In the preface to The Satanic Bible, founder of the Church of Satan Anton LaVey wrote, “Herein you will find truth—and fantasy. Each is necessary for the other to exist; but each must be recognized for what it is.” While fantasy is necessary and important to the human animal, it is reason and critical thinking, applied through the scientific method, that has proven to be our best means for ascertaining the truth. Distinguishing between truth and fantasy, though, is not always easy and is made more difficult by the appeal of conspiracy theories that exist along a spectrum of both.
One such conspiracy theory is the subject of Netflix’s latest docuseries, The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness, which explores journalist Maury Terry’s claims that David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” killer, did not act alone in committing his crimes but rather as a member of a devil worshipping cult. “He was convinced he was right,” says Tom Bartley, former editor of Gannet Newspapers, speaking in remembrance of Terry. “Can you prove that he wasn’t?” Joshua Zeman, director of the series, asks. Bartley replies, “No. That’s my point.” This brief exchange pretty much sums up the message of the series: because no one can disprove Terry’s claims, they just might be true. This is a classic example of shifting the burden of proof away from the claimant under the guise of what we might call “epistemic fairness.” It’s a problem many journalists, even well-intentioned ones, make, believing both sides ought to be given equal weight regardless of the strength of evidence in support of the claims. It’s also a fallacious way of thinking and often a clue that we’re drifting further away from the truth and closer to the realm of fantasy.
The official story of the New York City Police Department is that David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” otherwise known as the “.44 Caliber Killer,” acted alone in committing his murders from 1976 to 1977. At the time of his apprehension by police on the night of August 10, 1977, Berkowitz had in his possession both a Charter Arms Bulldog revolver (the same model used in all of the Son of Sam killings) and one of the infamous Son of Sam letters that had been sent to both the police and journalists. Berkowitz quickly confessed to the killings and adamantly declared his intent to plead guilty, claiming to detectives that his neighbor, Sam Carr, had a black Labrador Retriever through which Berkowitz received messages from a demonic entity.
Enter journalist Maury Terry. Terry was hardly the only person who disbelieved the NYPD’s official story; many of Berkowitz’s neighbors and coworkers expressed disbelief that such a quiet, mild-mannered, hard-working guy could really be the .44 Caliber Killer. Terry would spend the rest of his life (he died in 2015) trying to prove to the world his theory that Berkowitz and his neighbors—John and Michael Carr, the actual sons of Sam—had committed the murders as part of a devil worshipping cult. Terry’s conspiracy theory, like most, is sprawling and far reaching; there’s simply not enough room in a single article to cover all of Terry’s claims. Instead, I focus on two main premises upon which the rest of Terry’s argument rests: 1) whether or not, based on inconsistencies with the eyewitness accounts and the police sketches, there is good reason to believe that there was more than one Son of Sam killer, and 2) whether or not there are good reasons to believe that David Berkowitz and John and Michael Carr were all members of a devil worshipping cult. If we do not have good reasons for accepting either of these premises, we certainly have no good reasons for accepting Terry’s other claims.
The main reason Terry gave for believing that Berkowitz didn’t act alone came from the many discrepancies between the various eyewitness accounts of the murderer and the multiple composite sketches the police released to the public. Some people described the killer as having curly hair; some claimed he had straight hair. Some claimed to have seen the killer fleeing the scene of the crime in a yellow Volkswagen when, in fact, David Berkowitz drove a white Ford Galaxy. How could all of those eyewitnesses and all of those sketches be wrong? Michael Zuckerman, a fellow reporter at the Gannet Newspaper where Terry published his initial articles, states in the documentary, “In my experience, eyewitnesses are wrong within a certain range. You’re not going to mistake Berkowitz for being six feet tall and blonde.”
As someone who has a background in psychology, I was familiar with the work of Elizabeth Loftus with respect to eyewitness testimony. I reached out to Loftus and asked her whether it was reasonable to expect that eyewitnesses may be mistaken about features such as a person’s hair style, hair color, or vehicle model. “It would be very common for people to make mistakes on those aspects you mentioned,” she replied. Loftus pointed me in the direction of Gary Wells, a psychologist from Iowa State University who specializes in the reliability of eyewitness identification, who told me:
The simple fact is that if you have five eyewitnesses who briefly encounter a stranger, you will get five different descriptions later. They will agree on the broad aspect (typically, sex, general age range, or, if present, a highly distinctive feature). Outside of that, there is little agreement. People give different accounts of hair color, style, facial hair, height, weight, body build, and so on even though they all saw the same person.
Wells said the same was true of composite sketches, offering, “If you get five sketches from different witnesses who all saw the same person, you will get five different sketches. Commonly, people asked to look at those sketches will conclude they are five different people.”
I reached out to Alan Baddeley, professor of psychology at the University of York and author of Memory, who explained:
Eyewitness testimonies can be a very unreliable source of evidence, as can attempted reconstructions by witnesses. In the U.K., eyewitness recognition is, I believe, no longer sufficient to secure a conviction, while in the U.S. numerous cases based on person recognition evidence have since been discovered to be false on the basis of later DNA evidence.”
Signs of Satan?
This leaves the question of whether or not we have reason to believe Berkowitz and the Carr brothers were devil worshippers. Terry interviewed folks, off-the-record, and they began talking about rumors of a local cult called “The Children.” One local teen brought Terry to Untermeyer Park, the Old Croton Aqueduct behind which both Berkowitz and Sam Carr lived, and an old pumping station known locally as the “Devil’s Cave,” which was covered in graffiti interpreted by Terry as “satanic.” Additionally, Terry claimed to have found the remains of several German Shepherds, which he believed had been ritually sacrificed. Such tales of animal sacrifice were part of a larger hysteria about livestock killings during the late 1970s that were blamed variously on UFOs, cults, or even secret government experiments. Retired FBI agent Kenneth M. Rommel Jr. and anthropologist Nancy Owen, responding to the hysteria, authored a 1980 forensic analysis of animal mutilation cases in which they concluded that untrained observers simply cannot distinguish between the marks made by predators and scavengers and those made by humans with tools. Said the authors: “In order to eliminate the verdict of a predator and scavenger damage, one must show that the incisions in the carcass have been made by a knife or other sharp instrument.”
Most people associate livestock mutilations with midwestern states and might well wonder whether a city such as Yonkers in the state of New York would have a similar problem. According to Yonkers Wildlife & Animal Control, “The number one problem predator is the coyote. Because of a population boom, this canine has spread to both urban and rural areas, killing pets and livestock, posing a threat to small children.” The explanation that the mutilated dogs allegedly found by Maury Terry were the victims of natural predation is both more likely and plausible than the idea that they were mutilated by human agents. No mention is made in the documentary about whether veterinarians or any other forensic professionals examined the carcasses, and they would be the only ones qualified to make such a determination.
One of the more amusing examples the documentary offers as evidence that Berkowitz and the Carrs were involved in a devil worshipping cult comes from the similarity Terry noted between the eponymous Son of Sam symbol and what’s known as the Goetic Circle of Black Evocations and Pacts. (You can get this at Wal-Mart, so maybe the corporation really is evil!) The Goetic Circle was the work of nineteenth-century occultist Eliphas Levi, who, as author and occult historian Gavin Baddeley told me, was “also, perhaps inevitably, an epic bullshitter. He’s perhaps best remembered for reinventing ‘Baphomet’ as a goat-headed demon, but most occultist dabblers and popular authors of the era and early twentieth century were indebted to him. I wouldn’t give much credence to any of his work beyond a rich resource for occultic fiction.” According to Terry, the fact that the Goetic Circle contained the words Berkaial, which shares five letters with the name “Berkowitz” (I note that it also shares four letters with the phrase “Burger King”) and Amasarac, which backward spells “Sam Car” (actually, it spells “Car A Sam A”), were all proof of the trio’s involvement in the occult.
This kind of playing with letters and rearranging them to find secret hidden meanings may seem like good detective work to conspiracy theorists, but to the rest of us it’s as impressive as playing with a decoder ring out of a cereal box. It’s a fun exercise but one that ultimately teaches you nothing of value. Rather than uncovering the truth, what is most likely happening is that people are engaging in what psychologist’s call pareidolia, perceiving patterns and meaning in phenomena where none is actually present.
David Berkowitz would change his explanation for his crimes several times over the years, first in a 1979 letter to psychiatrist Dr. Abramson, in which he confessed: “Sam Carr and the Demons … Yes, it was all a hoax, a silly hoax, well planned and thought out. I just never thought this ‘demon story’ would carry out so much.” Berkowitz would later change his story again in a letter to Maury Terry postmarked 1981 in which he stated: “I’m guilty of these crimes, but I didn’t do it all.” He also stated “I can safely tell you that one member, John Carr, is deceased. Many others have vanished, scattered about across the United States.” Berkowitz would later meet in person with Terry, and that interview would be televised for Inside Edition on November 10, 1993 (which seems to contradict the documentary’s claim that “Nobody listened” to Maury Terry). In the interview, Berkowitz claimed both that “I was at more or less all of them,” and “I did not pull the trigger at every single one of them.” Berkowitz only ever named two of his alleged five accomplices: John and Michael Carr. Apparently, this cult very much cared about the identities of some of its members but not David Berkowitz or John or Michael Carr.
The idea that Berkowitz could have operated as part of a cult contradicts both former neighbor’s characterizations of him as “a loner, a nice boy,” who “stayed by himself” and “was always alone and never spoke to you more than to say hello,” as well as former FBI profiler John E. Douglas who, after hours spent interviewing Berkowitz, said he was an “introverted loner, not capable of being involved in group activity.” Dr. David Abramson, who was one of three court appointed psychiatrists to interview Berkowitz to determine his competency to stand trial, described him as an “expansive person, with a desire to be in the limelight and a fertile imagination.” During the course of many interviews, it became clear to Dr. Abramson that Berkowitz was not psychotic and did not suffer from schizophrenic hallucinations; his behavior didn’t excite suspicion from his neighbors or coworkers, and Berkowitz exhibited the ability to carefully plan and remain in control of his impulses to kill. As Dr. Abramson put it:
He had a character disorder with many hysterical traits mixed in growing from a need to call attention to himself, to make himself more important than he is. David Berkowitz had created his demons as an alibi, an excuse for his murders. He could then say, “I didn’t kill, the demons did it,” thereby lessening his guilt in the world’s eyes.
Maury Terry’s The Ultimate Evil didn’t emerge in a vacuum, and it’s no coincidence that Berkowitz’s story began to change when it did and happened to coincide with his becoming a born-again Christian. This period between the 1980s and 1990s has come to be known as the Satanic Panic due to the nationwide mass hysteria around Satanism and fear of devil worshippers. Despite thousands of reports allegedly connected to cult crimes, an investigation led by FBI special agent Kenneth Lanning declared that absolutely no evidence supporting such claims had been found. All the high-profile claimants (many of whom made money off book deals or touring the country giving lectures as “ex-Satanists”) were later revealed to be liars and frauds.
Throughout this article, I have resisted referring to the alleged cult as “satanic” and instead have referred to them as “devil worshippers.” This is because prior to the founding of the Church of Satan in 1966 by Anton LaVey, there was no recognized religion of Satanism. Satanism was codified by Anton LaVey with the 1969 publication of The Satanic Bible and has nothing to do with devil worship or animal sacrifice. Satanism is an atheistic, materialistic religion that uses the language and symbolism of the Christian devil (to great effect) as the perfect metaphor for human beings’ carnal, animal nature. Plus, it’s a hell of a lot of fun! Anyone who legitimately believes in a literal devil—and might be so inclined to make sacrifices to him—is not a Satanist but rather a devil worshipper, a heretical Christian.
There are no good reasons to believe that David Berkowitz had accomplices. The discrepancies between the multiple eyewitness accounts are not unusual and do not suggest multiple killers. The simple truth is that these murders really were senseless acts of violence perpetrated by a single seriously disturbed individual. According to Dr. Scott Bohn, who interviewed Berkowitz:
It is clear to me that Berkowitz relished his evil celebrity status and that he enjoyed terrorizing the city of New York throughout his murderous rampage. I believe that his criminal infamy boosted his otherwise fragile, disturbed ego and gave him a twisted sense of identity and purpose.
It’s reasonable to believe that, with the notoriety from the case having quieted down by the 1980s, Berkowitz saw Maury Terry’s book as a means of reigniting interest in his persona.
By the end of The Sons of Sam: Descent into Darkness, Maury Terry isn’t so much presented as a hero as he is a tragic figure, consumed by his obsession. I would argue, though, that the persons who were really negatively impacted by his book, The Ultimate Evil, and the Satanic Panic that he and his book helped perpetuate, were Satanists. As Ygraine, Magistra of the Church of Satan, told me:
The wariness I developed during the panic has never left me. I, as an activist, endured physical, verbal, and psychological abuse, as well as repeated acts of vandalism. After both my home and business were broken into, in the name of the good Lord, there was no place on the planet I felt safe. I see a reason for concern today. I’d be blind not to. We are contending with a vehement and powerful population that desperately requires a scapegoat.
Given the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, which were perpetrated by many individuals professing stalwart belief in the QAnon conspiracy theory, I believe it is both tasteless, unwise, and possibly dangerous for Netflix to be releasing The Sons of Sam now. Despite Maury Terry having been dead for six years, I suspect that this documentary is being released to ride on the wave of QAnon’s mainstream exposure. The potential for people who already believe in QAnon to see this documentary as further proof of their outlandish beliefs, and to act on them in some way, should not be ignored. Forgetfulness of past orthodoxies and lack of perspective are both Satanic Sins to be avoided. “Utilizing stratification, we came through the Panic not cowed but empowered. It made us craftier, better at assimilation and camouflage,” Magistra Ygraine explained to me. “We learned to stoke novelty, not fear, around those easy to trigger. It taught us which hills were worthy of dying on (answer? Virtually none. Survival is the highest law.) Most of all the Panic taught us how easy it is to create a false narrative and how quickly it can be accepted as fact to huge swaths of people.”