‘Son of Sam’ Mourns Death Of Pen Pal Jimmy Breslin

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By Daniel J. Solomon May 25, 2017

David Berkowitz extended his condolences to the family of the late Jimmy Breslin – four decades after the notorious butcher called himself the “Son of Sam” in a letter to the New York tabloid columnist.

“I wish to extend my condolences to his family at their loss,” he wrote to the letter of a local newspaper in the upstate penitentiary where he is serving a life sentence.

Berkowitz terrorized New York City between 1976 and 1977, killing six people and wounding eight others. His main target was young women, whom he claimed his neighbor’s dog had instructed him to go after.

“Mr. Breslin, sir, don’t think that because you haven’t heard from me for a while that I went to sleep. No, rather, I am still here. Like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest; anxious to please Sam. I love my work,” he wrote Breslin in one letter, in which he also self-identified as a “rapist and suffocator of young women.”

Breslin died in March, at the ripe age of 87, after having written columns in Newsday, the New York Post and New York Daily News in his storied career as a city newspaperman.

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

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