Thanks to you at home for joining us here.

I'm really happy to have you here.

In the late 1970s, the state legislature in New York passed a new law because of something really gross that they were worried about.

There had been a serial killer terrorizing New York City in the mid-1970s.

He killed a whole bunch of people in New York in

1975, 1976, in 1977, before he was finally arrested in 1977. And over the course of that

sort of reign of terror, there was not only a huge amount of news interests in the killings, for obvious reasons, because of how

terrible and terrorizing those killings were, there was also this other dynamic at work

in which the killer himself really seemed to enjoy and kind of get off on the media attention

that was being paid to his case. He wrote letters taunting the cops.

He wrote to a famous newspaper columnist.

The press was already turned up to 11 on this guy because of his crimes.

But he ended up, before they arrested him, really courting that attention.

And even after he was arrested,

he continued to court the attention and communicate with the press. So we have this situation

in which the appetite for news and information about this terrible killer was limitless.

The killer seemed to know that and want that.

And the combination of those two things in the late 1970s caused New York State legislators

to pass a law, to pass a law specifically to try to prevent that guy from selling his story,

prevent him from selling the story of his crimes for his own profit.

The killer was named David Berkowitz.

He was known as the son of Sam killer.

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