David Berkowitz

For a year beginning in July 1976, a gunman stalked New York City, shooting young couples in parked cars and women walking home at night. He killed six people and wounded seven, and he taunted police and the newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin with letters signed "Son of Sam." The city was gripped by fear; women dyed their hair because early victims had long brown hair. In August 1977 police arrested David Berkowitz, a twenty-four-year-old postal worker from Yonkers, after a parking ticket placed his car near the final shooting.

He was born Richard David Falco on June 1, 1953, in Brooklyn, at 4:52 in the afternoon, the time on his birth record, and was adopted as an infant by Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz. His Ascendant has only just crossed into Scorpio, a sign associated with secrecy and intensity.

Four planets fall in Gemini, the Sun, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter, and all four are in the eighth house, which in traditional astrology covers death, crisis and what is shared or taken between people. Gemini is restless and verbal. His letters became part of the case, full of strange imagery and taunts, and the press seized on every one. His Moon in Aquarius is in the third house, the house of messages and correspondence.

His adoptive mother died of cancer when he was fourteen, and he later learned that his birth mother had given him up. He served in the Army, including a posting in South Korea, and returned to New York increasingly isolated. After his arrest he said he had been commanded to kill by a demon speaking through a neighbor's dog, a claim he later said was invented.

Saturn and Neptune sit together in Libra just behind the Ascendant in the twelfth house, and Pluto in Leo is in the tenth. Berkowitz pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 1978 to six consecutive terms of twenty-five years to life. The case led New York to pass the first "Son of Sam law," meant to stop criminals from profiting from books or films about their crimes; versions of it spread to other states.

In prison he became an evangelical Christian and has said he is deeply sorry for the harm he caused. He has been denied parole many times. Relatives of the people he killed have spoken against his release at parole hearings.

The chart's concentration of planets in the eighth house is the feature astrologers most often point to, but the case is remembered for the people he killed: Donna Lauria, Christine Freund, Virginia Voskerichian, Alexander Esau, Valentina Suriani and Stacy Moskowitz.