My Adoption

I want to continue where I left off yesterday...

I wrote about my adoptive mother's passing, as well as my relationship with my birth mother. All these years later, there is still a lot of misinformation circulating about my adoption. I'm hoping to bring some clarity to the matter, and to set the record straight.

When I was in my early twenties, I decided to conduct a search to find my birth father and hopefully learn something about my lineage. I had assumed my birth mother was no longer living, as I had been told when I was about four or five years old that she died while giving birth to me. So after I got out of the Army and was living on my own, I decided to search for my roots.

At this time my adoptive father, Nathan, confessed that the story I had been told and believed, was untrue.  He told me that I had been born out of wedlock instead, and that my mother didn't die. My adoptive father had no other information than this. But he did provide me with my original birth certificate, which I had never seen before. It gave my original name at birth, starting me on an amazing journey.

After much effort, I was able to locate my birth mother. She was alive and well, and living in Brooklyn, New York. We had a wonderful meeting. I found her to be a loving woman, Jewish, with the likable nasally accent of a true Brooklynite. And I was overjoyed to have met my half-sister,
 too. I was about twenty-two years old at the time. It was a dream come true.

Having grown up an only child, I now found myself with a sister who was smart, attractive, and full of love for me. And I had a friendly brother-in-law too, along with two precious nieces. Everyone welcomed me into their lives, as our relationship grew stronger over time. I was visiting my sister's home and my mother's apartment almost weekly.

Sadly, however, even though I was now part of a caring, close-knit family, my mental health began to deteriorate. I was getting deeper into satanism, and I was becoming more and more delusional as the demons who had been pursuing me for years began to make increasing inroads into my soul. Now the brightest days of my life were fading. My mind was getting darker. I was losing sight
of reality. But this is a story in itself that I will save for another time.

For now, and especially since so much misinformation had been given out by the media at the time of the recent fortieth anniversary of my arrest, I wish to set the record straight about a few matters:
​
First, my being adopted at birth and meeting my maternal mother years later,
​had nothing whatsoever to do with the Son of Sam shootings. My birth mother
and I maintained a good relationship. We spent a lot of time together. Betty
Falco was a kindhearted, generous woman. She was also a good mother. I was
blessed to have met her and she enriched my life.

Second, being born out of wedlock also had nothing to do with the crimes I'd been
charged with. Throughout the years, various documentaries and media programs
have stated that by shooting at couples in parked cars, I was somehow trying to
prevent children from being born illegitimately, and then possibly having to
experience the same fate as me.

This theory, however, cannot stand up to the facts of the events, nor of common
sense. As the facts show, a number of the shootings did not involve male/female
couples. One incident involved a woman walking alone, while another involved
two young women sitting on the front porch of a house. Yet still another incident
was with two women sitting in a parked car.

And even in the shootings in which couples were together, most of these individuals
were simply sitting in their vehicles talking. Thus, the idea that I was hoping to stop
​children from being born out of wedlock, is nonsense. Yet it keeps getting regurgitated
again and again by various media productions, but it is untrue.

D.B.