With his neatly knotted tie and strained half-smile, the young boy looks just like any other kid forced to pose for a school picture. But behind those dark eyes lies a terrible secret. Little does the photographer realize that his subject will grow up to become one of the most infamous killers the world has ever known.
Richard David Falco came into the world on June 1, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York. His mother, Elizabeth Broder, was embroiled in an affair with a married man, and it was three years into the relationship that she gave birth to the baby boy. Apparently afraid that her lover would leave her, she put the child up for adoption when he was just a few days old.
Soon, though, the baby was taken in by a Jewish-American couple, Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz, who lived in the Bronx. Now renamed David Berkowitz, he proved to be a difficult child. Although he was said to have had higher than average intelligence, Berkowitz quickly began to misbehave.
