatic incidents don't necessarily create the same trauma for each individual who has that incident. You and I could get into a similar car accident and have different responses after that car accident, different symptoms that come up, different feelings around it, different ways of engaging in the world because of that car accident. It's just how that incident has affected our own biology and the way we see the world. It doesn't mean that the event wasn't a triggering event. I've seen people decide that they don't want this person in their life. And I've seen people reach out and create relationships with the biological parent. I've seen also clients who have reached out to the biological family or the biological family reached out to them, for example, which is how they have found out.

13:35
Speaker 2
And they attempted a relationship, realized that this family was not family the way they saw it, and decided that they didn't want this person in their life. There's no right or wrong answer here.

13:51
Speaker 1
It would appear that at the time of the adoption, Betty came clean about a few things, although, as stated, the baby was born with an italian name, but both parents were jewish. That was important to Nathan and Pearl, and it checked the box about the child and adoptive parents sharing the same religion. So at just three days old, the infant Richard David Falco, was handed over to Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz. Their first order of business was to legally change their new son's name. While Pearl liked the first and middle names of her new boy, she didn't like the order they were in. She preferred David Richard over the established Richard David. And of course, her husband's family name replaced Falco on the new birth certificate.

14:40
Speaker 1
And thus the family that Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz had always hoped for was complete with the arrival of their son, David Richard Berkowitz. David grew up in a warm and loving household with doting parents and all the Norman Rockwell innocents of the 1950s in America. New York City was booming, crime rates were low, and the public school system in New York was organized and flush with a new crop of progressive young teachers ready to prepare the baby boom generation to take the lead in a postwar America. As a child, David showed promise as a clever, curious boy who was a quick learner and an avid reader. But he was bullied at the Bedford Park Elementary School, also known as PS 77, on Webster street, just north of the botanical gardens in the Bronx. And that bullying continued into middle school.

15:40
Speaker 1
He was a heavyset kid, and some of the other students took to calling him chubby Juboy. Young David didn't take this lightly. He took it personally. But he also took it as an opportunity to learn.

15:54
Speaker 2
So you could go one of two ways, right? You can get bullied, and the lack of self esteem and the fear in the world has you walking through the world scared of others, subservient, feeling less than. And that has obviously a big effect on the psyche and depression and anxiety. The other thing that can happen is a kid who is bullied, especially a kid who's bullied, as you said, in middle school, pubescent age, beginning to head into puberty or in puberty, and they start to get bigger and realize that they now have some power and size. They then become the victimizers and bully others.

16:39
Speaker 1
As soon as he was older and bigger, he made it his mission to find kids that he could bully.

16:45
Speaker 2
It happens if you grow up in a home where you were bullied or abused in the family. It could also happen in school where you're bullied, but where ultimately, the victims become the victimizers. It happens in all kinds of abuse, physical and sexual, if untreated. And the way you've now lived in the world is this new construct, then that is how you live in the world. Essentially, a personality disorder is a disorder that is created in childhood, where you have learned to survive in your childhood using certain defense mechanisms that are useful for you during that period of time. So whatever home you grew up in, you create certain defense mechanisms and ways of living in the world that keep you safe, that are the best way to manage something when you are living in a world in which you have no control.

17:36
Speaker 2
So you could argue that it's very useful. The problem is you then take those personality symptoms of this way of living in the world, and you bring it into the world outside of your home. And now we have a personality disorder if those defense mechanisms are problematic. So I look at it this way, I'll say to clients sometimes, you were a medieval knight putting on heavy armor, and that armor was really useful for you in your childhood. It helped you really manage a difficult childhood. And now you are thrown into modern warfare, and you are clunking around in heavy medieval armor, trying to fight people who have Kevlar and more modern ways of fighting. That's right. You're ineffective.

18:23
Speaker 1
Then. The first of several earth shaking revelations occurred in the life of David Berkowitz, revelations that psychotherapists would later define as the, quote, primary crisis of his life. When David was eight years old, he was told that he was adopted. Even at that early age, the idea of adoption was a concept that David grasped easily. But an intellectual understanding and an emotional acceptance are two very different things.

18:53
Speaker 2
For some people, their belief is the family that raised them is their family, and they don't see it any other way. And that compartmentalization has really helped them live in a world where they accept their adoption. They love their adoptive family, and the biological parents were. I'm thankful that I was born, but this is my family, and I can totally compartmentalize that, and I have no need from them. There were no unmet needs in my own home that are going to be met by meeting this biological parent. So that's some people. Some people feel like, I love my adoptive family, and they are my family to me, but I'd be very curious to find out who my biological family is. What can I learn from them? How similar are we? What would that experience be like?

19:40
Speaker 2
And they're able to do it and incorporate that in their psyche in a healthy way. Some meet the other family. I've had stories of people who met their other family and then just regret it.

19:53
Speaker 1
After several long moments of contemplation in which David was apparently trying to figure out the best way to ask the woman he thought was his mother, the only mother that he had known, actually, about his real mother. No sooner had he asked than he received a life altering reply. He was told his natural mother had died in childbirth. That type of news would be devastating for anyone to learn. But for an intellectually sophisticated eight year old boy, the news presented an incredibly complex set of emotions that soon became overwhelming. When the dust settled, David Berkowitz was left with an abiding and near debilitating sense of guilt. He had convinced himself that he had killed his own mother.

20:42
Speaker 2
I in my office have seen so many people who've shown up here having their entire worldview thrown by the results of a DNA test. Some have been depressed, some have struggled. Some have decided to reach out to the biological family. Some have decided to keep secrets. None of them have become serial killers. I think that is a very important distinction.

21:06
Speaker 1
So David turned to the only mother he had, Pearl, and made her the object of his intense affections. The two formed a close bond that David took to an unusual extreme. Yes, it's normal for a child to be attached to their mother, sometimes obsessively so. The rivalry between siblings for attention from their parents is also well known. But David didn't have any siblings. Still, he felt threatened. He feared that he wasn't the sole beneficiary of his mother's love and felt the need to dispatch with his chief rival, a parakeet named Pudgy.

21:45
Speaker 2
You do not see it often. That is a really unhealthy relationship to the object. Whether you view it through object relations theory or attachment theory, or a freudian oedipal complex, which, the truth is, the Oedipus complex or edible complex doesn't really hold up in scientific studies. We don't really see it. That doesn't mean that it's not seen. And Berkowitz is a good example of it, if you want to view it through that lens, which is there are people who have those kind of relationships. Their mother. And maybe it was during the sexual stage of childhood where they grew this attachment to their mother and then wanted to kill off the father or any suitors. Or in this case, it was a parakeet or a parrot that, yeah. Had killed off because everything was seen as competition.

22:37
Speaker 1
Pudgy had been Pearl's pet parakeet for years. Now, small birds are curious choices for pets. They live their lives in a cage, prevented from behaving in ways basic to their nature. They long to fly and live in full view of open sky, but are relegated to sitting on a perch, eating seeds and waiting to die. Admittedly, that's a cynical view of bird ownership, but it's the view that young David Berkowitz held. In reality, bird owners are known to have deep, fulfilling relationships with their caged pets. And that truth is what led David to see Pudgy as a threat. Pudgy needed to go, but it needed to be done delicately and slowly so as not to draw suspicion to the murderer.

23:28
Speaker 1
So over the course of several weeks, David Berkowitz would exercise patience and vengeance as he meticulously poisoned pudgy by fouling the parakeet's daily seed intake with small amounts of household cleaner. It worked. Pudgy would mysteriously succumb to an unknown illness and be found at the bottom of his cage.

23:53
Speaker 2
Typical. No, but in an aberrant personality type like his. Yeah. And is that indicative of a problem? Absolutely. I mean, that is a clear cut indicator that there's going to be a serious issue here. His attachment to his mother, his need to kill. Anything that got in the way of that was pretty indicative of a problem that I'm sure was missed psychologically throughout most of his life. Right.

24:19
Speaker 1
David was never suspected. And the facts surrounding Pudgy's death would remain under wraps until he made a stunning jailhouse confession decades later. Yes, I'm making light of the murder of Pudgy the parakeet. But in all seriousness, this incident marks a crossing of the Rubicon for young David Berkowitz. The die was cast. He had ended a life to assuage uncomfortable feelings that he thought there was no other remedy for. For the next nine years, David slowly began to indulge a darker side of himself. He became a petty thief, racking up juvenile offenses and more destructively, an arsonist. He claims to have set more than 1500 fires across the boroughs in just five years. Two years of psychotherapy seemed to afford David and his parents some relief, some coping mechanisms, and much needed understanding for what David was going through. That relief wouldn't last.

25:26
Speaker 1
Unfortunately, at the age of 14, David would lose his adoptive mother, Pearl Berkowitz, to breast cancer. The remainder of David's teen years at Christopher Columbus High School were marked with truancy, violence, and passing grades. It shouldn't come as a surprise that David graduated high school in 1971. Despite his myriad self inflicted disciplinary issues, he remained, academically at least, a great student. His intellectual capacity was never in question. It was his emotional stability that had people worried and was quickly turning into, typical for the time, a smoldering Bronx dumpster fire. So in the nine years from age eight to age 17, when he finished high school, David had experienced Cris with the most important relationships in his life. First, he learned that he was given up for adoption, that he internalized as being abandoned by his birth parents.

26:30
Speaker 1
Then he was told that his natural mother had actually died giving birth to him, a revelation that manifested into feelings of intense guilt and responsibility. He blamed himself. Then, despite his zealousness for her affections, David's adoptive mother dies young. Three years later, just after graduation, David's father, the widower Nathan Berkowitz, informed him, hey, I'm getting married. And me and the new wife were moving to Florida. Oh, and you're not invited. Another abandonment. This time, though, it meant that David would soon have nowhere to live. Let me just get in front of this right now. Lest anyone think that I'm trying to normalize or explain away David Berkowitz, I'm not. What I'm doing is laying the foundation for what would be unleashed on the city of New York.

27:32
Speaker 1
Much like the pressures that Tommy Sullivan was feeling from school and sports and family and church, or much like the pressures that Michael Taylor was feeling unemployed, can't provide for his family, unrequited love for his new pastor, the things that led him to snap. These are the things in the life of David Berkowitz that led to his emotional break. Like so many young men before him, men with limited prospects, a sense of adventure, and preferably a strong sense of duty, 17 year old David Berkowitz joined the United States army. His father, when he learned of his son's decision, tried to talk him out of it and steer him towards a four year college. But David admitted that he was inspired by the war in Vietnam. So inspired that he actually hoped to join the fight in southeast Asia as soon as possible.

28:30
Speaker 1
It was June 23 when David stepped off the train in lower Manhattan and enlisted at the army induction center on Whitehall street. His military intake forms, widely circulated after his arrest, showed that private Berkowitz passed both his physical exam and his psych evaluation with flying.

28:50
Speaker 2
So, of course he'll pass the psych exam. I mean, one, sociopathy is wonderful in the army as long as he can handle discipline. But the idea to be able to go out and kill, when you've spent a lifetime imagining killing someone, you really have set someone up for a good position when they're a sociopath who has murderous tendencies. The other is the psychological issues he was having in home don't have to necessarily play out within the confines of the military until they do. But the psych exam, the idea of, like, do you want to go and fight? And we'll put a gun in your hand and know, save America and whatever we thought were doing there, that didn't work.

29:36
Speaker 1
After boot camp, David was assigned to Fort Knox, Kentucky, and then an infantry company. It's what he wanted. But he wasn't going to Vietnam. Instead, he was sent to the demilitarized zone in South Korea, where he would serve for a year. This time, in David's life, away from home and family opened up areas for growth. Not all of these areas were ultimately beneficial to the young soldier. The camaraderie, team building, and discipline that the military life affords were all aspects of David's life that were sorely lacking, and it showed. While in Korea, David struggled with punctuality, often being late and incurring fines. Eventually, he was demoted from specialist e four to specialist e three. He excelled in one particular area, though, firearms. Rifle marksmanship, to be precise.

30:34
Speaker 1
He qualified as a sharpshooter with the m 16, but fell just short regarding his skills with a handgun. But he did receive extensive handgun training, a fact that would be very important just a few years later. There is one very telling incident that took place in Korea one evening. Specialist Berkowitz missed his bus back to base and was subsequently missing for an entire evening. At his disciplinary hearing for the incident, he confessed to routine drug use and also implicated effectively his entire unit when he said it wasn't just him, but, quote, everyone was doing it. The it in question was LSD, and David attempted to blame the use of the psychedelic on his punctual failures. The admission of the use of LSD, although never mentioned again in his military records, is interesting in many ways, especially when considered alongside reports of his behavioral changes.

31:32
Speaker 1
Upon his return to the States in early 1973, with his tour in South Korea complete, David was sent back to Fort Knox. He seemed to fare better upon his return. Favorable disciplinary reports from his superiors and excellent marks for his skills as a military clerk, which was his other area of expertise besides marksmanship, made his time in Kentucky enjoyable and even allowed him to regain his rank of specialist e four. His time in Fort Knox, however, highlighted a major change for David in a profound and lasting way. He stopped practicing Judaism and became a devout baptist. It's unclear if his use of psychedelic drugs continued after his return from South Korea, but what is clear is how former friends and acquaintances described David after his honorable discharge from the army in 1973.

32:33
Speaker 1
He was a different person, they said, a recent convert to Christianity with an extremely conservative view on sexual morality that he attempted to force on everyone he met. It has been argued that this was an excuse that allowed him to be at peace with his inability to connect with women. Well, God didn't want him to. In the spring of 1974, David Berkowitz would receive another earth shaking revelation, this time from his father. David's birth mother, who for 15 years David had believed to be dead as a result of giving birth to him, was actually alive and well and living in Brooklyn. We can imagine the body blow this must have been to David Berkowitz. In June of 1974, David, aided by information from his father, was able to locate his birth mother.

33:41
Speaker 1
While the reunion was rewarding at first for both David and Betty, it soon became too much for David to handle. Betty would fully disclose the nature of David's conception, birth and subsequent decision to give him away at the urging of an extremely reluctant natural father. Keep in mind David's recent conversion and high moral bar set for himself and others. Now imagine how the news of his illegitimate conception and birth must have landed with him. It stung him to his core. And on top of all of this, he couldn't even confront the person who played the most pivotal role in this primary crisis of his life. Joseph Kleinman had died years earlier.

34:36
Speaker 1
And so, while David sat suffering with the fires of hell burning in the pit of his stomach, his mother, Betty, casually lobbed another emotional hand grenade into the center of the room when she told David that he had a half sister named Roslyn. She was about his age, just a few years older, she said with a smile. But all David could think of was that she had lived her entire life knowing the love of her actual mother, and that thought quickly snowballed into why was she good enough to keep? But I wasn't. The already boiling cauldron of anger and despair was instantly transformed into a nuclear blast where everything fused into a single monstrous goal, vengeance. Emotionally, David Berkowitz seemed to be searching for a tribe, a group to belong to, a family, just like the rest of us.

35:40
Speaker 1
He had skipped from Judaism to the army to becoming a devout Baptist, to trying to connect with his birth parents. And all of these attempts seemed to backfire. His main psychological roadblock to happiness appeared to be the one that he couldn't resolve. The very nature of his existence. The news of his illegitimate birth and abandonment, coupled with his sudden zealotry for Christianity, fueled extreme ideas about sexual purity that he felt required punishment. But who was to be the recipient of his wrath? A full 18 months before the attacks on Donna Lauria and Jody Valenti, a 22 year old David Berkowitz took his first baby steps towards serial killer infamy. Before he enlisted in the army, he had briefly lived in the Bronx neighborhood called Co op City. Briefly, in New York and other large cities.

36:44
Speaker 1
To live in a, quote, co op means to live in a building that is owned by a corporation comprised of the residents that live there. These buildings are called cooperatives, and it's a type of ownership that a person can sell, often for a profit. If they decide to move, the person isn't selling the apartment they live in, but rather their shares in the corporation. So it's not technically a real estate transaction, although it can seem very similar to one. Coop City in the Bronx is the world's largest cooperative community, with more than 15,000 units spread across 35 highrise buildings and seven clusters of townhomes. There are three shopping plazas, dozens of restaurants, and eight parking garages spread across 320 acres. There are also miles of sidewalks and pedestrian bridges connecting the entire development.

37:40
Speaker 1
After the death of his adoptive mother, Pearl, David and his father lived in Coop City until David graduated and his father moved to Florida. That is to say, david knew the area well. It's not clear where he got it, but David was in possession of a large hunting knife. It was December of 1975, and somewhere in the deep recesses of his broken mind, a switch was flipped or a circuit was blown, or he had finally heard enough of the screaming voices in his head that refused to be silenced, and he decided to take action. According to his own testimony years later, David concealed his knife inside his jacket and approached a woman from behind on a pedestrian bridge in Co op City. When he was a few steps away, he brandished his knife and rushed the unsuspecting victim, stabbing violently several times.

38:38
Speaker 1
To his utter shock, his efforts were in vain. The woman's thick winter coat stopped the thrusts of David's knife, and the woman ran away screaming. This alleged victim was never identified, and the lack of details surrounding the attack lead many to believe it was a fabrication on the part of Berkowitz. But assuming the story is true, David would not be deterred. He quickly concealed himself in a parking garage and emerged hours later on a different pedestrian bridge, this time near Dreyser Loop in Coop City. This next attack has been well documented. The victim was a 15 year old girl named Michelle Foreman, a sophomore at nearby Truman high school. David attacked her from behind, stabbing her six times. Incredibly, Michelle's life was saved again by the protection afforded her by the thick winter coat she had on. Plus, she was a fighter.

39:41
Speaker 1
When Berkowitz began stabbing her, she grabbed hold of him, started screaming, punching, and scratching at his face. Shocked by the strength and resistance of this small girl and convinced he had inflicted enough damage to kill, David retreated into the concrete jungle and made his escape. Michelle Foreman would live through the ordeal and take her place in history as the first known survivor of a vicious serial killer. The big takeaway for David Berkowitz, new to the business of murder, was this. He didn't like the up close and personal nature of knife attacks. Plus, it seemed he wasn't very good at it. If he wanted to continue his mission, and he definitely wanted to continue his mission, he would need a more efficient way of killing.

40:32
Speaker 1
Which brings us back to David's appearance in Texas to visit his old army buddy Billy Daniel Parker and the straw purchase of a. 44 caliber pistol. When David got back to New York, he started driving a cab. He took a job as an overnight security guard and worked several menial jobs before settling into a full time position as a letter sorter at a post office in Yonkers. Since he was working in Yonkers, he decided he was going to live in Yonkers. A small studio apartment on the top floor of a seven story building at 35 Pine street was where David would call home for the remainder of his life as a free man. Although inexperienced and disorganized, he had major plans for the next several months of his life. He had a car. He had a gun.

41:25
Speaker 1
And he had, of course, a righteous rage, stoking his desire for bloodshed. All he lacked was inspiration. He needed instruction, a mentor, a master. When David Berkowitz took up residence at 35 Pine street. It wasn't long before he was introduced to his neighbors, the Carr family. The Carr family consisted of three children, two boys about David's age, and a younger sister. They had a family dog, a black lab named Harvey, and the head of the household was their cold, abusive father, a strict disciplinarian with a violent streak named Sam. On the next episode of the Devil within a season in Hell, the seemingly random murders occurring across the city suddenly coalesce into a nightmare scenario. There's a serial killer on the loose.

42:32
Speaker 1
The Devil within a season in Hell is a cloud ten media production recorded live at Bel Air Studios in Los Angeles, California. Written and produced by Brandon Morgan, executive produced by Sim Sarna. Our post production supervisor is Bruce Wittkin, who also provided original music for this episode for the Devil within. I'm your host, Brandon Morgan.