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John Diel
Christine Freund and her fiancee, John Diel, were preparing to drive to a dance hall after they had seen the movie “Rocky.” At 12:40, three gunshots penetrated the car. In panic, Diel drove away for help. He suffered only minory injuries but Christine Freund was hit two times. She died several hours later at the hospital. Neither of them has seen the attacker.
Ballistics confirmed, the caliber was .44 fired from a Bulldog. At this time, police recognized, the cases could “might” be connected. The press releases confirmed the caliber but not the model of the weapon and the suspicion, a group of attackers may targeted young women with long dark hair. (The obviously forgot, Denaro was a man and so was Diel, they also forgot Michelle Forman, the case was not connected then and the fact, that Jody Valenti was blond. But hey, 2 out of 8 known facts right is not a bad result for NY police hunting serial killers, isn’t it?)
Joanne Lomino
Donna DeMasi and Joanne Lomino were walking home from a movie, when they were approached by a man, they later described as 5'9", tall and slender, with dirty blond hair and dark eyes. The man wore a knee-long raincoat reminding of military surplus gear. The girlds were startled but not afraid, rather they suspected, the man to be lost and in need for directions. Indeed, he asked in a high-pitched voice “Can you tell me, how to get…” but then he produced a weapon and shot each of them once and when they fell injured to the ground several times more. He also stroke an appartment building. Then he ran away. A neighbor, hearing the gunshots, rushed by and saw the perpetrator running away, a gun in his left hand.
DeMasi was ultimately rendered paraplegic.
The whole description indicates, Berkowitz was under high stress and his fire patterns, inclusive hitting a building while shooting at two victims basically laying at his feet, has some reminiscence to an outbreak.
Attacked on October 23, 1976
Location: Forest Hills Gardens, Queens (New York)
Age: 38
She was the owner of the Beetle in which Carl Denaro was shot. According to the police reports from the time, she drove the car back to the bar where she had met Denaro earlier at the party (in fact, they knew each other from college, which raises some questions about the ages).
Denaro had shoulder length hair and police suspected, the shooter may have mistaken him for a girl. However, despite a lot of similar details, police didn’t made the connection to the earlier shooting of Lauria-Valenti. In fact, it appears unlikely, police would have driven the effort, they had, if Keenan’s father wouldn’t have been anything else but a 20 year veteran on New York’s police force. But still, police officer weren’t able to look over the borders of the Buroughs and so, the cases were worked by different parts of the NYPD which proved unable to talk to each other.
According to some sources, he doubted, Berkowitz was the shooter, but in the reports from the time, he claimed, he didn’t see the shooter at all.
Attacked on December 24, 1975.
Age: 15
Berkowitz confessed to two knife attacks on Christmas Eve of 1975. The second victim was seriously enough injured to put her in a hospital.
Berkowitz’s first victim was unknown and attacked on December 24, 1975.
Berkowitz confessed to two attacks on women on Christmas Eve of 1975. Both victims survived, the first one was obviously not injured and never filed a complaint. Thus, she was never identified.
The attacks from December 24, 1975, both unsuccessful, were allegedly the reason for Berkowitz to change later to his signature weapon, a .44 Bulldog revolver. But as so often, this appears to be only half the truth. Berkowitz suffered from a number of mental “defects”, not just one, so his reactions always mirror some kind of mix, not just one single reason.
Klausner points out in his book that David’s state of mind in November was very bleak when he wrote to his father in Florida: “It’s cold and gloomy here in New York, but that’s okay because the weather fits my mood – gloomy. Dad, the world is getting dark now. I can feel it more and more. The people, they are developing a hatred for me. You wouldn’t believe how much some people hate me. Many of them want to kill me. I don’t even know these people, but still they hate me. Most of them are young. I walk down the street and they spit and kick at me. The girls call me ugly and they bother me the most. The guys just laugh. Anyhow, things will soon change for the better.”
This letter was a real cry for help. After writing the letter, he locked himself in his tiny apartment for almost a month, leaving only for food. He wrote wacky things on the walls with a marker: “In this hole lives the Wicked King. Kill for my Master. I turn children into Killers.”
Around Christmas of 1975, David later claimed to psychiatrists that he was giving into the demons with the hopes that they would stop tormenting him if he did what they asked. On Christmas Eve, he was in a crisis mentally and emotionally. In the early evening he took a large hunting knife and drove around for hours looking for a young female victim. The demons would let him know when he found the right woman.
That night, he had returned to Co-Op City where he and Nat had shared the solitary apartment after Pearl’s death. A woman was leaving a grocery store. Suddenly, David’s demons ordered him to kill her. “She has to be sacrificed,” they told him.
He plunged the hunting knife into her back once and then again. He was shocked at her reaction. “I stabbed her and she didn’t do anything. She just turned and looked at me.” Then she began to scream and he ran away. Later, police tried unsuccessfully to verify this story.
Then he saw another young woman. He hid the knife and attacked her from behind, stabbing her in the head. Fifteen-year-old Michelle Forman was seriously wounded, but she fought back. Her screaming scared David off and she was able to make it to one of the apartment buildings for help. She had six wounds from the hunting knife.
The attack on Michelle pacified David’s demons for the time being. He was relaxed and went out for a burger and fries.
(Source: trutv.com)
Robert Violante, 20, attacked at 2:35 a.m.
Stacy Moscowitz and her friend were sitting in her boyfriend’s, Robert Violante’s, car, kissing (personally, I suspect, what other couples did too, which is the reason the noticed the attacker approaching, but in this case, it was admitted by the boyfriend). A man approached till three feet of the car and fired several shots, hitting both victims in the head. Robert Violante survived but lost one eye and most of the vision on the other one.
This crime scene produced the biggest number of witnesses yet, including one direct eye witness who was not an intended victim. Tommy Zaino was parked with his girlfriend three car lengths ahead of Violante’s car. He caught a glimpse on the killer and saw in his rear mirror the crim actually happen.
Even more telling was a woman, parked with her boyfriend on the other side of the park, seeing a man running she described as white male with a cheap nylon wig and then entering a light colored small vehicle in which he drove away quickly. She couldn’t remember the first two letters from the plate but was sure, the other were either 4-GUR or 4-GVR.
Berkowitz would later claim that the shooter in the Moskowitz-Violante case was a friend of John Carr, who had arrived from North Dakota for the occasion. Assitionally, Berkowitz would claim that after his Ford Galaxy, license plate 561 XLB, received a parking ticket at 2:05 a.m. for being parked too close to a fire hydrant near the city park, he tried to persuade two other cult members at the scene to postpone or relocate the crime. Berkowitz claimed his suggestion was overruled, and he was ordered to remain in the area to make sure no police were nearby.
In the last shooting before David Berkowitz was nabbed, a couple was ambushed as they sat kissing near a park in Brooklyn on July 31, 1977. Bobby Violante was partially blinded; his girlfriend, Stacy Moskowitz, succumbed to a bullet wound to her head two days later. But in his rush to find fresh victims, Berkowitz got sloppy: He parked his Ford Galaxy at a hydrant, drawing the parking ticket that ultimately led to his capture.