Retired detective thinks 1970 Bronx murder of teenage girl could be linked to serial killer Son of Sam and wants case reopened
Five years before New York City was terrorized by the ‘Son of Sam’ killer David Berkowitz back in the 1970s, a teenage girl was gunned down on a Bronx street – and now, a retired detective believes her killing could be linked to Berkowitz, as he calls for the case to be reopened.
Mike Lorenzo, whose father worked the Berkowitz investigation, told The New York Post that the 1970 murder of 16-year-old Margaret Inglesia bears striking similarities to the crimes that would later make Berkowitz one of the most infamous serial killers in American history.
“This is a case that needs to be reexamined,” said Lorenzo, who is working with Son of Sam expert Manny Grossman, to urge the NYPD to reopen the decades-old case. Lorenzo spent 20 years with the Yonkers Police Department before retiring in 2008.
“This was Son of Sam before Son of Sam.”
On October 18, 1970, around 2 a.m., Inglesia was walking home from a party when she was shot on East 169th Street between Morris and Grant avenues in the Morrisania section of the Bronx. She was shot once in the front and twice in the back as she lay dying, according to a witness report at the time.
Her killing was the only fatal shooting in a string of six attacks carried out by an unidentified sniper on the same block over a two-month span that year. No arrests were ever made.
But Lorenzo and Grossman believe Berkowitz, who was 17 at the time, could have been the one responsible.
From June 1970 to June 1971, Berkowitz worked about a mile away from the attacks, at his father’s business, Melrose Hardware, before leaving to join the U.S. Army.
They also point to evidence uncovered after Berkowitz’s 1977 arrest, including 100-yard shooting targets found in his home, as sign he may have been honing long-distance shooting skills before his notorious killing spree.
“Why would he have 100-yard targets? He’s not a hunter,” Lorenzo pointed out.
The theory comes with notable differences. Berkowitz’s confirmed attacks between 1976 and 1977 were carried out at close range, using a .44-caliber revolver, often firing through car windows. The Bronx sniper used a .22-caliber rifle. Still, Lorenzo argues the similarities outweigh the discrepancies.
“It wasn’t right next door to the father’s shop but it wasn’t 20 miles away or in another borough and it fits his M.O.,” Lorenzo said. “It’s the same thing as the Son of Sam killings but just a different kind of gun. Shooting into a car is sniping too.”
New York City in the 1970s was already unraveling – financially strained, crime-ridden, and fearful. But between July 1976 and August 1977, that fear escalated when a faceless gunman stalked young women and couples across the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn.
Calling himself the “Son of Sam,” the killer taunted police and the media with handwritten letters and random violence. Berkowitz, a Yonkers postal worker, was eventually identified as the shooter who murdered six people and wounded seven others, including teenagers and young couples sitting in parked cars.
After more than a year of false leads and mounting panic, a parking ticket near the scene of the final shooting led police to Berkowitz’s car and he was arrested on August 10, 1977.
He was convicted in 1978 of six counts of second-degree murder and seven counts of attempted second-degree murder, and sentenced to 25 years to life. Now 72, Berkowitz remains incarcerated at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County.
Lorenzo said the Bronx sniper case had troubled him long before he began working with Grossman on other Son of Sam-related investigations.
“I really think there’s something in those files,” Lorenzo said.
The two have previously helped uncover a previously unknown Berkowitz victim – Wendy Savino, who survived a 1976 shooting in the Bronx after being struck five times while sitting in her car.
“I found out about Wendy because I found the sketch she did of her shooter that was an exact match of Berkowitz,” Grossman told The Post. “Then I found a police report that showed her shooting had all the characteristics of a Son of Sam shooting.”
He then cold called Savino and says she told him that she had identified Berkowitz as her shooter in 1977 right after his arrest. “She never forgot his face,” he added.
The findings were later brought to now-retired NYPD First Grade Detective Robert Klein, who concluded Savino had been shot by Berkowitz, despite Berkowitz denying the crime during a prison interview, police sources said.
Interest in the Son of Sam case has surged again in recent years, fueled most recently by a Netflix docuseries that revisits Berkowitz’s crimes using never-before-heard prison recordings and archival footage.
youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=mLENEDZK3h4&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.the-independent.com%2F&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE
Grossman believes the Inglesia case deserves a closer look — whether or not Berkowitz ultimately proves to be the killer.
“This is a major case that’s been forgotten,” Grossman said. “There’s a perp out there and we think it’s Berkowitz.”
