Carl Denaro and Rosemary Keenan were sitting in a parked car near Bowne Park in Flushing, Queens, on this day in 1976 when the windows suddenly exploded around them. Denaro was bleeding from a bullet wound to the head, Keenan was only cut by flying glass, and in her panic she sped off for help without either of them realising anyone had actually fired at them.
Police dug .44 calibre bullets out of the wrecked car, the same calibre already blamed for a string of near-identical attacks on young couples across New York, but the slugs were so deformed detectives doubted they could ever be traced to one weapon. The press had already given the unknown gunman a name before anyone had heard of “Son of Sam”: the .44 Calibre Killer. Because Denaro wore his hair shoulder length, investigators later decided he had simply been mistaken for a woman.
Jurisdiction kept the dots unjoined for months: this shooting sat with one Queens precinct, a near-identical attack on another couple three months earlier in the Bronx sat with another, and the bullets went unmatched until more victims fell. David Berkowitz was arrested the following year and later confessed to shooting Denaro and Keenan himself.
