The Murderer David Berkowitz Case Study

The Murderer David Berkowitz: Son of Sam

On June 1st in 1953, Elizabeth Falco gave birth to a baby boy named Richard David Falco in Brooklyn, New York. He was the result of an affair between his biological parents, Elizabeth (Broder) Falco and Joseph Klineman. His father was married to another woman at the time and refused to let Elizabeth keep the child. A few days later, Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz, a middle-aged Jewish couple adopted him. Eventually, they renamed him David Richard Berkowitz.

As a child, David was unruly and problematic, but his loving parents tried very hard to keep him under control. His poor behavior seemed to intensify at age 14 when his adoptive mother died of cancer. Many people who knew David state that he “was especially attached” to Pearl Berkowitz (Hamill, James, Edmonds, Browne, Gottlieb, 1977). Subsequently, David became involved with crimes like, petty theft and bullying. It grew worse when his adoptive father remarried just four years after her death.

Once he returned in 1974, he started looking into his birth records and discovered that his birth mother was alive and that he had a half-sister. In an interview in 2016, Berkowitz claims that “the crimes that happened later had nothing to do with her”, although many psychology professionals suggest that this reunion could have aggravated Berkowitz and lead him to commit the murders (Storyteller Ministries, 2016, 10:22). In December of 1975, Berkowitz claims to have attacked a woman by stabbing her (Jenkins, 2006). In addition to that, according to his journal, David set around 1,500 fires throughout New York City around this time (Jenkins,