Then you talked to a few police that did official reports of how many people they thought were involved. But slowly but surely he would start to give me little bits and pieces of information and I would end up fact-checking his work behind his back, and I found out that he really did an unbelievable job in terms of uncovering a plethora of evidence to suggest that Berkowitz didn’t act alone. He was a mentor and an unreliable narrator all woven into one, and I just didn’t believe him at all. As a true crime journalist and documentarian, he was truly fascinating. They basically gave me this book, The Ultimate Evil, and I read the book and it scared the shit out of me. ![]() And that’s when I called some cops, who sat me down and said, “No, we’ve looked into this and you should do your research.” I thought it was all bullshit, kind of Satanic Panic stuff. That Son of Sam didn’t act alone and that there was a cult behind it. I first met Maury, I was actually doing a documentary called Cropsey about some missing kids in my hometown in Staten Island and a number of the cops and journalists around at the time kept suggesting that these missing kids were somehow connected to the Son of Sam case. Maury Terry was a very fascinating character. In a case that doesn’t seem like it could possibly offer concrete answers, Zeman finds them in many areas and comes surprisingly close in others, complete with a bombshell ending straight out of a Hollywood thriller. ![]() The way Maury Terry let a legitimately shocking discovery lead him to find connections that weren’t there has an obvious whiff of Q-Anon and other conspiracy movements about it. In that sense, it’s also about officially unacknowledged truths and moral panics today. It’s both an exploration of Maury Terry’s pet theory and an exploration of Terry himself, and how trying to prove it ultimately destroyed him. The act of trying to make sense of it all is the driving force behind Zeman’s new docuseries, Sons of Sam, which hits Netflix on May 5th. “He was like a mentor and an unreliable narrator all rolled into one,” Zeman says of Terry. That didn’t mean that everything Berkowitz said was true, nor did it mean that all of Maury Terry’s theories - about Satan, the Process Church, the Manson Family - were true. Yet the more he tried to fact-check Terry, which, as a documentarian and investigator, is sort of Zeman’s job, the more he started to find a preponderance of evidence that David Berkowitz didn’t act alone. ![]() Probably like most people, Zeman didn’t buy it at first. A police source suggested Zeman’s case might have some connection to the Son of Sam, and put Zeman in touch with Terry, at the time an older and hard-drinking veteran journalist, who spun a wild tale of Satanic cults, Charles Manson, cash-for-snuff films, and his central thesis: that David Berkowitz hadn’t acted alone. ![]() Sons of Sam director Joshua Zeman met Terry while he was investigating a child kidnapping case in Zeman’s native Staten Island for his 2009 documentary, Cropsey. Didn’t he also say that a neighbor’s dog told him to do it? Such was the difficulty for Maury Terry, who spent the latter part of his increasingly dissolute life trying to convince the public that Berkowitz was actually telling the truth when he said he didn’t act alone. Of course, David Berkowitz was also a convicted serial killer and maybe psychotic. In 1981, David Berkowitz, the so-called “Son of Sam Killer” who’d been convicted of a string of murders in the late 1970s, told journalist Maury Terry, “I am guilty of these crimes, but I didn’t do it all.”
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