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In 1981, David Berkowitz, the so-called “Son of Sam Killer” who’d been convicted of a string of murders in the late 1970s, told journalist Maury Terry, “I am guilty of these crimes, but I didn’t do it all.”

Of course, David Berkowitz was also a convicted serial killer and maybe psychotic. Didn’t he also say that a neighbor’s dog told him to do it? Such was the difficulty for Maury Terry, who spent the latter part of his increasingly dissolute life trying to convince the public that Berkowitz was actually telling the truth when he said he didn’t act alone.

Sons of Sam director Joshua Zeman met Terry while he was investigating a child kidnapping case in Zeman’s native Staten Island for his 2009 documentary, Cropsey. A police source suggested Zeman’s case might have some connection to the Son of Sam, and put Zeman in touch with Terry, who spun a wild tale of Satanic cults, Charles Manson, cash-for-snuff films, and his central thesis, that David Berkowitz hadn’t acted alone. Probably like most people, Zeman didn’t buy it at first. “I thought it was bullshit,” Zeman says.

Yet the more he tried to fact-check Terry, which, as a documentarian and investigator, is sort of Zeman’s job, the more he started to find a preponderance of evidence that David Berkowitz didn’t act alone. That didn’t mean that everything Berkowitz said was true, nor did it mean that all of Maury Terry’s theories — about Satan, the Process Church, and the Manson Family — were true. “He was like a mentor and an unreliable narrator rolled into one,” Zeman says of Terry.

The act of trying to make sense of it all is the driving force behind Zeman’s new docuseries, Sons of Sam, which hits Netflix on May 5th. It’s both an exploration of Maury Terry’s pet theory and an exploration of Terry himself, and how trying to prove it ultimately destroyed him. In that sense, it’s also about officially unacknowledged truths and moral panics today. The way Maury Terry let a legitimately shocking discovery lead him to find connections that weren’t there has an obvious whiff of Q-Anon and other conspiracy movements about it.

In a case that doesn’t seem like it could possibly offer concrete answers, Zeman finds them in many areas and comes surprisingly close in others, complete with a bombshell ending straight out of a Hollywood thriller. We spoke to Zeman about it this week.

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So Maury Terry. Who was he, what do people need to know?

Maury Terry was a very fascinating character. I first met Maury, I was actually doing a documentary called Cropsey about some missing kids in my hometown in Staten Island and a number of the cops and journalists around at the time kept suggesting that these missing kids were somehow connected to the Son of Sam case. That Son of Sam didn’t act alone and that there was a cult behind it. I thought it was all bullshit, kind of Satanic Panic stuff. And that’s when I called some cops, who sat me down and said, “No, we’ve looked into this and you should do your research.”

They basically gave me this book, The Ultimate Evil, and I read the book and it scared the shit out of me. So I sought out Maury Terry. As a true crime journalist and documentarian, he was truly fascinating. He was a mentor and an unreliable narrator all woven into one, and I just didn’t believe him at all. But slowly but surely he would start to give me little bits and pieces of information and I would end up fact-checking his work behind his back, and I found out that he really did an unbelievable job in terms of uncovering a plethora of evidence to suggest that Berkowitz didn’t act alone.

Then you talked to a few police that did official reports of how many people they thought were involved.

Yes, I did. I would say over the course of this time, I spoke to about 20 to 30 different members of law enforcement — whether it’s people from the NYPD, the Brooklyn DA’s Office, the Yonkers Police Department, the Minot Sheriff’s Office, all these different people from all over the country, who all say that in their individual investigation, they discovered that Berkowitz didn’t act alone and more so that they kept trying to push the NYPD to investigate it. And the NYPD would always refuse.

Who are some of the people that Terry and some of those police alleged to have been involved and… What were some of the suspicious ends to some of those people?

You’re talking about the Carr brothers, the fact that one guy, John Carr (son of Sam Carr, who owned the dog that Berkowitz at one point claimed told him to kill), suspiciously committed suicide with a shotgun. And it’s just kind of fascinating, the idea that he had told this mental health expert that someone was trying to kill him the day before he shot himself. He also told that to his family. And then his brother dying in a mysterious way (Michael Carr died in a car accident a year after his brother’s supposed suicide). Speaking to a lot of these cops, there was an inordinate amount of people dying. Of course, that could be related to the fact that these guys are living very nefarious lifestyles, whether that’s drugs, or just being in a lot of bad places. Bad people like to do bad things with other bad people.

Right, I mean, how much did you buy into the Satanic cult aspect of any of this?

That’s a good question. I would say at the end of the day… I would say that people like to find moral justifications for their behavior, whether good or bad. Could it have been quote unquote, a bunch of Satanic people getting together, finding a justification for it? You know, at the end of the day, I think that the whole thing Satanic thing was a smokescreen. For sex, drugs and rock and roll. That’s at the heart of all bad behavior. When Maury went off the deep end was in thinking that this was somehow all organized.

And your take is that it was just people that got off on killing people or whatever, and things like that?

No, I mean, I think it’s a lot more nuanced than that. I mean, my take is, Maury Terry did an unbelievable investigation of the Son of Sam case. And he uncovered a preponderance of evidence to suggest that Berkowitz didn’t act alone. When he started to get further into it, he started this whole go down the whole Satanic rabbit hole. And again, whether or not these people were really Satanic, I don’t even know what that means, you know? I think it was a smokescreen for people to engage in a lot of bad behavior. I think part of the problem was at the time when Maury came out with his initial evidence, people called him crazy, and so he doubled down. And when you double down, you go down a rabbit hole and you don’t come back out. Also at the time, Satanic panic was happening. And I think Maury unfortunately made a deal with the Devil, where he bought into the Satanic part of it because those were the only people who were willing to give him a platform. It was a symbiotic relationship where the Satanic panic people were willing to listen to him and not call him a crackpot.

So the Satanic panic was more something that was going on that he latched onto rather than something he may have inadvertently helped inspire.

I don’t think he helped inspire the Satanic panic, Satanic panic was already happening. I think he latched onto it because again, I think guys like Geraldo would call. And it was a way for him to kind of put forth his narrative about the Son of Sam case. Unfortunately, it only lessened his credibility and ironically took away from the good part of the investigation that he did do. It was a lot of big-city politics involved as well. You had a lot of people who had a very vested interest in not suggesting that other people were involved.

How so?

New York City in 1975 is on the edge of bankruptcy. Okay? The city was going bankrupt. Crime was at an all-time high. In ’77 there was a horrific blackout that cost millions and millions of dollars worth of damage. You had 12,000 arson fires that were burning through the Bronx, creating a literal apocalypse. And for 13 months you had somebody terrorizing the people of New York City. People were not going out. The streets were empty. No one was going to bars, restaurants, eateries, discos. And suddenly one guy appears, says, “What took you so long?” And then you lead him on a perp walk through the crowd, he’s smiling. And he’s a 24-year-old loner postal worker who says, “I did it, and a demon dog made me do.” It’s perfect.

Even beyond New York, I think we’ve all talked about how much 2020 was bad and how it feels like we’re living in a weird alternate future. But then we go back to the seventies and in New York, there was Son of Sam. And then on the west coast, there was the Manson Family there were the Zebra murders, there were all these cults and all these serial killers… Does it ever blow your mind just how fucked up the seventies were, I guess?

First of all, constantly. But at the time, it’s super interesting. You had all this debauchery, disco, cocaine, Studio 54… This isn’t free love anymore. This is get down, this is some serious debauchery. And so it’s alluring, and it’s interesting. Look they say Manson was a product of the hippie free love generation. You know, Manson was a product of the Sixties, he’s the man that killed the Sixties. Well, Son of Sam killed the seventies. He was born out of that debauchery. He was born out of darkness.

When the cops are telling you things like, “do your research” and then some of Terry’s reasoning, do you ever get shades of Q-Anon?

Oh, absolutely. Which is why I also wanted to make a cautionary tale of true crime. You can find connections wherever you want to find them. I mean the whole QAnon thing, you hear stories about families who say, “Oh, I lost my husband, he went down a rabbit hole and hasn’t come out for a year.” I mean look at Maury Terry, he went down a rabbit hole for 40 years. And so I think it becomes a cautionary tale for all of us.

Well, I mean, I feel like that’s a good place to end. I really enjoyed the series. Do you have anything to add that I didn’t ramblingly ask you about?

We’re also going to be having a podcast called Searching for the Sons of Sam. You can probably tell, but the series itself just literally scratches the surface of Maury Terry’s actual investigation. And so this podcast is a much deeper dive into the actual clues that Maury uncovered.

‘Sons of Sam’ hits Netflix May 5th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

In March of this year, Saweetie shocked admirers of her relationship with Migos rapper Quavo when she announced that the two had broken up in a tweet that effectively turned every “goals” post about the couple into a grim reminder that social media only tells a fraction of the story. As it turned out, she sent that tweet from the set of W magazine cover shoot. That cover finally came out today and in the story that accompanies it, Saweetie addresses the controversy about her very public love affair and its equally public dissolution head-on.

“I’ve learned that the world doesn’t stop for anybody,” Saweetie said. “And it’s for sure not going to stop for me just because I got my heart broke. I was grateful to be doing the photoshoot. I was like, I can deal with all this later.” Although she doesn’t go into details about what led to her breakup with Quavo in the interview, she does discuss her plans for the future — and they involve a rather large sum of money. “I want 900 million dollars,” she said, elaborating, ““I look at Rihanna. I look at Kylie. I look at all the girls who are working in the worlds that I’m in. I kind of averaged out the money between all these women I admire, and 900 million is the number. So if I’m having a bad day, I’m just like, ‘900 million, girl! Go!’”

Saweetie declared that the two had split in a tweet declaring, “I’m single.” She elaborated, “I’ve endured too much betrayal and hurt behind the scenes for a false narrative to be circulating that degrades my character. Presents don’t band-aid scars and the love isn’t real when the intimacy is given to other women,” leading to speculation that Quavo had cheated on her. Later, a video surfaced of the couple having a physical altercation in an elevator at Saweetie’s apartment building, with both issuing statements dismissing the incident.

You can see the full pictorial here.

Saweetie is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

While the pandemic has been an unusual experience that’s been equal parts frustrating and terrifying for over a year now, Late Night host Seth Meyers decided to spend Tuesday night highlighting some of the positive changes society has made that we should definitely keep doing even when this whole thing is over.

In a segment titled “COVID Keepers,” Meyers unveiled a pretty solid list of items that should stick around for a while starting with elbow bumps, which he feels should permanently replace handshakes. “I don’t know where we got the idea that the best way to greet people was with one of the three or four parts of out body that are reliably damp,” Meyers effectively argued. Via The Wrap:

“Elbow bumps get the point across just as well,” Meyers continued. “And they kind of look cool. And, I can be 100% certain that you didn’t have your elbow down your pants five minutes before this meeting.”

As for the other items on the list, Meyers was a big fan of people having time for weird personal hobbies that they keep to themselves, wearing masks on the subway, putting more scientists on TV, and the biggest one of them all, working from home.

“It’s better for the environment, it cuts down on traffic, and if you think coming into the office means you’re more productive, then you have not visited my writer’s room,” Meyers joked. “Your computer at home works great. You know what doesn’t work? The office printer, the office copy machine and the office fridge.”

Channing Tatum hasn’t been shirtless in every movie he’s appeared in. For instance, here he is wearing a jaunty sailor’s suit in Hail, Caesar! But he has been shirtless in many of the movies he’s been in, including She’s the Man, Step Up, Magic Mike, and Magic Mike XXL, a masterpiece. Tatum doesn’t mind showing off his abs (and the people (me) watching his movies don’t mind seeing them), but it’s not easy being ripped.

“As someone who works out for a job, I promise you I would not look like this unless I had to be naked in most of my movies mostly,” he told Kelly Clarkson on Tuesday’s episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show. “At some point I have to get better at acting so I don’t have to be naked in all of them.” Someone get this man a wool sweater ASAP:

“I literally get to work out as a job and it’s still hard,” he said. “I can’t imagine people who have a 9-5 job, who have kids at home, and where do they get the energy and the time to actually focus on themselves?”

To be fair, Tatum wasn’t naked in This is the End. He’s wearing a gimp suit.

As the Facebook Oversight Board commission prepared to announce its decision on whether or not Donald Trump can return to the social media platform (UPDATE: The commission has decided that Trump will remain banned), Twitter CFO Ned Segal made it clear that Trump will remain permanently banned regardless of what Facebook decided. While talking to Yahoo! Finance Live on Tuesday, Segal affirmed that there have been no changes to their decision to keep Trump off of his platform of choice where his tweets routinely wreaked havoc several times a day, including his incitement of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol building. Via Mediaite:

“When you step back and think about our policies, we want to work hard to be consistent, to be transparent so people know exactly what to expect from us. We don’t have an oversight board like that. Our team is accountable for the decisions that we make,” Segal continued, and reiterated that “There is no changes to anything we have talked about in the past.”

Of course, banning Trump has become an even easier for Twitter. With the former president gone, the social media platform saw it’s revenue jump 28% in the first quarter, which was almost entirely Trump-free. According to The New York Times, “The company saw a 20 percent jump in daily active users who see ads, to 199 million. It also added new advertising formats, leading to a 32 percent increase in ad revenue in the quarter.”

Predictably, Trump has said that he doesn’t even miss Twitter, and now calls the platform “very boring” after being one of its most habitual power users for the better part of a decade. He’s now resorted to blogging to pass the time.

(Via Mediaite)

Piers Morgan may have left Good Morning Britain following his on-air temper tantrum over Meghan Markle, but he’s still got his Daily Mail column, and when he’s not popping off over frozen yogurt, he’s gotta keep his anger-bear brand alive. Piers’ latest rager of an article sees him aghast at Meghan daring to write a children’s book, called The Bench, that’s timed for a Father’s Day release. The book, which was inspired by Prince Harry’s relationship with their son, Archie, also contains drawings of a “red-headed soldier,” which is all too much for the pro-Monarchy Piers.

Piers, who is obviously still very salty about Meghan “ghosting” him after a pub date several years ago, promoted his newest thanking-the-haters sentiment with a tweet, in which Piers reveals that he’s still very angry about Meghan and Harry discussing why they fled to the U.S. and alleging racist statements from Royal family members.

“How the hell can Meghan ‘I hate royalty but call me Duchess’ Markle preach about father-child relationships,” Piers ranted in a tweet. “[W]hen she’s disowned her own Dad, and wrecked her husband’s relationship with his?”

Within the column, Piers doesn’t appear to have read Meghan’s book, only the promotional announcement, to which he “laughed out loud” and scoffed at her description of the book as “through an inclusive lens”:

Ms Markle proudly informed us that her debut literary tome captures ‘the warmth, joy and comfort of the relationship between fathers and sons from all walks of life.’ She added: ‘This representation was particularly important to me … and I worked closely to depict this special bond through an inclusive lens. My hope is that The Bench resonates with every family, no matter the make-up, as much as it does with mine.’

This doesn’t seem like someone overly keen to operate ‘an inclusive lens’ to me. In fact, it seems a singularly EX-clusive lens.

As for Harry, he trashed his father Prince Charles in the same interview, moaning about how Daddy had stopped taking his calls or giving him cash, sounding like some needy spoiled brat teenager rather than a 36-year-old multi-millionaire doormat who ditched his family, country and duty because his chillingly controlling and ambitious wife wanted him to.

And unforgivably, he did this as Charles was desperately worried about HIS father, Prince Philip, who was lying seriously ill in hospital and later died.

Let’s just say that people find Piers’ ongoing, anger-fueled obsession with Meghan to be quite amusing. Yes, it really does seem like Meghan deciding not to speak to Piers after having a drink is his “villain origin story,” and now, she’s truly “living rent free in his head.” The fact that he’s looked the other way from Prince Andrew’s well-documented association with Jeffrey Epstein also got some airtime from Twitter users, and the term “restraining order” surfaced as well.

And Meghan’s still living her life in Montecito with her family while Piers rages.

In the year-plus since releasing The Main Thing in February 2020, Real Estate has given their fans even more new material to sink their teeth into. Just a couple months ago, they followed up the album with the Half A Human EP, which the band made remotely during the pandemic. Now they’re back with another EP and this time, it’s all covers.

The five-track collection comes via Aquarium Drunkard’s The Lagniappe Sessions series, for which Real Estate covered Parsley Sound’s “Ocean House,” My Bloody Valentine’s “You Never Should,” John Cale’s “Please,” Roger Miller’s “Little Green Apples,” and Jawbone’s “Java Jelly.”

The band’s Julian Lynch says of the My Bloody Valentine cover, “‘You Never Should’ is one of my favorite tunes off of My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything. I had wanted to cover this song for quite some time. I even considered it for my own Lagniappe Session a while back. I’m glad I kept it tucked away until now, though, because I’m so happy with how the cover sounds with the full band.”

In an interview with Uproxx about The Main Thing, Martin Courtney described his mindset while making the album, saying, “I’ve got three kids now. My wife was pregnant through a lot of the process of writing [The Main Thing]. So, just on the level of, is this a responsible thing to do, to be a guy in an indie-rock band? I was really struggling with that, and also feeling like, the world is kind of in a bad state. […] Is there something more useful I could be doing with my life? I feel a little bit useless writing these songs. So, that was kind of what went into writing this record, those types of doubts. […] I think for me it was just like, ‘Obviously I’m going to do this because this is where I’m at in my life. I can’t just not do it. And I want to make a record. I love making music.’ It was never a question of whether or not I wanted to do it. So yeah, I think it just came down to, we need to work that much harder and just make it feel worthwhile, basically.”

Check out Real Estate’s The Lagniappe Sessions covers here.

After more than a year of massive closures and several months of carefully social-distanced screenings, movie theaters across the country are slowly coming back to life. If you’ve been to an indoor movie theater in recent months, you’ve probably seen a handful of employees decked out in PPE milling about to set off foggers and wipe down every surface in each cinema between screenings. But that sight could soon become a thing of the past.

As Variety reports, the National Association of Theatre Owners recently updated its “CinemaSafe” guidelines to do away with its mandate that each theater be thoroughly disinfected between screenings. Which doesn’t mean that they no longer care about the health of their patrons; the new rules simply stipulate that theater owners should be following current CDC, state, or local guidelines when it comes to cleaning up. At the moment, the CDC recommends giving theaters a thorough cleaning once a day.

Before you start screaming and vow to never visit a movie theater again, it’s worth noting that the big show made of disinfecting each theater likely didn’t make much of a difference anyway: The CDC has put the odds of contracting COVID through surface transmission at one in 10,000—or roughly the same as being struck by lightning. Even so, many theater owners know that peace of mind is now just as important as popcorn to the theatrical experience, so most theaters are continuing to be overly cautious.

“We’re still spraying between shows,” Jeff Logan, president and CEO of the South Dakota-based Logan Luxury Theaters Corporation told Variety. “We’ve got to maintain public confidence.”

Whether this trend will continue into the summer—when many studios are planning to mount their big theatrical comebacks, and theaters hope to recoup much of what they’ve lost, revenue-wise, in the past year—remains to be seen. For now, says Logan, “We’re just going to make darn sure everyone feels safe.”

(Via Variety)

I won’t go so far as to call Paul Verhoeven “underrated,” but we, collectively, don’t talk enough about how many must-see movies he’s made. Soldier of Orange, The Fourth Man, RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Starship Troopers, Elle — Verhoeven directed them all, and they’re all great. His new film, Benedetta, must be great, too, because it’s an official selection at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Based on the non-fiction book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun In Renaissance Italy, Benedetta is about a nun in the 17th century, played by Virginie Efira (she was in Elle, but more importantly, she’s the French voice of Mavis in the Hotel Transylvania movies), who has an affair with another nun. The drama also stars Charlotte Rampling, Daphné Patakia, Lambert Wilson, and Olivier Rabourdin.

Verhoeven’s long-time co-writer, Gerard Soeteman, distanced himself from the project, believing it was too focused on the more lurid aspects of the story. “She is a lesbian and knows how to get a lot of people behind her with her machinations,” he said. “For me, it was not about the sexual relations of this genius woman, but about the political constellation in which she moved. If you omit that element and just think, ‘Hmmm, lesbian, how nice,’ then I’ll serve you, I don’t find that acceptable. I am so against what Paul wants to make of it.” Watch the (slightly NSFW) trailer above.

Here’s the official plot synopsis:

In the late 15th century, with plague ravaging the land, Benedetta Carlini joins the convent in Pescia, Tuscany, as a novice. Capable from an early age of performing miracles, Benedetta’s impact on life in the community is immediate and momentous.

The Cannes Film Festival runs from July 6-17.