David Berkowitz

Beyond a barbed-wire fence and a locked metal door, David Berkowitz sat across from me in a visiting room at a maximum-security prison in upstate New York.

Son of Sam or Son of Hope

He was remembering a favorite song. “Amazing grace,” he sang, his head swaying slightly, rhythmically, back and forth, “how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” His voice, revealing its Bronx roots, now rose, if only briefly, to a higher, nasal pitch that echoed within the stone-walled white room. “I once was lost, but now I’m found; was blind, but now I see.” Berkowitz looked up, his blue eyes as wide as ever. “It’s a bit like my life,” he said, summing up his 11 years as a born-again Christian. “The person you saw when I was arrested, that was Satan’s creation. But then there’s a happy ending, where God comes in and transforms me.”

David Berkowitz singing “Amazing Grace”: It was one of the most remarkable moments in the 20 hours of interviews he gave me. Sure, I knew, as most people do, that Berkowitz had had some kind of jail-house conversion to Christianity. What most people don’t know is that he has parlayed this into a post-serial killer second career for himself as an evangelical-Christian media star. At 46, after most of the city he terrorized has forgotten both him and his unbelievable tale of demons commanding him to kill – at least until Spike Lee reminded them – something strange has happened. Berkowitz’s construct of lies, the lies that he told about his crimes, the lies he continues to tell about his crimes, has resurfaced, and has now found a worldwide audience of believers, an almost cult­like, gullible following of evangelical Christians who believe that Satan’s agents lured Berkowitz into murder. He has become a Christian-video star, featured in The Choice Is Yours, With David Berkowitz and Son of Sam/Son of Hope, both of which are shown across America in prisons, youth facilities, high schools, even on several Native American reservations, and across Europe and beyond, in Ireland, Iceland, Russia, Asia, West Africa. One is being translated into Romanian to be shown on TV there. Another into Tagalog for Filipinos.

Here, I thought, as I sat across from him, was a convicted murderer, a Jewish man from the Bronx, tapping into something deep within the psyche of hundreds of thousands of Christians all over the world. What did they see in him? I wondered. And even if I was skeptical about his conversion, even if I knew that at the heart of what he was saying was a lie, what was I to make of the people supposedly inspired by these videos to live better lives? Inspired by him? After all those hours of interviews with the new Christian guru himself, after spending months talking with his disciples, I found a new reason to hate the man who was once the most-hated man in New York, the man who pleaded guilty to killing six and wounding seven others.

David Berkowitz, Christian media star, preaches to the faithful in Son of Sam/Son of Hope: “If you feel lonely, depressed, guilt-ridden, Jesus Christ is sending the invitation, “Come, I’ll carry the burden for you.’”

With the lights reflecting off his glasses, Berkowitz looks into the video camera and smiles. “You know, sometimes I ask, ’Lord, why me? I don’t deserve Your forgiveness.’ There’s no answer. God just tells me, ’David, just accept that I love you. I’ve cleaned you up. Just be at peace.’”

I decided to seek an interview with Berkowitz after watching that video. It is an astonishingly slick production, with quick, TV-style shots and catchy music, distributed worldwide by Israel Christian Nations, an evangelical ministry based in Florida. In that video Berkowitz repeats the story he has told intermittently over the years, that a satanic cult lured him into murder. It is this assertion – the devil made him do it – that has been his ticket to stardom among evangelical Christians. His brand of lies validates a type of fundamentalist-Christian belief in demonology.

Soon after I saw the video I wrote to Berkowitz. I wanted to explore the nature of his alleged conversion, of the meaning of Christian salvation, of the limits, if any, of forgiveness. He agreed to meet with me, to talk about his life today, but not the past. Not the murders. “I am all for not dwelling on the past,” he wrote me. “esus Christ has given me a whole new life, and I am more interested in the present and the future.” The old David Berkowitz, the murdering David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, is dead, he insisted, replaced by a new man with a new name. Berkowitz now calls himself the Son of Hope. When I visited him he gave me hundreds of letters to read, letters attesting to the worldwide following he has garnered. In many of them he is referred to as “Brother David,” “Rev. David Berkowitz,” “Sir,” and for one 25- year-old man from Ghana he is “Father and friend in the Lord” and “Dad.” To another man from Tanzania, Berkowitz is his son’s namesake. He is also, as I was told by a spokesperson for Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” (on which Berkowitz appeared about two years ago), a “teddy bear.”

But his past is never far behind. It was revisited, albeit in fictionalized form, in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam, which held enough reminders to keep the “born again” Berkowitz up at night “pleading with the Lord” not to let it be released. “What’s the purpose of reliving that garbage?” Berkowitz asked, almost shouting at me. He can’t see the purpose, not when the New Testament assures him that “old things passed away.” Christianity is Berkowitz’s best defense; it’s his ultimate justification, not only for discarding his murderous past, but also for the damning inconsistencies in the story he told the courts about the demons who supposedly made him kill. That defense also includes burying the story of Berkowitz’s twisted relationship with Christianity, which began well before the murders, when he tried to proselytize his Army buddies.

Now his born-again status affords him the chance to further distance himself from any blame by clinging to a suspect, unproved story, purveyed in Son of Sam/Son of Hope, that he wasn’t the lone killer, but part of a satanic cult involved in human sacrifices: The devil made him do it. Worried about whether this particular satanic cult is still a danger? Don’t look to Berkowitz for reassurance. He’s not naming names, even though he told me that ’’most [cultists] have gone legitimate and blended into society.”

“I don’t want to discuss that,” he said. “It’s a mess. I don’t even deal with it anymore. God’s given me a peace about it, because He’s a God of justice. My role now is to be a faithful Christian, doing the best I can to encourage people, to carry out work as a minister and evangelist.” But the more I listened to Berkowitz, the more I realized that there was something sinister lying just beneath the surface of his account of “amazing grace” – that the Son of Sam and the Son of Hope were one and the same, leading his newfound followers into a web of lies.

I made my first trip to see Berkowitz with Richard Delfino, a retired police officer who is the leader of the most dedicated coterie of Berkowitz’s Christian friends. Because Delfino planned to leave early, at 6 A.M., I spent the night at his home in Parlin, New Jersey, anxiously awaiting the trek I would make at dawn with him and three of his Christian friends. By the morning of the trip, Delfino, who now works as a truck driver, had spent the previous eight hours delivering fish to shops around New York City. But he wasn’t tired. He was too excited about seeing his “brother in the Lord,” whom he visits every six weeks. And nothing stops Delfino. Even after he’d donated a kidney to a member of his church, he was up a week later, visiting Berkowitz.

After a prayer for “Brother David” the ride began, with Norm Kramer, a 51- year-old auto-factory worker, taking the wheel for the three-hour drive to the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York. Seated in the back with Delfino and me was Lorraine Moufang, a 48-year-old mother of two, who was working with Delfino in a prison ministry in New Jersey when he told her this year about Berkowitz’s conversion. In front, next to the driver, sat Martin Ferwerda, a tall, stout, bearded 28-year-old, who two years before had heard Berkowitz on a Christian radio program, “Andy Anderson Live,” telling listeners about that purported satanic cult.

As for Delfino, he told me that Jesus Christ set him free from a cocaine addiction that had rotted away his sinuses and $400,000. Turning on the TV one night seven years ago, he was flipping through the channels when a Christian gospel group caught his attention. “I want a holy anointing deep inside of me,” they sang. Delfino wanted it too. He began reading the Bible and reconnecting with his family. Within the year, he swore off cocaine, ditching his crack pipes and torch in the garbage by the curb of his home. He hasn’t touched cocaine since, he says.

Four years ago, while attending Sayrewoods Bible Church in Old Bridge, New Jersey, he heard about Berkowitz’s conversion through Roxanne Tauriello, a church member who had interviewed the killer on a local Christian cable show. After watching the interview, Delfino was convinced –  just by the enthusiasm with which Berkowitz spoke about the Bible –  that the former Son of Sam was a true Christian, transformed by a genuine encounter with Christianity. Later that year, Delfino went for the first time to visit Berkowitz. When he looked into the prisoner’s sparkling blue eyes he knew that Berkowitz had been “saved,” forgiven by God, reborn. “No question in my mind,” Delfino told me.

Three hours later, we reached Sullivan Correctional Facility, a large, sprawling complex enclosed on all sides by swirls of shiny barbed wire. After checks by the guards, we passed through the courtyard into the main visiting room and settled into some seats. Minutes later, Delfino walked to a nearby shelf and grabbed a few Bibles for what was to be five hours with Berkowitz. Placing the volumes on the chess tables before us, Delfino flipped through one and realized that he had inadvertently grabbed a Hebrew prayer book. He put it on the table with the others and then sat, waiting for Berkowitz to enter.

Five minutes later the door opened. And there he was, David Berkowitz, smiling, waving his hand, walking briskly into the room, almost bouncing, it seemed, in his immaculate white Nike sneakers. He was visibly older now – his hair gray and thinner, and he had a mustache. In that instant, with his white cotton knit shirt tucked in his green pants, he looked like an older, out of shape high school coach ready for a basketball game.

“Praise God,” he said softly, smiling and hugging Delfino and the three others. He gave me a weak handshake, then, looking at the chess table. Berkowitz spotted the Hebrew prayer book lying before him. “That brings back a lot of memories,” he said.

David Berkowitz has had a tortured relationship with his Jewishness. The fact that he was Jewish always unsettled him, and in his early twenties while serving in the Army, he immersed himself in Christianity and spent his days preaching about the need to be “saved” from sexual immorality. Now that he’s an evangelical Christian, he basks in the attention his Jewish roots afford him. Evangelicals always love publicizing that they have won over one of the “chosen people” – and in this case, a famous serial killer at that.

Berkowitz’s roots were inauspicious enough. He was born Richard David Falco, and was just three days old when, in 1953, Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz adopted him and renamed him David Richard Berkowitz. When David was seven, Nathan told him that he had been adopted, that his real mother had died in childbirth. David felt different. He felt isolated. And, as he later told David Abrahamsen, a psychiatrist hired in 1977 by the prosecution, he always “had homicidal fantasies.” Pearl’s bird, Pudgy, was one of his first victims. Berkowitz admitted to Abrahamsen that he’d killed it by feeding it “small doses of kitchen cleaning materials.” Berkowitz rebelled against his parents, against his own Jewishness. “I can’t say for certain why I developed a dislike for being Jewish when I was a child,” he told Abrahamsen some 20 years ago, “but I did… As a child I felt proud to hang around with the gentile boys.”

Two months after his bar mitzvah, Pearl Berkowitz died of cancer. David was devastated. The one anchor in his life was gone. In 1971 Nathan Berkowitz remarried, and now had a grown step­daughter. David felt out of place, as if two intruders, two new women, had suddenly usurped his role as the center of the family. Searching for an anchor, something to fight for, he enlisted in the Army in 1971 and hoped to be shipped to Vietnam. (He later told Abrahamsen that he joined the Army to lose his virginity.) Instead of Vietnam, he was sent to Korea: he never saw combat. Bored, he claimed to have received sexual favors from local women and to have used marijuana, mescaline, amphetamines, and L.S.D.

In March 1973 he was sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky. When military life proved disappointing, he searched for another anchor, and began going to a nearby Baptist church. He wanted to believe in something, to belong somewhere, to escape. Soon he was attending church with frenetic zeal, going every Sunday from 9 A.M. to 10 P.M., plus three other days a week. He got baptized. He listened to religious broadcasts every day. He read religious books. “I was enthralled with the doctrine of the Apocalypse,” he told Abrahamsen. “Hell fascinates me. I spent my days telling my peers and superior officers of the need to be saved.”

Berkowitz also began to proselytize in the streets, but his real wish was that his prospective converts, especially women, “would refuse to accept Christ, and thus suffer even more in hell for their deliberate rejection of the Gospel. I just wanted to see the men get to heaven… Who the hell needed those sluts. those go-go dancers? Too many women in heaven would spoil it.” His obsession with purgatory also fueled – even justified – his need to murder, he told me. “In this twisted logic, I really saw it as something good,” he said. “to create anarchy and hasten the end of the world for the Messiah to come.”

Following his honorable discharge from the Army in 1974, Berkowitz moved into his own apartment in the Bronx and worked briefly as a cabdriver. Alone and knowing that Nathan Berkowitz intended to move to Florida, David began searching for his roots. Through the Adoptees Liberty Movement – an organization dedicated to helping people find their biological parents – he discovered some shocking news: His biological mother hadn’t died. When he finally met Betty Falco (born Betty Broder) in May 1975, he was disappointed. She told him he was the product of an affair she’d had with a married man, Joseph Kleinman. On David’s birth certificate she’d given the baby – whom she was about to give away – her estranged husband’s name, Falco. So even his birth certificate was a fraud. It wasn’t what Berkowitz wanted to hear, that he was the bastard child of a Jewish man. And Betty Falco wasn’t the mother he wanted to see.

Now there were no illusions left. In June 1976, after visiting Nathan Berkowitz in Florida, David drove on to Texas to see an Army buddy, from whom he bought a .44-caliber revolver, a weapon that all of New York City, and in particular his 13 victims, would soon know all too well.

“God is always outreaching his hand,” said Berkowitz. sitting in the visiting room with Delfino and the rest of us before our opened Bibles.

“Amen,” said Delfino.

“He doesn’t want anyone to perish,” added Berkowitz, who was wearing the tinted glasses a pastor from New Jersey had bought him. He opened his Bible to the Book of Romans. “I say then,” he read, his thumb guiding his eyes across the page, “God has not rejected His people, has He? May it never be!”

“That’s a real comfort to me, especially at school,” said Martin Ferwerda, a student at Middlesex County Community College in Edison, New Jersey. “Sometimes I feel like I’ m the only Christian there,” he added. “That moment I got saved, the world got instantly brighter.”

“The same thing happened to me when I had that talk with God in my prison cell 11 years ago,” said Berkowitz. “I had been so sold out to Satan. Well, you know the story. I knew I was starting a turnaround. You can’t manufacture it. That’s what got me, Psalm 34. I just got on my knees, turned off the light in my cell. I thought God hated my guts, but I found out that I was wrong he said with a laugh.

“Amen,” said Lorraine Moufang.

“You know, putting my faith in Jesus has renewed my faith in being Jewish” Berkowitz said. “Before, as a kid, I used to run away from Hebrew school.” They all laughed, as if at the antics of naughty, good-natured child. “I was terrible,” he said, chuckling.

Delfino got up. Jingling the change in his pocket, he said to Berkowitz, “Let me buy you popcorn.”

As Delfino walked away, Norm Kramer took Berkowitz aside and told him about his daughter who is involve in Scientology, something Kramer’s not happy about.

“Just be patient,” said Berkowitz, “and show her a lot of love.”

A little later, Berkowitz looked at me “I have something for you. I left some books with the guards for you to take on your way out.”

Ferwerda shook his head and smiled “Here you are in jail,” he said, “in the most materialistic society in the world and you’re saying, ’I have something for you. ’”

Who, I wondered, was Ferwerda seeing – David Berkowitz the celebrity serial killer or David Berkowitz the humble servant of God? I recalled then what one of Berkowitz’s other friends, Carl A Scialfa. a 42-year-old evangelical Chris tian who works in a prison ministry in New Jersey, said to me one day. “He’s a high-profile prisoner,” Scialfa said by phone. “It’s like being friends with an ex­president. David captivates you. None of my friends in prison have nearly the personality that David does.”

“What if Berkowitz were released?” I asked, challenging him. “Would you open your home to him?”

“I’m really not sure that I would want him to live with me,” Scialfa said slowly. almost apologetically. “Right now it’s nice to be in a relationship with him because he’s secured up there and we know where he is and he knows where we are, but I honestly haven’t plumbed the depths of that question. I know that it remains a riddle.”

Placing the popcorn on a napkin in the center of the prison table, Berkowitz was quiet a moment. “There’s so much negative stuff from the past,” he said. “I can’t change that. What happened was such a tragedy. I just go forward with the life God’s given me.” He opened a Bible to Corinthians. “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature, the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” He repeated the verse.

“It’s like people who don’t forgive you,” said Kramer. “That bitterness will just eat them away.”

Berkowitz nodded. “I had a lot of anger and bitterness in me,” he said. “The whole court situation was a circus. I was put in isolation a whole year in Brooklyn. A lot of people had hostility toward me. I really believe that if that guy hadn’t come to me that day, I would have killed myself or ended up in isolation someplace.” He was speaking of a fellow inmate, a man in his twenties in for robbery and known only as Rick, who Berkowitz said had led him to Christ 11 years ago.

“And God is using you in such a way,” said Ferwerda, smiling broadly.

“Oh, thank you,” Berkowitz replied. “But like I said, I don’ t deserve it. I sowed terrible things. I’m reaping them for the rest of my life.” He paged through the Bible to Matthew. “Come to think of it, Matthew wasn’t a nice guy either,” Berkowitz said, laughing. “A crooked tax collector.”

“That’s right,” said Moufang.

“The Lord straightened him out,” said Berkowitz.

“With the pressure you’re under, count your joys,” said Delfino. “You’re in here, but you’re a free man behind closed doors.”

“As a believer in Jesus,” said Berkowitz, “I have to ask forgiveness from God, not for what I did in the past, but for today. I am by no means perfect. Now that I’m a Christian, there are certain things that I used to do but won’t anymore, like passing around pornography. Same thing with cigarettes.” He was silent a moment. Then he looked at me. “If there was a way that I could take back the past, I would.” His eyes welled up. “I never had anyone close to me, growing up.” He was always looking for a family, he said, first with the Army, then with the cult.

He pushed his chair back and extended his arms toward the others. “Now, this is my family.”

One of the problems with Berkowitz’s conversion is that he hasn’t really taken responsibility for the crimes. He still claims that there are people walking the streets of New York who instigated his murder spree. Which leads to the question, Why, as a Christian, wouldn’t he want to save New York City from these cult members, from individuals he claims to know? To understand that you need to understand the tangled history of his “devil made me do it “ alibi, the lie upon which his conversion rests, the lie he has turned into the key asset of his Christian-video stardom.

Back in 1977, after the police finally ended their largest manhunt ever to that date, Berkowitz, a smiling, dimpled, chubby 24-year-old postal worker, told cops that demons made him kill. He was, he claimed, the Son of Sam – Sam being a 6,000-year-old man who, through David’s neighbor Sam Carr’s black Labrador retriever, had conveyed orders for Berkowitz to kill people.

Serial-murder expert Robert Ressler has observed, “The Son of Sam business, and the assertion of the talking dog … had been [Berkowitz’s] way of signaling the authorities that he was insane. In other words, it was a construct made for the purpose of attempting to avoid proper prosecution for his crimes.” But that construct was based on a shaky story, riddled with inconsistencies, about the demons who supposedly ordered him to kill.

“I began to hear them [the demons] just after I moved to Yonkers,” Berkowitz said at the time, referring to a move that had occurred around May 1976. Earlier, however, Berkowitz had admitted to having tried to kill with a hunting knife a young woman on Christmas Eve 1975. If in fact Berkowitz had attempted to murder back in 1975, that would mean that he did so alone, not under the influence of demons.

After a judge ruled him mentally fit, Berkowitz, forgoing a trial, pled guilty to all the “Son of Sam “ murders; in June 1978 he was sentenced to 360 years in prison without possibility of parole. He began that sentence at Attica Prison.

It would seem as if for a short time, from late 1978 into 1979, Berkowitz was shedding all his defenses, especially the demons, and showing the world his true self. At a press conference at Attica in 1979, Berkowitz declared that the demons were a hoax, a lie. There were, he said then, “no real demons, no talking dogs, no satanic henchmen.” That story “was just invented by me in my mind to condone what I was doing.” He told the press that he was now setting the record straight in an effort to scuttle a possible multimillion-dollar book and movie deal being negotiated among his “former lawyers” and the court-appointed conservator of his estate (actually an employee of one of his lawyers) and a publishing company, McGraw-Hill. He also said he feared that the publication of a book or the making of a movie about his crimes could inflame somebody to “get even with me and try to hurt one of my family.”

Aware of the profits that these deals would generate, several victims in 1978 began a multimillion-dollar suit against Berkowitz. (This was before the New York State legislature passed the so­called Son of Sam law, which made it illegal for convicted criminals to profit from their crimes.) In January 1982 Berkowitz tried to evade any responsibility by telling Harry Lipsig, a lawyer representing several victims or their families, that with him each of the nights he murdered were at least three or four members of a cult. Berkowitz also claimed that the members of the cult planned his murders. Even then, though, he never identified any of the other alleged killers.

In 1987 Berkowitz’s claim of a satanic cult took on almost official status with the publication of Maury Terry’s book The Ultimate Evil. Written with Berkowitz’s cooperation, the book claims that the killer was a hit man for a cult known as the Process Church of the Final Judgment, which allegedly was also responsible for other ritual slayings nationwide.

A year later, at a time ripe for any news about him, Berkowitz had that conversion in his cell. Soon, word of his born-again Christian status was spread by Don Dickerman, a pastor who heads a prison ministry in Texas and who had learned of Berkowitz’s conversion on a 1988 visit to Sullivan. On his return, Dickerman began distributing tracts about Berkowitz to the prisoners in Texas-tracts that said Berkowitz was once the Son of Samhain, a high-ranking demon in a satanic cult that included several gunmen (somehow forgetting Berkowitz’s original story about Sam Carr’s dog).

Today, Berkowitz says that not only was he part of a satanic cult as an adult, but was also controlled by demons as a child. Fundamentalist Christianity – with its belief in demons – seems to be Berkowitz’s best defense. And he knows it. As he once wrote me, “Dear Lisa, When you get the chance, please read Mark 5:1-20 and Luke 8:26-39. These are accounts of a demon-possessed man. This is my story, too! The end result is that this damaged soul was completely set free of Satan’s power. What a beautiful ending!”

Sitting in the visiting room across from me, David Berkowitz recalled one of the first times that God spared his life. It was 1978 and he was in Attica, where a fellow inmate sliced his throat, barely missing Berkowitz’s jugular vein. Today that scar is still visible, seven and a half inches of knotted flesh on the left side of his neck. He will carry it with him for the rest of his life.

“That was just another miracle,” Berkowitz said, smiling. “It didn’t even hurt. The skin just rolled up and I had this ice-cold feeling.”

Now that he’s a Christian, Berkowitz spends little time thinking of the past. “There’s so much healing that has gone on in my life,” he says. “God’s cleaned up my mind. Some things are just not worth remembering anymore.”

As for the victims left behind… “God, Christ has come to heal the broken­hearted.”

Because inmates aren’t allowed to write to their victims or the victims’ families, Berkowitz knows little about his own. But oddly enough, Berkowitz and the mother of one of his victims have a mutual friend, an evangelical Christian named Betty Allen. Some 20 years ago, Allen, from her home in Georgia, wrote to Neysa Moskowitz in New York, expressing her sympathies over the loss of Moskowitz’s daughter Stacy, the last girl killed by Berkowitz. The two women have been corresponding ever since. Then in 1993, after Allen saw Berkowitz on “Inside Edition” telling the world about how Jesus Christ had set him free from a satanic cult, she began writing to him regularly. Today, through Allen, Berkowitz knows that Moskowitz recently lost her only remaining daughter, Ricky, to scleroderma, an incurable disease that causes hardening of the body’s tissues.

“She was such a young, attractive woman,” Berkowitz told me. “ust shortly before Ricky passed on, Betty had a long talk with her… They spoke a lot and talked about me.” He paused, his eyes full of tears. “Me and my friends were praying for her around the clock.”

Looking at those wide, teary blue eyes, it was easy to imagine that perhaps Berkowitz was truly sorry, and that perhaps he has a conscience. But he refuses to acknowledge his past; in fact, he almost denies he did anything wrong. He speaks of his whole history in vague generalities, often beginning his sentences with the rote disclaimer, “Looking back now, I realize…” It’s as if he would have you believe he spent most of his life in a semi-comatose state and just woke up to find himself in a nightmare not of his making. In my hours with Berkowitz, I never heard him accept blame for anything he has done.

When I asked about his childhood, he said, “There was definitely an evil streak in me.” Still, he offered few details. “I was just hostile. I wouldn’t talk to my parents. I gave them the silent treatment.” When he wasn’t doing that, he was, as he vaguely put it, “making trouble with the fellows.”

“What about your mother’s bird?” I asked. “Did you kill it?” He shook his head and looked to the side. “I never touched that bird.’’ he said with a chuckle. “No. No. I don’t remember messing with that bird.” In many ways, Pudgy speaks for all Berkowitz’s lies, big and small, that he has yet to acknowledge. Although Berkowitz spoke for hours about how Jesus had delivered him from a satanic cult, he didn’t get very concrete about the group whose evil grip he said he was once powerless to escape. He would say only that he had met its members, including a Mike and a Jeff, “in the parks… It just happened,” he said.

“I just needed someone to socialize with.” And he put a degree of blame on his stepsister, who, he said, spurred his initial interest in satanism by playing with Tarot cards at the kitchen table when he briefly lived with her in the early 1970s.

“Why were you smiling after you were arrested?” I asked.

“It was such a blur,” he said, looking away. “I don’t recall what was going through my mind. I was just so sold out to the devil and the powers of evil.”

After three visits, my time with Berkowitz had come to this: the realization that he had used Christianity to obliterate any sense of wrongdoing on his part. I had to ask. I had to hear him finally assume responsibility. “Did you ever take any lives?” Berkowitz lowered his head and, with his hands in his lap, looked like a scolded schoolboy. “I’ve taken human lives, sure,” he muttered. “Yeah, that’s what I was charged with,” he said, lifting his head, then shrugging his shoulders. “That’s what I was involved with.” Now his eyes were full of tears. “I just have to accept that was me. There were others involved, but the few that I know of have since passed away.”

So… they were dead. Another inconsistency, which didn’t fit with another claim he had made to me, that the cult members had now “gone legitimate and blended into society… indirectly influencing the media and Hollywood.”

Berkowitz, looking cornered in the prison’s small visiting room, put his hand on the Bible before him. “To me, the books have closed on the case,” he said loudly, sounding annoyed. “I pled guilty to the six homicides. As far as I’m concerned, there’s a Judgment Day coming when people will have to stand before God and give an accounting of their lives. I just have to let go and let God take over. God has given me a peace about this. I’ve shared this in my prayers with the Lord many times over the years, and He said, ’David, just leave everything in My hands and I’ll handle it. I’ll let the truth be known.’ “

I didn’t want Berkowitz to have the last word, so I flew down to Florida to hear from Stacy Moskowitz’s mother, Neysa, about what she thought of his So-called conversion. Berkowitz tells his followers, as he told me, that Moskowitz is on the road to forgiving him. I was skeptical. I wanted to hear the truth from her. After all the press she’s received, she wasn’t eager to be interviewed again, but she relented. She still wanted to have her say about the state of Berkowitz’s soul.

When I stopped by her Miami Beach apartment one morning, Neysa Moskowitz, now 66, emerged wearily from her bedroom, her thin body covered by a pink nightgown. “It’s been 23 years,” she said, taking a seat in a beige easy chair in the living room. “I can’t believe it. She’s been dead more years than she was alive.” As she spoke, she sat a few feet from a lit TV with its sound off. Night or day, her TV is always on. There’s one in her bedroom, and another in the small living room. At night, when she takes pills to fall asleep, she mutes the TV. Then when morning comes, she clicks on the noise, to help deaden the loneliness, the emptiness, that makes her feel as if someone had cut out her stomach. If she tries, she can even go a day without thinking about 20-year-old Stacy. But the memories always return.

When Stacy died, 39 hours after being shot three times in the head, her mother never stopped demanding an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. She wanted her daughter’s killer “dead, dead, dead.” Hoping that distance would ease the pain, in 1993 she and her now-deceased husband moved from Brooklyn to Miami. There, she cut her long auburn hair. She ditched the wigs and lashes that she was once so fond of wearing. Nowadays she doesn’t make up her eyes the way she used to. She doesn’t cover her pain. She knows, she said, that her brown eyes are dead.

She lives her life in “limbo,” never making long-term plans. It’s the good memories she clings to, defiantly, in the face of the horrifying ones, of seeing Stacy in the hospital with a tag on her toe, of seeing Berkowitz walking into the courtroom chanting, “Stacy is a whore. Stacy is a whore.”

“That piece of garbage – he’s walking around while my daughters are dead. No, no,” she said, shaking her head, “it’s not even-steven. He did terrible things and people forget it.” Her voice rising, her mouth drawn in disgust, she added, “They look at him like a little god. If he wasn’t in jail, he wouldn’t be with the Bibles.

“What was he before? A nothing. He worked in the mail room. He has a little power. Come on, that would make anyone drunk. He doesn’t deserve to live. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. If it’s good enough for the Bible, it’s good enough for me. I’ll say it till the day I die.”