David Berkowitz - Satanic Cult Claims

Satanic Cult Claims

In 1979, Berkowitz mailed a book about witchcraft to police in North Dakota. He had underlined several passages and written a few marginal notes, including the phrase: "Arliss Perry, Hunted, Stalked and Slain. Followed to Calif. Stanford University." The reference was to Arlis Perry, a 19-year-old North Dakota newlywed who had been murdered at Stanford on October 12, 1974. Her death, and the notorious abuse of her corpse in a Christian chapel on campus, was a widely reported case. Berkowitz mentioned the Perry attack in other letters, suggesting that he knew details of it from the perpetrator himself. Local police investigators interviewed him but "now believe he has nothing of value to offer" and the Perry case remains unsolved.

After his admission to Sullivan prison, Berkowitz began to claim that he had joined a Satanic cult in the spring of 1975. He had met some of its members at a party, and initially thought the group was involved only in occult activities such as séances and fortune telling; the group, however, gradually introduced him to drug use, sadism, crime and murder. Berkowitz states that he knew roughly two dozen core members in New York – the "twenty-two disciples of hell" mentioned in the Breslin letter – and that the group had ties across the U.S. in drug smuggling and other illegal activities.

In 1993, Berkowitz first made these claims known when he announced to the press that he had killed only three of the Son of Sam victims: Donna Lauria, Alexander Esau and Valentina Suriani. In this revised confession, Berkowitz says that there were other shooters involved and that he personally fired the gun only in the first attack (Lauria and Valenti, July 29 1976) and the sixth (Esau and Suriani, April 17, 1977). He says that he and several other cult members were involved in every incident by planning the events, providing early surveillance of the victims, and acting as lookouts and drivers at the crime scenes. Berkowitz states that he cannot divulge the names of most of his accomplices without putting his family directly at risk.

Among Berkowitz's unnamed associates was a female cult member who he claims fired the gun at the Denaro and Keenan: the victims survived, he said, because she was unfamiliar with the powerful recoil of a .44 Bulldog. Berkowitz declared that "at least five" cult members were at the scene of the Freund-Diel shooting, but the actual shooter was a prominent cult associate who had been brought in from outside New York with an unspecified motive – a cult member whom he identified only by his nickname, "Manson II". Another unnamed figure was the gunman in the Moskowitz-Violante case, a male cult member who had arrived from North Dakota for the occasion, also without explanation.

Berkowitz did name two of the cult members: John and Michael Carr. The two men were sons of the dog-owner Sam Carr and lived on nearby Wicker Street. Both of these other "sons of Sam" were long dead: John had been killed in an unsolved shooting in North Dakota in 1978, and Michael had been in a fatal car accident in 1979. Berkowitz claims that the actual perpetrator of the DeMasi-Lomino shooting was John Carr, and adds that a Yonkers police officer, also a cult member, was involved in this crime. He also claims that Michael Carr fired the shots at Lupo and Placido, adding that cult members had long wanted to kill someone at the Elephas disco because of its redolence of 19th century occultist Eliphas Levi.