Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Detective Edward Zigo, right, with David Berkowitz, known as Son of Sam, in August 1977.
The first homicide investigation began with a question to Cain — “Where is Abel, thy brother?” — and for thousands of years, confessions and witness testimony were the only ways to overcome the scarcity of physical evidence tying criminals to their crimes.
Sure, horse thieves were sometimes found atop other peoples’ horses, and stains of gunpowder were sometimes found on murderers’ hands. But for much of history, it was the rare burglary scene that presented detectives with a muddy shoe print from a thief with extra-wide feet and singular marking on his soles.
Then, all of a sudden, it was as though criminals began wearing muddy shoes. Cellphones, credit cards and E-ZPasses now leave an indelible electronic trail, security cameras are on every corner in some neighborhoods and there is DNA, a substance as old as life itself but only recently of use to crime solvers.
The recent death of a retired detective who helped crack an infamous case has some of the city’s gold shields talking about just how much crime solving has changed.
The detective, Edward Zigo, died Feb. 19 of cancer at his home in Lynbrook, on Long Island. In 1977, he was one of more than 50 detectives assigned to one of the most terrifying strings of crimes in the city’s history, the Son of Sam killings.
When Stacy Moskowitz was fatally shot in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, on July 31, 1977, it appeared at first that the Son of Sam killer had once again left little behind in the way of clues that might identify him. In the days to come, the police canvassed the neighborhood, talking to everyone they could get their hands on, and one resident recalled seeing a police officer writing parking tickets in the neighborhood on the night of the crime and a suspicious man approaching her with an object in his hand and then walking away. She heard gunshots a short while later, but waited a few days to talk to the police because she was afraid Son of Sam would come after her.
Detectives followed up on the lead, poring over all tickets written in the neighborhood around that time. Their lucky break came in the form of a ticket written to a Ford Galaxie for parking too close to a fire hydrant on Bay 17th Street.
It belonged to David Berkowitz, a postal worker from Yonkers, who was already under suspicion in Yonkers for sending threatening notes to a neighbor. Detectives found the Galaxie outside Mr. Berkowitz’s apartment; in the back seat, Detective Zigo spotted a duffel bag containing a rifle, and in the glove compartment, he found a letter threatening to attack a disco. They waited for Mr. Berkowitz to emerge and get into the car, at which point they stopped him and he uttered: “I’m the Son of Sam.”
If Son of Sam were lurking today, said Joseph Borrelli, who was once chief of detectives and who helped lead the search for Mr. Berkowitz, “they would have caught him earlier.”
But Mr. Borrelli does not believe the gadgetry and surveillance tools common to investigators today would have solved the murders. Rather, Mr. Borrelli speculates that a break in the case might have come from a clue that sounds almost quaint, a fingerprint.
By 1977, New York detectives had been using fingerprints to solve crimes for some 70 years. But for all of that time, the police matched prints by individually comparing them with the prints of suspects. Not until 1999 did the F.B.I. unveil a computer system that allowed investigators to search an unknown print against all the prints in the possession of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Borrelli said that he had a fingerprint, or part of one, from letters Mr. Berkowitz had sent to him and to the columnist Jimmy Breslin. Given that Mr. Berkowitz was a postal worker and the government had taken his prints when hiring him, Mr. Borrelli suggested that the killer might have been identified today on that basis alone.
Mr. Borrelli also mused that “we might have gotten DNA off the envelope from the letter that was sent to me, or to Breslin.”
But Mr. Borrelli said that it would be too optimistic to conclude that fingerprints aside, the intervening 34 years would have made Mr. Berkowitz significantly easier to catch.
“It’s like a stranger on stranger situation, and those are the most difficult cases,” Mr. Borrelli said, pointing out that the police have been trying for more than two months to catch the killer, or killers, of four women found on a stretch of beach on Long Island.
But from the moment of Mr. Berkowitz’s arrest, the parking ticket became a part of police lore, perhaps the most famous clue ever to turn up in the annals of New York City crime.
“It gave birth to an idea — to be able to search those types of summonses, that minutiae, and be able to solve a case,” said Lt. Christopher Lundberg, a shift commander at the Real Time Crime Center, which serves as the Police Department’s modern-day high-tech repository of clues, both big and small, including parking summonses. “It changed the way you could solve a case, and that brought attention to small things, like a graffiti tag, or a parking summons,” Lieutenant Lundberg said.
In essence, the Real Time Crime Center is a searchable database of a portion of the department’s paperwork as varied as traffic tickets, court summonses and complaints filed with the police in the past. As a detective heads to a crime scene, a detective at the center has already started to develop leads by “getting an understanding of the area, who nearby is being arrested, or getting summonses, and who is hanging out in the area,” Lieutenant Lundberg explained.
With the help of the crime center, Lieutenant Lundberg estimated that his detectives pulled up as much paperwork and background information in the two hours after a shooting as detectives once accomplished in the two to three weeks following one.
At a reporter’s request, Lieutenant Lundberg searched for parking tickets near where Mr. Berkowitz’s car was ticketed — 192 tickets were issued in one recent month.
The police officer who wrote the famous ticket, Michael Cataneo, reflected in a phone interview that after the Moskowitz murder, it took five or six days before the tickets he had written that night ended up in the hands of detectives.
Retired and living in North Carolina, Mr. Cataneo said that the new databases were a step forward but that they were no substitute for an investigator’s instinct.
“There will always be men and woman who say this doesn’t feel right; I got a hunch,” Mr. Cataneo said.
City Room takes you inside the nation’s largest police force every Thursday. The reporters can be reached at OnePolicePlaza@nytimes.com.
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