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You are now listening to True Murder, the most Shocking Killers in True Crime History and the authors that have written about him Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Good evening. Chances are you've already met the son of Sam in movies, documentaries, books, etc. May I introduce you to David, a fellow human being with familiar vulnerabilities. The monster you met in print collides with the man I met in person, irrefutably, the precious lives he ended screamed from the graves about his barbarism. Yet my one hundred hours thirty four sessions with him will open your eyes
to a guy who resembles your brother or friend. Here's David, a life for at Schwanagunk Correctional who still scratches his head about what possessed him decades ago in the city that has mythologized his crimes ever since. May I warn you that when you meet David, you will not look into the eyes of a monster, but a mirror. The book that we're featuring this evening is Monster Mirror. One hundred hours were David Berkowitz, once known as Son of Sam,
with my special guest author, doctor Michael Caperelli. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview, Doctor Michael Caperelli.
Thank you, Dan for the opportunity to talk to your audience about this analysis of David Berkowitz's convicted serial killer known as the Son of Sam.
And thank you very much, very very interesting take on this infamous killer, David Berkowitz, who, as you write, his akronym Son of Sam. He terrorized New York City from July twenty ninth, nineteen seventy six to August tenth, nineteen seventy seven. Six people were killed while seven were wounded close range forty four caliber revolver. Police and media were taunted with catch me if you can letters signed Wicked King, Wicker,
Duke of Death, and Son of Sam. Right away in your introduction you talk about the horn effect cognitive bias. Tell us what you mean by the horn effect and how it relates to this story.
Well, if you've ever seen a movie, I'm sure you've seen many on psychopaths, on those that commit senseless violence, It's never a positive depiction for justifiable reasons. Some of the acts that are committed by guys like David Berkowitz, Jeffrey Dahma, Charles Manson. We read about these acts or we watch them on television, and right away we begin to see these people as monsters. In any humanity whatsoever
is completely overlooked. The problem with that is you and I can have in our very household, maybe a child, a sibling, maybe even a spouse. We could be up close and personal with someone who has within them an inferno of rage and never detect that particular person as a person who could commit atrocities. I mean, you see it all the time news clippings. Someone commits a crime. Let's say it's a young man, he goes into a school,
he shoots the school up. Probably one of the most popular commentaries is I would have never suspected this person because we have this idea of psychopaths as being monsters.
So the horn effect, in simplicity, means to see someon one according to a character defect, and to not be able to see beyond that character defect, to put horns on their head, and there's a lot of you know, negative ramifications for a society and for an individual when we see the psychopaths through this horn effect bias, and how we were able to understand them in our minds.
Give our audience your background as a doctor and also how you came to enter this story. In December twenty twenty one with David Burkowitz.
Yeah, so I have mailed David Berkowitz a copy of a book I had previously written called Doctor Jesus. It's a book on mental health issues from a Christian perspective. I mailed it to David, not knowing him, having heard his story on a television program about his religious conversion. I've worked with prisoners for the last twenty years. I passed at a church in the Inner City for sixteen years and had a heart for those that called a compart if you will, for those that are in prisons.
As a kid, I visited my dad who was locked up for a brief period of time felt like an eternity, but at that time was maybe about a year and a half of visiting him. So I had this compassion towards inmates. I mailed David a copy of this book, Doctor Jesus, and he must have read it quickly, because within two weeks, David Berkowitz in May seven eight a nineteen seventy six, mailed me back. It was the very
first letter I've ever received from him. It was in early twenty twenty two, and he requested that I visit him. He believed that with my qualifications both as a clergyman because he too was a Christian, as well as a PhD in Advanced studies in human behavior, he thought I was the ideal candidate to tell his story from both a spiritual as well as a psychological vantage point.
Now tell us more about your first visit with David Berkowitz April first, twenty twenty two.
Well, you know, I meet David on that particular day in April. It's depending upon how you define COVID. It's during the COVID pandemic. I say that because I had to wear a mask. David also had to wear a mask, a COVID test had to be taken. I remember when I first showed the correctional office of my ID. I told him who I was, what I did. He asked me the question, does David know you're here to visit him,
and I said, yes, he requested my visit. He said, that's surprising because he doesn't meet with many people, so that was flattering. I've been asked a question often when you're nervous. Again, I work with prisoners for a long time, so there really wasn't a lot of fear. Definitely some awkwardness. I mean, this notorious figure the last forty six years. I remember being a kid growing up. My stepdad who raised me, was from New York City, the Bronx, right
where David grew up. New York was always a home away from home. So for in my mind, he was this mythologized figure. But I knew enough about human nature, being a pastor, being a PhD. To that behind the monster persona that was a man. And within the first visit, probably about three and a half hours long, we established
a pretty quick rapport. We built some common ground. We talked a lot about New York City, a lot about common interests, the Yankees, a particular ministry known as Team Challenge that David was very familiar with I've worked for many years, and that sort of built some common ground.
And that visit was the first of thirty four sessions over the next year and a half of meeting with David and exploring some of the factors behind his crimes as well as his life in prison over the last forty six years.
Now, you're right that you are a supernaturalist with a PhD in human behavior, and you see demonic interference and mental health factors working in tandem. And you write about the ancients believed that dominion interacted with natural phenomena. Discuss this a little bit further, about this dominion and that two thirds of the world still believe in this as well.
Yeah, you know, America is the minority across the globe in dismissing the involvement of the supernatural in human behavior. If you go to Africa, not maybe not everywhere in Africa, but a lot of places, there's a heavy emphasis upon spiritual activity. We Americans are very rational. In fact, we're so rational, we're so left brained. Our heads probably tilt to the left when we walk down street corners, So you know, we're very rational. We emphasize what we can see,
what's natural. But two thirds of the world understands that there's a spiritual realm of good and evil. It doesn't override free will. I don't believe any man can say the devil made me do it, but it does interact. It interacts with our choices. Talk about this interaction. I am not a supernaturalist at the expense of natural phenomenon. In fact, I describe in great detail psychological and sociological phenomenons that are at play within the crimes. But it
is a insisted by supernatural reality. Now, let me just give you an example of this. A listener right now that maybe has some trouble understanding the supernatural. How many times in your life have you behaved in a way that was out of character. Let's say you had a temped tantrum, angry outburst, you did something or said something that's not consistent with who you are, and when it was all said and done, you apologize and you say, I don't know what got into me, I don't know
what possessed me. I'm sorry I did that interesting language you use, I don't know what got into me, what possessed me, or I got carried away. It sort of insinuates that there's a paranormal energy that can insist us in doing right and wrong. And I go to great lengths in Monstermera my book, I'm David Berkowitz. I go to great lengths to describe the interaction between what gets into a man as well as what comes out of him, what comes out of a meaning in his psychology, the
psychological aspects of these kinds of senseless crimes. So I'm both a supernaturalist. I'm a Christian, I believe in good and evil. But I'm a PhD. I'm well studied in the area of human behavior. I do believe in man's involvement within his own choices in all the psychological and sociological factors behind that.
You pose the question early in the book, how does David Berkowitz explain the Son of Sam? And, replying to this question, you say that involves one hundred hours of data collection, data analysis, and the entirety of this book that we are discussing right now. You take us to his most recent parole hearing in the spring of twenty twenty two, his tenth parole hearing. Tell us what he's more interesting in bearing witness to at this parole hearing, what he's more interested in conveying.
So David is up for parole every two years, He'll be up for parole again in just a few months. He doesn't have any expectations of leaving. He's going to be seventy one years old, he's been incocerated for forty six years. So he shows up at these hearings. At one point he didn't show up at all, but then it was perceived as arrogance on behalf of the parole board, and he thought it was you know, he thought it was a slap in the face to not show up,
so out of respect, he shows up. But he shows up with the expectation of simply sharing his story, a story that he calls a story of transformation. He gave his life to Christ in nineteen eighty eight and since then it's been a journey of change. That doesn't mean he's perfect. David has had many character defects that he's still working on today. In fact, in one of the chapters of my book, I confront David about a character defect. I'll let the reader discover that for themselves. But David
is by no means a perfect man. But when he shows up at those hearings, he wants to tell his story about how there is hope, there is the possibility of redemption for anyone. And that's what he does, is he shares his story. Of course, the parole always ask the question David why he finds it difficult to answer,
because it's one of those questions. You know. The easy trap is something we call in behavioral science puzzle reductionism, which means to reduce complicated phenomenon to one single cause. It would be like blaming the last block in the game of Djenga for the towers collapse. You know, it's not the last block. You know, it's a puld up of blocks that leads to the collapse. And David is always cautious in giving an answer because he knows human nature we want a quick, easy answer. And the facts
are it was not one thing. It was a build up of many things. And that's what he sheds light on in his parole hearings, but more importantly his transformation over the last thirty five years.
He uses the language even at the parole hearing though you right that he fell under some kind of spell, which, of course is is not going to be adequate for any kind of parole hearing with it.
No, you know, of course, your average parole hearing is not looking at all for a conversation about supernatural phenomenon. I think David says that I fell under a spell. If you're looking for the crux of why I did what I did, it was demonic. If you're looking for the nuances, well, that's going to take some time. And that's why I say it takes one hundred hours of describing was behind Son of Sam. If you want a short,
simple answer, diabolical. But if you want that more involved, comprehensive answer, We've got to talk about the biological his head trauma. We've got to talk about social issues like the isolation that he experienced. We got to talk about psychological issues like shame and anger and abandonment. There's a lot involved in that quote unquote spell that David fell under.
You write about the very first things he said when he was arrested, and then very interestingly, he writes about retracting those statements and why, very very interesting the why.
Well, David initially told the NYPD August nineteen seventy seven, after being arrested, that he believed he was under the commands at the behest of Satan and committing his crimes. Now, when David shows up in prison, Attica, nineteen seventy eight. Attica is a very contentious environment. In fact, if you know anything about the history of Attica, the Attica Riots had taken place just a few years prior. There was a lot of tension between the correctional officers and the guards.
He said, Mike. The atmosphere was combustible. He said. The littlest thing would provoke a conflict. And here I am, I'm young, I'm scared, and all of a sudden, the inmates are harassing him because of his devil story. You know, the devil talked to me through a barking dog. And they're making howling sounds from the cells. I mean, they're harassing him in every turn. In fact, he was stabbed in the neck in nineteen seventy nine, a stabbing that had resulted and I want to say thirty some odd
stitches almost killed him. So he quickly. If you read a New York Times article from nineteen seventy I think it was in February, it says David Berkowitz, the son of Sam, retracts his devil possession story, and it was pretty much I want to go along to get along. I don't want to say anything that's going to stir up the hornet's nest. It's too combustible the atmosphere, and I'm not looking for problems with anybody.
You asked, though, too, about the infamous purp walk where he is seen as cocky and has a smirk on his face. You ask him about this, and at first you're very skeptical, But what's his explanation for this very famous photo.
You know, that purp walk goes right back to your first question about the horn effect. Most of us have branded in our minds David Berkowitz with a cocky what they call the Mona Lisa's smile back in the seventies when he's escorted by police officers outside of the Brooklyn Precinct. We've got that cocky smirk in our minds, and we see him as uncaring. We see him as evil, you know,
gloating in his crimes. And Dave said, Mike, there was a lot of shame behind that smile, And at first I was a little suspicious of that, but then I had remembered, you know, I didn't put this in the book, but I remembered a funeral that my grandmother had passed away, and a friend came to the funeral and they smiled while greeting my family. My family took it very insulting. They said, why is this girl smiling? It's grandma's funeral.
But I knew her. I knew she was nervous. I knew her neurotic energy had made its way through her. You know her facial expressions and a smile sometimes is more of a cover up for some inadequate feelings. In the case of David Berkowitz, a lot of shame. In fact, I would argue that cockiness in general, even if you say his smile was cocky, Cockiness in general, arrogance, even to the extremes narcissism, is a cover up or feelings of inferiority. I've known very few people that have a
superiority complex that are truly confident. Most of those folks with that kind of ear of superior already from pastoring for two decades. There's deep shame, deep self loathing, and there's an overcompensation through their persona. And I think that that's what you're seeing on that perp walk. I think it's just as David said. It may be cockiness on the surface, but it's deep shame and self loathing underneath.
You got to the isolation that he experienced and the deep shame with the examination of his childhood, and you talk about his adopted parents, but he did not grow up realizing they were his adopted parents. Not in Pearl Berkowitz tell us about his early childhood and the event where it is revealed about his actual or what he's told about his actual birth mother and his birth.
David emphasizes often how nurturing and devout his adopted parents or NAT in Pearl Berkowitz, they adopted him at four days old. In fact, not only David, but anybody that knows those people. And I talk to some other people that knew Nat and David or not in Pearl, very loving people. But David from the day he was taken home from Brooklyn Hospital, picked up four days old, driven
to the Bronx. From the day who's picked up at the hospital, he was a very difficult baby, not easy to console, very hyperactive child, very resistant towards Nat in Pearl's love, he said Mike. They tried every way to show affection, but it was like taking a piece of tape and trying to stick it to a wet surface. It just wouldn't stick. Now I go in in the book some of the what we call primal wounds. You know, if you read a book called Primal Wounds, it's all
about the psychology of adoption. There's a bond that is formed between a baby or as we would say, a fetus, in the mom for nine months. We think development or learning begins outside the womb. It does not begins in the way we know through countless studies and behavioral science that an infant a point of birth can recognize a mom's smell in the sound of her voice in a room full of strangers. So this is a serious bond that forms, and when that bond is severed, it creates
a trauma. Whether that trauma is cognitively recalled or not. It may not be the mind, but it is remembered by the central nervous system. And for some people that are adopted, even at a young age, not all. I can't explain why it's some and not all, and there's probably a lot of other variables there, but for some it creates attachment disorders, and David Burkwitz was certainly one of those. Now we know through some FBI analysis that the serial killer is sixteen times more likely to have
been adopted than the general population. Now, am I saying every adoptees become a serial killer? Absolutely not, That's not what I'm saying. I'm all for adoption, But I am saying that we're going to look at this and see it as a potential trauma. M Burco was his case. It caused an inability to bond at a very young age, despite his mother and father's best efforts. At five or six years old, they sit him down and they tell him the news. They tell him that he's his real mother.
Key word real, which you know, back then they were ignorant, they didn't know any better. Their intentions were well meaning, probably not the best choice of words, because if my mom my real mom, my biological mom, they said that she died when he was born. If she's my real mom, what does that make you? Does that mean you're not real? Does that mean what we share, what we have is something less than authentic? So that phrase real already The
bond severance really played on David's psychology. He actually believed the experienced survivor's guilt at a young age. He actually believed that because he survived his birth and his mother supposedly died. He believed that he was responsible for her death, that he killed his mother, maybe by kicking too hard when he came out of the womb, but he believed himself to be the culprit behind her death. So at a very young age, he starts to see himself in
this very warped, twisted light. Now some may think, well, that's ridiculous. How could a five to six year old think that they're the cause of their mother's death. But that line of reasoning is very consistent with let's say, Jeanepget's theory of cognitive development. Doctor pg had studied children for decades and found out that children are very egocentric in their thought process, so they believed themselves to be
the cause of events that are outside their control. And for David Berkowitz, he believed himself to be the culprit of his mother's death, and it began to shape his self image at a very young age, and interestingly enough, he becomes a killer of women later in his life.
You talk about his childhood and his father worth ten to twelve hour days, but beyond that, he was still a distant father that couldn't seem to reach his son, and his son was David was destructive of his toys and things and was not punished that this toys were replaced. But you talk about also an event when he is fourteen years old that has to be traumatic and seemingly was tell us about that.
At fourteen, his mom and dad, it's a Saturday night. They go out for Chinese food in New York City, leave David home. David loved to be home alone. He was at that age. He was very drawn to the dark. He'd watch horror movies, deep curiosity in the occult, so, you know, these sort of things. He can't watch when they're home because they're Jewish, he's able to watch when
they're gone. And they're out on a Saturday night in a Chinese restaurant and David's expecting them to return somewhere around eleven twelve o'clock like they normally would, and they don't come home that night, and David wakes up the next morning's about five o'clock in the morning, and he realizes it's still not home. And then he gets a
phone call from the hospital. His dad tells him that mom fainted while having dinner, and she was rushed to a hospital in Manhattan and a short time later diagnosed with cancer stage four, and about six months later she dies.
In fact, she never returned home. David watches this what he called the beautiful woman, a woman that was shapely, she's very attractive, she turned heads when she walked into a room, become this skeleton figure, and David says that the anticipation of her passing, let's call it an abandonment really, which, as we already explored, that abandonment is sort of hardwired, that fear of abandonment hardwired into him from birth because
of the separation from his biological mom. He says, the abandonment anticipation is so intense he can't stay in the hospital room he sees her for about a minute. Dad is on his knees bedside, devout husband, crying over his
wife's perishing body. And David would go for long walks in the city by himself, tormented by having to say goodbye to the only woman that he said, at that point in his life he ever really felt love from, and a lot of guilt he hadn't reciprocated that love, he had not responded to Pearl with the same affection he was constantly pushing away his adopted parents. I say in the book, I believe it's almost to beat them to the punch. It's as if he's afraid they're going
to push him away at some point. So, you know, as people often do when they're afraid of rejection or abandonment, they'll reject you first, or they'll abandon you first so that you don't have the opportunity to abandon or reject them. So David loses his mom at fourteen, and from that point the darkness envelops him even thicker, and the resentment begins to build towards God, towards himself, and really towards humanity at large.
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Well, he begins to delve into Satanism somewhere during his adolescence. He delves into Satanism because he sort of sympathizes with, say, you know, the classic narrative that Satan and God are at war. He sympathizes with Satan's hostility towards God because he himself is angry with God, Angry with God because he was taken away from his biological mom, angry with God because his adopted mom Pearl dies at fourteen. He
begins to see the world as very unjust. How is it a saintly woman like Pearl Berkowitz could die at a young age and a mischievous young man like him continue on to him this idea of an unjust world. It just fuels his hatred towards God, which lends itself into a deep dive into Satanism. He begins to read the Satanic Bible. He eventually, when he returns home from the military, does go away to the army for about
three years at eighteen years old. He meets a group of people in New York that are heavily involved in the occult, that have this same sort of gripe with God, the same sort of animosity towards the divine. He gravitates
towards that group. He begins sort of meeting with them for these ritualistic ceremonies, and his head really gets twisted in notts and he starts to believe that he's a messenger of Satan, and a lot of it, when you get to the bottom of it, is this fueling resentment towards God, I also believe towards himself that's been displaced towards God. That sort of becomes the weapon used against humanity at large.
Tell us more of his progression and the adoption rules at that time concerning confidentiality about your biological parents. Tell us about this effort by activists to be able to reverse this, and how David Berkowitz finds out about his biological family.
He's a student under the GI Bill at Community College in New York City. When he comes home from the Army, he had enrolled in two courses in English composition course. David is very linguistically gifted, by the way, I see that in some of his letters to the police when he was committing the crimes, very linguistically gifted. He's enrolled in an English class, and he's also enrolled in a
second course that eludes me right now. But while he's attending the community college one day, he walks by the community college bulletin board. This is back in the mid seventies, and there's a brochure for an organization known as ALMA, which if you study the history of ALMA, it's basically the rights of adopted children to find their biological parents.
And the bruch Shaw points to a particular meeting time a location somewhere in midtown Manhattan, where he's encouraged to attend that meeting, and he attends the meeting and he hears the stories of other adoptees, and his desire in attending that meeting is to reconcile with his dad, because in his mind, his biological mom died. When he shares his story at that meeting, the other attendees of that meeting,
they burst out in laughter. At first, He's a little bit insulted by it, because again, David's got some serious issues with shame and embarrassment. I didn't really get into this too heavy. It's very much discussed in the book. But he was shamed often as a kid for being fat, for being Jewish in an Italian neighborhood, a lot of shame shaming by his teacher. His desk was put in the middle of the classroom and in the third grade, and the teacher told the other kids, this is where
the bad boys sit. So here he is in this meeting and they're laughing when he tells his story about his mom dying, and he blushes, as David often does when he's embarrassed, and then he says, why are you laughing? And they said, well, that's the story that we've all been told. It's a very common story. There's a good probability that your mom, your biological mom, is still alive somewhere. It's a story that was told to many of us to reduce the sting of rejection. So if mom died
during birth, it would feel less personal. But if mom's alive leads itself to the question why does she get rid of me? So it's a common story told. So David leaves the meeting thinking, maybe my biological mom is alive, picks up the phone, calls his dad. His dad had moved to Florida when he got home from the army, remarried, and his dad says, Dave, we lied to you. Tells him the truth. And now David goes on a mission, almost like a pilgrimage to Mecca or to the Holy Land,
looking for his mother. And it was this, I believe, a deep need for belonging, for identity, all the things that he had really lacked in his development. He was hoping to find and reconciling with his mom. David wanted to belong. He wanted to belong so badly. That's why that's part of the reason why gravitated to was the cult. It wasn't just existential, but it was also social. He had this need to sort of fit in somewhere, always felt disconnected, always felt alone, even in the most populous,
populated city in America. So he finally finds this birth mom through a very interesting hunt, if you want to call it that. David has this sort of hunting instinct. You can read about the hunt in the book. And he meets his mom after hunting for her for about six months, he meets his half sister, biological sister meets his two and David says, Mike, as much as the media, you know in the seventies portrayed that reconciliation as the trigger for my murders. He said, it couldn't be further
from the truth. He said, I was already a ticking time bomb. He said, it's unfortunate the reconciliation hadn't happened a few years prior. Maybe my mind wouldn't have been as twisted as it was, he said, But my family, my biological family, wasn't a reason for killing. It was more like a refuge. In fact, there's one particular evening when he was having dinner with his biological sister. She remembers him not wanting to leave. He wanted to sleep over, and he made up a lie, saying there was too
much traffic. Well, it turns out her husband had come home and he was a bus driver, and he said David's lying, there's no traffic. Retrospectively, David wanted to stay because he was fighting the urges to kill, and he felt solace with his biological family. He felt a sense
of solace there. Now he had some bad blood with his biological mom after he went to prison, because she started talking to newspapers and magazines and she made some profit off of the story, and he felt insulted by that, and he kind of put his own dark spin on the reconciliation. But forty six years later he looks back and he tells me it was a positive meeting. I wish I hadn't pushed her away. He did push her away.
She visited with the sister, but he drove them away, just like he drove away the berkowitzays, but they were more of a refuge from his homicidal urges and not the impetus behind it.
You talk about that he was already full blown in this madness and that the reunion had nothing to do with the impetus for his killing spree, But many people ask, wasn't the killing spree right after the reunion?
Yes.
However, if you go back to David's pathology, he is lighting toys on fire at a young age. He's exhibiting all the symptoms of conduct disorders that usually prelude antisocial personality disorder, the cultural term psychopath Those psychopathies a little bit different than antisocial personality. Sort of there's a lot of parallels there these you know this the setting of the stage studying his pathology from a young age takes
place years before meeting Betty Broda, his biological mother. I think if there's any impetus at all that it plays, it's more of the fact that David's looking for a savior. He's looking for someone to save him from this madness that had begun at a young age. And let's face it, Betty may have been a wonderful woman, but nobody can play the role of a savior other than the savior himself.
So there might have been some letdown, you know, this thought that finding this family would finally remedy all of my mental health issues, and it's sort of, you know, as wonderful of a reunion as it was, there might have been some anti climatic aspects to it, because David's still going back home when he's done with those dinners, He's still going back home to his darkness, to his psychosis,
to his homicidal urges. So if it plays any impetus, I think it's more the impetus of it being a letdown that it did not save David from David.
You're right that he did have that sense of in the day he was helpful. In fact, he was in the midst of the killing spree and a woman asked for his help, was stuck in a snowbank. So he reverted to his altar self and went and helped that woman.
Willingly interesting, Yeah, So when David Berkowitz would leave the post office at around twelve thirty at night with the forty four caliber gun locked away in his glove compartment of his Ford Galaxy nineteen seventy yellow Ford Galaxy purchased
the vehicle with his money saved. While he was in the army, he would roam the streets of New York looking for the perfect prey, you know, some vulnerable person to unleash this fury inside of him, a fury that he believes and I believe with him it was very much energized by the powers of Hell, including his own psychology. In the midst of that, he had in his trunk an emergency kit that if someone was stuck some where.
One example that you reference was in January. I believe it was a couple of people, a couple of girls. I was stuck in a snow bank. He got out and he actually helped them retrieve the car from the snow bank back in his automobile and went back on his diabolical mission. Now one tries to make sense of that and say, okay, what is this. Some will say it's deceit. You know, it's part of his sort of pretending to be a nice guy and carrying on his
deceitful ax. And again that goes back to the Horn effect. I think that we take that idea of a psychopath that can be nothing human about them. They've got to fit that monster persona that we see in the movies.
I'm gonna just sidebar for one second. I was on one of those serial killer group pages I'd been invited in because of my work with David Berkowitz, and somebody asked the question, what motive would Ted Bundy have had for befriending the woman and forget her last name, the one that wrote the book about dating him, the stranger beside me, what motive would he have had for befriending her? And everyone is given these cynical perspectives, and I put
it the bottom of it, how about just friendship? And you know it's hard for that the average person to or the general public to accept that because we want our monsters to be just at monsters, they can't have any human qualities. Well, I can tell you to sit in with David Burkowitz for one hundred hours, and he's not my first serial killer I dealt with. To others, the relationships had to stop because of the psychopathic games. But I have found that the image we portray in
the movies, it's not consistent. I believe David Burkowitz was helping people at the same time he was killing him is because he was trying to almost, if you want to call it, a pease or placate his conscience, to feel a little bit more like a human in the acts that was so monstrous. So yeah, nobody. This may disagree with some people's worldview, but nobody is purely evil.
There's always some element of humanity, some vestiges of humanity that are there that if you get close enough, you're able to see them.
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Now you talk about the one hundred hours, the thirty four sessions, what you learned from David Berkowitz and what this relationship and this book entail. So let's go back to David Berkowitz and some of the issues that you raise with him, some of the issues that he imparts to you there's important to his psychological development and in the end in These.
Crimes, Well, I list nine themes in the book. You know, when you conduct this kind of qualitative research semi structured interviews, I'm submitting to David by way of emails, some questions I'm going to ask him when we meet. We meet each session probably about three and a half hours. You collect your data and then you do what's known as
thematic analysis. You're looking for themes that keep surfacing. And when I conduct my thematic analysis, I see these nine themes that keep surfacing, and I call these themes a recipe of violence. What's interesting to me about the themes, and it's the reason for the title Monstermera, is they are not themes that are exclusive to what we call the psychopath They're themes that affect all of us on some level. Isolation, shame, abandonment, trauma, resentment, the individuation, which
is a very fancy word for pay pressure. You know, you've got all these these themes that help us really understand why it is that in America right now there are thirteen mass shootings a week. Now, that is a staggering number. Why Now, you look at the different types of killers. Let's just take Columbine for instance. You've got Eric Eric Harris on one hand, as cold as it gets, and you got Dylan Claybold more of a depressive, melancholy personality,
two different kinds of people committing the same crime. The criminal profile keeps expanding, I mean, it just keeps going because I believe that anybody's capable of anything. And I call it monster Mara because I was expecting to see a monster. Instead I saw a Mira. And I discovered
themes that relate to me, that relate to anyone. And I can't help but say the words of John Bradford back in the seventeen hundreds, when they were escorting a man, a criminal, to his death, and the entire town was calling him every name in the book, Bradford stood up and he said, there but for the grace of God go I. What he meant by that was that man
that could have been me. And that's really the bottom line message of this book is, I'm I'm challenging the reader to take everything they know about a psychopath and put it aside for a minute and consider the possibility that if you for six months all over your resent for six months, the rate yourself, continually think about every insult spoken to you, start to see yourself through a very shameful lens, isolate from people, pull away for six months,
justify every little wrong thing you do. What would you become? And you know, I believe that there's a potential psychopath in everyone.
Let's talk about cognitive distortions and how it relates to this case with David Berkowitz.
I describe in the book of a variety of cognitive distortions. One of them that we've already alluded to is the unjust world or the just world fallacy, the idea that the world should be perfectly equitable, and any sign of injustice or inequality sort of causes us to go into a fury or rage or dark place in our minds where we start to see, you know, that the world is not being governed properly by the Almighty, and therefore
we must take matters into our own hands. This just world fallacy is behind lots of anti heroes and movies like taxi driver Travis Bickell. By the way, Travis Bickle played a large role in David's psyche development. It's seen taxi drive right before he did the killings. It was actually a taxi driver that motivated him to go buy the forty four caliber because the forty four caliber was
referenced in the movie. But this idea of the world being unjust and God not doing his job properly, David I mean brought into that line of thinking a hook line and sink, and it really distorted his view of the world and his own role sort of made him very presumptuous, not sort of persumption, be an understatement, made him take matters into his own hands and do what he did. He actually saw it as sort of a war with God, payback towards God. So that's one cognitive distortion.
He also had some very twisted distortions and how he saw himself and just personalize everything, going back to when he was a kid, believing that he was the cause of his mom's you know, his biological mom's death. Just sort of personalized everything. I mean, even listening to songs on the radio during that time. It was the late sixties, early seventies. He starts listening to a lot of songs by Barry you get his name, but it's a popular
song back then, of Destruction, Eve of Destruction. Thank You. Listen to that song over and over again, and it's sort of built in him. The sense of the world is headed towards absolute destruction. The value for life begins
to diminish. He sees on the news constantly. He was a news junkie, current events junkie, constantly reading the news, the headlines, Vietnam protests, riots breaking out, the wars in Vietnam, the bloodshed there just kind of puts in him this sense of the world is coming to an end and human life begins to lose its sense of value. And that's just to name a couple of the distortions that
were taking place in his mind. Ideas have consequences, and David has some very bad ideas about the world and himself, and those bad ideas bore some very bad consequences.
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Want to get back to this one on one. Face to face with David Berkowitz is very, very interesting, the sessions you describe talking to him and the things that he imparts to you. But what's most interesting is one of the victims of his horror, of his crimes free.
The mother's name is Nasa, and there is a relationship that ensues that you ask him about it, and you even see confirmation of the kinds of things that he says about this relationship through the letters tell us about this, how it came to be, and what was the result in their relationship.
Nisa Moskowitz was the mom of Stacy Moscowitz, David Berkowitz's last victim. She was murdered in July thirty first, nineteen seventy seven, in Brooklyn. She was a blonde lady about twenty years old, beautiful. She's gone on a date that night, Neisa, her mom, Jewish lady said, Tosa said to Stacy, please be carefuled as a madman at lose. Stacy's response, Mom, I'm safe. He's not targeting blondes well, she couldn't have
been more tragically wrong, because that was his first blonde victim. Immediately, Nisa understandably so hates David Berkowitz, probably one of his most vocal critics for the next I don't know, fifteen twenty years, from the late seventies all the way through the nineties, appearing on Heraldo Rivera, a lot of talk shows, you know, saying things about David, like he deserves to die, He's evil. I would die right here to see that man suffer greatly. I mean, she just hated David Brookwitch.
You could just YouTube Nasa Moscowitz David Brookowitz, and you're gonna pull up a variety of clips to show her animosity, which is understandable towards the man who ended her daughter's life. Well, somewhere in the late nineties broke Nasa Moscowitz forgives David Brookowitz. She actually told her neighbor in Florida, she left New York moved to Florida, typical migration route for people that
are Jewish. And she's in Florida and she's next door to a woman friend who told the newspaper reporters when they did a story on NSA's death that Nasa looked at her and said, don't be consumed by hate towards anyone. It'll devour your life. So she saw forgiveness as an escape from hate. So she forgave David. They developed a relationship, written course respondent's letters back and forth for about a year and a half, maybe two years. They spoke on
the phone regularly. Well, David gave me access to those letters, and I'll never forget asking Dave before he handed the letters to me. In fact, I went through about sixteen hundred documents pertaining to David Berkowitz, the son of Sam, psychiatric reports, police records, letters between David and his dad, letters between David and Asa. All that was part of the making of this book. I asked David before I looked at the letters. I said, what does she call you?
What was her name for you? Because I had heard some of the names she said in the media. And he said, with tears in his eyes, he said, she called me Davy, not David Davy when you think of Davy like a term of ben damn and a mom would call herself. And one of the letters read really touched my heart, she said to him at the end of the letter, David, please pray for my other daughter who's still alive. She was sick, she into dying. Please
pray for her. She's very sick right now. And here she is asking the man who murdered Stacy to pray for Stacy's sixth sister. I mean, one can only say this is the work of God because it's not human. I don't know. I've got four kids, I got three daughters. I can't imagine, like any listener, forgiving someone for murdering one of my daughter. It would have to be an act of God. Well, they became friendly, and Nisa and
him were going to actually start a ministry together. They wanted to go public and telling this story of forgiveness that it would hopefully inspire others. But Nisa was diagnosed with stage four cancer and she died in the early two thousands. But that played a large role in David's own healing and his own transformation.
You're right at the end of this book because people will still possibly not believe that this is real. You pose the question, is David's conversion real? And you also mentioned a longtime friend of David's who also offers his opinion.
Yeah, I mean, of course we say jailhouse conversions. But I want to challenge this idea by saying, I've dealt with prisoners for twenty years. I know what a jailhouse conversion is. They last about six months tops. They don't go thirty five years, and it's usually the six months prior to the parole hearing. David Berkowitz has not just believed in Christ for thirty five years, He's practiced the Christian faith. He mentors fifteen to seventeen guys, meets with
them weekly. Am I saying he should be released. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that at all. David's not even saying that. I'm just saying that his life behind bars. You can only judge a tree by its fruit, and I would say the fruit that I've tasted is good. Do I think he'd kill again? No? Do I think he should get out? Probably not for a lot of reasons. But I do believe that the life he's living contradicts any idea that we have of a jailhouse conversion. I've
seen jailhouse conversions and this is not it. It's a man who responds to letters that are written to him around the world. People that write him suicidal teenagers. They write to him people that committed awful crimes. Because he's a place where there are no stones to throw. How would David Burkowitz ever throw a stone at me? In fact, I'll give you this, Dan. I don't cite it in the book, but the campus serial killer who killed four and two years ago wrote David Berko which two times,
one time while he was out at loose. I don't know if it was before the killings or after or in the midst of them. But then again he wrote to him a second time. Leader David sees these letters as opportunities share his faith, try to talk suicidal teenagers off of ledges. He's trying his best to make his wrongs right. He knows the general public is not going to accept that, but he can only do what he believes is commendable to his God. He will face God someday.
He knows that he's had some real health scares, and he wants to try to make the best of the life that he has behind bars. Let me also say this, We like to think that you can tell a man's character. We always say talk is cheap. His actions. That's what tells a man's character. I got people can put on a good act. Shakespeare said the world is a stage right. All of the people in the world are its players. People can put on an act. I didn't just see
David's actions. I saw David's reactions. And reactions are a better litmus test for character than actions. Reaction, actions under pressure, caught off guard, taken by surprise, actions in real time. I've seen David anger. I describe a conflict that he had with an inmate and how he handles that anger. I've seen him empathetic. I've seen him own up to things that he never owned up to before, confessions that were very difficult to make. So I didn't just see
his actions. I saw his reactions, and I am a witness that I believe this man has experienced the major transformation.
I want to thank you very much, doctor Michael Caparelli for coming on and talking about your incredible monster Mirror one hundred hours with David Berkowitz, once known as Son of Sam. Those people that might want to check out your book, they can go to Amazon obviously, do you have do you any social media? Do you have a website? They might take a look at You.
Can go to unmuted myiwebsite, dot app app. But the best way to get it is the easiest way is to go on Amazon of Barnes and Noble. It came out October of this year, two months ago. It has sold thousands of copies since the first three days. It ranked the number one new really in the serial killer subgenre on Amazon. And now that's been a lot of uh hustle on my part. I've been on a lot of media appearances, but it seems to be a book that's resonated with many people. Right now, go to Amazon,
go to Bones and Noble. You can get on kindle paperback. You can even get it translated in Spanish. You know Spanish. I don't want to try pronouncing it. Just type in Monstermera and how you write that in Spanish and you'll see a copy of the book.
Well, thank you very much, doctor Michael Caparelli for Monster mir one hundred hours with David Berkowitz, once known as Son of Sam. Thank you very much for this interview, and you have a great evening and good night.
Thank you.
