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How ethnic profiling led to the arrest of a serial murderer
Everyone’s heard of the Son of Sam serial murder case, but how many know that the case was solved by means of what we would today call ethnic profiling? A friend of mine recently met Ed Zigo, the former Brooklyn homicide detective who broke the case back in 1977, and to whom she has a very distant family connection. He told her about a 1985 made-for-tv movie starring Martin Sheen, Out of the Darkness, on which he had served as a consultant. Here’s how the arrest happened, as Zigo told my friend, and as shown in the movie. After the latest Son of Sam murder takes place in Zigo’s own precinct in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, he and his fellow detectives get the idea of checking all parking summonses handed out within a 20 block radius of the murder site on the day of the murder. Zigo comes across a summons made out to a David Berkowitz of Yonkers. He says, “I know this neighborhood. Everyone here is Italian and Catholic. What is a Jew doing here?” A female detective says, “Jews and Italians date, you know,” but Zigo answers, “I want to check this out.” So he and his partner drive all the way up to Yonkers to Berkowitz’s apartment building. They find his car parked on the street, Zigo looks into it, and in the back seat he sees the butt of a rifle sticking out from a blanket; he enters the car and finds a mini arsenal in the back seat. He has his man. Though the movie doesn’t explain this, Berkowitz was planning a mass murder at the time he was arrested. Ironically, Berkowitz was adopted, so he may not have been born of Jewish parents, but the point still holds. Long familiarity with Bay Ridge, an instinct, told Zigo there was something about a Jewish name here that didn’t fit (even though two million Jews live in New York), so he drove to the other end of the city to pursue his hunch.
“Out of the Darkness” is a very good movie, filled with top-notch, human, realistic performances of the kind that Hollywood stopped providing after around 1990 when movies turned deliberately ugly, resentful, nihilistic, and incoherent. Martin Sheen is excellent. Also, there’s barely a single “super close-up” in the entire movie; we actually see the characters interrelating with each other in a shared physical environment instead of just each actor’s face filling the screen and staring fixedly into space, as is the rule in so many of today’s movies. The movie is a bit slow in spots as it focuses on Zigo’s family life as much as his police work, but it’s well worth seeing. Email entry |