Hey, remember back when we used to read books? I loved True Crime books. Now that I barely read, I am so hooked on True Crime docs that it’s basically the main thing I use my streaming services for. The genre has just gotten so damn good.
The latest is the docuseries The Sons of Sam: Descent Into Darkness and it has found a new narrative for something I thought I knew everything about.
You may also already know much about that summer of 1977 in New York City. The entire city was terrorized by a serial killer. His weapon was a .44 and his targets were generally couples parked in their cars on lover’s lanes.
The city was mad, not only at the killer, but also at the cops. The force was under tremendous public pressure to solve the case. To make things worse, the self-named Son of Sam killer was sending taunting handwritten letters to cops and journalists.
When a pudgy guy from Yonkers, David Berkowitz, was arrested, the cops were now heroes. And the mayor. And all the people who’d been under fire. Berkowitz gleefully confessed.
But a journalist and eventual author of Ultimate Evil, Maury Terry, smelled a rat. Why didn’t Berkowitz look like any of the police sketches? What about his references to Satanism and the fact that there was a secluded place in his area where Satanists killed dogs and plotted freaky stuff? Deadly stuff.
Terry became so obsessed with proving that Berkowitz had not acted alone, that he spent decades uncovering what seem to be very relevant facts that he said the initial investigators either ignored or dismissed, they were in such a hurry to close the case.
The first episode is a good refresher with lots of archival footage and news clips. Even if you know the “original” story, don’t skip it.
As the series progresses, the focus becomes less on Berkowitz and more on Terry’s Quixotic attempts to dig into the minutiae of Berkowitz’s every word he had said and written. What seemed like gibberish to others became important clues to Terry.
The series does a good job of balancing the points of view that this guy just became unhinged because of his quest, and others who knew him well and swear that he was onto something big.
Can you be both a crackpot and a good investigator? Maury Terry was maybe both.
Filmmaker Joshua Zeman (CROPSEY, MURDER MOUNTAIN), knows the genre well and he expertly weaves the news footage with current interviews and actor Paul Giamatti’s first-person narration (off camera, of course) of Terry’s own words. You could argue that the series didn’t need to be 4 hours long – there are places that seem repetitive within the same episodes, but I watched it all, non-stop. If this is your kind of thing, you’ll like it, too.
The Sons of Sam is currently streaming on Netflix | 3 out of 4 Stars | Reviewed by Kyle Osborne
