The Capture of Son of Sam

“You got me. What took you so long?”

Those were the words uttered 34 years ago tonight when the police finally caught up with and arrested David Berkowitz—aka the “Son of Sam”—perhaps the most notorious serial killer to ever stalk New York City.

Berkowitz, also known as the .44 Caliber Killer (for his preferred choice of weapon), had grown up in the Bronx to adoptive parents. His adoptive mother died when he was thirteen and he had restive adolescence.* He joined the army in 1971, was discharged three years later, and returned to New York where over the next few years he began to fall deeper into mental illness. He began setting fires; when the police searched his house on August 10, 1977, they found a diary claiming credit for hundreds of arsons. Some experts believe he may have set over 1,000 fires.

In 1975, he turned from arson to more personal attacks. On Christmas Eve, he stabbed and injured two women with a hunting knife, the beginning of a murderous crime spree that would last almost two years and culminate in eight shootings and six fatalities. It is too easy in retrospect to glamorize killers like Son of Sam—the American public seems to have a morbid fascination with murderers—but let’s take a moment, instead, to remember his known victims:

• Michelle Forman (stabbed with hunting knife; survived)
• Unknown victim (who was with Forman, survived)
• Donna Lauria (murdered)
• Jody Valenti (survived)
• Carl Denaro (survived, but with a metal plate in his skull)
• Rosemary Keenan (survived)
• Donna DeMasi (survived)
• Joanne Lomino (survived, but rendered a parapalegic)
• Christine Freund (murdered)
• John Diel (survived)
• Virginia Voskerichian (murdered)
• Alexander Esau (murdered)
• Valentina Suriani (murdered)
• Sal Lupo (survived)
• Judy Placido (survived)
• Stacy Moskowitz (murdered)
• Robert Violante (survived, but blinded)

The summer of 1977 was a volatile one in New York not only because Berkowitz had eluded capture. As we write in Inside the Apple:

[T]he city was plagued by countless other problems. For one, it was nearly out of money. The famous 1975 headline in the Daily News—“Ford to City: Drop Dead”—summed up the city’s problem in trying to secure a federal bailout. Even the election of New York-friendly Jimmy Carter in 1976 hadn’t helped much. The lack of funds meant that necessary city services were always on the verge of being cut. When John Lindsay was mayor, he’d tried to brand New York “Fun City.” When the city vowed to cut the police force, cops handed out flyers at the airports telling tourists it was now “Fear City.” The flyer recommended they not go out after dark and that they not ride the subway at all. The city made cuts to the NYPD nonetheless. Thousands of other jobs were lost, too. When city sanitation workers were furloughed, the entire department went on strike, causing massive amounts of garbage to pile up on city streets. Despite building projects like the World Trade Center, which were supposed to provide a new economic stimulus, the city had lost a record number of jobs since the early 1970s, with little end in sight.

The subways, strewn with litter and covered in graffiti, were the only affordable option for many New Yorkers. However, the budget gap meant that token prices shot up from 35 to 50 cents, a move necessary just to keep the trains running.

In the Bronx, five thousand apartments burned down every year, the result of persistent arson. The theaters along 42nd Street, once home to some of Broadway’s greatest theaters, had instead become XXX movie parlors; indeed the number of places to buy pornography had gone up by 2000% in a decade. 

Then, on the night of July 13—just as the city was beginning a terrible heat wave—the power failed, plunging the city into darkness. That night, portions of the city erupted into looting and arson: over 1,000 fires were lit and more than 1,600 shops were looted. It was the worst disturbance in the city since the Civil War Draft Riots and the most widespread. No borough was exempted—from the Bronx to Bensonhurst the burning and robbery lasted well into the night. In the end, a congressional committee estimated the damage at $300 million dollars, though some guessed the real toll had been closer to $1 billion. By the time the power was restored a day later, over 3,700 people had been arrested.

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Read much more about New York in the '70s in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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E. Ridley & Sons and the Murder of Edward Ridley

The Ridley building as it appeared in 1874; it was expanded in 1886, badly damaged in a fire in 1905 after the store had been sold, and truncated in 1931-32.

As guest blogger Bowery Boogie noted on Curbed yesterday, the pink Jodamo building on the Lower East Side at the corner of Orchard and Grand streets is for sale for a cool $25 million.

In the nineteenth century, the building was home to E. Ridley and Sons, one of the biggest department stores on the Lower East Side. Though Broadway in the area we today call SoHo was home to most of the city’s high-end shops, including A.T. Stewart’s “Marble Palace,” the stretch of Grand Street east of Broadway was an important retail district in its own right. Many of the shoppers came from Brooklyn or New Jersey on the Grand Street ferry and were then transported by horse-drawn street car.

Ridley’s was founded in 1849 by Edward Ridley Sr., an immigrant from Nottinghamshire, England, in a small building at 311-1/2 Grand Street. As the shop grew over the next two decades, Ridley began acquiring nearby lots and by 1883, he had built a store that encompassed the entire street-front on Grand from Orchard to Allen. According to some sources, it was the country’s largest retail store. (Today’s building is actually slightly truncated; when Allen Street was widened in 1931-32, a portion of the building was shorn off to accommodate the expanded road.)

For the Jewish immigrants who began to flood in the neighborhood in the 1880s, Ridley’s became a destination for young Jewish women to window shop – and from which to occasionally purchase, a sure sign of upward-mobility. Understanding the need to appeal to the area’s new clientele, Ridley’s began to promote itself more to local residents, including a big push in December equating Hanukkah with the gift-giving of Christmas. The shop was also one of the first to send out a catalogue so that buyers could peruse and purchase their goods from the comfort of home. (In 1964, a request was delivered to 311 Grand Street demanding to know why the Ridley's catalgoue had not been sent out "for some time." The writer clearly didn't know the store had gone out of business--in 1901!)

Edward Ridley died in 1883 and the store was taken over by his sons, Edward A. and Arthur Ridley. They continued in business until 1901, by which time they could no longer attract a enough clientele to fill the store. The building was sold and subdivided and both brothers went into real estate.

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Now, here’s where the story gets weird.

Edward A. Ridley was a bit of an eccentric, to say the least. He operated out of the subbasement of the old department store’s stables, a dungeon-like space 40 feet below street level. (The address is variously reported as 59, 61, and 63 Allen Street.)

As the New York Times wrote in 1931:

Ridley needed to wear rubber overshoes in his dank, cellar office and ultimately took to wearing them at all times. He allowed his beard to grow out, making him look like a wild-eyed Biblical prophet (“Whitmanesque” the Times called it), and he was rarely seen outside the office except going to and from his boarding house in New Jersey, always carrying an umbrella, rain or shine.

Then, in 1931, Ridley showed up for work one day to find his assistant, Herman Moench, dead. Actually, Ridley read his mail for about an hour, then bothered to go to the other side of the 8x15 foot office and found Moench lying next to his desk. At first the police assumed that Moench, who had worked for Ridley for an astonishing 51 years (he’d started at the store when he was 9 years old) had died of natural causes. Only when the body was examined by the coroner were two bullet wounds discovered. No one who worked at the garage that surrounded the office, including its managers, Harry and Lee Weinstein (who leased the space from Ridley) had seen or heard anything and with no leads, the case soon went cold.

Just a little over two years later, tragedy struck again. Ridley had hired Lee Weinstein from the garage to be his new assistant. On May 10, Lee’s brother Harry was unable to reach them in the office by telephone; he asked a garage employee to check on his brother and the man discovered that Lee Weinstein had been shot twice and Ridley beaten to death. The similarity of the two cases led the police to reopen the Herman Moench murder and ballistics tests immediately proved that the same gun had been used to kill both of Ridley’s assistants.

At first, the police assumed Ridley had been killed trying to protect Weinstein. However, when the old man’s will was found, it showed a $200,000 bequest to Weinstein, making the police wonder if Ridley had been the intended target and if Weinstein had been involved in both murders. The next day, the police discovered that Weinstein had been secretly married and living with his wife under an assumed name at a midtown hotel. As the investigation continued, the police found an unused bootlegging room in the Allen Street garage where Ridley kept his office, but decided that illegal alcohol had nothing to do with the murders. More promising was the discovery that Lee Weinstein had purchased a $2,050 car—while only making about $40 a week. It soon became clear that the will was a fake, signed by Ridley unwittingly and “witnessed” by two fellow conspirators—both of them accountants who helped keep Ridley’s books—who had hoped to split the $200,000. Further investigation revealed that Weinstein and his accomplices had already stolen over $200,000 from his employer.

But this discovery did little to shed the light on the killings and Weinstein's fellow thieves seemed to have nothing to do with the murders (and no connection to Herman Moench). The accountants were indicted for the theft and forgery but despite a $10,000 reward, no useful information came to the police. Ridley had owned many tenements on the Lower East Side and was said to be a miserly landlord, but none of his tenants was ever seriously looked at for the murders. To this day, the case remains one of the great unsolved crimes of the Lower East Side.

The building at 59-63 Allen Street still stands – and is still a parking garage. Does Ridley’s obscure basement office still exist, as well? If you park in the building, check it out and let us know!

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Our book, Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City, has a great walking tour of this neighborhood. And while it doesn’t stop at Ridley’s, it does take you to a number of famous places on the Lower East Side, ending just a couple of blocks from the Ridley’s intersection.

The book is available from retailers across the country or online.

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