Looking for the Sermon
For 13 months between the summers of 1976 to 1977, a series of eerily similar murders took place in the boroughs around New York City — in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, white couples in cars and lover’s lanes were targeted by a man with a .44 caliber revolver. 13 people were shot, 6 women would die. The murderer would earn the moniker of The .44 Caliber Killer and, after sending a chilling letter to the Daily News, the Son of Sam.
The NYPD failed over and over to stop the killings until, finally, they zeroed in on a suspect, and when they surrounded the car of David Berkowitz outside his home in Yonkers, the 24-year old surrendered and said mildly, “Well, you got me.”
Berkowitz’s immediate confession, as well as possession of the murder weapon, was a closed case. Relief washed over New York City, which had been living in terror for over a year.
Except, perhaps, for writer and reporter Maury Terry, as documented in the 2021 Netflix docuseries Sons of Sam: Descent into Darkness.
I’ve had Sons of Sam on my watchlist, mostly because it’s directed by Joshua Zeman, who directed one of my favorite documentaries, Cropsey. If you aren’t familiar, Cropsey, which was co-directed with Barbara Brancaccio and released in 2009, follows Zeman and Brancaccio through their childhood neighborhoods on Staten Island as they delve into the history of the missing children cases in the 1980s, many of which were attributed to the titular Cropsey, an urban legend bogeyman with a hook for a hand who haunted the local abandoned asylum. It is a spooky time, it is not an entirely factual documentary, but if you want to freak out your friends for Halloween with something that seems real and isn’t Paranormal Activity, there you go.
Zeman is not present in Sons of Sam, but he does employ Paul Giamatti as the narrative voice for Terry (who passed away in 2015). His voice ponders through the first episode as the NYPD tries to solve the killings in the late 1970s, lingering over details that might otherwise go unnoticed — the aliases alongside Son of Sam in the “Hello from the Gutters” letter, details in a police sketch, the locations of the crimes. Briefly, Terry steps back in time, to the night that Martin Luther King was shot and he, a 21 year old reporter, witnessed the riots and looting on the streets and then watched his paper refuse to publish his reporting in lieu of something more palatable. He already knows what it’s like to not be believed, for the people in power to dismiss what he knows to be true for an easier story.
In the documentary, grainy, brightly colorful footage shows the chaos and smoke and bloodshed, as Maury Terry tries to find the truth of it all.
Like many women of my experience, I have a (somewhat) predictable obsession with the writings of Joan Didion, and a particular pedestal for the essay The White Album, from which this opening passage constantly comes to mind, especially when I watch things like Sons of Sam:
We tell ourselves stories in order to live... We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
The two meanings to this are: we tell ourselves stories because they make life worth living, and we tell ourselves stories because we need life to mean something. The White Album was written about another tumultuous time, during the end of the 1960s in southern California, which might seem divorced from the year of Berkowitz’s killings, but it is not: for one, Terry will find a way to connect Berkowitz to the Sharon Tate murders that Didion also writes about, and second, Didion writes about being able to understand the chaos in a way that Terry, as we will see, cannot. Again Didion:
In this light all narrative was sentimental. In this light all connections were equally meaningful, and equally senseless. Try these: on the morning of John Kennedy’s death in 1963 I was buying, at Ransohoff’s in San Francisco, a short silk dress in which to be married. A few years later this dress of mine was ruined when, at a dinner party in Bel-Air, Roman Polanski accidentally spilled a glass of red wine on it. Sharon Tate was also a guest at this party, although she and Roman Polanski were not yet married. On July 27, 1970, I went to the Magnin-Hi Shop on the third floor of I. Magnin in Beverly Hills and picked out, at Linda Kasabian’s request, the dress in which she began her testimony about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive…
I believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondences, but in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else did.
And so, back to 1977. New York is relieved and Maury Terry is not: Berkowitz’s features (a tall forehead and curly hair) do not match the long, swept hair covering the forehead of the police sketches. There were other oddities: Berkowitz’s neighbor seemed to be an actual son of a man named Sam, a John Carr, middle name Wheat, and in one of his letters Berkowitz gave himself a variety of monikers, including John Wheaties — so Terry pulled at the thread. More and more, the evidence seemed clear to him: Berkowitz did not act alone; he was part of a conspiracy. He was part of a cult. John Carr and his brother, Michael, had indoctrinated him into a sect of a Satanic cult in Yonkers that called themselves the Children, allegedly an offshoot of the Family, they of Manson fame; responsible for the death of the above mentioned Sharon Tate, as well as her unborn child and four other people in her home on Cielo Drive in August, 1969.
You may read that and see a senseless chain of correspondences, or you might see layers of an onion being peeled back to reveal the rot at the core.
As Maury Terry collected his evidence, publishing findings in local newspapers, the NYPD turned a cold shoulder. Even though they may have closed their case surprisingly quickly, even if some evidence was collected in a questionable manner, even if they have a known track record for forced confessions and, after all, had taken 13 months to find the murderer in the first place — they got their man and wouldn’t budge. By 1980, Berkowitz himself sent Terry a letter, saying:
Maury, the public will never ever truly believe you, no matter how well your evidence is presented.
Terry kept looking for evidence: the Carr brothers came up dead, allegedly under mysterious circumstances, including a car accident. Berkowitz mailed a bible to the police and left a note about “Arliss[sic] Perry”, a reference to a widely reported murder at Stanford University that appeared to be part of a Satanic ritual, in the margins. Convinced that one of Berkowitz’s victim’s was meant to be featured in a snuff film, Maury sought out Roy Radin, a decadent movie producer who allegedly oversaw the filmed assault of actress Melonie Haller at his house in the Hamptons. Perhaps this, too, was an attempted snuff film, thus Radin was a part of the cult, and three years later he was dead, too, shot in the head and dumped in a California canyon. Maury cancelled a trip he’d planned with his wife, found the canyon, the road, the spot where Radin’s body had laid to rot, still putrid from decay. Only a few meters away, he spotted something. A Bible, open to 1 Corinthians, chapter 15, verse 32:
If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantage is there to me, if the dead rise not? “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!”
With this smoking gun, Terry published more evidence, finally compiling it all into a book, The Ultimate Evil, which he published in 1987.
The NYPD may not have been ready for Maury Terry’s evidence, but the late 1980s were: the Satanic Panic was in full swing in the US, with its most notorious event, the McMartin Preschool Case, finally going to trial in 1987 after four years of investigation. Dungeons and Dragons was targeted in 1985, and by 1990, Michelle Remembers author Laurence Pazder had “treated” around 1000 cases of so-called Satanic Ritual Abuse in children.
As would be the case with Terry’s book, there was no physical evidence for a violent, satanic underbelly in the United States. Still, the idea of there being a cult that worshipped the devil, that could be stopped by the patriarchal trinity of pastors, psychiatrists, and police, was far easier to stomach than whatever the truth was: that the world was becoming less knowable, that those in power were becoming less powerful, and that cruelty did not need an excuse.
The reason Didion’s White Album comes up so often, I think, is because it manages to capture a person at the precipice, where they realize their life is either made of order or disorder, modern or postmodern, meaning or nothing, life or entropy. Didion, beloved for her intimate detachment, able to catalog her nervous breakdowns and heartbreaks with poetic and surgical precision, brings you along the journey of the White Album, as she navigates her marriage, reporting, meeting Huey P. Newton, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, learning about the murders on Cielo Drive, her packing list, being diagnosed with depression and multiple sclerosis. She says “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” and we know that it’s true, stories are what we make of the detritus of everything, like building shelter from shipwrecks. The rest of the opening quote says:
The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves it would make some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, in the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.”
I look at the quotes hovering around the word “interesting”, and I think of Georgiana, Maury Terry’s ex-wife, who took her to the site of one of the Berkowitz’s murders on their first date because he was so obsessed with the case, that it was there he first kissed her.
This is how Didion ends her reflections:
Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on “Midnight Confessions” and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.
Didion’s account, as someone who lived in Hollywood and was in Sharon Tate’s social circle at the time of the murders, was the first intimate look I had into the Manson murders when I first read The White Album at the age of 19. It is also one of the few instances in pop culture that mentions almost nothing of cults or satanism or mind control. Didion did, as a reporter, become close to Linda Kasabian, who was present at the murders, but still she never sensationalized the story. It remains, at least in her telling, somewhat distant, but still human.
As a crime against famous, affluent, beautiful white people by members of a white countercultural group, the murder of Sharon Tate and the guests at her house have become a tentpole of American conspiracy theory culture. Maury Terry became interested in Charles Manson via the Children, the satanic cult that the supposed associates of David Berkowitz belonged to, based on — according to the documentary — evidence that one of the two Carr brothers had been a Scientologist, which (allegedly) has ties to a Satanic group called the Process Church of the Final Judgement, which splintered into the Family, aka the Manson Family. All of this is a relatively gymnastic game of hopscotch, but with the right conviction and a strong enough underlying narrative, anything could feel true.
Terry went on the talk show tour with his book for years until he finally got another break: a face to face meeting with Berkowitz himself, and then, finally, he was believed: the NYPD reopened the .44 Caliber Killer case, based on what Berkowitz had said on tape to Terry.
If you watch the interview from 1993 (it’s archived in full on Terry’s research website, oddly labeled under “Inside Addition” (also, enjoy the 1993 commercials and Bill O’Reilly)) you might notice that it is far from impartial journalism: Terry asks leading questions, starting with “would I be correct in stating that” and then presenting a theory from his book, to which Berkowitz nods and agrees but gives no further information. When he does give descriptions, Berkowitz’s descriptions seem to hone extremely close to what Terry’s book — which at this point had been in print for six years — claimed he had done, including the park in Yonkers where he allegedly met with his accomplices, who they were, and what had happened to the individuals that had died. But beyond that, Berkowitz gave nothing; no names of living persons, no other locations, no other victims, only what Terry had already learned or inferred, and Terry, for his part, lapped it up with gusto.
To Terry the interview was a final score of proof, but after the case was reopened a few years later, no new charges were brought forth, no new suspects identified. Some of the survivors of Berkowitz’s crimes believed Terry, if at least insofar as believing that Berkowitz didn’t act alone, but as the Satanic Panic cooled, so did interest in the case. Terry and Berkowitz were given one more chance in 1999 to talk, but the producers of the televised interview saw through the act, and that was the end of it. Terry put together a group of gumshoes — they’re the ones who keep his website up to date as they continue to search for more evidence of a conspiracy — and allowed the story to consume him, even if less and less people were listening.
That was not the only bad news for the conspiracy theory; in 1991 four men were convicted for killing Roy Radin, not over a cult-connected snuff film, but over the financing for the motion picture The Cotton Club. Many years later, after Terry’s death, the killer of Arlis Perry would finally be arrested; not a satanic ritualist, but the campus security guard who had claimed to find her body — he shot himself in the head when the police came to arrest him. When they searched his home, they found a copy of The Ultimate Evil.
Less than two months before Sons of Sam was released, HBO debuted the miniseries Q: Into the Storm, directed by Cullen Hoback. The majority of the show is a stranger-than-fiction dive into the lives of the men who run 8-chan, trying to identify who the real Q is (Hoback does figure it out, and the NYT confirmed it). The first episode, though, goes through the story of QAnon from the outside, meeting with the members of the conspiracy theory who go to Trump rallies and post analysis online of the cryptic “drops.” One interview stuck out to me, with former columnist Liz Crokin. She says “Literally nothing would surprise me. If you tell me that aliens are real or the Earth’s flat or whatever…”
Hoback interjects, “you wouldn’t be surprised if the Earth was flat?”
Crokin raises her eyebrows. “I expose people that literally rape and eat babies. If that is able to exist in this world, anything is possible.”
The mistreatment of children is not an original accusation from QAnon, we have already seen it with Satanic Ritual Abuse, an experience that, according to Michelle Remembers and its copycats, occurs in childhood before being promptly buried in the subconscious and then reemerging via hypnosis therapy in adulthood that is administered, ideally, by the author of Michelle Remembers, Lawrence Pazder. Later, therapists and psychiatrists, such as the infamous Kee MacFarlane, would use leading questions and manipulation to misdiagnose hundreds of children as victims of satanic abuse. MacFarlane, for example, would confidently claim that 360 children at the McMartin preschool were victims of horrible assault, without any physical evidence.
At its root, the Satanic Panic was a result of both long-held antisemitic canards like Blood Libel but also a reaction to women’s liberation and the counterculture, the dissolution of the nuclear family and so-called American values. It was, in short, a reaction to a jingle-jangle madness, a center that was not holding (to paraphrase Yeats but also another Didion essay). The Satanic Panic was a story being told in order to revive what seemed to be dying: the perfect America needed to be saved or else it would all go to hell. We all needed to experience what the young Michelle (allegedly) does at the end of her horrific tribulations in Michelle Remembers: to see the light of the pure Virgin Mary and get right with God.
QAnon, however, is a much less religious movement. There are performances of religion: invocations of Satan in Hollywood, the ever-present antisemitism, that shaman praying in the Senate chamber during January 6, the typical American conservative Christianity that is less about going to Church and more about performing a certain type of person: patriarchal, fearful, violent, heterosexual, etc.
QAnon calls its final act a Great Awakening, a term taken from four previous moments of American Christian history. This time, however, we will not see people rush into revival tents but (once again) unto the Capital building and oust whatever elites are deemed to be traitors. That, or some secret dossiers will be unsealed and the Clintons and Tom Hanks will be arrested and sent to a Gulag, I am not sure. This is their story that they are trying to revive, what Q needs to live, the sermon in the chaos of diversity and progress and financial upheaval: the world that you live in has not actually abandoned you. The people who are starting to claim some power don’t actually deserve it, and you’ll get it back. Trust the plan.
This QAnon story is, in a way, fascism, and I do not want this digression to come across as though I think that Maury Terry, who we left back in 1999 being fed lines by the most notorious serial killer in New York history, is a fascist.
What I do think, though, is that we ought to pity him.
What story was Maury Terry telling, in order to live? The way Sons of Sam frames it, it was all that kept him alive, even as he drank more and more and smoked constantly until his heart gave out in 2015. Why was he never satisfied with what he found? Perhaps it was because he was ignored by his own boss when he tried to report the truth about riots and brutality, or because when he saw New York in the violent and tumultuous 1970s he wasn’t a journalist, but working as a writer for IBM, and this was a way out. We don’t know. Maybe he didn’t.
But the story he tried to tell was this: David Berkowitz didn’t stalk the streets of the Bronx and Queens and Brooklyn several times over the course of thirteen months, firing a .44 pistol into the heads of 13 people, killing six women, with no motive at all. He did it because he was told to, because he was part of a plan that stretched over decades and across the entire continent, from California to North Dakota to Yonkers. That his actions would be the final sacrifice to darkness, and that he would be a part of it, that his capture would ensure the safety of the rest of his coven of murderers. Maybe he only killed a few of the victims, maybe he was completely set up, but he knows the consequences of talking, and he has kept his vows and maybe if you, Maury Terry, are intrepid enough, you can untangle the whole grisly thing, and free his soul and let those poor kids whose blood has littered the streets of New York rest in peace.
writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.
Conspiracy theories are often described as pipelines by those who teach about them: you start somewhere seemingly innocent — liking a meme that mocks feminism or queer identity, perhaps — and through online algorithms and communities slowly slip into more and more radicalization until there’s no way up. I think this model works for some experiences, but for people like Maury Terry and, I think, for some people in QAnon — people who are always paranoid, or always looking for an answer, for a narrative that makes it all make sense — the conspiracy is more of an endless maze of doors and tunnels, with each turn revealing a new clue, a new idea, but never the answer or a sense of satisfaction, just more turns and shifts and moves, further and deeper in. After a while these are not the movements of an intrepid explorer but of a desperate person, an addict, not even remembering that there is a way out of the maze, only focused on the next turn, the next clue, the next break. It is a story that never ends, a pinboard that fills up with so much red string it becomes a knit blanket that still unravels at a single touch.
And so, maybe — we shouldn’t enter the maze at all.
This isn’t to say that stories don’t matter, or that we shouldn’t tell them. I adore the kismet moments of my life, the things that make my relationships, my home, the days and hours feel full. What I am saying — and what I have come to understand, when comparing these two people in Joan Didion writing the White Album and Maury Terry in Sons of Sam, is that those stories and connections should weave themselves and be read when they are ready. To force the meaning, to create the sentimentality, to look at the chaos and the trouble and the maddening things in the world and try to make it make sense is a door to the maze, and sometimes we have to accept that in 1976 a man started a killing spree because he wanted to do it. The truth is not meant to be satisfying, but accepting it can be. Not accepting it, as we have and will likely continue to see in this country, will only lead to your own ruin.
Perhaps, sometimes, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. But we also need to live so that we can have stories to tell.
Further Reading
If you do want a really great take on the Manson murders, I cannot stress enough how much I love Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This podcast, which has an entire season dedicated to Charles Manson’s Hollywood. The episode about the murders themselves are hard to stomach, so please proceed with caution.
If you want to read more about the Satanic Panic, Satan’s Silence is the go-to book on the McMartin case, as well as We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s.
I would also be remiss not to include the excellent You’re Wrong About episodes on Michelle Remembers.
You can read the entirety of Joan Didion’s essay The White Album here. I can’t find a decent copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but if you can, I highly recommend that, too.
Trust the Plan is probably the best place to start with reading on QAnon, though I did enjoy Pastels and Pedophiles, which talks about some of the women in the movement.
