Dead Men Walking (True Crime) by Bill Wallace Read Free Book Online Page B

‘Son of Sam’.
    It was not over. On 26 June, in Queens, Salvatore Lupo and Judith Placido were shot and wounded in their car. Five weeks later, on Sunday 31 July, just over a year since the murder of Donna Lauria, ‘Son of Sam’ claimed his last victims. Stacy Moskowitz was shot and died later in hospital while her boyfriend Bobby Violante was hit twice in the face, but survived.
    This time, however, Sam committed a fatal error. When he returned to his Ford Galaxy which had been parked in front of a fire hydrant, he found he had been given a ticket for the violation. Angrily ripping it from his windscreen, he threw it to the ground. However, he was seen doing this by a woman who when she saw him again later, thought that he might have something up his sleeve resembling a gun. She informed the police who traced the ticket and ran a check on the vehicle, coming up with the name David Berkowitz, a man living in the New York suburb of Yonkers.
    On 10 August, officers waited outside Berkowitz’s apartment building at 35 Pine Street. A man walked out of the building towards the Ford Galaxy and climbed in. Before he could start the engine, how-ever, a police officer approached the car from the rear, pointing a gun at Berkowitz and screaming ‘Freeze!’
    The man turned slowly, a smile of acceptance on his face. He was ordered out of the car and told to put his hands on the roof.
     
    ‘Now that I’ve got you,’ said the officer, ‘who have I got?’
    ‘You know,’ the man replied in a soft voice.
    ‘No, I don’t. You tell me.’ Said the officer.
     
    He paused and, the smile still on his face, laughed, ‘I’m Sam. David Berkowitz’.
     

     
    Peter Sutcliffe – The Yorkshire Ripper
     
    Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was at last locked up at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight on 22 May 1981, bringing to an end five years of terror in which he had killed thirteen women and left seven others for dead. The women of Yorkshire could again feel safe on the streets of their county’s towns and cities. For the Ripper, however, it was the beginning of a torrid time.
    At his trial he had been found to be sane but soon after arriving at Parkhurst, he was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. However, all attempts to have him removed to a secure psychiatric facility were blocked. On 10 January, he was attacked and seriously wounded in prison by a thirty-five-year-old Glasgow criminal, James Costello. Costello plunged a broken coffee cup twice into the left side of Sutcliffe’s face, leaving wounds that required thirty stitches.
    In March, 1984, he was finally transferred to Broadmoor Hospital under Section 47 of the Mental Health Act, but twelve years later he was the victim of another vicious attack when Paul Wilson, a convicted robber, attempted to strangle him with the electrical flex of a pair of headphones. He was saved only by the intervention of two other inmates.
    In March 1997, he was attacked again, by fellow inmate Ian Kay. This time, he lost the sight of his left eye and his right was seriously damaged.
    Sutcliffe could conceivably be released in the near future – his name was noticably absent from a 2006 Home Office list of prisoners who should never be released.
    He seemed an unlikely candidate for a serial killer, a quiet man who appeared devoted to his wife Sonia. Born in 1946 in Bingley, to John and Kathleen Sutcliffe, he was something of a disappointment to his parents and especially to his sports-mad father who wanted young Peter to succeed at sport. Unfortunately, he failed in that as well as in his school work and left school, aged fifteen.
    He worked in a number of jobs over the next few years, but seemed to settle down at the age of twenty when he met Sonia Szurma, a girl of Czech parentage. In 1974, they married and all seemed well apart from the fact that Sonia began to suffer a series of miscarriages. After a while they were devastated by the news that she would never be able