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to go and feed a parking meter. So maybe the Son of Sam had gotten one or two parking tickets during
his attacks.
After a painstaking search through tens of thousands of violations, the cops found a pattern. There
was a 1970 yellow Ford Galaxie sedan that belonged to a man who lived in Yonkers and had been
ticketed numerous times within blocks of each of the murders. When detectives went to the car
owner’s home, they were greeted by David Berkowitz, a defiant twenty-four-year-old, who admitted
instantly that he was the Son of Sam. “Well, you’ve got me,” Berkowitz said at the time, and then,
with one last barb toward police: “What took you so long?”
Gary told his new team that the similarities abounded. In 1977 traditional policing techniques
had failed to solve the murders in the same way that in 2013 modern-day procedures for capturing
drug dealers had failed to catch DPR. Both men taunted the police. Both men grew more brazen as
they continued to get away with their crimes. And the task forces then and now had failed to find them
both.
“I’m going to crack this case,” Gary told anyone who would listen. “I really think I’m going to
get DPR.”
Just like the parking citations had helped catch the Son of Sam during the summer of 1977, Gary
was convinced that somewhere out there the founder of the Silk Road had made a mistake. He
believed that in a dark corner of the Internet there was the digital equivalent of a parking ticket that
would help unmask the Dread Pirate Roberts. And Gary Alford was determined that he was going to
find it.