Part 7: The Ultimate Evil...Minot? Why Not?....A Matter of Murder

THE ULTIMATE EVIL 
An Investigation into a 
Dangerous Satanic Cult

XIII 

Minot? Why Not? 

The call came on March 2, 1979, the day after the article about the unanswered questions in the .44 case appeared. He was a Yonkers teenager named Richard,* the product of a good home, and he lived near Untermyer Park and frequently took walks through the former estate's desolate, wooded confines and along the path of the aqueduct. 

*not real name

"I don't know if this has anything to do with the dead German shepherds you wrote about, but I found some, too, in the park," he told me. "And I know there's a devil-worshipping group that's been meeting in there for quite a while." 

Richard had my attention. Not one word of suspected cult involvement in the case had reached the public. "Where do they meet?" I asked. 

"There's an old pump house in the woods called the Devil's Cave. That's one place. And they also had an altar set up on the gutters." 

"The gutters?" I asked quickly. "What do you mean, the gutters?" 

"The aqueduct. We call it the gutters or the sewers." 

"You mean the kids who live around there call it the gutters?" 

"Yeah. If you come down, I'll even show you some graffiti with 'NGP' written in a bunch of places—that means 'near gutters' path' around here." 

"Really? They had an altar set up there—on the gutters? Were the dogs nearby?" 

"Pretty close. .. . A couple of my friends saw the group, too." 

The next day, in the company of Dave Hartley, the youngish, soft-spoken editor and general manager of the Yonkers Herald Statesman, I met Richard near the park's entrance on North Broadway, barely a mile north of Pine Street. He was a high school sophomore, and a lanky, pleasant-looking youth. Dave Hartley himself was aware a cult had convened on the premises, but he didn't know I was looking for such a group until then. 

"The student nurses and some doctors at St. John's Hospital [adjacent to the park] heard the chanting and saw candles and torches around midnight last Halloween; and they'd heard them before that, too," Hartley said. "Security guards went down through the woods to the old pump house and saw them. The guards went back and called the cops, but by the time the police got here the cult had scattered." 

But there was evidence left behind. "Some candles and torches," Dave said. "And I came up myself and found a hood and two capes they left when they took off." The outfits, which I later saw, were gray in color and consisted of a full, peaked hood with eye slits and two long capes, or cowls. 

"I saw them meeting, too," Richard interjected, "although not on that night. Two of my friends also spotted them." 

"Let's check out the place," I said, and we entered the spacious, sprawling park. Passing through the restored section, which boasted fountains, gardens and elaborate columns and statuary, we walked down toward the river on a long, steep stone stairway known as "the Thousand Steps." At the bottom, on what was once a round, open-air observation point with decorative columns, we turned to the right and groped our way through about a hundred yards of a muddy abandoned vineyard. Finally, hidden in the dense shrubbery, we came to the Devil's Cave. 

"This was where they pumped the water for the gardens and vineyards in the old days," Dave explained. 

"Yeah, another water reference," I answered. "They're all over the place in the Sam letters." 

The pump house was a circular structure about thirty feet in diameter that was built into the side of a hill. It was constructed of stone, and a small doorway allowed access to its dank interior. With flashlights to illuminate the gloom, we walked inside. I was stunned by what I saw. 

Built into the far wall was a long stone platform, or bench, which obviously served as an altar, for above and behind it black-painted pentagrams and large, inverted crosses glared grotesquely from the wall in the light beams. To the right, a hideous red painting of the head of Satan appeared; and more inverted crosses, painted in black, leered from other strategic locations in the structure. 

On the ceiling, which was damp with moisture, there was a small rendering of the German SS lightning-bolt insignia, along with the numbers 666, the sign of the great biblical beast of Revelation—a satanic symbol. On one of the support columns in the center of the cave, an X-shaped figure with arrow points at the four ends was painted in black. 

"That looks just like the Sam symbol," I said. "The arrows are pointing out to the so-called four magical elements: earth, air, fire and water. Each of those was alluded to in the Breslin letter." 

The pump-house floor was dirt, and the stagnant air reeked of must and mildew. "We've got to get photos of this," I said to Dave. "But for now, let's get the hell out of here. This place is making me queasy." 

"Amen," he replied. 

Richard, who had stood by silently as we made our observations, then took us farther down the hill to the aqueduct itself. Through the still-barren trees, the Hudson River shone brightly below, reflecting the dying orange sun, which was setting in the western sky over the Palisades. 

Walking the aqueduct path, Richard directed us to the site where he saw the wooden altar assembled. The supporting nails were still embedded in the two trees between which it was suspended. 

"It was a long, wide board, and it hung there between the trees about four feet off the ground. They had a wooden chair placed in front of it," he explained. 

Continuing down the path, he pointed out several spots adorned with the "NGP" graffiti, which he again said meant "near gutters' path." He next led us to three sites where he'd found dead German shepherds. Two areas were proximate enough to the meeting scenes to appear significant. The third, where a rotted carcass still lay, was too far away to be definitely linked to cult activity. 

"So this is the gutters and the sewers?" I asked once more. 

"That's what we call it," Richard replied. "Lots of people who live along here, the young people, know it by those names. What's so important about the name?" 

"Not much. I'm just curious about it. It's a unique name for a place to have," I said, giving Dave Hartley a sideways glance.

Richard then took us to meet two of his friends, both local teenagers. Each confirmed the "NGP" designation, and one said he'd witnessed a cult meeting one summer night—from a safe distance. "There were about twenty of them, wearing hoods and carrying torches. They were standing in a circle and chanting something I couldn't understand." 

"That's what the nurses saw and heard," Dave said, and Richard added a similar story, putting the number of cultists at "around fifteen or twenty." 

Dave and I then returned to the pump house alone, where he pointed out small red arrows painted on a series of trees which led up to the back of the hospital property. 

"Some of them must have parked somewhere around the hospital and come in this way," he said. "They had a trail marked so they could find their way in here at night. Quite an operation. Put a flashlight on the trees and you end up at the pump house, or you keep going down to the aqueduct." 

"You know," I said, "it seems like a fair amount of people knew what was going on in here, but nobody knew the significance of it. About a year ago, Sal D'lorio of the Sheriff's Department told me there were strong indications of cult activity somewhere in this area. Now I know what he meant." 

"Then this must be the spot," Dave stated. "Here and the aqueduct." 

"Yes," I answered. " The wemon of Queens are the prettiest of all. It must be the water they drink.' That's the Son of Sam Borrelli letter—New York City drinking water." 

"The pump house," Dave said, "and the aqueduct." 

I nodded. "And I've got a better one for you. 'Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood. Hello from the sewers of N.Y.C. which swallow up these delicacies . . .' " 

"The Breslin letter," Dave cut in. 

"Which also signs off with in their blood and from the gutters,' " I added. 

"You've got them, don't you?" Dave asked. 

"We sure as hell do." 

As a conduit of water, an aqueduct was a gutter or sewer by definition. In this instance, it was literally the "gutters of NYC" since it once carried drinking water to the metropolis. And because "dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood" referred to the satanic Black Mass, that sentence of the Breslin letter meant, "Black Mass-aqueduct." 

The site was but a mile north of the Berkowitz and Carr homes, and one could walk the aqueduct path from Untermyer Park to the Pine and Wicker Street sections, where the other dead shepherds were found, in a matter of fifteen minutes. An adventurous individual with access could also travel that distance underground, with difficulty, through the old pipe itself. Chances were excellent that the Pine Street dogs, carried in plastic bags, were dumped there after rituals further up the path at Untermyer Park. 

Putting the puzzle pieces together, there was physical and eyewitness evidence of the cult's existence, and the entire pack- age—including symbols in the pump house—was linked to the Breslin letter, in which Berkowitz at Marcy acknowledged word substitution clues were employed. 

Most important, the initial evidence was unearthed before Berkowitz said a word about cult involvement. 

More than a year before, when Larry Siegel and I first deciphered the satanic clues in the Sam letters, we drew up a list of three items which, separately or together, could demonstrate the accuracy of what we uncovered. 

One of those required the discovery of evidence that Berkowitz or John Carr was in a cult. At Marcy, Berkowitz admit- ted to just that, and added Michael Carr to the roster. A second step was to locate the cult itself and link it to Berkowitz and the Son of Sam case. That was now done. And the third step was to develop evidence independent of cult activity which demonstrated Berkowitz didn't act alone in the actual .44 incidents. We had made progress there, besides the already known inconsistencies concerning composite sketches and the like, but still had a distance to travel. Handwriting expert Charles Hamilton's analysis of the Sam letters provided a tremendous boost, but I intended to move on by conducting an in-depth investigation of the Moskowitz-Violante shooting. If it could be demonstrated Berkowitz wasn't alone at several crime scenes, the case would be stronger yet—but all we needed to do was to show evidence of a conspiracy in one shooting to topple the entire house of cards. Then all the diver- gent pieces of evidence would mesh, substantiate each other, and the truth would be undeniable. 

Before beginning the Moskowitz-Violante investigation, I phoned Tony Catalano, manager of the Yonkers Animal Shelter, to learn if my count of the dead German shepherds was accurate. It wasn't. More had been found subsequent to Berkowitz's arrest, in virtually the same spot on the aqueduct near Pine Street as the earlier three. 

"The first one was shot to death," Catalano told me. "It was lying there alone. The other two were together. They were either strangled, shot or poisoned. Because of the condition of the bodies we couldn't tell, but they didn't walk off together and lie down side by side to die. They were murdered." 

He added that still another shepherd had been wounded in the immediate neighborhood. "Its ear was sliced off. It wasn't chewed off, like in a dog fight. It was a clean, even cut, like it was done with a knife." 

The toll of dead German shepherds stood at ten, at least; and one, minus an ear, was wounded. 

It was, I reasoned, time to explore the Process a bit further. Besides the shepherds, a Process link, we had to consider Berkowitz's Marcy statement that he believed he was protecting "hundreds" by remaining silent. If so, there was no doubt his alleged cult was part of a larger organization, one which likely had branches in different U.S. cities—branches such as those a Process subset, probably with OTO crossovers, could have. 

Since the Sam letters contained so many clues, I went back to them and to other Berkowitz writings with which I was now familiar. Doing so revealed definite connections to Process-like terms. For instance, Berkowitz had written he needed a "messenger to earth"; and messenger was a Process rank—as were "father and master," both of which were allusions he made to Sam Carr and Craig Glassman. The Borrelli letter contained the phrase "honour thy father," using the British spelling of "honor." The Process was founded in Britain, as was Aleister Crowley's OTO chapter. 

Additionally, the Breslin letter said: "Now, the void has been filled"; and the "bottomless void" was definitely Process terminology. That letter's return address, in part, said: "Blood and Family"; and the Process had referred to itself as "the family." Berkowitz signed a threatening letter to Glassman with "Brother," another Process level, and he'd written "H.H." on the envelope of one of the anonymous letters he mailed to Sam Carr. This, I would later learn, signified "Heil Hitler"—a Process demigod. Regarding Hitler-Process links (which also brought Fred Cowan into the fold), I would learn that an associate of Berkowitz's told police in 1977 that Berkowitz frequented the White Plains Road area of the northeast Bronx and "possessed and wore Nazi insignia." Quote. 

In another 1977 police report, a witness stated that Berkowitz was seen in Manhattan with one "Father Lars," who was said to be involved with some offbeat society, supposedly religious in nature. It was a Process offshoot. 

Two other phrases, closely associated with the Process via Charles Manson, were also used by Berkowitz. They were: "My children I'm turning into killers," which was written on the wall of Berkowitz's apartment; and "little ones," a phrase used by Berkowitz in a letter to Glassman. 

There were other illustrations of this orientation as well. Putting them together, along with the German shepherds and Berkowitz's Marcy comments, I began to realistically believe that a Process subset organization was involved in the .44 shootings. But I still wasn't willing to make the cult connection public. I hoped we could catch some members of the Yonkers group in the act and uncover more evidence of conspiracy in the killings themselves. 

In the next few months, there were various developments in the case. Stacy Moskowitz's father, Jerry, called to thank Tom Bartley and me for the articles specifying the less than professional conduct of the Yonkers police and Westchester Sheriff's Department in the local Berkowitz investigations. The Moskowitz family had filed a $10 million lawsuit against the Yonkers Police Department, charging negligence in Stacy's death. They would lose the suit. Before the articles appeared, they were ignorant of the sheriff's role in the case. 

I visited Jerry, his wife, Neysa, and their daughter, Ricki, on a March Sunday and told them I seriously doubted Berkowitz shot Stacy. It was a difficult thing to say, but I was gratified the family trusted the analysis and said they'd stand by as I probed further. Neysa showed me Stacy's room and some personal effects and photos. 

"She meant everything to us," Neysa said sadly. "I hate Berkowitz with a passion, as you know. I was all over the place calling for his execution on the spot. But if he didn't do it, I just hope to hell you get the people who did." (At his sentencing, Berkowitz, who was subdued when he pleaded guilty, threw the courtroom into turmoil by chanting "Stacy was a whore" several times. The courtroom erupted, and the  sentencing was delayed. Berkowitz, I'd later learn, was motivated by two reasons: he wasn't ready to be sentenced, in his mind; and he had developed an intense dislike for Neysa Moskowitz, who had loudly sought his execution. Berkowitz also knew something else: he hadn't shot Stacy.) 

"I went along with what the cops said," Jerry added. "But I always knew he didn't look anything like the sketches. And I got to know a lot of the local police as a result of what happened—and a lot of them aren't convinced it was him either." 

On my way home that night, I drove by Pine Street and down the hill to Wicker and Warburton. From the home of the victim to the hangouts of the killers, I thought before slowly driving on. As hard as I tried to avoid emotional involvement in the deaths and the families' sufferings, I wasn't always successful. That night was one of those occasions. 

I received another call in the wake of the articles. It had a familiar tone to it. The caller was an anonymous woman who began to tell me about a girl named Jane and a station wagon and Little Neck Bay and a successful accountant named Reeve Carl Rockman. "Cut it out, Veronica. I know just who you are," I said. "I was at your house last year, but you ducked under the bed. Go call Dunleavy—he could probably use a little excitement." 

Veronica Lueken was at first aghast, and immediately hung up the phone. An hour later she called back, apologizing for her actions of 1978 and admitting she had "made a mistake." 

"You sure did, lady," I told her. 

Lueken said her information about Staten Island's Meehan family was erroneous because she confused Mike Wollman, a friend of the Meehans' son, with Rockman. "They look alike, and when I saw Wollman going in and out of that house I thought it was Rockman." 

"You were paranoid, Veronica." 

"I'm sorry, but I thought Rockman was using another alias out there. He already uses aliases—did you at least check that?" 

"Yes, we know he had two addresses in Queens and was calling himself Reeve Carl Rockman and Reeve T. Carl. But there's more to this—we interviewed Jane Jacklin and she's not dead at all, as you claimed she was." 

"I was told she was murdered," Lueken insisted. "And I even met her a few months before." 

"Oh yeah? Then what did she look like?" 

Lueken then described a woman other than the Jane Jacklin that Mitteager and I spoke to. Besides obvious appearance differences, the real Jane was the mother of an infant, and would have been noticeably pregnant in June 1977, when Lueken said the meeting occurred. 

"No, she wasn't pregnant," Lueken said, and her husband, Arthur, who said he was present that day, came on the line and confirmed the details. 

"People come to me, they confide in me," Lueken then explained. "That's how I heard about the cult and Rockman." 

"If you're leveling with me this time—and that's a big if— then whoever approached you used the real Jane's name," I said. "And if anyone was murdered, it might have been the Jane impostor." 

Lueken then said that a New York City homicide detective was privy to the information and could vouch for its authenticity. She gave me the detective's name, and he called the next day. We arranged to meet for lunch at a restaurant on Central Avenue in Yonkers. 

In appearance, Bronx homicide detective Henry (Hank) Cinotti wasn't what I expected. Husky, and about six feet tall with jet-black hair, he sported a mustache and a prominent goatee. Wearing black clothes, with a large gold crucifix draped around his neck, he looked more like an undercover vice or narcotics cop than a homicide detective. His speech was classic New Yorkese. 

Cinotti was thirty-seven, and a seventeen-year police veteran who owned several departmental commendations. He also was openly, devoutly religious—to a fault, some said—and acknowledged that he was a follower of Veronica Lueken—an association he would later sever. 

Because of his ties to Lueken, I was openly skeptical of Cinotti, who insisted he investigated her claims and found they had considerable validity. He revealed that in June 1977 three young women approached Lueken in a Queens restaurant and told her of a satanic cult which was involved in ongoing murders, apparently the Son of Sam killings. The girls fingered Rockman as a leader of the group. One of the girls gave her name as Jane Jacklin. The others introduced themselves as Wendy Smith* and Nicki,* who didn't offer a last name. The girls expressed fear of Rockman and said they wanted to escape the group's clutches. 

Lueken never saw Jane or Wendy again, Cinotti said, but Nicki subsequently came to her and asked to be hidden out, claiming that the group was involved in the .44 case and that Jane had been slain and dumped into Little Neck Bay. Cinotti said that Lueken took Nicki to her residence on Van Duzer Street on Staten Island, where Nicki, a native Haitian, remained for several weeks before flying back to her Caribbean homeland. (I remembered the Meehans reported a black girl lived with Lueken during that period, so this part of the story seemed accurate.) 

Two days before Berkowitz's arrest, Lueken, who by then knew what Rockman looked like, claimed she spied him in an old station wagon in the company of a young man with dark, curly hair. Lueken copied the car's license plate number, and gave it to Cinotti, who showed me a dated computer printout proving he ran the plate number that day—August 8, 1977. When Berkowitz was arrested on the tenth, Lueken claimed he was the man in the station wagon with Rockman. The car, the printout showed, was registered to the real Jane Jacklin. 

"That's simply bizarre," I said to Cinotti. "The real Jane admitted to Jim and me that she owned that car at the time, but said she knew nothing about any of this. Now, we did check with Motor Vehicles, and they told us the car was later junked at an auto wrecker's in Queens. We checked that place, and were told it went out of business in 1971—six years before." 

"Ah, hah," Cinotti said. "Maybe Jane isn't involved at all. It could be her husband has some link to all this. He was a laid-off New York City cop at the time. And anyone who knew Jane could have used her name when talking to Lueken." 

I asked Cinotti what he knew about Rockman. "He's college-educated, no police record, divorced and now remarried. He did some accounting work at a drug rehab center, and had a dope problem himself at one time. He's also been under a psychiatrist's care, but we can't find out why due to the confidentiality factor. He's working now for a company on Wall Street—actually at 2 Broadway." 

"Number 2 Broadway?" I asked. "That's the building where one of the Sam victims worked—Christine Freund." 

"Jesus," Cinotti exclaimed. "Rockman works for Acme Limited*—who did she work for?" 

"Reynolds Securities," I replied. "That's probably a big building, but it's still a remarkable coincidence. And one of Rockman's addresses is in Forest Hills—only about seven blocks from the Freund killing scene. What kind of car was he driving then, Hank?" 

"A small green Fiat." 

"Well, at the time of the shooting, the cops had reports that a guy in a small green car dropped off another man at the railroad station there just a few minutes before the shots were fired. They never found the guys or the car." 

"He's starting to look better to you, eh?" Cinotti grinned. 

"It's an interesting turn of events," I admitted, somewhat reluctantly. "We had written Lueken off as a crackpot. And her Staten Island information was in fact garbage, and the real Jane wasn't killed. I'm not willing to say she really saw Berkowitz either. She was seeing conspirators everywhere. And Lueken made it all worse by refusing to talk to us." 

"She's eccentric," Cinotti agreed. "And she was scared." 

My interest in Rockman heightened further when I learned that a small business in Manhattan, located in a building where he once worked and his father still maintained an office, utilized Sam Carr's answering service in Yonkers. It was another unlikely coincidence. 

Rockman was born in 1947, was about five feet nine, had a medium build and straight, sandy-colored hair. He also had some type of defect or deformity of one of his fingers or thumbs, which caused him to favor the hand and discreetly shield the imperfection from others. 

When I discussed Rockman, Lueken and Cinotti with Jim Mitteager, I quickly discovered his appraisal of Lueken's credibility hadn't changed. The situation was worsened on the night of Good Friday, when we planned a midnight stakeout of Untermyer Park in hopes of spotting a cult meeting, an operation that the Yonkers police would attempt months later. 

That night, a small group of interested parties gathered at 10 P.M. in the home of Don Starkey, an arson investigator for the Yonkers Fire Department. Starkey had advised me that a series of more than twenty automobile arsons occurred in the general vicinity during Berkowitz's tenure on Pine Street, and that he received reports that a car similar to Berkowitz's— with two people in it on at least one occasion—was observed driving from a scene. 

Berkowitz had admitted he was a onetime firebug, and Starkey was also aware of Berkowitz's acknowledged complicity in the firebombings of the Carr, Neto and Glassman homes. 

Also present at Starkey's house were Gannett's Tom Bartley, Mitteager and Cinotti. No one except me had met Cinotti before. Hank arrived with two companions wielding baseball bats, handed out religious medals, and began to discuss demonology and religious topics in a manner that caused Bartley to back out of the surveillance and convince Mitteager half the world had gone totally crazy. 

Jim almost took to the exit sign with Bartley, but I persuaded him to see the evening through. 

At 11:30 P.M., on a cloudy, moonless night, Starkey, Jim, Hank, his two companions and I sneaked into the eerie darkness of Untermyer Park. Jim insisted on letting Cinotti and his friends lead the way. "Somebody could get shot or beaten to death tonight," Jim warned. "I don't like this at all. Somebody might shoot first and worry about it later. I got enough problems—I don't need something like this on top of them." 

Don Starkey was also on edge. "If anyone's meeting here, I just want to observe them. I'm not looking for any confrontations," he emphasized. 

For ninety minutes, we searched the woods near the pump house and walked along the aqueduct. Each time an animal stirred in the bushes we froze expectantly. Then, shortly after 1 A.M., it began to rain heavily, and we abandoned the stakeout. 

"Never again," Jim said later. "Not under those circumstances. I don't give a shit if Charlie Manson himself was going to be slitting a dog's throat, I just don't know how Hank and those guys he brought would react." 

Jim, already skeptical of Veronica Lueken, as was I, now echoed Tom Bartley's distrust of Cinotti. My own faith in the detective wavered, and for several months I didn't speak to him. Our investigation of Rockman also ceased. 

In April, I testified at Jim's pre-trial hearing at State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, where I repeated my limited knowledge of the Mitteager-Clarke-Berkowitz relationships. Since the Gannett Westchester Newspapers were now involved in the investigation, they sent a reporter to cover the hearing, as did other New York City media (but not the Post). In my testimony, I referred to John Carr and the conspiracy hunt, as did Jim, and our comments were reported by the press. We were still trying to get the message out. 

On cross-examination, prosecutor Tom McCloskey thought he'd make a big point about clandestine operations by demanding to know if I attended the Marcy interview. Until he saw me in court, I don't believe he knew it was me, by name, who participated in the Berkowitz interrogation. McCloskey attempted to suggest I'd somehow cloak-and-daggered my way into the maximum-security facility. I managed to deflect his allusion by answering: "You know I was at Marcy, Tom. We saw each other there, remember?" McCloskey immediately dropped the subject. 

Also that spring, Michael Carr, who had blossomed into a top suspect although he didn't know it, naively sent a press release to the Yonkers Herald Statesman. Editor Dave Hartley, who didn't publish it, forwarded the item to me. Dated April 29, it said: 

Carr's Telephone Answering Service, Inc. is happy to announce the return of Michael Vail Carr III, BvC, M.C.O.S., its secretary and Org. Exec. Sec. from the Flag Land Base—a religious retreat maintained by the Church of Scientology of California in Clearwater, Florida—after completion of the Executive Delegation and Supervision course. 

By now cognizant that the Process had sprung from Scientology, which called itself a "church" but functioned as a large "self-realization" cult with its own intelligence operatives, I called Mitteager to relate the news to him. Scientology had run into legal difficulties with the Justice Department, and was suspected of fostering illicit smear tactics in a number of cities, including Clearwater, Florida, scene of Michael Carr's sabbatical. 

"This confirms what we heard about Michael after John Carr's death," I said to Jim. "He's a ranking Scientologist. And regarding the Process, maybe the apple didn't fall too far from the tree." 

"Yeah, and maybe some of the apples climbed back into the tree," Jim suggested. "If he's counseling lost souls for Scientology, allegedly helping them discover themselves, he could certainly be working both sides of the street and plucking a few out for recruitment in the Satan stuff. That Scientology movement is fertile ground for latching on to confused people. He'd have his pick of candidates. Even that press release sounds like some recruitment gimmick. It's certainly got nothing to do with answering telephones." 

"Not on the surface, at any rate," I cautioned. "We'll have to wait and see if it's the apple and the tree or if he's using his Scientology position for other reasons." 

In May, I received word from a source that Berkowitz's life was in danger. I immediately phoned Jim, who contacted Felix Gilroy. Gilroy sent a formal advisement to the Correction Department warning that reliable informants said an attempt might soon be made on Berkowitz's life. 

It happened at about 8:15 A.M. on the morning of Tuesday, July 10. Berkowitz, in a segregated Attica cellblock reserved for high-security-risk prisoners, was carrying a pail of hot wash water as part of his inmate's job as a porter when the razor slash came. The cut, which caught Berkowitz from behind, extended from the left side of his throat to the back of his neck. It required fifty-six stitches to close. A bit deeper and he would have been dead. 

Berkowitz, with typical aplomb, walked up to a correction guard and said, "I'm sorry, but I've been cut." He was taken to the infirmary for treatment and refused to cooperate with prison officials in their investigation. He never revealed the name of his assailant, who was another inmate. 

Writing about the incident to a friend, Berkowitz blamed his inattention and lack of concentration on an occult book he'd been reading. He wrote: 

There were other things. I wasn't sleeping well and I was tossing and turning. I was losing sleep and I walked around all day feeling tired. There were still more things but I can't pinpoint it other than saying I was getting bad feelings in general and bad vibes from everybody else. 

I admit that I did get somewhat enmeshed in this book and often spent hours inside its pages. How- ever, everything was happening so subtly, so slowly, that I never connected the book to this. Maybe it wasn't the book but just a very common stroke of bad luck. Anyhow, everything culminated with my throat being slashed. I could well have lost my life, yet, it didn't upset me. 

After the assault, I was sent to an isolation room at the hospital. Being locked alone in that airless room, that solitary soundless room, I started to think and meditate about this close brush with death and everything that led up to it, and the last rotten, depressing month. FINALLY! I put two and two together. I was getting these negative feelings from this book all along. . . . 

If you could have seen this book, then you'd understand. It was full of satanic symbols, prayers, and most of all, pictures. Do you know someone by the name, Eliphas Levi? [He] had this picture drawn up. It was a picture of a goat head attached to the body of a man. It was called BAPHOMET. I did stare at this picture for hours on end. . . . 

In that hospital room, I slept and slept. .. . I realized that I had gotten careless, I wasn't alert. . . . So out comes the razor blade and swoosh. 

Immediately upon my return to my own cell a week later, I went strait [sic] to my bunk, kneeled down underneath it, grabbed that book, and tore it into shreds. 

Although I can't say with certainty that the attack on Berkowitz was linked to my source's information, it's definitely possible it was, given the timing of the incident—although Berkowitz would later imply another motive. That motive, ac- cording to a prison source, involved Berkowitz's cult activities. Nonetheless, a chagrined Gilroy told the press that he'd for- mally alerted the Correction Department weeks before that an attack might be imminent. But only then, in the aftermath of the assault, were security measures around Berkowitz increased. 

As word of the attempted murder was flashed, we were in the final stages of preparing a major report on the Moskowitz killing for the Gannett Westchester-Rockland Newspapers (WRN). For six weeks, with help from Jim Mitteager and Tom Bartley, I probed that shooting. We re-interviewed witness Tommy Zaino, who saw the attack from his borrowed blue Corvette; and located and extensively questioned Cacilia Davis, whose complete account of what happened that night had never reached the public. 

With stopwatches and multiple re-creations and other analysis of the events of July 31, 1977 a picture emerged which demonstrated, as I'd long suspected, that Berkowitz wasn't alone at that scene and apparently wasn't the triggerman either. The article, which occupied more than an entire page in the large-formatted newspapers, was published on Thursday, July 19. This time, the editors allowed Jim's name on the story, and he and I shared the byline. 

Whereas the March article, which raised a number of conspiracy-related questions, was largely ignored by the rest of the media, this one wasn't. TV and radio covered the story, and the Associated Press released a dispatch written by Richard (Rick) Pienciak, who'd been following our investigation since interviewing Mitteager nine months earlier. Pienciak had urged us to publish John Carr's suspected link to the case, but we demurred, waiting for more information before doing so. 

Not surprisingly, law enforcement officials denied the article's revelations, which were far less extensive than the later details that appear in this writing. WCBS radio reporter Irene Cornell sought out Brooklyn DA Eugene Gold, who refused to speak with her but hollered that the article was "wild speculation" as he ducked into an elevator. WPIX-TV sent reporter Jeff Kamen to Gold's office for comment, but he was denied access. WPIX would follow the case closely from then on and air extensive coverage of future developments. 

Gold, under pressure, finally released a statement, which my colleague Mike Zuckerman reported in the next day's editions of the Gannett papers. The statement charged that his own star witnesses were in error. The story, Gold's office said, was "a wild hypothesis not supported by the evidence." Gold, his spokeswoman, Rhonda Nager, admitted, "hasn't read the story but he knows of its contents." 

Then Nager requested that the following comment not be attributed to her by name. "It was night, it was dark, and at the very best [the witnesses'] recollections are hazy and those recollections could be marred by the intensity of the experience." 

The DA's office was now trying to destroy the credibility of its own key witnesses, whom the police believed and upon whom much credit was bestowed at the time of the arrest. 

The Moskowitz report drew the battle lines. Gold was going to stonewall for as long as he could get away with it; and, because the article concerned Gold's jurisdiction, Queens DA John Santucci and the Bronx's Mario Merola remained silent. The NYPD issued a soft public denial, but was clandestinely operating on a different level. 

Regarding the press, it was enlightening to gauge current reaction to new developments in the case that originally was such a media spectacular. The wire services and most TV and radio stations—who were not in direct competition with their print counterparts—paid some attention to the story. The New York Times published a small piece reporting our allegations and the official denials. The Daily News., which unfortunately had a stake in the sole-killer concept, ignored the issue. This was the same publication that, along with the Post, had embraced the Son of Sam story as its own two years earlier. 

News columnist Jimmy Breslin, with TV sports reporter Dick Schaap, had penned a novel about the .44 case which depicted Berkowitz as a drooling, demented madman who acted alone. Additionally, the News, which had posted reward money for the apprehension of Son of Sam, presented some of that booty to—of all people—the Carr family. So the News, whose reporter William Federici was involved in the jumbling of Mrs. Davis' original story, would treat the hunt for accomplices as if it didn't exist. It would be several years before management changes restored the paper's traditional lifeblood. 

The Post, with problems of its own regarding the Mitteager case, which was about to come to trial, also ignored the Moskowitz article. But later, at the urging of Steve Dunleavy, who was well aware of the subject's validity, the Post covered the conspiracy probe. 

Once we'd broken the ground, the New York area press might have made a positive impact by transcending the reporting of charges and denials to mount serious inquiries to complement ours. But it wasn't to be, and there were several reasons why we effectively had to go it alone. 

First, there was a combination of incredulity and embarrassment. Except for the Post, which dropped out due to circumstances described earlier, no one had looked behind the headlines after Berkowitz's apprehension. Reluctant to consider that they might have missed a story of such dimensions, some publications simply accepted the official renunciations as gospel. 

Second, no media outlet likes to play "catch-up," and all were unknowing of the sources and leads we had developed. So rather than start from scratch in the middle of a labyrinth or continually publish credited versions of the Gannett pieces, some editors simply disregarded the new developments. 

Third, since the press relies on official agencies for material, it can have inherent motives for generally assuming a non-combative posture with the likes of police departments and district attorneys' offices—a position that would have been severely compromised by pursuit of the Sam case. Concurrently, with the days of Watergate-type investigative reporting on the wane —much to the dismay of most reporters and editors—a fair number of media executives, including the then top editor of the Daily News, were actively seeking to shed their "watchdog" cloaks and rekindle amiable relationships with government branches. 

We, ourselves, didn't relish a battlefield setting for the new Son of Sam investigation. We had made official visits before publishing a word about John Carr or the Moskowitz murder. But when it became evident that authorities wouldn't follow through, we determined that they could read about our findings at the same time everyone else did. 

But the Gannett staff, Mitteager and I were basically satisfied with the response to the Moskowitz story. The message was out: there were big problems with the Son of Sam case, and there would be no turning back. 

In Minot, North Dakota, far from the New York subterfuge, Jeff Nies, twenty-six, a reporter and native of Ridgewood, New Jersey, was scanning the overnight AP wire at the Minot Daily News when he saw the dispatch about the Moskowitz story and its conclusion that Berkowitz wasn't alone in the .44 shootings. 

Nies's mind immediately clicked on to John Carr. Nies wasn't working in North Dakota when Carr died seventeen months earlier. But, as his paper's current police reporter, he'd heard stories of Carr's links to Berkowitz from various Minot and Ward County police officers—connections that were un- known by us in New York. 

Twice in the months after Carr's death I phoned Dakota authorities, only to be turned away. And New York officials had slammed the lid on us in the East. But Nies, who dealt with the Dakota officers daily, knew explosive facts which had been kept from us. 

He phoned Gannett's main office in White Plains and reached Tom Bartley, who told him I was en route to Fire Island but would be checking back with him. Four days later, Nies and I established contact. 

"There's a lot of information on John Carr out here," Jeff said. "They know he was involved with Berkowitz and belonged to a satanic cult. They sent it all to New York before Berkowitz pleaded guilty but it was squelched back there." 

"What?" I was incredulous. "We were after him before his death and they closed us down. Now you're saying they knew he was tied to Berkowitz all along?" 

"Exactly," Nies emphasized. 

"And a cult, too?" 

"Yeah, they got it all right after Carr died." 

"Jeff, you'd have no way of knowing this, but we saw Berkowitz nine months ago and he confirmed knowing Carr and he said there was a cult, too. Now I hear that the cops out there uncovered the same things long before we talked to Berkowitz. Damn it, confirmations of everything existed all along. Berkowitz's statements were confirmed before we even met him." 

"They didn't really cover it up out here," Jeff said. "They sent it all to New York." 

"O.K., O.K. But don't you see, there's no debate on this anymore. Both Carr and Berkowitz admitted to knowing each other and there's cult evidence on both ends. We've got it!" 

Nies then began filling in the blanks. Over the next two weeks, the scope of what had been hidden about John Carr was unveiled to me. The information was stunning. Finally, I told Jeff I needed to talk with one of the officers involved in the Carr investigation. Three more days elapsed before Nies persuaded Lieutenant Terry Gardner of the Ward County Sheriff 's Department to speak with me. It was Gardner who was quoted in the Post story about Carr's death and said the Dakota investigation was complete. 

Gardner was initially suspicious, and several conversations ensued before be began to open up at all. When he did, he put Minot police officer Mike Knoop on an extension. Knoop, who'd done undercover work in Minot's drug culture, had himself developed information about Carr. 

"Hell, yes," Gardner said. "We said the investigation was done. We didn't owe those papers in New York a thing. Some of them thought they were God almighty because they were from New York, and we didn't take too well to that. In the second place, we were asked to keep it quiet by the Westchester Sheriff's Department because, they told us, there was a confidential investigation going on." 

"Who asked you to keep it quiet and what did you do?" I asked.  

"The investigator's name was Ken Zajac, and he said they had a case going with John Carr and Son of Sam." 

"Yeah, thanks to us, they did," I said. "They didn't know shit until I told them." 

"You told them?" Gardner was surprised. 

"Yeah, and before them we went to the Brooklyn DA's office." 

"Well, we forwarded everything we found to Westchester," Gardner said. "We couldn't believe we never heard from anyone in New York after that. It just died. Someone back there called [our] sheriff—because we kept looking into it—and told us to forget it." 

"You're aware they then ignored what you people dug up and let Berkowitz plead guilty as a lone killer three months later?" 

"Yeah. We were surprised there wasn't any follow-up, but what could we do?" 

"New York had the Son of Sam case, not us," Mike Knoop said. 

"That's right," Gardner added. "I'm certain they figured that Carr was Berkowitz's accomplice and he was dead, so they couldn't prosecute him. And to let this out would have blown the whole case against Berkowitz out of the water. All his confessions, everything would go up in smoke." 

"Was Carr in a cult?" I asked. 

"Yeah," said Gardner. "He was a cultie, and he was involved with Berkowitz. We interviewed a lot of his friends and looked into his life pretty good at the time." 

"There was a lot of dope dealing out here, too," Knoop cut in. "And old John Carr was up to his neck in it." 

"Do either of you guys know Carr's nicknames?" I asked. 

"Sure," Gardner answered. "J.C. was one and Wheaties was another." 

"Where'd you get that?" 

"His girlfriend, Linda O'Connor, and his drug counselor," Gardner said. 

"That's a big piece of information, gentlemen. Berkowitz told us John Carr was John Wheaties." 

"Sure," Knoop agreed. "They knew each other. We got that, too." 

The evidence compiled in North Dakota was so compelling I immediately pulled out all the stops in New York to learn just what official agencies were aware of the information. Sal DoTorio of the Westchester Sheriff's Department, which apparently ran interference for the Brooklyn DA's office, said all information the department received was forwarded to Brooklyn DA Eugene Gold "in a matter of days." 

Technically, the Sheriff's Department was blameless. But in effect, it ducked its Son of Sam responsibilities on jurisdictional grounds and laid the accountability on Brooklyn. "They were prosecuting the Son of Sam case," DoTorio said. "We passed everything we uncovered on to them." 

At no time did anyone in the Westchester Sheriff's Department advise me that important information confirming the John Carr, Berkowitz and cult suspicions I'd originated had been unearthed in North Dakota. And neither, of course, did Gold's office in Brooklyn. Without any follow-up investigation, as Gardner and Knoop said, the Brooklyn DA—who kept Queens and apparently the Bronx in the dark—sat back and allowed Berkowitz to plead guilty as a sole killer in early May 1978. And this was the agency that already knew about the VW chase, our information about Carr and a cult, and Mrs. Davis's statement about Berkowitz's Galaxie leaving the area shortly before the Moskowitz-Violante attack. 

Queens district attorney John Santucci would later remark: "The information about Carr never reached this office. Five .44 attacks occurred in my jurisdiction and I was uncomfortable with the entire case since the arrest and had been urging a trial, but couldn't convince the other district attorneys [Gold and Mario Merola], who were willing to accept the guilty pleas. If I was aware of the Carr information I would have acted on it then. I only wish you'd come to me instead of Brooklyn. But you had no way of knowing what was going to occur either." 

Indeed, eighteen months had elapsed and only now was I learning what really happened after John Carr's death. 

When Carr's body was found the night of February 16, 1978, he was in fact termed a probable homicide victim, not the suicide as later told to the Post. Said Gardner: "At the time, we didn't really know what happened. We eventually called it an apparent suicide, but we never really closed the case. If information was later found to call it homicide or probable homicide again, we'd do so." 

What Gardner didn't mention is that a tentative determination of "apparent suicide" eliminated the need for a long, complicated murder investigation which could have failed. As sheriff's investigator Glenn Gietzen later told the Minot Daily News: "New York told us Carr was wanted for questioning. I viewed him as a devil worshipper who blew himself away rather than get caught." 

Yes, a devil worshipper. Gietzen said he found Carr's tarot cards and occult posters "with X's and O's, upturned [inverted] crosses, and snakes on them." And there was more. On February 21, the day before our Post story appeared, Westchester sheriff's investigator Kenneth Zajac contacted North Dakota concerning Carr. He reported to his superior, DoTorio, the day after I called DoTorio about Carr's death that he had: 

. . . contacted the Minot, North Dakota, Police Department, speaking to Lt. Hendrickson who revealed to me that John C. Carr, DOB 10/12/46, was in fact found dead in their jurisdiction and that it was being carried as a homicide, possible suicide, but was not classified as suicide as of this writing. He further stated that the Ward County Sheriff's Dept. was investigating the case. 

He informed me that a Detective Getson [Gietzen] was working on the case. I then spoke to Deputy Linn Howe who related to me that John C. Carr was the victim of a homicide, as yet not classified a suicide, and that their investigation into the case was continuing. He did, however, inform me that they were in possession of written statements from friends of John C. Carr in which John C. Carr allegedly told them he was friends of David Berkowitz and he knew him personally for a long time. 

. . . Also at this time, this writer [Zajac] was informed that Det. Getson had interviewed the psychiatrist who was treating John C. Carr who listed him (Carr) as a "paranoid schizophrenic" and made statements to Det. Getson of his (Carr's) problems. Det. Getson also ascertained that John C. Carr made, during therapy, drawings of David Berkowitz, his home, apartment, etc. 

. . . Det. Getson informed Investigator Zajac that he would be sending this writer [Zajac] via mail copies of the reports, statements, etc.

 . The undersigned asked Det. Getson at this point if any other law enforcement agencies had contacted him [yet] regarding this case, to which he stated that WFAS radio [a Westchester station] had called him. Other members of his department were contacted by the New York Post. . . . After the first statement was made by them (Ward County Sheriff's Dept.) they were hanging up on these people and not discussing the case further with anyone except the undersigned. 

DoTorio then authorized a telex, which was sent to North Dakota that afternoon, February 21. Addressed to Ward County deputy Linn Howe, the message was signed by Zajac for the Westchester sheriff, Thomas Delaney. 

As per our conversation this date. May this serve to . . . request all information re: John C. Carr, DOA as of 2/17/78 homicide your jurisdiction. Request copies of investigation, any photos, or photos found in residence revealing any connection or possible connection with New York or residents of New York. Also, copies of statements you have from friends. Official letter of request in mail to your jurisdiction this date. 

Later that same night, as the Post presses prepared to roll, another telex was sent to North Dakota from Westchester authorities. This one impounded all of John Carr's effects: 

This dept. believes family of John C. Carr . . . homicide your jurisdiction, en route to your jurisdiction in attempt to regain or take possession of personal property of victim Carr. This property presently impounded by your department for this department. Do not release to family. If any difficulty pis call . . . attention Chief Investigator DoTorio or Investigator Zajac immediately. Repeat: Do not release property. 

On February 22, with the Post article on the newsstands, Zajac reported to DoTorio that he'd done an initial check on Carr's brother, Michael, as I'd recommended two days earlier. I advised DoTorio that North Dakota contacts told us Michael, twenty-five, was a counselor in the Church of Scientology and was professionally involved in photo graphics and illustrations, a possible link to the Breslin letter's printing style. Zajac then switched to the North Dakota probe and dropped a bombshell: 

Detective Getson [Gietzen] stated during this personal conversation with the undersigned that John C. Carr was known to be a member of a satanic occult group in his jurisdiction that was drug oriented. He (Carr) made statements to Getson that part of the ritual was drinking the leader's urine. This ritual, according to Detective Getson, was satanic oriented. 

Gietzen had been told about the ritual by Carr himself when he was picked up on a Minot street in October 1976. Minot police officer Michael Knoop also heard the urine-drinking comment, and stated Carr said it was consumed from a chalice. Knoop had uncovered evidence of satanic cult activity in the area while working with undercover drug informants; and Carr was known to the police as a drug dealer. 

At the time of this incident, Carr, suffering from a drug overdose, had been thrown from a van and found by Gietzen, who was then joined by Knoop. Carr had more than two thousand dollars in cash strapped to his leg and in his wallet, allegedly from drug dealings. 

Zajac absorbed more details during his conversations with Ward County and Minot officials that day, and fired off another report to DoTorio. In it, Zajac stated his professional evaluation of the case. The memo, as usual, was labeled "Son of Sam Investigation." 

It is the opinion of the undersigned that there is a strong possibility that John C. Carr may be involved with David Berkowitz, [in addition to] the fact that the North Dakota Ward County Sheriff's Office informed this writer at 4:30 P.M. . . . that they had statements from John C. Carr's girlfriend in North Dakota, which contained alleged facts that John C. Carr did in fact know David Berkowitz. Also, statements from . . . males verify the fact that John C. Carr knew David Berkowitz personally. 

The investigation was at this stage at the moment the Post article was being discredited by the authorities in New York  City and Westchester. On February 23, with the story we'd put together dead and buried, Zajac wrote: 

Det. Getson, while speaking to [Zajac] via telephone . . . stated that Linda R. O'Connor had made a statement that during John C. Carr's trips in and out of North Dakota he made statements to her that he knew the police were looking for him in connection with David Berkowitz and he (Carr) was extremely paranoid. Det. Getson then stated to Linda R. O'Connor: "You knew that he was being looked for by the police and yet you still harbored him. Do you realize that is a crime?" She stated, "I had no knowledge that he was a criminal, so I was not bound by that law." . . . 

(Carr) stated [to Linda] that the cops were hot on his trail and he had to leave [New York] for a while but he would contact her. 

On February 24, Ward County officers interviewed Jeffrey Sloat, an airman and former roommate of Carr's. The report said, in part: "During the period of them being roommates, John C. Carr acted in strange ways, always talking of Berkowitz and stating they were friends." (One of the "strange ways" Carr acted, another report said, was to cover ten-dollar bills with mayonnaise and eat them.) 

On February 27, Ward County investigator Glenn Gietzen wrote up another report on an interview with Sloat. In part, it said: 

He (Carr) talked a lot of Berkowitz, a lot of Son of Sam, and talked about his dog Berkowitz had shot. When asked for particular details, Jeffrey said it was mostly small talk until after the dog was shot. . . . [The Carr dog was shot in April; Berkowitz was arrested in August. According to Sloat, Carr was talking about Berkowitz even before April, many months before his arrest as Son of Sam. The Carr family said they'd never even heard of Berkowitz until June, when the Cassaras in New Rochelle named him as a suspect in the wounding of the Carr family's dog in Yonkers.] 

Jeffrey was instrumental in committing John in a mental institution. When asked why he had done that, he stated: "All the time he lived with me he acted very crazy." .. . He stated John would run around beating on the walls, breaking glass, and screaming something that was incoherent. John con- versed quite often with Abraham Lincoln through a picture, carrying on lengthy conversations with the past president. He would write all over the walls the letters XXO and XOX [with an inverted cross be- neath, as drawn by Gietzen later]. .. . He would also write, "There's only 32 days in a month, so to hell." 

Carr, the authorities also determined, owned several guns. In total, police in North Dakota amassed information indicating that Carr knew Berkowitz (in contrast to the official story put forth in New York); was involved in a satanic cult; knew police in New York were looking for him and fled; and used and dealt drugs and owned weapons, including handguns. 

A clear picture of Carr's deteriorated mental state also emerged from the interviews, as did the fact that he closely resembled a Son of Sam composite sketch released after the Lomino-DeMasi attack, a time police established Carr was in New York. 

And nothing happened. Berkowitz was allowed to plead guilty as a lone killer. There wasn't even a follow-up investigation, as emphasized by the North Dakota police. 

In late August 1979, my conversations continued with Jeff Nies, Gardner and Knoop. One night, while Nies listened in on an extension in the Sheriff's Department, I asked Gardner for the names of people he'd learned were associated with John Carr. The deputy reached into a file and went down a list of names, most of whom were from North Dakota. 

He then came to another name. "This guy's supposed to be from New York," he said. 

"O.K., that's of interest. Who is it?" 

"It's this guy named Reeve Rockman," Gardner replied, and then prepared to continue with his list. 

"Reeve Rockman?" 

"Yeah, we don't have much on this dude. Just that he was out here with Carr in October of '76, just after John got the boot from the Air Force and went on a druggie binge." 

"What else?" 

"Nothing much. Rockman showed up out here and John went back to New York with him about October 25 of '76." 

"I see." 

"Who the hell is he? You know him?" Gardner asked. 

"I don't know anymore. I thought he was a figment of somebody's imagination." 

I hadn't spoken to Bronx homicide detective Hank Cinotti since the week after the aborted Good Friday stakeout in Untermyer Park. And it wasn't easy for me to make the call. 

"Hank, you remember your boy Rockman—Veronica Lueken's pride and joy? Well, it seems he managed to get himself to North Dakota to visit his buddy John Wheaties." 

"No shit!" Cinotti exulted. "I told you he was involved but you didn't want to believe it." 

"I knew about his two names and addresses, and I always said he was curious. But I couldn't buy the rest of Lueken's story and neither could Jim," I explained. "Look, what's done is done. The important thing is that he's a live wire again." 

"He always was with me." Hank chuckled. 

"O.K., I had that coming." I told Cinotti about the North Dakota information and said I was flying to Minot as soon as possible. 

"Not without me, you aren't," Hank insisted. 

"I've got the interviews lined up. I've got to talk to these friends of Carr. They're expecting me there over Labor Day weekend. I've got a flight that Friday before." 

"Will you let me talk to this Gardner?" Hank asked. 

I gave Cinotti the deputy's number and began preparing for the trip. I would be going alone. Joe Ungaro, the Gannett papers' executive editor, authorized my expenses, but not Jim Mitteager's. And Mitteager, who was strapped for cash because of his legal problem, couldn't afford to go on his own. His trial date was also approaching and he was occupied with his defense. A third consideration was that Jim remained openly critical of both Cinotti and Lueken. 

"I think all the stuff about Carr is great," he said. "And you can bet it's on target. But this Rockman thing—for all I know Lueken called up out there a year ago and Gardner just forgets the information came that way." 

"No, he knows right where it came from." 

Jim was starting to feel that his input was being backburnered, and he was dismayed that I'd reached out for Cinotti again. He also resented that Gannett declined to underwrite his trip, although it was merely an economic decision. But Jim still remembered the first series published in March, when editors kept his byline off the articles because of his arrest. 

"I don't like what's going on," he said. "I don't blame you, but it seems like things are starting to get out of hand." 

"You don't expect me to stay home, do you?" 

"Of course not. You dug it up anyway. I hope everything goes great out there. Just call me from Minot and let me know what the hell is happening, will you?" 

"You got it." 

As I drove to La Guardia Airport on August 31, I was unaware of a violent event that had recently happened in Queens. Shortly after the Moskowitz article was published— which itself came on the heels of Berkowitz's throat slashing— a rotund young man named Howard Weiss was shot to death in his Flushing apartment. 

Months later, Weiss's close male companion, his homosexual lover, police say, would be arrested for the killing. His name was Rodriguez. The relevancy of this murder would in- crease when it became known that Weiss was a friend of David Berkowitz. 

Weiss, Berkowitz and a former Yonkers police officer I will call Peter Shane all belonged to a police auxiliary fire rescue unit in the Bronx in 1971, before Berkowitz joined the Army. 

Shane, in applying for the Yonkers police position in 1973, listed Weiss as a reference. He would later acknowledge that he gave Weiss two handguns in the spring of 1979, shortly before Weiss's murder. Shane and Berkowitz each owned .44 Bulldog revolvers; and although sources said Weiss also did, none was found in his apartment. But detectives working the Weiss case told a reporter that "most of Weiss's guns were recovered." 

The implication was evident: Weiss owned more guns. Both Weiss and Shane held "peace officer" status: Shane as a Yonkers cop and Weiss as a part-time investigator for a Bronx child welfare agency. Thus, firearms registration certificates, through which their gun ownerships could be traced, weren't available. 

Shane knew Wheat Carr, sister of John and Michael, from her own post as a civilian dispatcher with the Yonkers Police Department. Therefore, Shane provided a direct link between  Weiss, Berkowitz and members of the Carr family. And Shane's tie to Berkowitz wasn't an old one. It would be established that Shane, Berkowitz and Weiss all attended the Mary- land wedding of another friend shortly before the Son of Sam killings began. 

"There were movies of the wedding reception. They were there," I'd learn from Queens assistant district attorney Herb Leifer. 

Shane, for his part, would acknowledge his friendship with Wheat Carr and Weiss, but said he didn't work with Berkowitz in the auxiliary unit. Yet, as Leifer would say, "Those guys were all at the wedding, and Shane and Weiss were friends— and so were Weiss and Berkowitz." 

Reporter Dan Diamond later quoted a source as telling him, flat out, that Shane and Weiss were both involved in the cult with Berkowitz. "They are all psychos who are intrigued by blood and death. It's part of their life," the source stated. He added that the three men, as well as other cult members, were "fire buffs" and explained that this common bond influenced their cult activities, some of which involved arson. 

Years later, a friend of Berkowitz's would supply me with specifics of the "fire" connection that confirmed the allegations made by the source. 

In the meantime, Howard Weiss was dead, and another avenue of investigation was shut off permanently. His ties with Berkowitz and Shane would be firmly established during the coming months. Charter Arms had sold only 28,000 .44 Bull- dogs in the entire United States at this time. Yet at least two (and later more) people linked to Berkowitz owned them. It was a curious statistic. If only 28,000 out of 250 million U.S. residents owned .44 Bulldogs, the odds against any one person having one were already high. And the odds against several people, all of whom were connected to one person—Berkowitz —owning them were astronomical. 

Before the Weiss link would be uncovered, there was evidence lurking in North Dakota. It was time to pull it from the shadows once and for all.

XI 

A Matter of Murder 

A crashing thunderstorm raged in the early-evening darkness as the jet bucked its way toward the small Minot airport. Outside the cabin windows, jagged bolts of lightning stabbed the inky summer sky. 

"See that, Hank? They know we're coming. The witches of Minot are out to get us." 

Cinotti, trying to balance a teetering glass of wine as the plane shuddered in the buffeting wind, laughed nervously. Until I saw him at the ticket counter in New York, I didn't know if the detective would make the trip. Only at the last minute did he receive his superiors' permission to go. He even held a pre-departure phone conference with Detective Captain John Plansker, not mentioning he was traveling with me. And so once again, as had occurred eighteen months earlier in Westchester, the Son of Sam case was technically reopened. 

"Come on," Cinotti chided. "You're not afraid of those witches, are you?" 

"Screw the witches. It's this weather that's somewhat unnerving," I answered as the jet dipped again. 

The trip had been a long one. We'd changed planes in Minneapolis and stopped at Grand Forks, North Dakota, before encountering the storm. The pilot announced we were circling Minot and would land from the west to escape the frightening weather. 

"I wonder what's waiting for us down there," Hank said. 

"The ground, I hope. And after that, I don't know. But there's a lot to learn. I just hope to hell we can get it." 

Finally, we touched the runway and the plane lurched toward the terminal area. 

"I'll bet the Pope took this flight once and ever since then he  kisses the ground when he gets off a plane," I said as we braked to a halt. 

Ever religious, Hank shook his head at the blasphemy. At the exact moment we stepped into the rainy night, I thought there was some ironic truth to the Pope comment as a brass band began playing in front of the terminal. 

"Some covert intelligence trip this is," Cinotti shouted over the din. "They send out an orchestra to meet us." 

Actually, the group was assembled to welcome a local politician. 

Once inside the terminal, I heard a familiar twang. 

"Hey, you guys looking for a couple of cops?" It was Terry Gardner, accompanied by Mike Knoop and Jeff Nies. 

"How'd you know it was us?" Hank asked. "The plane was full." 

"That's why we're cops." Gardner grinned. 

Gardner, twenty-nine, was an Air Force Vietnam veteran who joined the Ward County Sheriff's Department in 1973. Born in Illinois, he spoke with a pronounced midwestern lilt; and the cowboy hat he wore completed the effect. Cinotti promptly anointed Gardner with nicknames, dubbing him both "McCloud" and "Deputy Dawg," for the cartoon character. 

"Well, pa'dner," Hank drawled in Bronxese, "we got a horse named Maverick in the NYPD. You should come on all in to New York and ride him right through the front of One Poleese Plaza, heah." 

"Shit, I should have done that with the Carr file last year," Gardner agreed. "When I get to New York I'll bring Knooper here with me. Need somebody to wade through that mess you guys made back there." 

Mike Knoop laughed easily. He was tall, husky and bespectacled. At thirty, he was a veteran Minot police officer. Like Gardner, he spoke with a midwestern flair. But unlike Gardner, he rarely raised his voice above a low decibel. 

While the cops bantered, Jeff Nies pulled me aside and we exchanged greetings. His work on the case was extremely helpful, and I thanked him for contacting me after reading the AP dispatch about the Moskowitz article. 

"Enough of this stuff," Gardner said. "Let's get the hell out of here and get you folks to your motel." 

Minot is a small city, its population about 33,000. It is situated 1,600 feet above sea level on the banks of the Souris River a hundred miles north of Bismarck and about fifty miles south of the Canadian border. Its summers are short and pleasant; its winters, long and bitterly cold. In farm country, Minot is surrounded by miles of open, rolling plains and an occasional large, scenic lake. The Air Force base, where John Carr died, is about thirteen miles north of the city. 

In short order we gathered in our motel's cocktail lounge to discuss the case. The two Dakota policemen had lined up several interviews for us: Linda O'Connor, John Carr's girlfriend; her ex-husband, Craig; Tom Taylor and Darlene Christiansen, two close friends of Carr who traveled to New York for his funeral; and Leslie Shago, another friend. Nies also arranged for us to talk by phone with Carr's drug counselor, Lee Slaughter, from his new home in Minnesota. 

Over a round of drinks, Gardner and Knoop filled us in on their investigation of Carr. 

"He was really tight with an Indian named Phil Falcon, who ran a coffee shop here called the Falcon's Nest. We found some dead German shepherds behind that place," Gardner said. "That goes with what you found in New York. Falcon was into the occult—he's out West now. He left here about a year before Carr became oatmeal." 

"There was a group of about eight or nine of them," Knoop continued. "Dope dealing, Satan rituals, you name it. Carr was a dealer and a user." 

"Where'd they meet?" I asked. 

"Besides the Falcon's Nest, they had rituals at some old farm somewhere out of town," Gardner said. "There's a guy named Donny Boone, who split from here. He was in it. He was decapped in a car wreck in Arizona in '76. And then there's Jerry Berg, who used to live in Bismarck but came up here to Minot State College and stayed. He and his buddy, Larry Milenko,* were in the cult scene with Carr." 

"Along with a guy called the Wiz," Knoop added. "And there were some others, too, who were minor players." 

"What about Carr and Berkowitz?" Cinotti asked. 

"Our investigation showed they knew each other and Carr admitted it," Gardner answered. 

"Well, Berkowitz admitted knowing Carr, too," I said. "And both these admissions came at different times in different parts of the country. That argument is over." 

"Besides Carr, could any of these others have come to New York for the Sam shootings?" Cinotti wanted to know. 

"It's possible," Knoop replied. "We can't prove it, but it's not off the wall to think they might have. We know John was back there to be available for four or five of the shootings— including that one where the two girls were shot on the stoop." 

"Yeah, that's one I'm very interested in concerning John," I said. "He fits the description, he was left-handed and he was in town. They had a witness who saw the shooter split carrying the gun in the left hand." 

"What about Rockman?" Hank demanded. "How the hell did you get him?" 

Gardner chuckled. "I talked to Craig O'Connor, who told me Carr was afraid of a 'Rockman.' I thought he said 'rock man.' I even put it in my notes that way: 'Carr said a rock man is going to kill him, apparently a musician.'" 

I looked at Gardner. "And you say New York cops are turkeys?" 

"Shit, Craig didn't know anything but that statement. Anyway, I then found some local girl named Harliss, who I heard knew Carr and was into the occult. She gave me some cult dope about Carr and said Rockman was a dude who came out here on one occasion in order to see John." 

"Why?" Cinotti asked. 

"Maybe dope, but we don't know for sure. He spent about a week here and then John went back to New York with him in late October '76—just after he left the service." 

"Rock man," I teased again. "Who'd you think it was, David Bowie?" 

"Goddamn," Gardner said. "It was just me and Knooper here trying to dig up all this information. Gietzen didn't give a damn once the first week of interviews was over. He said it was New York's problem—and look how they handled it. Down the hatch. But we were curious about what we found, so we just kept going." 

"How did the sheriff feel about this?" Hank asked. 

"He didn't mind, but after a while he said there was nowhere to go with the information except to use it as intelligence about the dope and cult scene. So we stopped." 

"That was the Minot Police Department's response, too," Mike Knoop added. 

"It's a good thing you guys kept poking into it," Hank said. 

"I'm furious about this whole damned thing," I said. "We were there right after Berkowitz's arrest. All this Carr stuff you guys got confirmed was what we were onto all along. And we see Berkowitz, who gives us all this information that you guys had already confirmed, but we didn't know it. We blew a year and a half." 

"Look," Gardner said. "We didn't know what you were into back there. We're cops. We hear from the cops back there and we deal with them. They fucked it up, nobody else." 

Jeff Nies, who'd been quiet during most of the conversation, put things into perspective. 

"At least it wasn't lost forever. It could have been. But now everybody's together here. We can still pull it together," he said. 

"A lot of time has gone by," Cinotti replied. "The trail is colder now." 

"Well, let's heat 'er up," Gardner said, and ordered another round for the table. 

The first interviews were scheduled for the afternoon of Saturday, September 1. In the morning, we met Sheriff Leon Schwan and Minot police chief Carroll Erickson, visited the now shuttered Falcon's Nest and drove out to the base—where we saw the Liberty Loop home where Carr was found dead and were introduced to Rick Ferron, OSI's chief investigator. 

We also studied notes and reports compiled by Gardner, Knoop and Gietzen, and Jeff Nies showed us the results of interviews he'd conducted since we established contact in late July. 

For the sake of conciseness and clarity, the following are highlights of the information uncovered by us, the North Dakota authorities and investigators for the Queens district attorney's office—who would travel to Minot two months after our visit. In each instance, the information overlapped, as the details provided by Carr's associates and others remained consistent. 

That John Carr was nicknamed Wheaties was confirmed in taped statements by Linda O'Connor, counselor Lee Slaughter and Phil Falcon, whom we later reached by telephone. "On one of his jackets he even had a patch with a Wheaties box sewn on the shoulder," Falcon said. 

Linda O'Connor added: "Wheaties, breakfast of champions. He liked to eat them. I thought the nickname originated here and not in New York." Slaughter said simply: "John told me one of his nicknames was Wheaties." 

Queens investigators later received an additional confirmation from a friend of Carr's in New York. Thus, Berkowitz's statement about the nickname at Marcy was confirmed, and John Carr was identified as an alias of Son of Sam used in the Breslin letter. 

That John Carr was involved in satanic cult activity, as stated by Berkowitz at Marcy and crucial to our evaluation of the entire case, was confirmed by Tom Taylor, Darlene Christiansen, Leslie Shago, Harliss, Phil Falcon and Carr's own sister, Wheat. She later told Queens investigators: "John's involvement in the occult I'm not going to deny. There's no way I could deny it. I'd be stupid to deny it." 

Counselor Lee Slaughter also said: "John talked about witchcraft in passing, but didn't dwell on it." Airman Jeff Sloat, who roomed with Carr for a time, previously described the "XXO" symbols with inverted crosses beneath that Carr drew on walls. And Deputy Glenn Gietzen recovered occult posters and Tarot cards among Carr's effects. 

Leslie Shago provided an important link between New York and Minot rituals when she produced a receipt which showed that she brought the ear of a German shepherd to a taxidermist for mounting on August 9, 1977—the day before Berkowitz's arrest. "I didn't know what it meant," she said. "Bobby Dukes,* a friend of John Carr's, asked me to do it for him." (In the Pine Street neighborhood, a German shepherd was later found with an ear "sliced off.") 

Tom Taylor, Carr's lanky, long-haired musician friend, said Carr asked him to attend a cult meeting at an old farm outside Minot, but he declined. 

But perhaps the most graphic description of Carr's cult activities came from his dark-haired Indian friend, Phil Falcon. In a recorded interview with me, Nies and Jack Graham of the Minot Daily News, Falcon said: "He kept a list of the demons of hell on him. And to gain power over people, to put a curse on them, he'd go out and bury shit on their lawns. He thought this was some black magic curse. He was a Satanist." 

"These demons he kept a list of—would they include 'Behemoth' and 'Beelzebub'?" I asked. 

"Those were two of them." 

"And this excrement—was it dog manure?" 

"Yeah." 

This information provided two more links between Carr and the Son of Sam letters. 

Falcon went on to say that Carr belonged to cults in both Minot and Westchester County, New York, an important confirmation of our suspicions. He described the New York group as "very violent, large and underground. They were really into the occult. They'd all get together in like a witches' coven, a witch's church. Their sacrifices went all the way." 

Falcon said the Westchester group convened "both indoors and outdoors," and at least one of its meeting sites "was pretty close to [Carr's] house." This fit the description of Untermyer Park, but Falcon couldn't recall the exact location. He described an indoor site also, which he remembered as being an attachment to someone's home or business. He added that he thought there were other locations, too, but said he knew nothing about them. At the time, we didn't think Falcon meant "witch's church" literally. It would later turn out to be just that. 

Falcon said that John Carr was "very much" into satanism and that "John read my entire collection of occult books, [from] how to make amulets to the 'third eye.'" 

Carr, Falcon said, practiced some satanic rituals in Minot with Donny Boone, whom Falcon didn't know was dead. 

"I came to my house and here were Donny and John," Falcon explained in describing one ritual. "When I walked in the door, they were in the kitchen, and Donny had this animal, whatever it was. He had cut its throat and it was bleeding all over the kitchen. He was going to take it into the other room there. There was a [magic] circle drawn and they were sacrificing it. Old Donny Boone was drinking the animal's blood. It was running down his chin." 

Falcon said he put a stop to the ritual and threw Carr and Boone out of his house. "It was an unbelievable mess to clean up." 

If Falcon knew other details about cult activity in Minot or Westchester, he didn't disclose them. He acknowledged his own occult interests, but avoided saying whether or not he participated in any sacrificial rituals himself. As Gardner noted, several German shepherds were found slain behind Falcon's coffee shop, although there is no evidence that Falcon himself was involved in the deaths of those dogs. The coffee shop was a regular hangout for Carr, Boone and others involved in the Satan scene.

In other areas of inquiry vital to our investigation, Carr's relationship with Berkowitz, which each had confirmed, was paramount. 

Counselor Lee Slaughter said: "John told me he looked up to Berkowitz because Berkowitz wasn't afraid to do anti-establishment things. He told me they used to bum around together in Yonkers. But something happened between them. There was bad blood between them after a while." This statement supported Berkowitz's Marcy comment, when he said he "hated" John Carr. 

Slaughter added that Carr "had a tremendous amount of detailed knowledge of the [.44] shootings, like the kinds of cars the victims were in and things like that. He said he knew more about the Son of Sam case than the police did. He also alluded to being at crime scenes, but his inference was subtle. He didn't actually say he was." Slaughter then said: "I told all this to a New York detective who called me and asked me about John shortly after his death. I don't remember [the detective's] name." 

Phil Falcon made a significant statement: "He never called him David or Dave. I didn't know it was Berkowitz. He just used to talk about his friend Berkie in Yonkers." So, as Berkowitz knew Carr's nickname, so did Carr know Berkowitz's, one of which was in fact Berkie. 

Falcon's comment was important for another reason. He left Minot for the Pacific Northwest in March 1977—five months before Berkowitz's arrest and three months before Sam Carr first learned Berkowitz's name from the Cassaras. Yet Falcon said Carr was talking about Berkowitz earlier. Falcon's revelation was strengthened by the fact that he didn't return to Mi- not after March 1977, hadn't spoken to Carr and actually didn't even know Carr was dead until we told him. 

Leslie Shago went further. The young fringe associate of the Carr crowd identified a photo of Berkowitz and said he was in Minot on one occasion. The photo was only a portrait, but Shago correctly described Berkowitz's height and weight. Berkowitz has never written about this alleged trip, but a source close to him later told me Berkowitz said he was in Minot. And in a letter Berkowitz later wrote, he said North Dakota was one of his "favorite states" and accurately described its terrain and other features. No more is known about the alleged trip at this time. 

Even more telling about Carr's involvement in the Son of Sam case were statements from Tom Taylor and Darlene Christiansen, who each said they saw him draw the Son of Sam graphic symbol on the back of a Minot telephone directory in February 1977—four months before it first appeared in the Breslin letter, but immediately after Carr returned to North Dakota from an extended stay in Yonkers. Taylor said Carr explained the symbol's meaning to him and Darlene at the time. They didn't know it was later used in a Son of Sam communication. 

Linda O'Connor, Carr's auburn-haired girlfriend, added that John once wrote a poem dedicated to her husband, Craig, in appreciation of his acceptance of her relationship with John. The writing, she told Gardner and Knoop, said: "Because Craig is Craig, so must the streets be filled with Craigs." 

Those same words appeared in a poem later found in Berkowitz's apartment, in which the original meaning was hatefully twisted and directed at Berkowitz's downstairs neighbor, Craig Glassman. That poem said: "Because Craig is Craig, so must the streets be filled with Craig (Death). And huge drops of lead poured down upon her head until she was dead. Yet, the cats still come out at night to mate, and the sparrows still sing in the morning." 

"John Carr wrote the original words saying the streets should be filled with good people like Craig O'Connor long before Berkowitz borrowed them," said Gardner. 

Linda O'Connor also reported to Gardner, Knoop and the Queens investigators that she saw a receipt for a .44 revolver in the glove compartment of John Carr's auto. She couldn't recall if the receipt was for a Charter Arms .44 or a Colt model. 

Along those lines, Tom Taylor said that he personally picked up and examined .44-caliber ammunition in Carr's Minot apartment. "They were Winchesters," he said. He also stated that Carr had a "large handgun," although he wasn't certain whether it was a .44 or a .45, as he hadn't actually held the weapon. "But I never saw any .45 ammo around," he said. Phil Falcon also said that Carr owned "either a .44 or a .45." 

A potentially important link to the .44 ammunition is the fact that Berkowitz, via Billy Dan Parker, purchased .44 Winchester bullets in Houston, according to a federal report. But when arrested, Berkowitz had only Smith & Wesson .44 bullets. In his confession, he claimed the S&W ammunition was that which he purchased in Houston, but it wasn't. Therefore, there were two boxes, a hundred rounds, of Winchester bullets unaccounted for, something that apparently didn't concern the NYPD or the Brooklyn DA's office, which sent investigators to Houston after Berkowitz's arrest. (Berkowitz didn't have any .44 shell casings, cleaning equipment or manuals in his apartment, which he should have, as he had that equipment for his other weapons.) 

Whether the .44 Winchester bullets Taylor said he examined in Carr's Minot apartment were those bought by Berkowitz in Houston is not known. 

Regarding Houston, the interviews in North Dakota established that John Carr visited that city every summer, since his ex-wife and daughter lived nearby, and he apparently was there at the same time as Berkowitz in June 1976. Linda O'Connor said that Carr's brother, Michael, told her this. 

Carr, we learned, was in New York at the time of the .44 attacks on Joanne Lomino and Donna DeMasi on November 27, 1976; the murder of Christine Freund on January 30, 1977; the wounding of Judy Placido and Sal Lupo on June 26, 1977; and the murder of Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante on July 31, 1977. He was also thought to have been in New York at the time of the murder of Donna Lauria and the wounding of Jody Valente on July 29, 1976. He was eliminated as a suspect in the October 23 wounding of Carl Denaro in 1976; the murder of Virginia Voskerichian on March 8, 1977; and the killing of Valentina Suriani and Alex Esau on April 17, 1977— although it remained possible he could have made a quick turnaround flight to New York on those occasions. 

Carr, according to Tom Taylor, wasn't shy about using a gun on people either. Taylor stated that Carr carried a revolver under the front seat of his auto and that on one occasion he fired shots at an acquaintance in Minot named Whitey. 

"Whitey ripped him off for some crystal or coke, and he decided to have some fun with this guy. Whitey told me he shot at him; other people told me, too. Whitey was in his Volkswagen, putting speakers in it or something like that, and John just pulled up across the street, pulled out his .22 and started shooting at him. Whitey freaked out and ran into the house." 

Lieutenant Gardner said: "Whitey reported the shooting to me. He said it was over some drug deal gone bad. He didn't name Carr as the gunman, however. He just wanted to alert us that his life was in danger. They must have settled it all after that." 

Regarding Carr's use of alcohol and narcotics, Taylor, and others, said he "drank heavily" (which was known by Berkowitz). Carr was also hospitalized at least three times for drug overdoses. Taylor said: "He was into coke, pot, LSD, angel dust, crystal or whatever you want to call it." 

Another strong piece of evidence linking Carr to the Son of Sam case was the discovery that Carr dated thirteen- to fifteen- year-old girls in Minot. At least three friends, including Tom Taylor and Frank Head, reported this proclivity. In the Breslin letter, John Wheaties was called a "rapist and suffocator of young girls." 

Moreover, in a note left in his apartment and dismissed by New York authorities, Berkowitz referred to Carr as a "terrible rapist and child molestor. You should hear John boast of his perverted conquests," Berkowitz wrote, but the accurate clue was ignored. 

In a closing note on Carr's activities, Gardner said an informant named Denise Malcom* said that Carr advised her that "a chain of safe houses for Satanists on the run existed in the United States and Canada. We checked with the Canadian authorities," Gardner said, "and we were told that some kind of network existed up there for bikers and that they heard Satanists also sometimes used the same facilities." 

By the time the extended series of interviews was completed, all the involved parties were certain as to where we stood regarding John Carr. 

"Besides what we learned, he and Michael were, in real life, the sons of Sam," I said. "It makes more sense for them to have used the name than Berkowitz. I keep remembering that Borrelli letter, with all its intimate knowledge of Sam Carr and how it sounded like it was written from right inside that house." 

And so it was with John Carr, a man who New York officials—without any investigation—first maintained didn't even know Berkowitz and whose suspected involvement in the murders—and that of a satanic cult—was formally reported to authorities by Jim Mitteager and me weeks before his death. A man whose initially uncovered connections to Berkowitz were buried by the office of Brooklyn district attorney Eugene Gold before Berkowitz entered his guilty pleas. A man whose links to the Son of Sam were not fully fleshed out until we traveled to Minot, making the journey no New York officials made before then. 

And then there was Reeve Rockman, the other subject of the trip. His photo was identified by Taylor, Christiansen and Leslie Shago, who pointed out: "When he was here he was about twenty pounds lighter than in the picture." Shago also said Rockman "had something wrong with one of his hands," as did Taylor and Falcon. These observations were accurate. 

Rockman, a mystery figure and stranger to Carr's friends in North Dakota, was observed at the Falcon's Nest and at a party in Minot in mid-October 1976—shortly after Carr left the Air Force and was hospitalized with a drug overdose after telling Gietzen and Knoop about his urine drinking at a satanic ritual. 

The Minot residents said Rockman was introduced as "Reeve, John's friend from New York." They said they understood that Rockman was involved in drug dealings with Carr in New York. 

Taylor and Christiansen said Carr carried a photo of Rockman, apparently a newspaper clipping, in his wallet and told them: "This is the guy who wants to kill me." That statement was essentially the same as one made earlier by Craig O'Connor. "John burned the picture right there in the sink," Taylor said. 

"J.C. Carr also told me that if he stayed in New York the state would have fried him in the electric chair," Christiansen added. 

In late 1988, a friend of Carr's, who was himself a former member of the Yonkers cult would come forward and state that Carr had been involved in devil worship as far back as the early 1960s, when he was in high school. The ex-member also joined the group during this period and remained a participant until 1972. His statement would corroborate the message Berkowitz left in his apartment, when he wrote that the cult had been operating "for quite some time." 

The former member, who is now in a religious order in the Midwest, said that meetings were held at several locations in Untermyer Park; that acts of ritualistic rape occurred during some of them; and that a leader of the group introduced him to drugs and later forced him and others into male prostitution in New York City. 

In 1972, the ex-member said, he escaped and subsequently  joined the religious order he now serves. He said that Carr "possessed pictures of cadavers" while in high school. He also revealed that Carr told him the Yonkers group had from time to time abducted and murdered youngsters from a nearby home for troubled youths. Carr said that authorities had assumed the missing teens were merely runaways. 

An investigation of the former member's allegations began in late 1988. 

The Minot interviews were conducted at the Sheriff's Department, with the exception of that with Leslie Shago, who was visited at her home. Carr's friends were given the option of cooperating or not. The work was exhausting, as some were initially reluctant to talk about their knowledge of Carr. 

It wasn't until Monday morning, our third day in Minot, that Cinotti got around to asking a question he and I discussed privately during the weekend. 

"What makes you so sure Carr committed suicide?" he asked Gardner. "He was afraid for his life; afraid of Rockman and who knows who else. Someone could have come out here to kill him after he cut out of New York. He was here two days —why come all the way back here to kill yourself in your girlfriend's bedroom? He knew he was wanted for questioning, so there's no reason others couldn't have found that out, too." 

"Aw, shit," Gardner replied. "I had a feeling this was coming. We're not certain he killed himself. We called it 'apparent' suicide. It looked like he did it himself, but I can't swear that he did. I know Linda and Taylor and the others think it was murder. Based on all this, it does look like we've got a motive for murder as well as suicide. But he knew he was wanted for questioning—that's a damn good motive for suicide, too." 

"He was a weak link, Terry," I said. "He was found out. They could have knocked him off to block the trail." 

"Yeah," Hank added. "But they try to make it look like suicide so as not to defeat the purpose." 

"Don't look at me," Mike Knoop quickly said. "This was the sheriff's case, with some assistance from the Air Force." 

"I'll tell you," said Gardner. "I called Michael Carr that night to tell him of the death. Linda told me not to call Sam because he had a heart condition—" 

"A heart condition? Now doesn't that sound familiar?" I said. 

"The Borrelli letter," Hank said, nodding. 

"Let me finish," Gardner remarked. "Michael didn't sound surprised when I told him. He just said, 'Well, I hope he didn't suffer.' That's a strange thing to say." 

"A little hard," Jeff Nies agreed. 

"Maybe it was just because they knew of his drug problems and all that," I suggested. "But still, it was a very matter-of- fact way to put it." 

"There's something else I didn't tell you," Gardner said. "I didn't want to stir anything up about murder. Nosing around after John's death, I got three anonymous long-distance calls. From the connections I knew they were from a ways off. They were all from women, different women. One said, 'We got John and the gun was across his legs and if you don't lay off we're going to get you.' 

"Now the gun thing wasn't public, so I didn't dismiss the call," Gardner continued. "The other two were tips. One said John had a .44 Bulldog, and the other said three .44s were bought down in Texas—one by Berkowitz, one for John and one for somebody else she didn't name." 

"Put that with what Linda and Taylor said," I stated. "What about it, Hank? More than one .44? John was down there then." 

"I don't know," Cinotti replied. "Most of the bullets were pretty smashed up. And any .44 Bulldogs would have similarities. It's possible." 

"How'd they get your name?" Nies asked Gardner. 

"It was in the New York Post, at least. We did the story," I said. 

Gardner then produced the photos of Carr's death scene. His head was practically blown off, and he lay on his face at the foot of the bed in Linda O'Connor's apartment. The rifle butt was perched across one leg. 

"We think he sat on the bed, put the gun butt on the floor, put the other end in his mouth and pulled the trigger," Gardner explained. "The bullet split and there were two holes in the ceiling above the bed." 

"Two holes?" 

"But one bullet." 

"As long as you're sure," I said. "But shouldn't the gun have hit the floor before he did? It's on top of him." 

"Maybe it bounced off the wall and came back. There's only a couple of feet there between the bed and the wall," said Gardner. 

"And maybe it didn't." 

"Man, you guys are causing trouble," Gardner complained. 

Cinotti, a veteran homicide investigator, had another observation. "I think the force of the shot with that .30-30 Marlin rifle should have blown him back onto the bed, not forward to the floor. Unless someone was behind him propping him up. There's hardly any blood at all behind where he sat—everything went forward. So the guy wouldn't have been covered with it." 

With that, Cinotti demonstrated his theory. Lying prone on the motel bed, facing the foot of it, he told Gardner to take Carr's seated position. Cinotti then placed his hand on the small of Gardner's back, supporting him. He then simulated the gunshot. 

"See, he'd start to go back, but the hand behind him would stop his motion and he'd fall forward, face down, and to the left—just like the body did." 

"I don't know," Gardner said slowly. "I mean, what's old Johnny going to do—just sit there and say, 'O.K., now you get behind me'?" 

"He'd have been knocked out first," Hank answered. "Then propped up. They'd then set the rifle off with a stick or a broom handle or something. His face was blown off; no one would know if he was slugged first." 

"And didn't Linda say he got a call at about eight o'clock, before she went out, but he didn't say who he talked to?" I asked. 

"Yeah, that's true. They could have found out then that she was going out for the night. Maybe it did happen that way," Gardner conceded. 

Then it was time for our flight back to New York. "We'll keep on everything here," Knoop said. 

"And we'll also start looking at this murder scenario," Gardner promised. 

"Well, my job is to get moving on Rockman," Hank said. "And no leaks," he stated firmly to me. "You've got to swear none of this goes in the papers. We've got to be able to work this without the damn cameras over our shoulders. And I didn't tell the department I was coming here with you. They'd have stopped me if I did, and the investigation would have been dead as far as they're concerned." 

"Why?" I asked. "The NYPD didn't even know Rockman was here until I told you. They take information from all sorts  of lowlifes every day—they even pay for it. But the press is different; it's taboo. I don't know if I can make that promise. This is significant news, and I've been after this for more than two years. I've seen enough cover-ups." 

"This isn't any cover-up," Hank fumed. "You know this case, damn it. You've seen what's happened before. They don't want the press to know anything—let alone be the ones who dug this stuff up in the first place. You're right, I piggybacked with you, and it was the right thing to do—but the PD will never accept that." 

For a minute the room was silent. I looked at Jeff Nies, who shrugged. "O.K., no publicity," I then agreed. "We don't need the headlines right now. I think we all want to see some arrests. Nobody out here eliminated Michael Carr, and he was my top suspect coming in. So Mitteager and I will get cracking on him." 

Jeff Nies nodded his assent. "I'm in, Hank. My partner [Jack Graham] will be back soon. We'll keep doing our bit. I'm sure the paper will go along with whatever you and Maury want to do." 

Gardner jumped in. "If you don't, I'll wrap your little weasel butt around a tree," he said half seriously. He and Nies had had a few run-ins over other coverage in the Minot Daily News, so this was a fragile alliance for both of them. Indeed, the situation was precarious for everyone. 

Nies, who'd absorbed several Gardner barbs over the weekend, didn't let this one pass. His voice rose an octave. "Don't try to threaten me, Terry," he yelled. "There's nothing in the world that says I have to do what you say." 

"Jeff, it's only temporary," I soothed. "If we hold off, the whole thing might fall. If we're premature, we may blow it. And we don't need the NYPD's political crap either." 

Mike Knoop was a Solomon of reason. "John Carr is dead. No one can prosecute him. We all want the others—Rockman, Michael Carr or whoever. And a couple of them could even be somewhere in Minot. So we'll all keep it quiet, for everybody's sake. Agreed?" 

"Yeah, it's agreed," Jeff said. "I never said it wasn't. I just don't like taking instructions from the Ward County Sheriff's Department." 

Gardner glared at him, but said nothing. With everyone finally in accord, if not completely satisfied, we drove to the airport, and within thirty minutes we were en route back to New York. It was Labor Day, September 3, 1979. 

"It's a lot different than during that storm Friday night," Hank observed as the sleek jet climbed through the marshmallow cumulus clouds. "The witches of Minot didn't get us after all." 

As we settled back to doze, we didn't know that other demons, including death, would soon rise up to face us in New York. The fallout from our trip would stretch some 1,800 miles. And in Minot, now far below us in the warming sun, other tragic events would occur. 

In more ways than one, all hell was about to break loose. 

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Inside the Biggest Case 362s