The Coffey Files (23 page)

The next day the letter to Borrelli was opened at the department's Fingerprint Section. The first paragraph read:

Dear Captain Joseph Borrelli,

I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon [sic] hater [referring to Borrelli's remarks at the March 11 press conference]. I am not. But I am a monster.

I am the “Son of Sam.” I am a little brat.

The letter went on with about 200 rambling, nonsensical phrases and ended with a warning:

I say good-bye and good night.

Police: Let me haunt you with these words:

I'll be back!

I'll be back!

To be interrpreted [sic]

As
—
bang, bang, bang, bank [sic], bang
—
ugh!

Yours in Murder,

Mr. Monster

Coffey was furious that the letter was mishandled, though as it turned out no useful fingerprints were lifted from it and it would not be valuable evidence in the event of a trial. However, it served another purpose in this case. In early June, the
Daily News
got hold of a copy of the letter. “Son of Sam” was born in the public's mind, and the case would be known by that title forever.

On April 19, as pressure from the media for police action mounted and precinct telephone lines around the city were choked with calls from frightened citizens, it was announced that the Queens task force would be expanded. Because of its high priority and the crossing of precinct and borough lines—and not incidentally because the case was now costing the city almost $100,000 a day—it would be headed by an inspector. Codd chose a mild-mannered detective with a reputation for supervising group efforts named Inspector Timothy J. Dowd.

The veteran group of cops who had been working the serial cases from the beginning resented the intrusion of Dowd, but they knew a headquarters heavyweight was needed. Borrelli may have felt pushed to the rear but admitted to colleagues that naming Dowd was a necessary move.

The group was named Task Force Omega with headquarters set up at the 109th Precinct in Flushing. Detectives from all over the city were now being assigned to the case during days, nights, and Coffey's weekend shift. Coffey adjusted his escape route surveillance with the additional tactic of shutting down all bridges and tunnels leading out of Queens as soon as word of another hit was broadcast on the police radios. Such a tactic required manpower. In the absence of physical evidence, manpower would play a large role in hunt for the .44 caliber killer, as the press was now calling the serial psycho.

Coffey continued planning based on his strong feeling that the killer lived either in the Bronx or Westchester. A decade later he cannot call that feeling any more than a hunch. But he was always a hunch player and had learned to trust his instinct.

For the handful of detectives like Joe, Gorman, Power, and Conlon, the efforts on the case were what police work was about. It was challenging, dangerous work, toward a worthwhile end. They found professional satisfaction in being assigned to such a case no matter how much pain it would cause them. A handful of cops from all over the city volunteered to join the Omega group for the same reasons. But for the most part, Coffey was disappointed in the attitudes of most of the cops ordered to report to Task Force Omega. He found them to be resentful and cynical about the assignment beyond reason.

“Most of the guys, and I had a relative and some close friends among the group, thought it was a bullshit assignment. They resented being taken from their own cases, cases they controlled, to be used as foot soldiers in a manhunt,” Coffey says. “They just did not see it as work that would advance their careers or salaries. I never could understand that attitude and I guess they could never understand mine.”

The task force was undoubtably a political maneuver to make the public believe the department had a handle on the case. Coffey did not really think it would help. He continued to believe the killer would be caught through old-fashioned police work or a lucky break. Almost one year after his first attack, the .44 caliber killer was still totally anonymous to his pursuers. He might as well have been a ghost. Recognizing all that, Joe resigned himself to being somewhat under the control of the bureaucracy he hated so much. “Whether I liked it or not, I got the help,” Coffey says.

There was a feverish mood in the city about the case. Press conferences were held every day. Mayor Beame could not attend any type of function without being asked about the manhunt. Dark-haired young women were dying their hair blonde; long-haired girls were rushing for haircuts. Parents were stepping up their warnings about lovers' lanes. Reporters interviewed disco owners who feared the news of the killer would ruin their businesses, and psychics popped up who claimed they knew where and when the killer would strike next.

Coffey had no use for most of the help the public was offering, especially the psychics. One famous crystal ball reader who had worked with New Jersey police on several occasions showed up at the 109th Precinct one morning to offer her help. Coffey rudely dismissed her. The next day she ripped into “that Detective Sergeant Joe Coffey, who really doesn't want to solve this case,” on a radio talk show. Joe was thankful most of his superiors agreed with his view of supernatural detective work.

While the task force detectives blanketed areas around lovers' lanes and other places young people might park in their cars and stopped any suspicious-looking man walking alone, they continued their patrols of escape routes. Work was also continued on the individual cases as if they were not connected. If any case could be solved alone and established as not having a link to the others, it could bury the, thought of the .44 caliber killer.

The detectives traced all 28,000 Charter Arms Bulldogs manufactured by the Bridgeport, Connecticut, company, a complicated task that failed to lead to Son of Sam because the gun, it turned out, was purchased by a friend of the killer in Houston, Texas. Coffey assigned himself to do background checks on auxiliary cops in the precincts where the attacks occurred because of the military- or police-type shooting stance of the killer—another hunch.

Coffey's other specific assignment was to follow up on the “kites”—reports alleging a cop was guilty of a crime, usually just thrown up for grabs anonymously by another cop. During the course of the Son of Sam investigation Coffey received more than 300 “kites.” Some were like the call from a patrol sergeant who suspected his police-officer driver. The driver had offered to fix the sergeant up with a willing woman in a pickup spot on Queens Boulevard known as the “Wrinkle Room” because of the advanced age of its female patrons.

“If he hangs out in places like that and the way he knows his way around the borough, I'm pretty sure it's him,” offered the otherwise competent sergeant. Before hanging up the sergeant told Coffey he wanted credit for the call if the police officer was arrested but asked Coffey not to mention it to anyone if the tip did not pan out.

Another “kite” was from a priest in the Bronx who suspected one of his congregants. The suspect was a police officer who in recent months had taken to cursing at young women who walked down the aisle to take communion. “He called them whores and tramps,” the priest said, “and all of a sudden he has been wearing a large gold cross.”

Coffey took this one seriously and staked out the cop for a while. Eventually he decided that while this was one cop who needed help, he was not the .44 caliber killer.

It was a wild time in the 109 squad room, which now bristled with two or three telephones on every desk and piles of police forms waiting to be filed filling up every available corner. “We were getting calls around the clock. Wives were turning in their husbands; mothers turned in their sons; angry girlfriends were sure that their lovers were the killer and demanded that they be arrested and sent to the electric chair,” Coffey remembers. “It may be hard to believe, but we checked into most of the calls. We had nothing else to go on.”

Coffey was now working around the clock, seeing little of his family. As he left his house early one Saturday morning, Steven Coffey, eight years old and missing his father's attention, ran after him, a thin rope in his hand. “Daddy, use this rope to catch the guy, like Deputy Dog,” the youngster yelled. “Deputy Dog” was one of his favorite television shows at the time. Coffey put the rope in his trunk, promising Steven he would use it if he needed it. The rope stayed there throughout the Son of Sam case.

Things were getting very rough on the nighttime streets of the Bronx and Queens. Coffey spread the word that he wanted people followed, questioned, frisked, and ordered to open their packages and cars, without warrants.

“I guess we kind of put the constitution on the back burner for a while,” he concedes. His men began calling their procedures “Coffey's Martial Law.” The public did not complain. “More often than not, after we explained what we were doing, the people thanked us.”

It was around this time that the task force cops on Coffey's shift began doing their most dangerous work. Joe devised a plan to put cops in unmarked cars posing as young lovers making out. A local department store chain supplied a bunch of mannequins that were fitted with wigs. Coffey took the first shift himself.

Night after night detectives sat in their cars with mannequins or sometimes with other male detectives wearing wigs. They wore bulletproof vests and kept their regulation .38 caliber revolvers in their laps. Backup teams armed with shotguns kept watch from nearby cars and from behind bushes and trees. This was a desperation tactic. Police brass do not like putting officers in positions of such jeopardy, but there was nothing else to do.

“We thought we were going to have to catch this guy in the act,” Coffey says. “We were ready to kill him. It seemed to be the only way the nightmare would end.”

Fearing the brass would call off the decoy squad before someone got hurt, Coffey spoke to a friend in the Secret Service and got the name of the company that made the bulletproof cars used to protect the president of the United States. He contacted the company, and they offered five cars free of charge if that would help catch “Son of Sam.” When Coffey passed the offer to his superiors, he ran into the type of response he never learned to live with.

Headquarters told him that the department, still smarting from the corruption scandals of the seventies, could not accept the cars for free. But they thought it was a good idea and might be able to afford to buy one car. Eventually a blue bulletproof 1977 Chevrolet Monte Carlo was purchased for $5,000. It arrived in New York the day after Son of Sam, David Berkowitz, was captured.

More than two months had passed since the murders of Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau, and detectives were pursuing one false lead after another. Joe spent days following a bus driver whose route passed almost directly by the crime scenes. Finally confronting the man, Coffey had to be physically restrained by John O'Connell when the bus driver began complaining that the cops had no right to bother him.

Tips to the police were being classified in three categories: priority one, priority two, and priority three.

Coffey and O'Connell spent a whole day checking out a tip that involved the television series “Starsky and Hutch.” A caller to the task force made a convincing argument that an episode of the show paralleled the .44 caliber case. With nothing more pressing to follow up, the two seasoned detectives went to ABC network headquarters and in one marathon session reviewed every episode of the popular show. It was a waste of an afternoon.

Then Inspector Dowd got a hunch of his own. Every night on his way home from the Omega headquarters he passed a disco called Elephas on Northern Boulevard in Bayside, Queens. He talked to Coffey about beefing up the task force presence at the popular disco, which was in an area bordered by single-family homes on tree-lined streets. Coffey never doubted a cop's hunch and readily agreed to the adjustment even though he already had extra cops there, and he made sure to swing by the disco himself on every patrol. Other cops, behind his back, poked fun at Dowd's request. “It's the only disco he knows, so that's his big contribution,” they murmured. At the same time they doubly admonished their own daughters to steer clear of the Elephas. “Even Inspector Dowd thinks the place is a target,” they warned.

Bingo. In June, Dowd's hunch seemed prescient.

On June 26, 1977, Judy Placido, eighteen, and Sal Lupo, twenty, met for the first time at the Elephas Disco. Judy had gone there for an evening of dancing and drinking with two girlfriends from the Bronx. Sal introduced himself to Judy, and when her girlfriends left she decided to stay for another drink with Sal. He and his friend, a bouncer at the club, would drive her home later.

Sal and Judy really hit it off and after the last drink they walked to the car on 211th Street and 45th Road about a block away while Sal's bouncer friend helped close up. The young couple had talked about the Son of Sam cases and both admitted to being frightened about being on the dark streets at that hour; about 3:00
A.M.
Sal let Judy in the passenger side and then ran around to the driver's side of the Cadillac to let himself in. They were hardly settled into their seats when the car exploded in a blast of noise and shattering glass. Four shots were fired. Lupo was hit in the arm, Judy Placido struck three times in the head, neck, and back. Doctors cannot explain why she did not die. But both survived the attack.

Leaving the scene, the shooter walked down Northern Boulevard. He was a lone man, wearing a ski hat, carrying a paper bag. Two detectives, assigned to the beefed-up patrol by Coffey, stopped him. They began to ask for identification when their hand-held walkie-talkie barked, “Shots fired, two down, 211th Street and 45th Road.” Turning their back on the lone man, the two detectives ran to their unmarked car and sped to the scene. At the precinct house that night both men sobbed. Son of Sam had been in their hands and had walked away. It was not the only time that night that Coffey's team had the chance to nail the killer.