Then, in 1978, he learned that Carr had just died, in Minot, North Dakota, of a gunshot wound. In addition to noting that the man in question was, literally, a son of Sam, Terry found plausible references to John in one of Berkowitz’s letters, and he discovered a local, violent satanic cult in which both Carr and Berkowitz had been involved. His investigation led him to John Wheat Carr, the son of a man named Sam Carr they were neighbors of Berkowitz’s in Yonkers, and John, Terry thought, resembled one of the composites. and the city’s mayor, Abraham Beame, declared the case closed, but Terry suspected that there were others involved who hadn’t yet been arrested, let alone acknowledged, and he decided to investigate on his own. He was troubled by apparent disparities between the composite sketches of the shooter, based on eyewitness accounts, and the appearance of Berkowitz. (He remains in prison to this day.) But, as the movie makes clear, something in the news struck Terry-a former journalist, then working as an in-house writer for the research department of I.B.M.-as inconsistent. detective, who connected David Berkowitz, of Yonkers, to the attacks by means of a parking ticket.īerkowitz was arrested and confessed to all of the murders. Nonetheless, Zeman captures a startling moment of revelation-an amazing detail of banal police work that cracked the case-in an interview with James Justus, a retired N.Y.P.D. From the beginning, Zeman tells this story with an ardent sense of research that’s packaged in an impersonally conventional format-a blend of original interviews (including with retired police officers, journalists who’d covered the case, and Terry’s associates), archival news footage, photographs, newspaper clips, and other documents, all displayed through a floating and zooming camera that both forces the feeling of motion and turns substance into impressions. He was intensely conscious of his own public image, even taking care to address a letter directly to the New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin (who sparked controversy, including in the pages of The New Yorker, by publishing portions of it). As the movie makes clear, the killings terrified the city-all the more so because the attacker taunted the world with tangled and menacing letters in which he identified himself as the “son of Sam” and offered up a jumble of occult references to adorn his reign of terror. To set up the story, Zeman summarizes the facts of the Son of Sam shootings-eight attacks, from July, 1976, to July, 1977, in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, that targeted young couples, especially ones sitting together in cars, and also young women. The entire movie plays like an effort to compensate for that absence, and turns what could have been a fascinatingly personal docuseries into a distractingly conventional, arm’s-length one. What the film leaves unresolved, to its detriment, is the relationship between Zeman and Terry that led Zeman to make his film in the first place. Those materials, and Terry’s quest, are the framework for Zeman’s series. In 2017, he says, he received boxes of materials related to the murders from a late investigative journalist, Maury Terry, who’d devoted much of his career to pursuing alternate theories of the murder case. Rather, it’s a mystery that Zeman himself sets up, in his own voice, at the very start. The biggest mystery of the new four-part true-crime series “The Sons of Sam,” from the director Joshua Zeman, has little to do with the infamous murders, in 19, of young people in New York City.
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