A Disturbed Child and Young Adult
Berkowitz’s homicidal tendencies began with his troubled early years, reflected in first-hand accounts on his website of violent and disruptive outbursts throughout childhood, bouts of depression and seizure-like attacks.
By the time he was in his early 20s, Berkowitz was deeply dissatisfied with the world around him. Conflicts with family combined with the death of his mother and his father’s affair with another woman left him with suppressed rage that he struggled to conceal.
He began reading the Satanic Bible, even practicing his own occult rituals and incantations, according to Confessions of Son of Sam by David Abrahamsen. As he leaned into evil forces, Berkowitz found a life of crime, initially by lighting fires around New York City.
Berkowitz was never caught committing these small-scale acts of arson but kept notebooks with meticulous records of the events and where they took place, whether they were fires set in trash cans or empty lots. It was only after he was arrested years later that his writings were discovered and he was revealed as the person behind over 2,000 acts of arson throughout the city.
Seeking Darkness
As Berkowitz became increasingly involved in Satanic activity, he began to seek content related to his dark tendencies. In interviews conducted with Berkowitz shared in the miniseries Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes, Berkowitz says he started consuming books and movies focusing on people “acting out their angers and frustrations on other people,” citing films like The Boston Strangler and books that chronicled the lives of killers like Jack the Ripper.
“I became outwardly aggressive, especially after all these movies seemed to encourage me,” Berkowitz said in the tapes, which were recorded in a 1980 conversation with reporter Jack Jones at Attica Correctional Facility.
He added: “The movies didn’t cause it but they reassured me of my feelings of self-destructive or destructive tendencies and reaffirmed the idea that I could take ’em out against society like it’s the proper thing to do. The American way or something.”
Obsession with Taxi Driver
In 1976, Berkowitz joined a friend for an outing to the movies and quickly became obsessed with the plot of Martin Scorsese’s new film Taxi Driver.
Berkowitz instantly related to the movie's central character Travis Bickle, portrayed by Robert De Niro. Like Bickle, Berkowitz had also briefly served in the military—and upon returning home, the mentally unstable men both lived alone in New York City, surrounded by millions of people but feeling solitary and abandoned.
The film showcased 1970s New York at its height of criminal activity and economic decline amid social unrest. With themes focusing on moral decay and sexual exploitation, Bickle had a misdirected vision of getting the “scum” off the streets, driven by a self-centered desire to redeem himself and aid in his desperate search for purpose.
Berkowitz used Bickle as an inspiration for how to live his life.
A Hollywood Weapon
Not long after seeing the movie, Berkowitz purchased the Charter Arms .44 caliber Bulldog revolver used in all of his attacks—the same caliber as the one of the four handguns that Bickle bought in Taxi Driver.
In an infamous scene from the film, Bickle drives a customer who laments that his wife is cheating on him and recites one of the film’s most famous lines: “I’m gonna kill her. I’m gonna kill her with a .44 Magnum pistol. You ever see what a .44 Magnum pistol would do to a woman’s face?”
After purchasing the gun, Berkowitz proceeded to follow in Bickle’s footsteps in another way—by applying for a job as a taxi driver in New York.
“Now I had the cab! And I was actually patterning my life after the movie Taxi Driver. I saw myself exactly as Robert De Niro: an outcast, a loser, living in a cramped little apartment. I just saw everything. That was me in that movie!” Berkowitz recalled in Conversations with a Killer.
Not long after acquiring the weapon, Berkowitz’s reign of terror began. While Bickle only attacked once, Berkowitz killed again and again, targeting young women and couples, often as they sat in parked cars. Over the course of just over a year, including a very hot and humid New York City summer, Berkowitz murdered six people and injured 11 more.
What Were David Berkowitz’s Other Motives?
After he was arrested in 1977, Berkowitz said his former neighbor Sam Carr was a powerful demon to whom he owed allegiance and the reason why he dubbed himself Son of Sam.
He explained that Sam’s dog had also been possessed by a demon and he obeyed the canine’s commands, per The New York Times, which eventually led to his killing spree. Berkowitz ultimately pled guilty to six counts of second-degree murder and seven counts of attempted second-degree murder, earning him 365 years in prison.
Berkowitz has maintained that he believes there was a demonic possession involved in his murder spree.
In a video from prison recorded in 2016, he explained that as a young man, he believes he was driven to schizophrenia by evil entities while paying homage to a demonic deity named Samhain who demanded human sacrifice.
“That sounds very dumb but at the time I really believed that stuff and I was really brainwashed and I believe I was under a degree of hypnotic control,” Berkowitz said. “This is not to make an excuse for anything but at the time of my life that’s how messed up I was.”
