Son of Sam Friend Touts Innocence to Bronx Victim as Netflix Readies New Doc

Nearly half a century after the ‘Son of Sam’ murders, a bizarre confrontation at a suburban library reminds New York of the enduring echoes of its most infamous killing spree.

If the 1970s conjure images of a gritty, fear-ridden New York City, nothing summons those days quite like the “Son of Sam.” The summer of 1976 was a season of dread: a .44-caliber revolver, anonymous taunting letters, and the city held captive by a killer’s whim. Nearly fifty years on, that era was unexpectedly resurrected in the quiet Valley Cottage Library, forty miles north of the city, when Wendy Savino—once among the first to bleed from David Berkowitz’s gun—was accosted by a man bearing news from her assailant: that Berkowitz “didn’t do it.”

The incident, reported on June 20th, might seem trifling—a septuagenarian woman, a library foyer, and a man with curious loyalties. Yet the details border on the uncanny. Frank DeGennaro, a retired Bronx school principal, now casting himself as Berkowitz’s confidant, approached Savino as she prepared to leave a routine event. Pausing her retreat, he offered unsolicited reassurance that the convicted murderer was “very upset” and, perhaps more astonishingly, claimed the now-born-again prosecution darling “didn’t do it.”

Savino, whose life was upended in the spring of 1976 by five point-blank shots, reacted with composed alarm; her report to local police followed swiftly. DeGennaro, for his part, regards his actions as benign, dismissing accusations that he intimidated or blocked her. The mélange of embarrassment and hubris is classic for a city weaned on notoriety. Still, it is telling that what so many New Yorkers consider ancient history is, for some, remarkably unsettled.

For the city, the renewed whirring of the “Son of Sam” machinery serves as a reminder of traumas seldom fully expunged. Authorities closed the official file on the killings with Berkowitz’s 1977 arrest; his subsequent confessions, coupled with ballistics evidence and contemporaneous writings, stitched a story both chilling and, in the end, satisfyingly closed. Yet Savino herself was never avenged in a court of law: the statute of limitations on attempted murder ran out before prosecutors could charge Berkowitz for her case, and small discrepancies in his various accounts cultivated fringe theories and occasional agitations for a competing narrative.

The present confrontation lays bare a peculiar strain in the city’s DNA—a fascination with infamy, intertwined with the capacity for urban myth to harden into counter-history. The ease with which figures like DeGennaro might slip from advocacy to intrusion chief among them. More broadly, Savino’s ordeal underscores a perennial challenge for New York: reconciling its sprawling, boosterish amnesia with the unquiet persistence of its traumas. This is no longer the bankrupt, crime-ridden metropolis of 1977; murder rates in the five boroughs now hover near post-war lows. But the city remains a stage for revisiting old wounds, sometimes in the most unexpected settings.

If the actual risk of violence has receded, the market for true crime has only ballooned. Indeed, DeGennaro’s approach comes just as Netflix prepares to stoke the coals with a forthcoming documentary, “Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes,” set for release on July 30th. The streaming behemoth has a canny eye for tales that linger in the public imagination, however morbid. For Savino and the other targets—six killed and eight wounded—the renewed exposure brings little comfort. It is not hard to imagine that New Yorkers, always wary of being cast as extras in their own tragedies, may view such productions with skepticism.

Psychologically, the dynamic is hard to miss. The city’s appetite for redemption stories—be it Berkowitz’s evangelism from prison or a principal’s quest for connection—seldom sits comfortably alongside victims’ need for closure. Figures like DeGennaro, who choose to correspond with notorious convicts, exemplify a peculiar form of New York do-gooder: at once quixotic and naïve, their personal crusades operating parallel to, but never quite intersecting with, the desires of those most grievously harmed.

The city’s obsession with notoriety

This episode is hardly unique by American standards. Other cities, from Los Angeles to Boston, have witnessed efforts at mythologization and victim confrontation long after a crime scene fades from the headlines. The “Zodiac” remains a cottage industry on the West Coast; the Boston Strangler’s legend refuses to die. Yet New York’s capacities for spectacle and reinvention—the ability to swap remembrance for rumour, and vice versa—bode for an especially buoyant afterlife for its criminal folklore.

Globally, the phenomenon is unlikely to abate. Some European countries, such as Germany, tightly restrict interviews and correspondence with notorious prisoners; the United States, by contrast, has a robust, sometimes unruly, tradition of public engagement—from podcasts to confessional paperbacks to prison ministry. Even the British tabloids, arguably the world’s most indefatigable engines of notoriety, struggle to keep pace with America’s blending of penitence, entertainment, and unresolved guilt.

Still, the pattern here is discomforting. The transformation of suffering into conversational fodder, spliced with earnest pleas for alternative truths, often does little except revisit wrongs best left to rest. The briefest brush with infamy, as this library fracas shows, retains a potency out of all proportion to its actual bearing on public safety or justice.

In our view, the indignity visited upon Savino—and even DeGennaro’s embarrassment—attests not to a need for more documentaries, but for greater reserve. New York’s appetite for notoriety has long been a mixed blessing: it fuels its culture and its resilience, but can foster casual cruelties and a penchant for half-digested legend. There is a point, we reckon, at which fascination tips into absurdity, and public discourse is worse for it.

The city survives, as it always does, inclined to remember—and, sometimes, to misremember. Yet the momentary unease outside a bookshelves’ alcove is a reminder: some ghosts should be left to slumber, unconsoled and unexhumed. ■