Deeper still
By Miguel Guanipa (11/09/06)
"There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it all my life." Those are the words of Ted Haggard in a letter written to his church after he confessed to recent allegations of sexual misconduct.
Eerily similar words were spoken a few decades ago by another man named Richard David Falco.
Between July 1976 and July 1977 Richard David Falco is reported to have killed 6 different people at close range with a 44 Caliber gun for no other reason than the fact that they happened to be around. Most of them were young couples sitting in their cars at night.
Presently Falco is serving a 365 year jail sentence. From the number of parole hearings he will have to attend before he is able to walk the streets again it is expected that he will not enjoy that privilege anytime before his 174th birthday.
Falco attributed his crime spree to an obsession with pornography as a young man and a fascination with the occult. He always felt that he was doing the bidding of indwelling demons urging him to kill people for their pleasure. On a few occasions he mailed taunting letters to the New York police department warning that he would soon strike again. He often signed these letters as “The Monster”.
In the summer of 1976 a task force of over 200 of New York City’s finest had been assigned to Falco’s case. A parking ticket issued on his vehicle that he had parked illegally around the area where his last murder took place helped the police finally catch up with him. Soon after he was arrested he freely confessed to all of the murders that had stumped the New York police department for an entire year.
Upon meeting Falco for the first time, a correction’s officer at Attica prison who remembers looking into Falco’s eyes remarked that he “saw the darkest evil (he) had ever encountered.
After surviving an attack by another inmate who had tried to slit his throat in 1987, Falco was transferred to Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York
One day as a deeply depressed Falco walked the prison yard contemplating thoughts of suicide a man named Rick walked up to him. He politely asked Falco if he could share something with him. Falco assented and Rick told him that God wanted to tell him that Jesus loved him and had a plan for him. Falco rebuffed him and assured Rick that God would surely not want anything to do with him, given all of the evil things that he had done. Falco remembered a time a few years earlier when a priest named Don Dickerman had written him a letter in prison telling him that God loved him. “When I get out of here”- Falco had responded-“I am going to kill you”.
But Rick continued to gently pursue Falco and to share the hope that he would have in Christ, in spite of all the seemingly unforgivable things he had done.
Falco recalls one evening in prison as he read the psalms from a Gideon’s Bible that Rick had given him. He remembers being struck by their beauty and simplicity, and captivated by the story of a man called David, a king whom God had forgiven for the terrible misdeeds he had committed. That night he fell down on his knees crying desperately and began to speak to this God in the Bible and to tell him that he was sorry for the things that he had done.
“When I got up off my knees” he recalls “it felt as if a ton of weight had been lifted”.
The name Richard David Falco may not sound familiar to most of us; because his birth name had been changed to David Berkowitz by his adoptive parents Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz. As a young man venturing into the world of perverse sexual fantasies and murder David donned a peculiar name for himself; the “Son of Sam”.
Today Berkowitz works as a chaplain’s clerk in prison, and is involved in work overseas, supporting orphanages in Africa, Mexico and India. A church runs a website where his writings and testimony are posted. He shares the testimony of how God radically transformed his life with other troubled youths. For once David Berkowitz feels that the words spoken to him by his friend Rick on the prison yard that day were true.
The story of David Berkowitz is not only a testimony of the depths of cruelty and evil to which a person is capable of sinking but also a story of the chasms God is willing to bridge in order to save that part of us which matters most: our souls. A reminder that nobody, including people like Ted Haggard and David Berkowitz, could sink to depths that fall beyond the reach of God’s mercy and love.
A mercy so deep, that it still bestows this hope on the rest of us, who if given the chance, would willingly rise to cast the first stone.
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