Episode 403: Sons Of Sam, Part 1

The First Degree

Alexis Linkletter and Jac Vanek

News, Society & Culture, True Crime

4.5 • 10.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2026

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the early hours of July 29th, 1976, an 18-year-old woman sits in her car outside her house chatting with a friend following a night out in New York City. The aspiring emergency medic’s life is brutally cut short when a man suddenly fires through the window, killing the young woman. Her friend is wounded and survives, but over the coming year, five more people will lose their lives to the man initially dubbed ‘the .44 caliber killer’. The city lives in the grip of sheer terror until August 1977, when 24-year-old David Berkowitz is arrested. He soon confesses and later pleads guilty, sentenced to life in prison. But questions remain. Not everyone believes there was one killer. And for one reporter, the case becomes a decades-long obsession. In episode 403, Jac and Alexis discuss the infamous ‘Son of Sam’ serial murders, and how one man’s relentless persistence in questioning the official narrative to uncover the truth completely and utterly consumed him. 🎟 Catch up to FOUR bonus episodes per month plus full video episodes over on Patreon: patreon.com/thefirstdegree 📸 Instagram: instagram.com/thefirstdegree 🕺 TikTok: tiktok.com/@thefirstdegreee 👤 Facebook: facebook.com/thefirstdegree 📓 Substack: http://thefirstdegree.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The first degree.
0:02.0	First degree.
0:03.0	First degree.
0:04.0	First degree.
0:05.0	First degree.
0:06.0	First degree.
0:07.0	The first degree.
0:08.0	You see it on the news.
0:10.0	You see it on the paper.
0:11.0	You see it on Facebook.
0:13.0	These things are supposed to happen in movies, not in real life.
0:20.0	When you speak to folks who were slightly older than ourselves, because I would have been pretty young, they're always like, son of Sam, oh my God, we couldn't go out to the discos.
0:30.5	We had to change the color of our hair. We didn't go outside. And it is this really interesting cultural phenomenon.
0:38.0	These couples, they didn't go out of their house for months on end in 1977.
0:43.4	The Son of Sam, that was a big thing when we were across the Verasama Bridge in Brooklyn growing up.
0:49.2	So it had a lot of nostalgia.
0:52.5	It had a lot of nostalgia. It had a lot of fear.
0:55.8	So when we started to look into it really open up this door to this crime that nobody at the time had really delved into, not for a long time.
1:06.4	Sometimes the press narrative is just so good and becomes so institutionalized that you're
1:15.4	never going to beat the press narrative.
1:19.3	When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
1:24.1	That's one of the most interesting parts of this whole thing, is that David Berkowitz is an unreliable narrator.
	...

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