David Berkowitz | A&E (2024)

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What is the psychological analysis of David Berkowitz? ›

Doctors agree that he was a psychopathic personality with malingering concomitant paranoid and hysterical traits. 05-08-1978 Berkowitz pleads guilty to the six shootings.

Authorities searched Berkowitz's car and found a machine gun in his back seat. They found a 44-caliber bulldog revolver in the front seat and bullets in his pocket. They immediately arrested him. Berkowitz claimed that it was the dog of his neighbor, Sam Carr, who ordered him to kill.

Similarly, the state of California's Son of Sam law was struck down in 2002 after being used against Barry Keenan, one of the men who kidnapped Frank Sinatra, Jr. in 1963. After numerous revisions, New York adopted a new "Son of Sam" law in 2001.

He is in a medical unit at the CMF for his severe diabetes, and has never been in the hospice. Kemper regularly uses a wheelchair but he can still walk. It is just more difficult due to neuropathy and other issues. The stroke he suffered in late 2015 early 2016 didn't leave him paralyzed or cognitively disabled.

Berkowitz was ultimately a narcissistic control-seeker who killed because he wanted to, not because he was "forced" to.

Before he was caught, Berkowitz's crimes were escalating in intensity, signaling that his mental state had spiraled out of control. Read on to delve into the Son of Sam's psyche and learn how psychologists came to his paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis.

During his killing spree, he sent letters to New York newspapers, signing them “Son of Sam,” a reference to a demon he believed lived inside the black Labrador retriever owned by his neighbour Sam Carr. Berkowitz was arrested on August 10, 1977, 11 days after his last murder.

Rose Bundy

Ted Bundy / Daughter

Under existing law, crime survivors are not entitled to any rights of consultation or compensation for entertainment-based stories based on their personal traumas. And as a rule, the dead and the bereaved, are not a litigious demographic. True crime content creators may thus be less concerned about their perspectives.

Prisoners who publish their writing are legally protected under the First Amendment. But some states have tried to limit inmates's ability to publish and get paid for their work.

What states don't have Son of Sam laws? ›

California, Massachusetts courts nix Son of Sam laws.

Initial testing measured his IQ at 136, over two standard deviations above average. Kemper was re-diagnosed with a less severe condition, a "personality trait disturbance, passive-aggressive type." Later during his stay at Atascadero, he was given another IQ test, which produced a higher result of 145.

Ted Bundy, however, did have an IQ that was above average. His IQ was measured at 136, meaning he was very intelligent (Buchanan-Dunne, 2016).

As a group, serial killers suffer from a variety of personality disorders, including psychopathy, anti-social personality, and others. Most, however, are not adjudicated as insane under the law. The media has created a number of fictional serial killer “geniuses”, who outsmart law enforcement at every turn.

Most serial killers have some early history of trauma or neglect; some, but not all, also engage in early delinquent behavior. A well-known concept, the “Macdonald triad,” posits that repeated violent offenders share three early traits: animal cruelty, fire-setting, and bedwetting.

He was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, and psychotic disorder; some psychologists theorize that his substance abuse and possible hom*osexuality contributed to feelings of loneliness that drove his extreme methods for seeking control and companionship.

The overall picture of KT suggests that serial killing may be closer to normality than psychopathy defined according to either the DSM IV or the PCL-R, and it would be characterized by a relatively spared moral cognition and selective deficits in social and emotional cognition domains.