This podcast details firsthand accounts of graphic crime, as well as deeply disturbing

emotional profiles, and may not be suitable for all listeners.

Please proceed with caution.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I was always kind of not upright evil. A molasses manifesto production brought to you by audio up you're listening to Killer Tape. The True Crime Podcast where killers and hardcore criminals tell their own story and their own words. I'm your host, documentary filmmaker Bill Baschley. Joining me is veteran prison reporter Jack Jones. This is Killer Tape, season one, David Berkowitz, aka Son of Sam.

David Berkowitz, 24 years old, found himself surrounded by police. Well, he said, you got him. And now the neat story, it's not for anybody else from myself.

Actually, those words ended the biggest man hunt in New York City history. I should spend my whole life here for what I've done.

Episode 5. Goodbye, sweetheart. Hello, Vietnam. Act 1. Sort of like a loner.

David Berkowitz enters his high school years. He is traumatized, shattered by the death of his mother, feeling even more guilt that he somehow was a cause of that, at least a source that complicated the illness she had to kill her.

When David Berkowitz adoptive mother Pearl died in 1967 during David's freshman year of high school, two important things happened.

First was that he considered himself directly responsible. Pearl had died of cancer, which can be exacerbated by stress, and he had tormented her day and night.

He had also wished her dead the day she left and never came back, all of which added up in his 14-year-old mind to the fact that he had in some way caused her death and that made him a murderer. And it wasn't the first time.

At the tender age of five, his adoptive parents, Nat and Pearl, in an effort to be open, honest, and modern in the treatment of their child, had told him of his adoption, explaining that his adoptive mother had died tragically during his birth, which is what they had been instructed to tell him by the adoption agency.

And that to him meant that he had done her in as well. And so, at 14 years old, a newly minted teenager, David Berkowitz considered himself to be the indirect murderer of not just one but two women.

The second was that with Pearl gone, David was left alone with his father, Nat. The two had never been close, and with Nat struggling to keep his little neighborhood hardware store afloat,

David was left without the crucially needed oversight Pearl had provided, especially as it related to school.

Pearl had forced him to do his homework, arranged special meetings with his teachers, and just kept an eye on him in general, doing everything she possibly could to make sure David was as successful in his studies as he absolutely could be.

And so, with Pearl gone and Nat at work, struggling to make ends meet, David Berkowitz began to disengage from school entirely.

Were you excessively truly? Yes, really.

Yeah, I know I know if I could have put my mind into school that I could have really done good, you know, but I did.

He basically quit going.

Did you ever feel like you were actually in school?

...