The film that made a serial killer weep

David Berkowitz, the serial killer known as the Son of Sam, wept in prison last week, grieving over the coming release of a Spike Lee movie called Summer of Sam. Gone was the Mona Lisa half-smile that spooked the US after his arrest 22 summers ago. Gone too was the unblinking stare that unnerved detectives

It is 22 years since the Son of Sam held New York in a grip of terror. Now Spike Lee's reconstruction has opened old wounds - and the killer, who is serving a life sentence, is angry. Blaine Harden reports

David Berkowitz, the serial killer known as the Son of Sam, wept in prison last week, grieving over the coming release of a Spike Lee movie called Summer of Sam.

Gone was the Mona Lisa half-smile that spooked the US after his arrest 22 summers ago. Gone too was the unblinking stare that unnerved detectives when the pudgy postal clerk cheerfully confessed to shooting six people dead and wounding seven others. He took orders, he said then, from a black Labrador retriever owned by a neighbour named Sam.

Now 46, still pudgy, and going grey, Berkowitz walked briskly last week into a cramped visiting room in the Sullivan Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in the Catskill mountains. He carried a Bible and smelled pleasantly of talcum powder. In a green polo shirt, white Nikes and blue prison pants, the most publicised murderer in New York history had a crisp, slightly officious bearing - until he began to cry.

"This madness, the ugliness of the past is resurfacing again: all because some people want to make some money," said Berkowitz, who agreed to be interviewed because of his distress over Lee's movie.

The deputy superintendent for security at the prison describes Berkowitz as an "exemplary" inmate whose good behaviour has made him a role model prisoner. The murderer who once taunted the police with notes about hunting in Queens for "tasty meat" says he is a born-again Christian. He works as a helper and counsellor in the prison's mental health unit. Berkowitz said that from prison he monitors "everything there is" about Spike Lee and his family. "I pray for Spike Lee, his wife, Tonya, his two children, Jackson and Satchel," he said. "God does not want me to be angry with anybody."

Although Walt Disney's Touchstone will not release the movie until next week in the US, Summer of Sam is already jarring loose memories - some of them extraordinarily painful - inside the circle of New Yorkers whose lives were fundamentally changed by the Son of Sam.

Some parents of young people killed by Berkowitz are enraged by the movie. They accuse Mr Lee of callously cashing in on their misery. For the police who then struggled to find Berkowitz and for the journalists who made reputations covering him, the movie, which has been screened for a few people in New York, has become an occasion to meditate on a singularly riveting episode in their lives. Again and again, the movie shows a corpulent Son of Sam character stalking the boroughs of New York at night, firing his .44-calibre revolver into the faces of young people, mostly women in parked cars. The murder scenes are unflinching, blood-splattered and harrowing.

Berkowitz said the movie will cause needless pain for families of his victims, and remind America of something better forgotten. "I am just so sorry that this movie is coming out," he said. "I am so sorry that, you know, this pain doesn't seem to end. I am disappointed in Hollywood and Disney."

Summer of Sam zeroes in on what Spike Lee has called an "insane" season in the history of New York. "I was attempting to put madness on film," he said at the Cannes Film Festival last month. The summer of 1977 was maddeningly hot and sticky. An electrical blackout triggered looting. The city teetered near bankruptcy. The police seemed powerless to stop a mysterious, heavy-set white man from killing. Periodically, the killer teased the city with chillingly literate notes. "Don't think that because you haven't heard from me for a while that I went to sleep," Berkowitz wrote to Jimmy Breslin, then a columnist for the Daily News. "No, rather, I am still here, like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest; anxious to please Sam."

Breslin, who appears as himself in Lee's movie, said: "Berkowitz is the only murderer I ever heard of who knew how to use a semi-colon." Two murders occurred within a mile of where Breslin lived in Forest Hills, Queens. His daughter Rosemary was the age of the victims. Afraid that his daughter might be a target, Breslin sent his family to live with relatives in East Hampton and accepted police protection for himself. "It was a dreadful summer," said Breslin, now a columnist at Newsday. "My family was away. I was drinking too much."

People unable to move out of the city devised ways to elude the Son of Sam, who was rumoured to prefer long-haired brunettes. Many hundreds of young women had their hair cut short and dyed blonde. Thousands more simply stayed at home at night. Many nightclubs and restaurants in the Bronx and Queens were all but empty that summer.

For the police and for the news media, it was a season of lucrative overtime and neglected families, soaring television ratings and record newsstand sales, professional jealousy and shameless gimmicks to milk the story. Editors at the New York Post, which had recently been purchased by Rupert Murdoch, were said to be furious that Berkowitz chose to write to the Daily News. "Murdoch was screaming, 'Why can't we get a letter from this blighter?' " said Breslin, who remains puzzled as to why Berkowitz singled him out.

On the day after Berkowitz was captured, the Daily News sold 2.2 million copies, 350,000 more than usual. After its famous one-word banner headline - "CAUGHT" - circulation at the New York Post jumped for a day to one million from 609,000. But the hunt for the Son of Sam was ghastly, soul-crushing work. Hordes of detectives and reporters periodically spent long nights inspecting the bullet-mangled bodies of innocent young people and weeks hounding families.

Some of those families are also furious about the movie. "Spike Lee feels that murder is entertainment, which it is not," said Michael Lauria, 67, a retired bus mechanic in the Bronx. His 18-year-old daughter Donna was Berkowitz's first murder victim. "Spike Lee is making the families relive this all over again," said Lauria, who protested last summer when the movie was filmed in the Bronx. "He is making money off my sorrow and my family's hurt. He has got no compassion. They should have come to the families and asked for permission. Let me tell you something, Walt Disney must be turning over in his grave."

Neysa Moskowitz, 66, whose 20-year-old daughter Stacy was the last to die, said she does not want her daughter "to be remembered all bloody and shot by a lunatic". A scene of her daughter being shot to death in Brooklyn is depicted in the movie. "Spike Lee was out there to make a buck, but he could have been much, much nicer to the families," said Moskowitz, interviewed by telephone from her apartment in Miami.

Asked to comment on the pain of the victims' families, Lee said: "I made a statement on that at the beginning. You will have to do some fact-checking." He ended the phone interview after less than a minute. At Cannes in May, he told reporters: "I feel deeply for the parents of the victims of Son of Sam. At the same time, I'm an artist and this is a story I wanted to tell. Even if I didn't make this film, that was not going to bring their daughters, their loved ones, back. They got buried by a psychopath. We do not feel that the film is a glorification of David Berkowitz."

After Berkowitz was arrested and confessed to the murders, a handful of the 200 detectives assigned to the case were promoted. Joe Coffey, a sergeant in charge of the weekend night shift when Berkowitz committed most of his murders, was among them.

"I got a $5,000-a-year raise," said Coffey, 61, who retired from the police force in 1985. "But I think the case has taken at least 10 years off my life. I quit smoking three years before I got called in on Son of Sam. But I started again after I saw what he did to Virginia Voskerichian, and I never stopped smoking since." Voskerichian, 19, a Barnard College student, was shot in the face and killed, a scene that is depicted in Lee's movie. The police officer who profited most from working on the case is Bill Clark, now an executive producer of the television drama NYPD Blue. "I do make more money than the police commissioner," said Clark, 55, who credits his 1992 move to television - after a 25-year police career - to contacts he made with reporters while working on the Berkowitz case.

Clark now lives in a large house in Santa Monica, California, and owns four cars."It is a fair bet to say had I not met Dick Schaap and Jimmy Breslin, I probably would not have ended up out here," Clark said in a phone interview. Schaap and Breslin worked together on a novel based on the shootings, called .44. At the extreme end of the Son of Sam continuum is Berkowitz himself.

He is serving six consecutive life sentences that total more than 300 years. An inmate at Attica slashed his throat in 1979, and the wound required 65 stitches. For fighting with the many inmates who taunted him, he was often confined to his cell in Attica and other prisons. The fights ended with his transfer 12 years ago to Sullivan Correctional Facility, where he says he converted to Christianity.

"I will never be released from prison," he said last week. "I deserve to be in prison for the rest of my life. I can accept that." Berkowitz prefers not to talk about, as he blandly puts it, "the things that happened in my case". But, when pressed, he blames the murders on Satan. In a television interview two years ago, he said he belonged to a satanic cult when he was the Son of Sam. He committed only three of the six murders to which he pleaded guilty, he said: other cult members com mitted the rest. "I am absolutely convinced without a shadow of a doubt that I was demonically possessed and controlled," he said last week. "I allowed these spirits through my own ignorance to control me. The murder and mayhem was a result of that." A few police officers, a former district attorney in Queens and several journalists subscribe to the cult theory. But some detectives, such as Joe Coffey, who worked the case and who listened to Berkowitz's confession, say the theory is ludicrous. They say the confession had details only the killer could know.

Asked last week about the cult, Berkowitz refused to be specific. "I knew some people, yes, there was satanic influence," he said. "I would rather not talk about that. I'm sorry." He was eager, though, to talk about his two Christian videos, which have been distributed to schools and prisons around the country and which warn young people to avoid his satanic mistakes. One video is called Son of Sam/Son of Hope.

Berkowitz writes several letters a day to "my Christian friends" around the world. Last week, he showed off a picture of a Tanzanian baby named David Wandamba, who he said was named after him by a grateful father to whom he has been sending Bibles.

Parents of some of his victims do not believe the conversion is genuine. "I don't want to hear that," Moskowitz said. "Show me one person that goes away for murder who doesn't turn to religion. I heard that someone named his son for him. I think that it is utterly, utterly so sick."

If he had not been a serial killer, Berkowitz said he probably would have ended up "married with a wife and kids in the suburbs, making a living, working in the post office. I never wanted anything special".

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