The Ultimate Evil

The true-crime cult classic that inspired the Netflix docuseries The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness and a companion podcast, The Ultimate Evil follows journalist Maury Terry s decades-long investigation into the terrifying truth behind the Son of Sam murders.

On August 10, 1977, the NYPD arrested David Berkowitz for the Son of Sam murders that had terrorized New York City for over a year. Berkowitz confessed to shooting sixteen people and killing six with a .44 caliber Bulldog revolver, and the case was officially closed.

Journalist Maury Terry was suspicious of Berkowitz s confession. Spurred by conflicting witness descriptions of the killer and clues overlooked in the investigation, Terry was convinced Berkowitz didn t act alone. Meticulously gathering evidence for a decade, he released his findings in the first edition of The Ultimate Evil. Based upon the evidence he had uncovered, Terry theorized that the Son of Sam attacks were masterminded by a Yonkers-based cult that was responsible for other ritual murders across the country.

After Terry s death in 2015, documentary filmmaker Josh Zeman (Cropsey, The Killing Season, Murder Mountain) was given access to Terry s files, which form the basis of his docuseries with Netflix and a companion podcast. Taken together with The Ultimate Evil, which includes a new introduction by Zeman, these works reveal the stunning intersections of power, wealth, privilege, and evil in America from the Summer of Sam until today.

“If the details of the Son of Sam case have always left you wondering if there was more to it, then Terry’s in-depth book will satisfy your curiosity. The Ultimate Evil is a true-crime classic that details one of the most notorious serial killings of all time, connecting the dots to a larger conspiracy.”—Geeks of Doom

“This book isn’t just about Son of Sam...It’s about an author who drove himself into the ground trying to make sense of some of the most brutal crimes in American history. Is what he found true? That’s for you to ponder. But I will tell you, I wasn’t able to put this book down—and neither will you.”—Billy Jensen, **author of Chase Darkness with Me

Autorentext
Maury Terry was an award-winning investigative reporter whose work was prominently featured in both television and print media. He wrote for the Gannett newspaper chain, Vanity Fair, Gear, and Penthouse, among others. He reported on and coproduced nearly a dozen national TV specials about the Son of Sam conspiracy. Terry died in Yonkers, New York, in 2015.
 
Joshua Zeman has been at the forefront of the true crime genre for the past decade. He is the director of the critically acclaimed film Cropsey, the docuseries The Killing Season, and Murder Mountain.

Klappentext

"Featured in the Netflix documentary The Sons of Sam"--Cover.

Zusammenfassung
The true crime cult classic that inspired an upcoming Netflix documentary series and companion podcast, The Ultimate Evil follows journalist Maury Terry s terrifying investigation into the true evil behind the Son of Sam murders.

Leseprobe
Introduction by Joshua Zeman

I first learned of Maury Terry in the summer of 2008. At the time, I was directing my first documentary about five missing children and the man linked to their disappearances in my hometow of Staten Island, New York. My interest in the case was sparked by a local legend I’d heard years before about a boogeyman named Cropsey. According to the kids in our neighborhood, Cropsey was an escaped mental patient who lived in the tunnels beneath the old abandoned Willowbrook State School and came out late at night to snatch children off the street.
     For most of my childhood, Cropsey remained nothing more than a cautionary tale—until the summer of 1987. That was the summer I turned fifteen and Jennifer Schweiger, a twelve-year-old girl with Down syndrome, disappeared from our neighborhood. After more than six weeks of searching, her body was found on the grounds of the same Willowbrook State School. Though I didn’t know it back then, Willowbrook had a nefarious history. For decades, the “snake pit institution,” as Bobby Kennedy called it, had been warehousing hundreds of developmentally disabled children in a real-life house of horrors, until a 1972 exposО by Geraldo Rivera finally led to its closure. In the days following Jennifer’s discovery, the police arrested a man named Andre Rand. He wasn’t a mental patient, as the urban legend suggested, but a former orderly who often lived in a campsite on the school grounds. The police revealed that Rand was suspected in the disappearances of four other missing children going back to the early ’70s. For the kids on Staten Island, the legend of Cropsey had turned into something very real and truly terrifying.
     Eventually, Rand was sent to prison for the kidnapping of Jennifer Schweiger, and I moved away. In 2004, Rand returned to Staten Island to stand trial for another missing child, and I came back as well, now as an adult and a filmmaker, to find out what really happened to those disappearing children and to see if my childhood boogeyman was real. However, as I tried to reconcile one urban legend, I soon uncovered another—or, at least, what I thought was a legend.
     While interviewing Staten Island residents who had searched for Jennifer back in 1987, I documented rumor after rumor of “devil worshippers” who supposedly roamed the island’s woods and held ceremonies on Willowbrook’s grounds. At the time, Satanic Panic was sweeping the nation. In 1988, Geraldo Rivera, the man who sparked the school’s closure, would bring the hysteria to its frenzied peak with the highly sensationalized prime-time special Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground. I still believe most of those “sightings” were nothing more than devious teenagers who took an understandable pleasure in tweaking their parents’ anxiety. However, at some point during our filming, something happened. The stories began to change.
     The legends turned strangely specific as people told tales about a cult operating on the island, which was ultimately responsible for these missing children. Most intriguing, this cult was said to be connected to the infamous Son of Sam murders. Of course, I knew the story of David Berkowitz, the madman who claimed a demon dog had commanded him to kill couples in parked cars during the sweltering New York City summer of 1977. Considering my film was about both “childhood” and “adult” urban legends, I continued to dig deeper.
     Piecing together rumors of this so-called Son of Sam cult, I soon found a local reporter who could confirm a few errant facts—a name, a date, a local house that the police had looked into. He passed me on to an eccentric lawyer who only added credence to my growing list of clues. Finally, I found a truly credible source: a veteran detective from the NYPD’s Cold Case Squad, a man who had been trained to compile evidence, not conjecture. After much prodding, the detective agreed to tell me the source of these rumors. One night, he sat me down with two other detectives as they revealed a secret, one that had swirled through the squad rooms of the NYPD for decades: David Berkowitz, the infamous Son of Sam, did not act alone.
     I learned there were a number of detectives in the NYPD, past and present, who had come to believe, based upon their own investigations, that David Berkowitz had accomplices and that the allegations of a so-called cult were true. While they didn’t think Staten Island’s mi…