‘Son of Sam’ Mourns Death Of Pen Pal Jimmy Breslin
Image by Wikipedia
David Berkowitz extended his condolences to the family of the late Jimmy Breslin – four decades after the notorious butcher called himself the “Son of Sam” in a letter to the New York tabloid columnist.
“I wish to extend my condolences to his family at their loss,” he wrote to the letter of a local newspaper in the upstate penitentiary where he is serving a life sentence.
Berkowitz terrorized New York City between 1976 and 1977, killing six people and wounding eight others. His main target was young women, whom he claimed his neighbor’s dog had instructed him to go after.
“Mr. Breslin, sir, don’t think that because you haven’t heard from me for a while that I went to sleep. No, rather, I am still here. Like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest; anxious to please Sam. I love my work,” he wrote Breslin in one letter, in which he also self-identified as a “rapist and suffocator of young women.”
Breslin died in March, at the ripe age of 87, after having written columns in Newsday, the New York Post and New York Daily News in his storied career as a city newspaperman.
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
