After 20-year-old Stacy Moskowitz was mortally wounded, and her date Robert Violante was blinded in Brooklyn on July 31, NYPD detectives got a lead.  They discovered a parking ticket issued to a 24-year-old postal clerk named David Berkowitz for parking alongside a fire hydrant near the crime scene. Berkowitz’s statement to police left no doubt in their minds that he was responsible for the attacks. Berkowitz was arraigned in Brooklyn for the Moskowitz-Violante shootings, as well as, the prior shootings attributed to the “Son of Sam.”

As David Berkowitz sat in jail, and district attorneys continued their preparations for prosecution, Brooklyn District Attorney Eugene Gold turned a deaf ear to mounting evidence that Berkowitz did not act alone in these shootings. Without any follow-up investigation, the Brooklyn DA kept his Queens and Bronx counterparts in the dark, allowing Berkowitz to plead guilty as a sole killer in early May 1978.  Gold continued to endorse the Berkowitz-alone position.

This was the district attorney that was aware of the Volkswagen chase through the streets of Brooklyn on the night of the Moscowitz murder.  This was the district attorney that was aware of Mrs. Cacilia Davis’s statement about Berkowitz’s Ford Galaxie leaving the crime scene shortly before the Moskowitz-Violante attack.  And this was the district attorney that was aware of the allegations of John Carr’s cult involvement and association with Berkowitz months before Berkowitz pleaded guilty. 

As a result of the investigative reporting of journalist Maury Terry, a wave of news reports began to air in 1981 listing evidence supporting Berkowitz’s confirmation of the cult’s existence.  Among the reports was the disclosure of a letter Berkowitz left in his “topsy-turvy” apartment which warned that his cult planned to kill “at least 100” young people in the tri-state area. The news reports emphasized that the letter was withheld from the public by DA Gold and top NYPD officials.

It wasn’t long before DA Gold was forced to acknowledge that pieces of a puzzle concerning a cult had indeed existed all along.  According to Maury Terry, “Gold’s concession marked a point as close as he could possibly come to falling on his sword. Gold had been caught in a rising tide; a surge he could have avoided had he not attempted to whitewash the case from the outset.”  Even “Son of Sam” victims’ families were lining up against Gold, and the NYPD. 

A short time later Gold announced he was stepping down as Brooklyn District Attorney. High-level sources in Gold’s office, who had defied him by providing Maury Terry with the cult letter found in Berkowitz’ apartment, as well as, classified reports of the Moskowitz murder, told Terry that Gold’s decision to retire from office was influenced by a few factors – among them was the way he handled the “Son of Sam” case. 

To add insult to injury, twenty months after Gold retired, he admitted to a Tennessee court that he’d sexually molested a ten-year-old girl while attending a district attorneys’ convention after he left office.  The victim, Gold acknowledged, was the daughter of a prosecutor who participated in the conference.  Additionally, during a 1986 federal organized crime trial, a government witness alleged that Gold halted an investigation of a shooting incident involving the son of a slain mob boss at the request of organized crime figures.