Shortly after joining the Daily News in November 1976, columnist Jimmy Breslin became a marquee name for the paper — and would soon become a larger than life figure after a serial killer terrorizing New York City chose him as a pen pal.
The News now owned the story of “Son of Sam” and circulation — and Breslin’s fame — skyrocketed as millions of readers turned to his stories on the taunting murderer also known as the “.44 Caliber Killer.”
Excerpted here is an account of that era from Richard Esposito’s new biography “Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told the Truth” [Crime Ink].
The tabloid war simmered with the knowledge that the killer had sent a letter taunting police. The police did not release that letter, but without a doubt, this was a sensational story. The coverage had been ramping up. Soon it was a story the Daily News would come to dominate—because Son of Sam wrote a second letter and he sent it to Jimmy Breslin.
Now Breslin was typing his reply. Tie undone. A black bowl of curls. Beefy black sideburns. Rat. Tat. Tat. Tat. The people around him walk on eggshells. He needs the tension. He needs it and he needs chaos. His demons. Sam’s demon. They connect.
Over at the New York Post, they would read it, and begin their campaign to get into the game. To match. To increase the fear. To add sensation. To bring the city to a boil.
Breslin was writing for the Sunday News. Don Singleton, the mutton chop-sporting keyboard artist whose demeanor was as calm as Breslin’s was volatile, on Friday had effortlessly slid his carriage back and forth with deft keystrokes and smooth shifts into reverse made by pulling the return and had alerted the readers to what was coming in that thin edition that slipped off the presses Friday nights and early Saturday mornings. The Saturday paper was an appetizer. If you were a horseplayer, a Mets fan, couldn’t sleep, or stayed out late, the Final Edition slid you into Sunday. And if you had a daughter, you might have checked in on her.
The headline on the Four Star Final: .44 KILLER: I AM NOT ASLEEP.
“Don’t think because you haven’t heard from (me) for a while that I went to sleep. No, rather, I am still here. Like a spirit roaming the night. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest; anxious to please Sam. I love my work. Now, the void has been filled.”
The letter, addressed to Breslin, was examined in the police laboratory, and handwriting analysis confirmed that the letter was written by the same person who wrote the first message.
In the new note the killer warns that he cannot stop himself … He adds that he looks forward to meeting Breslin “face to face someday or perhaps I will be blown away by cops with smoking .38’s.”
The killer closed his note: “I will see you at the next job. Or should I say you will see my handiwork at the next job.”
Now it was Breslin’s turn for handiwork. A reply to Sam. His audience, one man. “Son of Sam.” In a city of newsstands, a city on edge, the reply was as big a piece of work as Breslin had ever been given.
The letter had come into the paper several days earlier. According to city editor Sam Roberts, “Jimmy was genuinely scared. I know for his family because it was getting a little too close to home. When a serial killer makes you his pen pal, there is every reason for concern. He could be—and at one point, in Breslin’s case, might have been—watching your house.”
Meanwhile, there was a discussion among the senior editors about whether they should rush the letter and a column by Breslin into the paper right away or alert the authorities. In the end, the Daily News turned the letter over to the New York Police Department.
“The police thought publishing it might somehow help,” Roberts said. And, he acknowledged, it would sell papers.
Unlike most of his work for the News, Breslin had more than a day, not hours, to think about how he would tell the story. When he first wrote about crimes large and small for the news reader and earlier in life when he wrote for the sports reader, his work was informed by the requirements of immediacy and scores and results. He now used the extra time well and put all of that accumulated skill to work, creating that immediacy and the same human frame that captured a pitcher failing to twist himself backward on his mound fast enough to stop a double play, or a jockey cheating a horse by standing in the stirrups, to capture the emotion of something far more important:
Donna Lauria was the only victim mentioned by the killer in this letter, which was sent to me at my newspaper in New York, the Daily News. So yesterday, I took the letter up to the fourth-floor apartment of Donna Lauria’s parents and I sat over coffee and read the letter again and talked to the Laurias about it.
You can feel the silent reverence in those footsteps. You can feel him watch the pain form and reform on the faces. If you were to read all of the Facebook encomiums posted on his death, you would find he had educated so many younger men and women on which stairs to climb and how to climb them in order to achieve this kind of reporting. The story, he explained, was always at the top of the stairs. When you find it, tell it. And in this case, the reader would feel the Laurias grow old.
In this case, Rose Lauria, the victim’s mother, now growing old, gave an insight as good as any and better than most of the theories circulating through the city and among the police detectives:
We took out the page that mentioned her daughter and gave Rose Lauria the rest. Her large expressive brown eyes become cold . . . On the wall behind her was a picture of her daughter, a lovely brown-haired girl with the mother’s features … “He’s probably a very brilliant man, boy, whatever he is,” she said.
“His brain functions the opposite way.”
The next part of the column tells a different part of the story of Breslin. Here he is the tabloid showman, even while writing about great grief and pain, about fear stalking the city itself. He inserts himself into the column in a way that he had rarely done in the past. He had long played the buffoon and the bully. He had been an arrogant, difficult, and entitled man-child. He wrote bullying or cajoling memos to his editors. He bragged about his movie money. He made threats to his competitors. And every day he lobbed shattering telephone calls into the otherwise thoughtful early mornings of his editors’ lives. He would not learn to drive. He would not do his expenses. Everyone around him was a bit player in the drama of his life.
Here, it seems, he was at a pivot point. With Son of Sam, Breslin knew he was ready to become even bigger, to become larger than life to an audience of millions. Larger than life to radio listeners, readers of the print ads, TV viewers and to New Yorkers who watched as the black Daily News delivery trucks raced by with bundles of wire-tied papers inside the panels that bore posters with their own larger-than-life images of Breslin.
The only way for the killer to leave this special torment is to give himself up to me, if he trusts me, or to the police … If he wants any further contact, all he has to do is call or write me at The Daily News. It’s simple to get me. The only people I don’t answer are bill collectors. The time to do it, however, is now. We are too close to the July 29 that the killer mentions in his letter. It is the first anniversary of the death of Donna Lauria.
Now when Breslin sat disheveled on a corner barstool, drinking too much, in the kind of place where he years earlier captured the arrival of the first television in a Queens, New York, bar, he could look up and marvel at something he truly loved: his own face on the electronic barroom wall. He had become, if not famous, a celebrity.
[Richard Esposito began his career as a copy boy and reporter at the Daily News. He later became metro editor and editor of the Sunday News. Subsequent to his career in journalism he became deputy commissioner for public information at the NYPD, the second News employee to hold that post.]