The Sons of Sam The Fatal Flaw in Maury Terry’s Reporting

The Sons of Sam: The Fatal Flaw in Maury Terry’s Reporting

In Netflix’s The Sons of Sam, Maury Terry makes a strong case that David Berkowitz never acted alone, but he’s bogged down by journalistic mistakes.

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The Sons of Sam The Fatal Flaw in Maury Terry’s Reporting

Netflix’s new four-episode true crime documentary, The Sons of Sam: A Descent Into Darkness, is a riveting ride alongside late independent journalist Maury Terry. Terry was the outspoken force behind the compelling theory that the Son of Sam, David Berkowitz, didn’t act alone during his year-long crime spree that killed six and wounded at least seven more. But the documentary also shows how Terry’s biggest mistake manages to derail his crusade. A dogged investigator with great instincts, Terry falls into the trap of looking for details that fit his theory, instead of focusing on the facts.

Terry quickly put his finger on what bothered him about Berkowitz’s arrest. With several police sketches in hand and none of them matching Berkowitz, there were also questions about different suspicious vehicles seen at the various attacks. By studying the taunting letters the Son of Sam penned, Terry also realized that multiple details suggested Berkowitz’s neighbors, the Carrs, may have had more to do with the killings than simply owning the black dog Berkowitz claimed gave him demonic orders. References to John ‘Wheaties’ put elder son John Carr in Terry’s sights, and patriarch Sam Carr may have been the Son of Sam’s ‘Wicker King.’

The Sons of Sam The Fatal Flaw in Maury Terry’s Reporting

There was plenty of evidence to suggest that the two Carr sons, John and Michael, knew Berkowitz and may have even dabbled with occult themes in the abandoned tunnels underneath Untermyer Park. Increasing rumors of dead and skinned dogs in the area furthered the growing Satanic fears, although animal abuse is also a common trait in burgeoning serial killers; traits the two Carr sons shared along with stories of being abused by their father. Yet these occult threads, compelling as they are, also began to pull Terry off course in ways that later hurt his credibility.

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Terry saw occult connections in crime scenes that didn’t hold up under scrutiny. He began to weave a nationwide conspiracy out of air. Terry gripped onto the name of the disco where one of the attacks happened, Elephas, and tied it to the French ritual magician Éliphas Lévi. The names are similar, true, but “elephas” is only the genus name of the elephant family. Levi was never a satanist, but a ritual Kabbalist and occultist in the vein of John Dee. Yet Terry doubled down and assumed the Son of Sam’s infamous symbol was similar to A.W. White’s Lévi-inspired Goetic circle. He saw anagrams that weren’t there, as if this 200-year-old image prophesied the dark works of Berkowitz and the Carrs.

Even haphazard occultists wouldn’t mix up Lévi’s mercurial symbolism with the generic male/female/satanic/divine symbolism that’s the basis of Son of Sam’s mark. But Terry let these unsupported threads pull him along, excitedly finding affirmation in bibles thrown away near crime scenes and making too much out of vague but intriguing connections to the Manson Family. It’s easy and even understandable to see how he trapped himself in this web, and the documentary is too willing to act as if it supports his wilder assumptions for the bulk of its running time.

It’s only in The Sons of Sam’s final episode that the documentary begins to pull back and talk with people who believed in Maury Terry’s passion but worried about his tangents. Journalist Sarah Wallace is a voice of reason that realized Berkowitz had encouraged Terry to build a wilder story than the facts support in their final interview. Berkowitz was eager for the attention and suggested tightening the interview so as to not bore the audience, but offered increasingly less in the way of concrete evidence to support Terry’s leading questions.

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It’s a failure of journalistic ethics on Terry’s part, and it pulled him into the lurid world of daytime talk shows, further erasing the genuine work Terry’s done to reveal the very real possibility that Berkowitz didn’t act alone. It’s a tragedy because, as the documentary unfolds at its very end, Terry’s instincts could be remarkable. Though he let himself be absorbed into meandering occult tangents around the gruesome murder of West Coast co-ed Arlis Perry, Terry was adamant that security guard Stephen Crawford was behind it.

Because he’d let go of facts long ago, Terry could never support why he believed this to friends and investigators, building a conspiracy of religious horror that tied back to the Son of Sam. But DNA evidence in 2018 proved him right after all. Perhaps someday more facts will emerge to prove Maury Terry was also right about David Berkowitz, a killer who really may not have worked alone.

Directed by Joshua Zeman, and featuring the words of bestselling crime writer Maury Terry as narrated by Paul Giamatti, The Sons of Sam: A Descent Into Darkness is now streaming on Netflix.

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/netflix-sons-of-sam-reveals-maury-terry-journalist-mistake/

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