[eerie music playing]
[brooding music playing]
[Terry] For nearly 16 years,
I had undertaken a harrowing investigation into the Son of Sam killings.
But I had yet to uncover the ultimate truth behind these crimes.
Since the beginning,
I had suspected a mysterious cult known as "The Children"
played a pivotal role in the Son of Sam murders.
But still, there were so many unanswered questions.
How did David Berkowitz become involved with this cult?
Who pulled the trigger at each brutal slaying?
And who was still out there?
And now, for the first time in all of these years,
I had my chance to finally understand why.
Today, I would meet the elusive and silent…
David Berkowitz.
[Darwen] This was the moment that Maury had been dreaming about
and working for really hard for a long time.
This was the Golden Fleece.
He got an interview with a guy who never spoke to anyone and everyone wanted.
And I'm observing all this.
We're about to meet David Berkowitz.
We're obviously nervous. We want this.
We don't know which way it's gonna fall.
We don't know who we're about to talk to.
This is Son of Sam. God knows what we're gonna see.
For Maury, it was a huge deal.
A little bit like Maury was Holmes and Berkowitz was his Moriarty.
This was intense.
This was heavy shit.
-[people clamoring] -[camera shutters clicking]
And sure enough, out he walks.
[tense music playing]
[man] Watch it. Come on now, son! Get out of here.
["Season of the Witch" by Joan Jett plays]
♪ When I look out my window ♪
♪ Many sights to see ♪
♪ That it's strange ♪
♪ So strange
♪ You've got to pick up every stitch ♪
♪ Oh, no ♪
♪ Must be the season of the witch ♪
[atmospheric music playing]
[crows cawing]
[Berkowitz] Just seemed like everything that happened was my destiny.
Almost as if everything had been set up.
That all of this stuff was inevitable.
It was just inevitable.
I was born out of wedlock.
And…
my mother had been married to someone else,
and my father to someone else, and so,
they did not want to, uh, keep me,
so the Berkowitzes, they took me home, they adopted me, and, uh, they raised me.
And, uh, even though I grew up in a loving home,
I had many, many emotional problems and was always in trouble.
We couldn't believe it. He was polite.
He was well-spoken.
[Darwen] We were all expecting to meet a raving maniac.
But really… I never just could get a grip of things.
I was always a very tormented person.
[Darwen] We went into his background. How he felt tormented as a child.
He felt something calling to him, pulling him into the darkness.
[Berkowitz] There was something, a force, pulling me outside into the night,
to just kind of roam around.
I don't know what it was. It was just…
Why do you think, looking back,
some things happened when you came out of the army?
When I had gotten out of the service, it was a big time of transition for me.
I was very vulnerable. I was very lonely, empty, and…
You know, I had no sense of direction.
Just wasn't getting anything out of life.
I had met some people.
They were at a party nearby, and we met, and, uh,…
we spoke for a while.
Some of the people seemed to be just hanging out, you know, like me,
and just looking for companionship.
That was basically it, you know?
Maury knew the area where Berkowitz was.
He also was aware of Untermyer Park
and some of the strange stuff you see down there.
He wanted to know if Berkowitz was part of it.
Did there come a point in time when it got more serious?
Was that over in Yonkers, up in Untermyer Park?
[Berkowitz] Right, right, right.
We had a spot where there was like a circle with rocks.
Everybody could sit on a rock and so forth and rap out there,
in the middle of nowhere.
You could actually feel, like, a force out there,
a presence out there in the darkness.
We began to hear more and more conversations about witchcraft,
about black magic.
We were really having little religious services almost.
I did begin to witness some animal sacrifices.
I was repulsed in one way, but I was fascinated in another.
This was something different.
Nobody else was doing this, except our small, little circle of people.
They made it feel special or something?
Yeah, yeah. We felt special.
There came a time, uh, when you were formally initiated into this group.
[Darwen] He asked him details about the cult.
How they lured him into it.
Introduced him to the ceremonies.
He was drawn in, manipulated.
I think Maury understood that a bunch of kids messing around in the woods,
you know, can be very good foot soldiers for a large satanic network.
I took an oath and made a little blood pact
that I would serve the devil, and, uh…
Did you have to turn over anything to the leaders
-of the group at that point? -Yeah.
Yeah. I had to give pictures of, uh, my family.
I was told that, "We're all brothers and sisters now."
"If you betray this group, you have to understand, we're gonna get your family."
Did it surprise you that John Carr and Michael Carr
came to the end that they came to?
No. There's a price to pay.
What usually happens to people involved in the occult,
it's the tragic auto accident,
and, you know, the freak accident,
and they're gone.
[Terry] So all this had been going on.
It seemed like a snowball going down a hill in a sense, wasn't it?
Yeah. I never believed, beyond my wildest imagination,
that, one day, innocent people were gonna die.
The Son of Sam shootings, did that just happen, or were these…
Or did they just want more violence,
and they planned that they were gonna do this?
It's something even so horrible to contemplate, but…
Is that how they viewed the shootings, or at least most of the shootings,
as the ultimate sacrifice?
-Is that sort of the idea? -Yeah.
Did Maury lead? I don't know if I'd call it leading.
Maury would say things like, "Is it true…
that this happened?"
If it was you, and you'd done 16 years of this,
and you're talking to the guy that did it…
Did Maury want him to confirm his investigation? Of course he did.
Now, there were a series of eight attacks.
-Yeah. -Did you do all of them?
Uh, I was at all of them.
I did not pull the trigger at every single one of them.
But the police, for some reason, just stuck with the one-person scenario.
Although, it's not important, because I did do some of the crimes. I did--
You may not think that it's all that relevant
as to what you did or what you didn't do,
but I can guarantee you that to the public and the families and all,
it's very important, to the survivors, the victims.
-Well-- -So if we can go through that quickly.
-Yeah. -Is that all right?
-Just to go through it quickly. -From what I can remember…
So much of it, I really wanna forget. Don't really wanna talk about that.
Mh-hm.
[Darwen] There may have been a little cat and mouse going on.
Berkowitz wouldn't tell him he was on or off.
Wouldn't give him information he wanted.
Maury pushed him.
At these crime scenes, David…
There were eight attacks.
You said you didn't do all of them.
Yeah.
Um…
Donna Lauria in the Bronx?
Was that you?
Yeah.
Uh… Carl Denaro, Rosemary Keenan in Queens?
No.
Joanne Lomino, Donna DeMasi?
[siren wailing]
No.
Christine Freund in Queens?
No.
Virginia Voskerichian in Queens?
No.
[Maury] Any of those in Queens?
No, I was there. I was in that area.
Back to the Bronx, we have the shootings of Valentina Suriani and Alex Esau.
Was that you?
We go back out to Queens by the Elephas disco out in Bayside.
Judy Placido, Sal Lupo. Was that you?
No.
And finally, probably one of the most infamous shootings
in the history of the United States,
the murder of Stacy Moskowitz,
the blinding of Robert Violante
-in Brooklyn. -[indistinct police radio chatter]
[Terry] Was that you?
No.
Is it true that John and Michael Carr were part of this group?
Yes, yes, they were.
Did either John or Michael Carr on occasion
pull the trigger in one of these attacks?
Yes.
So, in summation, at each of these crime scenes,
we had multiple accomplices acting in concert.
-Sometimes three or four-- -And multiple vehicles.
-Yeah. -Okay. And multiple shooters.
Yeah.
[Darwen] We couldn't believe it. This was the step he wanted.
David Berkowitz largely confirming everything of his investigation.
And giving him more details on it.
But Maury, most of all,
wanted Berkowitz to name the people.
But apart from the Carr brothers, Berkowitz wouldn't give it up.
No.
[Darwen] And so, unfortunately, he didn't get everything he wanted.
But Maury confirmed in his mind that he found the evidence,
he investigated it, and he was right.
And you know what? This rewrites criminal history.
A .44 caliber Bulldog.
[Darwen] The worst serial killer in New York City didn't do it on his own.
This is monstrous.
I mean, that's a big frickin' deal.
I was ecstatic.
The interview was prepared for Inside Edition.
And we knew we had a ton of great stuff.
[TV show theme plays]
[O'Reilly] A killer called Son of Sam. He preyed on pretty, young women.
He terrorized New York City. He taunted the police and the media.
And since he was caught, he has not talked,
until now.
[Darwen] The reaction was like the equivalent of firing a missile.
[reporter] David Berkowitz speaks.
It just exploded.
[John Roland] David Berkowitz's sick, twisted mind
put him on the front pages 16 years ago as the Son of Sam.
Well, now he is back.
So the Son of Sam conspiracy theory lives,
with new help from David Berkowitz himself.
Mr. Berkowitz is now saying that he is not alone.
He said he was a member of a satanic cult. He said others joined him in the killings.
This was the biggest reaction I ever got to anything I ever did by far.
[reporter] He was involved with a satanic cult.
And he had help in committing murder after murder.
[Terry] There were a series of eight…
[Denaro] I turned this on.
There's Maury Terry, the guy that wrote the book,
interviewing David Berkowitz.
It's kinda cool.
But it was also a little unnerving to hear your name being talked about
by two people you never met before.
I did not pull the trigger at every single one of them.
[Denaro] To hear him in his own voice say, "I did not shoot Carl Denaro,"
I was just blown away. I was, like…
This guy who, for the last 35 years, you were told that he shot you…
I mean, this is, like, mind-boggling.
This is information that could turn this case around.
[Darwen] Maury would have loved
for the police to admit they fucked up.
I don't know what the New York City police did.
I still don't know.
I feel the city did wrong. They never followed up the case.
And we thought the case would get reopened on the strength of this.
Unfortunately, it just outraged the police.
And some of the press started pushing back.
"This is bullshit. Maury's a liar. I'm a liar.
Berkowitz is a liar, and we've facilitated the lie."
'Cause they don't wanna hear anyone saying that, for 16 years, they fucked it up.
It was a war.
Boom, boom.
Hit, counter punch. Hit.
I was kinda under siege. So was Maury.
Suddenly, somebody writes a book about satanic cults,
and stories start changing. Don't know.
It's interesting how stories change if the books are written.
When you're coming, and you're criticizing me,
and that criticism is justified,
fine, I'll take that.
We'll correct that.
But when you go making up stories, like a cult,
I don't buy it at all.
I get annoyed. Like I'm getting annoyed now.
I think the police, at least the top levels of the police department,
had to suspect that something was really wrong here.
[Ott] NYPD is a very powerful organization.
They don't wanna look bad. Okay? It's all politics.
They would do anything to dispel Maury Terry,
his reputation, his beliefs or his theories or whatever,
because they felt threatened.
I don't wanna use any profanity, but baloney.
It was almost like the police investigators
who accepted a lone gunman theory were getting very defensive about it.
We looked into cult activities. We looked into a variety of things.
And he committed all those crimes alone.
There was a detective involved in that case.
He was kind of Maury's nemesis.
His name was Coffey.
As far as I'm concerned, and I'll go to my grave with this, he acted alone.
[Ott] Joe Coffey had a very antagonistic relationship with Maury Terry.
Joe Coffey would go out of his way to make Maury look bad.
He has Berkowitz mouthing his ideas,
which I believe, and I'm convinced of it, are totally fraudulent.
Coffey swore he was right, and Maury knew he was right.
It's a stalemate.
[male radio host] From New Jersey 489 WABC.
Investigative reporter, writer, Maury Terry.
If you'd like to join in this most chilling conversation, 2-1-2-8-7-7 WABC.
Yes, Joseph?
[Coffey] Yes, uh, Mr. Terry, I have a question for you.
-[Terry] Yes. -I was an investigator on that case.
I was the detective sergeant in charge of nine operations on the case.
-[Terry] This wouldn't be Joe Coffey? -[Coffey] Yes, it is.
We know exactly what you are.
You're perpetrating a fraud on the public. You know it.
[Terry] If there was a fraud perpetrated,
it was done by the Omega task force back in 1977,
not by me, the Queens DA's office, or other investigators seeking the truth.
[Coffey] The PD deals in evidence.
-Regulations. -[Terry] So do I, Joe.
and so does John Santucci in Queens.
[Coffey] John Santucci is another story. Everybody is entitled to their opinion.
[Terry] You mean Santucci just has an opinion?
-He's not a professional investigator? -Certainly not.
[Terry] His office will be delighted to hear that.
-[host] Joe. -Yes?
[host] Uh, do you feel threatened by Maury Terry's--
[Coffey] Not at all. I think the public should be made aware what a fraud this is.
[host] Have you read the book?
[Coffey] No, sir, I wouldn't read that trash.
-It's rubbish. -[host] You ought to.
[Coffey] I don't like reading fiction.
When you know you're right,
when you know you're pursuing the right goals,
and others are giving you no credibility at all and refusing even to listen…
Maury, one former New York City cop says Berkowitz is lying flat out.
How do you respond?
-They have something to hide, to protect. -[Amicone] That's the toughest part.
When you have evidence, and they won't even look at it.
That frustrated him.
There are shooters who are still alive,
leaders who are still alive, accomplices who are still alive.
[Amicone] Maury was relentless,
and he was gonna double his efforts because he was gonna prove he was right.
[Terry] I'd extracted a confession from Son of Sam,
admitting to several accomplices
to one of the most famous murder sprees in history.
[camera clicks]
I had uncovered the existence of a nationwide satanic network
that was seemingly responsible for numerous other mysterious deaths.
But still, the wheels of justice refused to turn.
While the authorities were willing to rest on their laurels,
I was not.
The murdered and maimed victims of the Son of Sam,
Sisman, Platzman, Arlis Perry,
and, yes, even the Carr brothers, deserved answers.
Their murderers were still out there,
free to continue with the chaos and the killing.
[siren wailing]
To bring them to justice, I needed help.
I needed allies.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Denaro] When I heard David Berkowitz say, "I did not shoot Carl Denaro,"
once I got over that shock, my goal was to get the case reopened.
I wanted to track down other people that were involved
and get closure for myself and a lot of other people.
[reporter] Denaro doesn't like to talk…
I get approached. "You wanna be a part of this show, this interview?"
-Usually it's just a news show. -[TV show theme plays]
This one was Geraldo Rivera.
I said, "Sure."
So he said, "Do you mind getting up to 57th Street and go to Kennedy's?
We'll pick up a car. We'll bring you out to Secaucus."
I walk in, and the bartender greets me like he's an old friend.
He says, "You're Carl, right?"
"Yeah."
And he says, "I have to introduce you to somebody."
I look over, and there's a guy standing next to me.
Sticks his hand out, and he's like, "Carl, meet Maury. Maury, meet Carl."
This guy, he wasn't quite my hero yet,
but after reading his book, I got a ton of questions.
Maury definitely likes a good drink, and we hit it off so well.
He said, "Do you wanna be part of the investigation?"
I said, "Absolutely."
We decided to exchange information and stay in touch.
Of course, Maury doesn't have a cell phone, he's got no computer.
He's got a landline at home.
So he started sending me stuff.
Addresses, names.
"Find out what you can about this address. Who owned this building?"
So, now I went from victim to protégé.
From what I do know,
um, a lot of it being, uh, from Maury Terry's book,
I certainly believe there's a conspiracy.
You'd have to be an idiot not to believe that more than one person did it.
It didn't take long for me to fit right in and be part of Maury's inner circle.
[Ott] Maury collected a lot of friends to help with his investigation.
They'd do some of the legwork for Maury.
[eerie music playing]
[Kevin Murphy] I met Maury Terry at a seminar
for police officers, uh, involving occult crimes.
I was a detective in Yonkers in the special investigations unit.
I was an "expert" on occult and cult-type activity.
David Berkowitz is claiming members of a satanic cult
helped in the murders of six young people.
[Kevin] There was a lot of public discussion about the Son of Sam murders.
People were scared sometime that this is still happening.
The Yonkers mayor at the time said, "I wanna put this to bed."
He gave me carte blanche to go out and find out what's the truth.
So Maury and I started putting the case together.
[Mounts] My introduction to Terry
was at a place called Kennedy's on West 57th Street.
He says, "You ever heard of Son of Sam?" I said, "Yeah. I've heard of it."
[people conversing]
[Mounts] Terry was a drinker. He wasn't a drunk.
But when he drank, Maury would talk about the case.
Approximately once a month, we'd meet up at Kennedy's on a Friday night.
All his friends and associates helping out, trying to solve this case,
he called "Pine Street Irregulars."
And it was Pine Street, from where Berkowitz lived.
But also, there was some Sherlock Holmes connection to it.
So it was kinda like a cool club to belong to.
[Mounts] Well… [bleeps] …worked for the sewer department for years.
[Denaro] Once a tunnel rat, always one.
[Mounts] And he's talking about catacombs and tunnels that don't exist on maps.
-[Denaro] He would go directly down… -[both] To Devil's Cave.
[Mounts] Runs to the aqueduct.
I was a smoker at the time. We'd sit and smoke cigarettes.
"Look at this, look at that."
Those days were fun days.
I mean, you got a witness who eyeballs Berkowitz
in Untermyer Park with a bunch of people.
-[Denaro] Mm-hmm. -[Mounts] Bingo.
Maury wanted to ensure justice was done.
I believe Maury was onto a greater thing than what anybody knew.
[Terry] Our informal force of Pine Street Irregulars kept checking new leads
and investigating every new angle,
as we dedicated our days
to uncovering the truth.
[Kevin] In Yonkers, we started delving into the background of the case.
And I uncovered a whole litany of things that needed more investigation.
People said Berkowitz never went out with women. "He never did this."
"He's a loner."
In my investigation,
I found he was somebody who would be social. A social butterfly.
I looked into the group in Untermyer Park…
and I found his girlfriend.
And, uh, he had many friends.
They all hung out at Untermyer.
They were all partaking in the drugs and the sex and so on.
They called themselves "The Children." That's what the street people called it.
There were older people.
Some of them were just bad actors.
We had one fellow
who lived at the Pine Street address where Berkowitz lived.
He knew the Carrs.
And he was driving a yellow Volkswagen.
Reportedly, someone saw and chased a yellow Volkswagen
not far from where Moskowitz was murdered.
David Berkowitz drove a Ford.
I was wondering if he had any connection
and if he could be brought in for an interview.
And I finally tracked him down,
and, uh, I spoke to him.
He was totally paranoid.
He said, "There were people after me."
He was terrified that if he opened his mouth, he was gonna get killed.
A couple of days later, he killed himself.
[Zeman] You interview any others?
Most of them lawyered up right away.
They wouldn't talk to me.
Nobody wanted to be implicated in this case.
But we did come across this one person, John Paul.
[Paul] At the time, I was a high school freshman.
And early on, I had been approached by John Carr.
I think it was just a game in the beginning,
with druid ceremonies and whatever.
There wasn't anything that was that serious, okay?
Somewhere along the line, somebody got to the head of this thing
and took it in a completely different direction.
That was Untermyer Park.
There had to be somewhere between 30 or 40 people at that initiation.
They started chanting very slowly
and, uh, increased in intensity.
I do remember being brought in front of this…
very cold, either marble or whatever, platform,
and we had heard dogs getting killed.
It's one of the most horrible things I've ever heard. I'll never forget it.
I'm kinda hard to press what was fact and what was fiction.
He claimed to be part of the group as a kid.
Apparently, some of them were involved with pornography.
And Maury started looking into the pornography angle.
[Terry] Through numerous off-the-record interviews,
we were able to corroborate the existence of The Children
and uncovered members associated with pornography and the drug trade.
I couldn't help but think of Ron Sisman,
the photographer who had allegedly been killed by the cult.
[Mounts] When I was working with Terry, I was selected for the cold case squad.
Well, one of the first cases that I asked to take a look at
was the Ron Sisman and Elizabeth Platzman double homicide
from Halloween night, 1981.
[siren wailing]
Initial investigation by the precinct detectives went nowhere.
The case remained unsolved.
But I wanted to find out who killed these two people.
Maury Terry believed that they were killed over a snuff film,
a film of Stacy Moskowitz's homicide.
Maury told me that Ron Sisman was in a van that night,
been parked within a distance where he could see
the actual homicide take place.
It was right under a street light.
And he filmed the actual shooting of Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante
in their vehicle in Brooklyn.
And so basically, we went and talked to Sisman's family.
Found out Ron Sisman owned a van.
And Sisman's family told us that he had borrowed a Betamax
to film his girlfriends in the apartment.
That was corroborated through the investigation.
So he could have very easily shot a snuff film if he was so inclined.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Terry] Though I now had additional evidence to support the snuff film theory,
I would soon find an informant
that would introduce me to a far darker truth.
[Mounts] Maury had told me about a guy by the name of Jesse Turner.
Jesse Turner had written to Maury Terry a letter from prison.
And he said that he had information on the Sisman-Platzman homicide.
So we decided we were gonna go talk to Jesse Turner
down at the federal prison in Talladega, Alabama.
[Turner] You'd never heard my name before?
[Terry] I never heard your name until your letter
that I got here yesterday about the Sisman case.
We sat down and spent two hours with him on a Sunday morning.
He told us that he was a member of The Process Church of the Final Judgement.
[Turner] I'd meet with them occasionally.
-[Terry] By "them," who do you mean? -[Turner] The Process.
When you're 16, 17, 18 years old, you're pretty much alone, you know?
And somebody makes you feel important, man.
[Terry] I understand. I do.
-[Turner] They can do whatever they want. -[Terry] I really do.
He advised us that Ron Sisman and Elizabeth Platzman were killed
by the cult itself.
[Turner] The Sisman-Platzman killing,
this is some fuckin' sick, demented fuckin' Easter egg hunt.
They were searching for snuff films.
Hearing this from a jailbird, you take it with a couple grains of salt,
but this is what Maury had talked about previously.
They wanted that snuff film.
The film was in Ron's apartment.
The apartment looked like it had been turned around
to find something they were looking for.
And he said,
the cult would use a film like that to bring about more chaos.
And that's what the cult was about.
[Turner] That was all part of, like, apocalyptic trials, you know?
Intensifying acts of random, organized violence.
[Terry] A form of terrorism.
[Turner] Yeah, exactly.
So now things start making a little more sense.
Almost everyone in those crimes, Maury Terry had investigated.
There's ties to every last one of them into the Process Church.
We know David Berkowitz was meeting people up in Untermyer Park
that were involved and went to the Church in Manhattan.
[Turner] There are many, many degrees of the Church,
and there are people from the streets
who were the blood and the guts of the movement,
the real fuckin' heart and soul of the movement.
[Mounts] That's how Berkowitz got involved with them.
They offered him a belief system.
That's how he became their trigger man to help them
do these things.
I don't think David Berkowitz ever thought he'd end up killing somebody,
but once you're in, those things kinda happen.
[Terry] In the four years since my interview with Berkowitz,
I had tracked down every lead I could.
And now I understood the clues in David's letters
or in his veiled on-camera responses.
No.
I had delved into The Children
and uncovered a never-ending web of murders
that stretched across the country.
[atmospheric music playing]
[Terry] It had been a difficult road, investigating such heinous crimes,
and I had sacrificed so much.
But now it was time to end it,
once and for all.
I had the facts,
but I still needed the irrefutable proof that would finally force the NYPD to act,
so that I could find peace.
And so, armed with my camera, I returned to David.
Tonight on Eyewitness News, a family in Queens is torn apart…
At the time, I was working at Channel 7, ABC in New York as a local reporter.
I've covered crime for 35 years in New York City,
some of the biggest cases.
I know the NYPD very well.
I know how things work on the street.
I can't tell you how many wrongful conviction cases I have been involved with
where the NYPD coerced witnesses, coerced suspects,
made up confessions, and lied.
The most notorious case in New York crime…
Maury Terry knew my work, and he approached me.
I could have dismissed Maury in a second, as I have many people.
Maury was an outsider and never could get in.
But his information was solid.
The connections that he made about the park in Yonkers.
The group often met here in Untermyer Park in the mid-1970s.
And he could get people to talk.
He had Berkowitz's ear. He was basically his gatekeeper.
[cameraman] Let me know when you go to speed.
[Wallace] At the time, David Berkowitz was making sensational claims
that he didn't act alone.
-That's what interested me. -[cameraman] We are rolling on…
Were there other people? And what about the police investigation?
[cameraman] Camera ready?
[Wallace] He was a big get.
He was the interview that everybody wanted.
So we put this series together,
and we agreed to have Maury as the producer of the interview.
[Berkowitz] What's this gonna be like? Same as Inside Edition?
Or are you gonna make just one hour-long block out of it?
-Or two. -Two? That's a lot.
That's a lot, because that's gonna mean a lot of…
talking about a lot of stuff.
-There's a lot of corroboration out there. -But if it's too long, you lose people.
People don't have the same interest you do.
You know, if it's too long.
You know, it's just not really very joyous talking about this stuff.
[Wallace] But in the interview,
what became clear to me was that Maury Terry had his own agenda.
[Terry] Let's talk about the people involved
in the .44 shooting of Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante.
There was a witness who saw
a reddish or rust-colored van
parked across the street from the victim's car
and slightly behind it.
Is that van relevant to this case?
Yeah, it was part of a…
group.
I have information which holds that there were three individuals in that van.
Is that correct?
Might have been three. [whispers] Can't remember.
Why was the van there?
Well, uh…
there was some filming going on.
Somebody wanted to film it for somebody else or, uh, whatever…
Are you stating to me, then, that they made a snuff film,
from that van, of the shooting of Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante?
Maybe that's what you can call it.
Is it so that another of the individuals in that van,
actually running the camera most likely,
was named Ronald Sisman?
Yeah.
Yeah, I knew him.
And he was in the van that night?
Yeah. He wanted to do something, filming, you know.
[Wallace] From the very beginning,
it was difficult to know what was happening in the interview.
I didn't see David Berkowitz with a lot of details about what happened.
[Darwen] Berkowitz was reticent to talk about things.
I don't know why.
He didn't wanna go there.
Maybe he was worried about snitching on other people in the crime,
or he didn't wanna relive it.
But Maury wanted the truth out of him.
Was this the cult group itself that was responsible for the Son of Sam murders?
Or was there something else that went on?
Uh…
There was another group, a more elite group,
hidden into it and woven into it, you know?
The Process? You're talking about the Process cult from Britain?
[Berkowitz] Yes. Right. Right.
You're saying, then, and this is really astounding,
that Process leaders were among those gathered at the time
when the plans were put into effect to commit the .44 caliber shootings?
Yeah.
He was vague about this whole thing about the Process Church,
who the players were.
You know, there's some suggestive interviewing going on.
There have been stories about a certain infamous individual…
Charles Manson, that he had been tied to Process.
Did Process members or leaders ever speak about Manson to you
-or to you and others in your group? -Well…
I'd heard, uh, about some involvement, yeah.
I'm not sure whether Berkowitz was just giving in to Maury Terry's narrative.
Do you recall the case of a young woman named Arlis Perry?
Yes.
You sent, in writing, quite a number of years ago,
"Hunted, stalked, and slain. Followed to California."
Is that what you'd heard happened to Arlis Perry?
Yeah. Right. Yeah.
[Wallace] I remember thinking, "He's not telling the truth."
I just didn't buy these other theories.
[Zuckerman] Whatever he was saying, it wasn't of any real value. It was…
He was telling Maury what Maury wanted to hear.
Now, if Process exists today, which it does,
should society be worried about people like this Process group?
[Darwen] Maury was aggressive to the point where I thought he was being
a bit too much like a cop, maybe freak him out.
[Terry] What other kinds of crimes did they commit?
Well, heavy drug trafficking and, uh, other things involving children.
Involving children. What do you mean?
What kind of business were they in?
[Darwen] He kept pushing him. He kept pushing, pushing, pushing.
It started to look like an interrogation at one point.
I thought it hurt his credibility.
You're telling me the Process was producing child pornography?
Is that what you're saying? And providing children?
I love him, but he looked frickin' crazy. You know?
[Terry] Let's talk about the other activities--
[producer] This is a good time to break.
[Terry] What other crimes did they commit?
[producer] I let it go as long as I could.
-Okay. -You know,
I can't be rehashing this stuff all the time. It's too painful.
It's driving me… It's like…
Maury was always trying to somehow get acceptance.
And he thought that this interview,
if everybody latched onto his theory about a cult being involved,
that would somehow parlay into journalistic credibility.
With the arrest of the 24-year-old Yonkers postal worker,
police quickly closed the most sensational case
in New York City crime history.
But did they solve it? Not according to David Berkowitz.
The Son of Sam speaks.
When we put this series together,
the overwhelming reaction that I had was that people said,
"Hmm.
That's a possibility."
Berkowitz offers new…
But it wasn't what Maury wanted.
It didn't change this narrative about David Berkowitz.
And then it was over and done with.
But I think Maury was obsessed with this case.
People who are obsessed with cases don't want to see reality,
and sometimes the truth smacks you in the face,
and you have to say,
"It wasn't what I thought, and I need to back off."
[somber music playing]
[Kevin] Maury was a very thick person. He did not take no for an answer.
And in 1998, two years into my investigation,
I wrote up the report,
wrote up a summary, flow charts,
and I did a presentation to the district attorney's office in Queens.
And we had all the New York City brass,
the district attorney, the New York City police department.
I didn't know half the people.
Laid out all the information.
I found, during the investigation,
that there were at least five different people
involved in the shootings.
That came from eyewitnesses.
Told 'em who the suspects were.
We talked about the Process Church. You could just follow the evidence.
All I was asking for was, uh, resources.
And after an hour-and-a-half presentation, they said,
"Thank you very much. We'll be in touch."
And I never heard again from them.
I wrote a report on what information I had
as far as David Berkowitz being involved with the Process Church.
Gave it to the Southern District of New York.
Gave it to the New York City Police.
Explained everything, how this was all put together.
First thing that happened is they took it to Joe Borrelli.
And within 24 to 48 hours,
I was told, "Get that case closed.
Get it out of the office. It's done."
[Kevin] You know, I don't want to besmirch the NYPD,
but they don't play well with others.
I was never given access to the New York City police records
that I requested.
I had zero forensics.
I had zero from the crime scene.
I was handicapped from the beginning.
It was all political.
A lot of people made their bones on this case.
And, uh, you know, politics is politics.
[dramatic music playing]
And that was the end of it.
[Mounts] Maury was very upset.
There was days that he wouldn't speak to me.
There was days he would send me an email,
"Why don't you go back and really solve the case this time?"
It frustrated the hell out of him
that he couldn't get to the bottom of the story
and that nobody else was interested in it.
He said, "I laid it out there for everyone to see.
And no one saw it, and no one cares about it."
That hurt him.
And the NYPD just made everyone look like a fool,
that, you know, we're just crazy conspiracy theorists.
He did what he did because he became involved with a satanic cult,
and the evidence to that effect is overwhelming.
That's not just me speaking, nor is that just David Berkowitz speaking.
Maury thought that if these people continued to do what they were doing,
other people were gonna be hurt.
And the police had no desire to pick it up.
He was not given the credibility he deserved.
He was called a crackpot.
I think we've got a psychopathic killer who is being very manipulative,
who's playing Mr. Terry and others like a violin,
selling him this really ludicrous story.
I'm gonna respond to that with one word. Evidence.
Look it up, know it, and then make that statement.
Until then, Greg, I think you're out of your league on this case.
You're out of your league, dealing with serial killers.
I've dealt with serial killers for a career, sir,
and this doesn't happen this way.
[Wallace] Maury went off the rails a bit.
And he would try to float things by me,
and I just wasn't going to bite.
[woman] I'm afraid to go out or to do anything.
[reporter] In a reign of terror, he had shot 13 and murdered six,
all young lovers.
[Ott] He had so much information.
So many variables of things that he was working on.
[reporter] Five members of a so-called religious cult, including Charles Manson…
[Ott] Every time you turned around,
there was another avenue to take and another thread to follow.
[reporter] In a wild party
at the 72-room Southampton mansion of producer Roy Radin…
Maury was putting too much value in the cult aspect of it.
-He started to see it all over. -[preacher] We thank you for everything.
[Kevin] For example, Arlis Perry.
[reporter] Two candles used to assault her sexually.
He said, "My suspect is the security guard.
The security guard had to be involved with the cult.
He's the one that killed her."
But he couldn't give me specifics. There was no evidence.
It was so convoluted.
[Zuckerman] Some of the connections, I felt, were theories.
Maury would take them and run with them.
He became very righteous about attacking evil.
First it was satanic cults.
And that led to pedophiles,
child molesters.
It became a web.
And that web kept getting bigger and bigger.
Knitted together by the occult.
He would associate people with the case,
and he would go from "A knew B. Therefore, he must know C and D."
Evil people do evil things.
It has nothing to do with, uh, some satanic force.
[Denaro] He was all over the place.
But if you didn't agree with him, you know, you're dead.
I used to say, "Maury, this isn't your--"
"Yes, it is my case." And I said, "It's my case."
He says, "What did you do?" "I got shot in the head."
[Turner] Acts of random organized violence.
At times I was concerned about him, but there was no pulling Maury off it.
[Turner] The real fuckin' heart and soul of the movement.
[Ott] Maury became a two-fisted drinker.
I used to keep up with him, but I couldn't anymore.
Became a two-pack-a-day smoker.
[Kevin] Lost a lot of friends and kept to himself.
Over 1 million Satanists in this country.
[Zuckerman] He was headed towards obsession.
[Berkowitz] Satan was reaching out to me.
It became debilitating.
[Berkowitz] A force was pulling me outside, into the night.
-[reporter] Religious cult. -Screams, "God, help me."
[man] This stuff is not science fiction.
It's true.
[intense music swelling]
[Terry] "Maury, the public will never, ever truly believe you,
no matter how well your evidence is presented."
[somber music playing]
[dog barking]
[Murphy] When you put your heart into it,
there is a danger of getting very consumed with a story.
You know, you're looking into a dark world where evil exists.
And you don't understand why it exists.
So you wanna delve into, "Where does the darkness come from?"
Then sometimes, you go over the line.
Maury really felt that he had the truth. He tried to do the best job he could.
Then, maybe, he didn't know how to come back.
[Mounts] Maury just… He couldn't come to the final conclusion, you know?
Got to third base, but never got that home run.
He could not accept that, no matter what you do,
people are not gonna believe it.
No matter how hard he tried.
In 2010, when I was living up in New York,
I met him at Walgreens, and…
I did not recognize him.
He had lost so much weight.
The hair was down over his ears,
with a cap, a baseball cap, which he never wore.
He just…
He thought he was doing okay.
He really was a little delusional.
I think the evidence is overwhelming that David Berkowitz did not act alone
and that others did cooperate.
[Mounts] You could tell physically this had taken a toll on him.
I was a detective for 15 years.
I know what stress does to your body and how it makes you feel.
Maury Terry suffered through a lot of stress.
[Amicone] Maury wasn't looking for sympathy.
Most things he did, it was not about Maury.
It was about what he was pursuing.
Maury's intent in every case was, "Allow the story to stay alive.
The story needs to stay alive because there are still people out there
who are perpetrating these kinds of crimes on people.
They should be brought to justice."
And he basically suffered until he could no longer hide it.
[Kay] He'd never talk about his health.
But it was obvious his heart was failing.
[Amicone] He was on oxygen.
I think those last few months of his life, especially, were very tough
because he had to know that he was dying.
[Kevin] I was with him the day he died.
The last thing he said to me was,
"Contact this attorney, who was part of a case."
I said, "Maury, don't worry about it." I'm like…
[chuckles] He's hours away from dying, and he's worried about other people.
I'm getting… I get upset thinking about it right now.
He was that kind of a person.
On his last, dying… Literally his last breaths.
And that said it all about him.
And that was it. He died a few hours later.
[Byrne] I flew up for the funeral.
In the casket,
he looked better than I'd ever seen him.
He did. He really did. He looked better than he's ever looked.
He was well-dressed.
Please welcome Maury Terry.
[reporter] One man has been able to piece together
a new version of the slayings,
reporter Maury Terry.
[host 1] My first guest, Maury Terry.
[host 2] We are joined now by Maury Terry, the author of Ultimate Evil.
[applause]
[Amicone] I hope the narrative doesn't die there.
I hope somebody takes it up and continues it.
His choice was to dedicate a very large portion of his life
to pursuing this story,
and in doing so, he gave up doing other things
that he might've really enjoyed in his life.
We did realize afterwards how many people he helped.
We had people come to us and say,
"I was victimized, and no one would pay attention.
No one would listen. No one would believe.
But Maury took me seriously, and I'll be forever grateful for that."
[seagulls squawking]
[Ott] You get involved in a case, and it becomes your life.
He'd put all his heart and soul into something, everything he had.
And it was never-ending.
It didn't end. Only he ended.
[Zeman] Maury had tried to make sense of the madness,
to explain the unanswerable, "Why?"
[pounds wall, sobs]
We brought him up the right way.
[Zeman] Why would someone shoot Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante
on a Brooklyn lover's lane?
Why would a group of flower children stab a pregnant Sharon Tate?
Why would Arlis Perry be viciously assaulted in a church?
That an animal should snuff away a life of a young girl…
[Zeman] Digging inside Maury's boxes,
we thought we'd find our answer in that one final clue.
A name, a number,
an overlooked fact.
Instead, we found something else.
Maury's most compelling evidence was, in the end, his own story…
that of one man's tragic journey into the abyss.
[man] Innocent lives were lost, young lives.
I don't know if it'll be my wife tomorrow, my daughter.
Maury genuinely believed, right down to his core,
in what he was chasing.
It was his white whale.
[Kevin] Maury was the only one holding the police department's foot to the fire.
Of course, they had to say he was just a conspiracy nut,
and sometimes I thought he was too.
But the fact is he was right more times than he was wrong.
I was shot in the top of the head.
-[interviewer] Where? -Right there.
And there was a plate inserted.
[Zeman] So, at the end of the day, what do you believe?
100%, I believe David Berkowitz did not shoot me.
But put it this way, if you want to use a meter on the truth,
the ultimate evil, the truth…
This is a total lie. This is, you know, the total truth.
It's here.
[Zeman] His story doesn't point to a grand conspiracy.
But only to a far darker truth
that, at times, the world is a dark and rudderless place.
And good and evil do exist,
but only inside the hearts and minds of us all.
[Breslin] There's interest in the streets with this case.
-And we-- -Do you think that's a healthy interest?
-[Breslin] A healthy interest? Murder? -Yeah.
[Darwen] Maury didn't get everything he wanted.
God bless his soul. He died before he could.
However, that's maybe not that important.
He was a journalist.
That's his passion. That's what he loved.
Maury and I had a philosophy.
"Tell 'em what they don't know."
Doesn't matter how old the story is. Find something new on it.
That's what drove him.
[Terry] We've been faced with a challenge
to back up our information and to go further.
We accept that challenge.
[Darwen] Whether he could prove it or not…
it was still a damn good story.
[atmospheric music playing]
-Hi, Mr. Crawford. How are ya? -[Crawford] Pretty good, but…
-Can you open the door for us? -[Crawford] Sure. Let me get dressed.
-Okay. -[Crawford] Real quick here.
-One second. -Okay. Thank you.
Are you about dressed?
-[Crawford] I have one leg in underwear. -Just tell him you'll help him.
Mr. Crawford, we're gonna help you.
[Crawford] No, that's all right.
There's a gun. Gun! Gun!
Mr. Crawford, put the gun away.
[Crawford] Why are you coming in?
[gun shot]
-[officer] Shot? -Patrol one, shots fired on Camden Avenue.
-[officer 1] Anyone hurt? -[officer 2] Anyone hit?
Nobody hit. Torres is fine.
Now to our other top story, the end to a decades-long cold case.
[Carlos Saucedo] Arlis Perry was 19 years old at the time of her brutal death.
Officials found her nude from the waist down
in the back of the church.
For years, the debate's raged
over whether this killing was part of a satanic ritual.
[reporter] The Santa Clara County sheriff wrapped up a press briefing.
It comes with great honor to announce we solved the 43-year-old cold case.
Stephen Blake Crawford, 72-year-old,
was a security guard at Stanford University
at the time of the murder.
Crawford's been a person of interest since the beginning.
We were able recently to link Crawford's DNA to the crime scene.
Today, our detectives were serving a warrant,
and when they knocked on the door of Crawford's residence,
he killed himself.
During the search of the apartment, there were a couple of items of interest.
One, there was a box in his closet with some important papers in it,
and in it was a book called The Ultimate Evil,
and it's a book about serial killers.
[ominous music playing]
[closing theme music plays]