I’m a religious person but I don’t begrudge someone their beliefs. Each person has their own journey. Might make me the world’s worst evangelist but whatever, I’ll take it. If God is real, God knows more than I do so I’ll let Them figure it out.
I say this because when it comes to conspiracy theories, I tend to parrot a line I’ve heard many an agnostic use over the decades: maybe God is real, maybe not, either way, if God is real, God’s probably too big or too difficult to define.
I don’t really believe the full breadth of what many of these journalists try do to when they attempt to connect the son of Sam to the Manson murders (this one) and the Manson murders to the CIA (Chaos) and the CIA to the Kennedy assassination (various) and the Kennedy assassination to a massive good vs. evil plot against the world (William Cooper).
What I can get down with is that both the Son of Sam murders and the Tate-LaBianca murders respectively were both investigated in imperfect, slipshod fashion that encouraged prosecutors to come up with flimsy narratives in order to end the stress of these cities by punishing the guilty.
And yeah, there might be bigger conspiracies a foot. Not that they reach to the top, but that they involve people who’d rather see the full truth not come to light.
The problem here is that Maury Terry, who writes an otherwise interesting and readable book, leans hard into the Satan panic that would dominate the 1980s for worse. And there’s plenty of accompanying homophobia with visions of black masses and animal sacrifice.
I live in proximity to all the stuff Berkowitz and his crew did in Yonkers in the 70s and it was creepy to read, well-researched. It really is a three-star just for keeping me engaged but as the Satanism/occult stuff has been a clear gateway for the modern day QAnon crowd, I gotta dock it a star based on principal.