The Man Hunt For Son of Sam Goes On

CRIME The Man Hunt For Son of Sam Goes On

Along with the killer, fear and suspicion stalk a city

The lonely killer, cunningly carrying out his crazed sexual fantasies by coldly stalking female victims and killing them in the night, is a hackneyed figure of cheap thrill movies and crime pulps. But in New York, his existence is a chilling reality, terrifying hundreds of thousands of young women in and around the city, enraging public officials, and both fascinating and frustrating one of the nation's most sophisticated police forces. The elusive "Son of Sam," who skillfully wields a lethal .44-cal. Bulldog revolver, struck for the eighth time last week, slaying Stacy Moskowitz, 20, and blinding Robert Violante, also 20, as the two sat in a parked car at 2:35 a.m. and watched a full moon illuminate Brooklyn's Gravesend Bay.

Stacy, a popular, outgoing young woman who worked as a secretary for a shoe firm in the Empire State Building, was Son of Sam's sixth murder victim. Robert, a polite, conservatively dressed fellow who had just applied for a construction job with Con Ed, was the seventh person to survive bullet wounds in the killer's yearlong series of attacks.

The spreading fear drastically altered New York's uninhibited courting habits and added a new travail to an already painful summer in Job City. The metropolis, which is still only a few legalistic steps ahead of fiscal insolvency, has suffered through a nightmarish blackout and looting, a bloody bus hijacking and last week two bombings by Puerto Rican independence terrorists. One man was killed and seven people injured, while other bomb scares over two days forced the evacuation of more than 100,000 workers from their buildings.

If terrorists might well pose a greater potential danger to more people, there was much more apprehension of the threat of random shots in the dark from the lone gunman. He has haunted lovers' lanes, attacked couples coming from strobe-lighted discotheques, even opened fire at a pair of girls on a house porch and shot another as he passed her on a street. Twice he taunted police with notes (one left at the scene of a double murder, one sent to Columnist Jimmy Breslin). He has phoned precinct headquarters to say which neighborhood he planned to hit next. But he was neither caught nor cowed, and an aroused modern police force looked no more effective in preventing this type of crude terror than Scotland Yard in dealing with Jack the Ripper's preannounced plans to kill London prostitutes in 1888. He killed half a dozen and was never caught.

The city's anger was most personally expressed by Stacy's anguished but controlled mother, Neysa Moskowitz, who said: "An animal like this has to be caught. I hope he suffers for the rest of his life." More directly to the killer, she pleaded: "I hope you get caught, but if you don't, just stop it. If you don't get caught, just stop it." Mayor Abraham Beanie ordered the rehiring of 136 laid-off policemen. In all, 75 detectives and 225 uniformed cops worked full time on the case, while another 700 officers volunteered to spend their off-duty hours helping. But while top officers professed optimism, some lower-ranking detectives saw the huge manpower effort as window dressing. They consider the chances of seizing Son of Sam as minimal, unless, however subconsciously, he wants to be caught, is overtaken before he can flee a shooting site or some citizen provides a revealing tip.

Whether properly alarmed, lured by reward money ($31,000 and climbing) or pursuing twisted ends of their own, New Yorkers overwhelmed special police telephone lines. The main task-force center near Shea Stadium sometimes logged more than 100 calls an hour; the telephone company counted some 1,000 other hourly callers who found the lines busy. Fanned by frenzied tabloid coverage in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, including a cliched open letter to Son of Sam and a sensational--and false--report that the Mafia had joined the hunt because the killings were hurting mob-controlled dating bars and discos,* an air of suspicion spread through the city.

"It's incredible," reported a police official. "Women are naming their husbands, their ex-boy friends. People are calling in about their co-workers." Police were given no fewer than 5,000 names to check out by an astonishing number of residents who thought they knew sexually inadequate young men capable of turning their frustration into murder. Dozens of men phoned to tell police they were the hunted Son of Sam, sometimes asking to be picked up at a specific address. With sirens screaming, squad cars raced to the sites, where no one waited.

Lacking manpower to follow up all leads, harassed police put instinctive priorities on them. They sought information on more than 1,500 men, placing the most likely suspects under surveillance. TIME Correspondent John Tompkins reports that at the time of the latest shooting, detectives were tailing twelve top suspects. Remarkably, seven or eight were present or former cops; one was a former FBI agent. The killer showed he was familiar with police work in his note to Breslin; he also fires his .44 in the police-approved two-handed, legs-apart crouch. "We're dealing with someone with training, a policeman, a former MP, an FBI agent," insists one veteran detective. Ironically, as the killings continue, the clearing of suspects gets easier. Anyone being followed in one place at the time of a shooting elsewhere or who can prove that he was not at any of the murder scenes at the fatal hour can be scratched from police lists--as were the top twelve last week. A large number of ex-cops, laid off in New York's budget cutbacks or fired from the force, were checked out early in the case.

The hunt has none of the excitement of TV's familiar police dramas. At the control center at 109th Precinct headquarters in Queens, the city-wide task force mostly answers telephones, hears out citizens who bring their information personally, dispatches teams to the tedious job of trying to determine if the informants' suspicions have a solid base.

Nervous and shy, a freckle-faced woman in her 20s walked into the offices and told a typical story to police that TIME Correspondent James Willwerth overheard. Said she: "Well, I was in The Assembly [a Bayside, Queens, dating bar] about a year ago. It was a Friday, you know, and I started to talk to this guy named Eric. He had real burning eyes, you know? He kept staring at me. I asked him why he didn't dance. He said he hated people. He asked me to go out with him, and I finally said I would. At the end of the evening, I told him I didn't want to see him again. He was strange. Another time I was on Staten Island, going to a party. I saw him. I said, 'What are you doing here?' He said, 'I'm watching you.' It was very weird."

There are, of course, thousands of stories like that in any large city. In the search for Son of Sam, police could rely only on hunches honed by years of experience in deciding which reports warranted legwork. A man seen dancing to music from a portable radio at one of the victim's graves in a Bronx cemetery one night last week obviously merited study.

Police have also checked out the employees of stores and companies with names like Sam, Samson or Samsonite. Cops have minutely studied each of the crimes for clues to the murderer's methods and motivation. All the victims were young, from 17 to 26. Although three young men were shot, each was with a woman and seemed incidental to the killer's apparent sexual focus. Six of the eight attacks were on parked cars, the gunman approaching from the rear and firing into the front passenger window. Six of the shootings took place on weekend nights. One was as early as 7:30 p.m., the others after midnight. Ballistics tests helped conclude that all eight assaults were almost certainly the work of the same .44 revolver, an easily concealed, short-barreled gun that fires with a loud roar, a big kick and a deadly effect.

Yet the variations have been broad enough to make the killer unpredictable. While six of the women victims had fairly long dark hair, three did not. Stacy's was blonde. Only one of the parked cars was in a traditional romantic lovers' lane; the rest were on quiet residential streets. The geographical pattern first centered on neighboring parts of Queens and The Bronx, but then spread to Brooklyn, alarming all of New York City. Since Son of Sam's letter to Breslin was postmarked in New Jersey, the killer seems highly mobile.

Few witnesses and survivors have had more than a fleeting look at the gunman, and their impressions of his appearance have varied confusingly. He is known to be white, about 25 to 33 years old, between 5 ft. 7 in. and 5 ft. 11 in. tall and well built. Police last week updated what they considered to be their most reliable artist's sketch after one witness, identified only as "Tommy Z," said he was parked with a date in front of Stacy's car, saw the gunman's approach in his rear-view mirror and watched helplessly in terror as the man fired. (The earlier sketch was sent out to 160,000 gun and ammunition dealers across the country; the sketch is taped on the dashboards of many police patrol cars.) Tommy Z believes he can identify the assailant if the man is caught.

Other witnesses claim they saw a gunman jump into a mustard-colored small car and speed away after the seventh assault. A yellow Volkswagen was seen near the site of last week's attack No. 8. Yet more than 25,000 yellow Volkswagens are registered in New York State, and police have little confidence that state computers can narrow the number of owners who also roughly fit the killer's age range and physical description. The job of tracing ownership of the 28,000 Bulldog revolvers made by Charter Arms Corp. of Stratford, Conn., over the past five years is similarly hopeless; at least 600 were reported stolen before reaching retail outlets, and police estimate at least half of the rest were sold illegally or without their sale being recorded.

So far, the killer's notes have been teasers to investigators, revealing little. The message to Breslin showed that Son of Sam seemed to enjoy his grisly game with police. "Please inform all the detectives working the case that I wish them the best of luck," he wrote. "Keep 'em digging, drive on, think positive, get off your butts, knock on coffins, etc. Upon my capture I promise to buy all the guys working on the case a new pair of shoes if I can get up the money." The Son of Sam label lost some of its mystery when police confirmed they had coined it. The killer had claimed in his first note to police that he was directed by a vague father figure he called Sam.

As the investigators grappled futilely last week, police patrols cruised parks and lovers' lanes, noting license-plate numbers of all cars seen in such areas after midnight. Police have placed mannequins in some parked cars to simulate necking couples; the use of live decoys was considered too dangerous. Vigilante action was spreading. When a false rumor spread that a man seized by police in a car in Brooklyn for carrying two pistols was Son of Sam, angry crowds swarmed out of bar and threatened to attack the gunman. Police sped away with him for his own protection. The bitter yearning for revenge was widespread. A candy-store owner asked, "You know what I'd do with him?' Then answered: "I'd cut both his legs off and say to the police, 'When you give me the reward, I'll bring the rest of the body.' "

Meanwhile the lone killer was forcing a huge city's young women to shun their usual dating places, to roll up their long hair, to travel only in groups. All this provided another painful reminder of a mass society's vulnerability to the whims and torments of the oddballs in its midst.

*Federal investigators scoff at the report that Godfather Carmine Galante, 67, the nation's most powerful Mafia leader, has ordered mobsters into the hunt. He has other worries. He was on crutches last week because rival gangsters assaulted him in Brooklyn as a warning to keep his fingers put of the gambling casinos soon to open in Atlantic City. Then FBI agents served him with a subpoena that requires he appear this week before a Miami federal grand jury probing mob infiltration of businesses there.

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