SUMMER OF FEAR, Part 2: Son of Sam Names Himself — the Ballistics Match, Christine Freund, and Virginia Voskerichian

In Part 2 of the five-part series Summer of Fear, the city finds out. On January 30, 1977, Christine Freund, twenty-six, and her fiancé John Diel leave a screening of Rocky in Forest Hills and never make it to the dance; Christine dies that morning, weeks after their engagement. Thirty-seven days later and half a block away, a nineteen-year-old Barnard College honor student named Virginia Voskerichian is killed walking home from the train with her books in her arms. Then a technician in a police ballistics lab lays two bullets side by side — one from Virginia, one taken from Donna Lauria in the Bronx eight months earlier — and the striations line up. On March 10, 1977, Police Commissioner Michael Codd and Mayor Abraham Beame tell eight million people that one man with one revolver has been hunting them. Six weeks later, on Easter weekend, Valentina Suriani, eighteen, and Alexander Esau, twenty, are shot in a parked car in the Bronx, and a white envelope is found lying in the street beside them. Inside, the killer gives himself a name. Garret Fisher on the ballistics match, the largest manhunt in New York City history, and the seven weeks the city didn't know what he called himself.

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