Thirty years ago this summer the City of New York was gripped by fear. The "Son of Sam," was on the loose, and no one knew when he'd kill again.

Sam focused his attention on Queens and the Bronx. His preferred targets were couples in parked cars. Dark-haired women who wore their hair long seemed to be what would attract Sam to a particular car.

The Son of Sam wrote insane letters to the press and the authorities. Sometimes Sam's ramblings bordered on a sick sort of poetry, and this was perhaps one of the things that added an extra layer of terror to his legacy. The killer's letter sent to columnist Jimmy Breslin in May, 1977 was but one example of how this particular killer saw the world, and how he used language to intensify the public fear of him. The letter began,

Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C., which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood. Hello from the sewers of N.Y.C. which swallow up the delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks. Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C. and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed on the dried blood of the dead that has seeped into these cracks...

The Son of Sam was arrested on August 10, 1977. That was when the public learned his real name, David Berkowitz. The .44 caliber killer, the monster, was a nebbishy former postal worker. He was tripped up, it turned out, by a parking ticket.

For his crimes David Berkowitz received a sentence of 25 years to life in prison.

Since his incarceration Berkowitz has claimed to be a born-again Christian. At a website built for him, Berkowitz peddles a book based on his prison diaries. The book is titled Son of Hope.

*****

Seven years before the Son of Sam began to kill couples making out in parked cars, before he began to send bizarre, disturbing letters to the press, a similar killer was at work on the West Coast. This killer targeted young couples parked in isolated spots at night. One set of victims was attacked outdoors, during the daylight, but they still fit this killer's victim profile.

This killer's letters were published in the papers. Many of his letters contained meticulously-rendered coded messages. Only one of the codes was ever conclusively solved.

The Zodiac Killer killed 5 and injured 2. Many believe they know who The Zodiac was, but no one has ever been arrested for his crimes.

Forty-seven years before the Son of Sam, thirty-nine years before Zodiac, there was 3X. He didn't take as many victims as his spiritual offspring. Technically, he may not have been a serial killer. The 3X killer caused a brief flurry of news coverage in papers nationwide before everyone went back to worrying about where to find a job, or the next square meal.

He stalked amorous couples in cars, couples who thought they'd found respite from prying eyes. The 3X killer then wrote letters about what he'd done, and what he might do next. In these letters there were rambling and disjointed passages similar to some found in the letters sent by Zodiac and the Son of Sam. Like the Zodiac Killer, 3X was fond of coded messages.

Like the Zodiac, the 3X Killer got away with murder.

Night spawned the stranger. The man from nowhere wore a black suit and a black fedora. He carried a silver gun.

Lovers Joseph Mozynski and Catherine May were wary, frightened. Joseph, a grocer, was married to another woman, with whom he had two children. Catherine was only 19. They'd chosen their isolated parking spot with care. Was the strange man outside Joseph's car a police detective? A private detective? A robber?

The stranger ordered Mozynski to move from the back seat into the front of the vehicle. Then he shot Joseph Mozynski at point-blank range. A bullet split Mozynski's skull, splintering bone, shredding brain matter. Death was instantaneous.

The stranger then turned his attention to Catherine May. He ordered the terrified girl from the vehicle.

Early news reports detailing the murder of Joseph Mozynski depicted the killer as a gentleman -- once the killing was done. New York papers told of the murderer rifling Catherine's purse. He found some letters she was carrying and burned them. The gunman then walked the traumatized young woman to a trolley. Before she boarded a car to go home, the man handed Catherine a note. Stamped in red ink on the paper in Catherine's hand was the following cryptic message:

Joseph Mozynski
3X3-X-097

It took two weeks for the press to report a crucial detail omitted from the first reports about the death of Joseph Mozynski. Before the "courtly" killer ensured Catherine May's safe passage home, his strange message in her possession, he raped her.

The police decided to hold Ms. May on a $50,000 bond until they were satisfied that she had nothing to do with her lover's demise. A 23-year-old friend of May's named Joseph Moisette traveled to New York from Chicago at police request. It took more than a week, but investigators finally concluded that neither Moisette nor Catherine May were responsible for Joseph Mozynski's murder.

Two days after Mozynski was murdered, a bizarre letter was sent to a New York newspaper. In part, it read:

kindly print this letter in your paper for Mozynski's friends: "CC-NY ADCM-Y16a-DQR-PA...241 PM6 Queens." By doing this you may save their lives. We do not want any more shooting unless we have to...

The next day, June 14, another letter came. It said that the "dirty rat" Mozynski was supposed to have "certain documents." The writer then said that "unfortunately, they were not in his possession at the time."

The letter writer described the gun and ammo used to kill Mozynski, and at the end of the letter he issued a warning. Unless the killer received some important documents, "14 more of Mozynski's friends will join him."

It was June 11, 1930, and the beginning of a truly bizarre mystery.

*****

The man who stepped out of the darkness 5 days later was following a script known only to him. Certain elements were fixed in place -- the night, a parked car, the lovers inside the car.

The stranger standing outside Noel Sowley's auto wanted to see Sowley's license. Sowley, 26, was parked in an out of the way spot with his girlfriend, Elizabeth Ring.

After examining the license, the man turned away from Sowley's car. He raised a flashlight and flicked it off and on, as if broadcasting some kind of code. Turning back to Sowley, he said, "You're the one we want, all right. You're going to get what Joe got."

Then the stranger shot the radio salesman from Brooklyn. Two bullets to the brain, and Noel Sowley was dead.

The killer leaned over and whispered, "Now you've got the same dose as the other fellow." He dug through Sowley's pockets, finally pulling out a piece of paper. He said, "I have it!"

Noel Sowley's murderer concluded his business with Sowley's corpse by dropping a newspaper clipping in Sowley's lap. In the margin of the clipping were scribbled these words: "Here's how." The article was about the murder of Joseph Mozynski.

Elizabeth Ring might have been raped like Catherine May, but she reportedly avoided the outrage by showing the killer some kind of "religious medal." The man walked Ring to a bus stop to catch a ride home.

*****

Though police had yet to find Noel Sowley's remains the following day, another mysterious letter had already arrived at the William Randolph Hearst-owned New York Journal. The tabloid Journal was already infamous for the way its publisher had literally helped to foment the Spanish-American War with dramatic accounts of Spanish "atrocities" in Cuba.

The letter described Noel Sowley's murder from the killer's point of view. It didn't stop there. The killer had also sent along two cartridge casings. Sowley was referred to as "V-5 Sowley," and it was apparent that the killer believed Sowley to be "one more of Mozynski's friends."

There was another warning in this letter. The killer stated that 13 men and a woman would be killed "if they do not make peace with us and stop bleeding us to death."

For the moment, mobsters and most other workaday malefactors were forgotten. A massive police force was deployed to find the madman. Suspects, new witnesses were sought. In Queens alone 700 cops hit the streets. That night, patrolmen and plainclothesmen were stationed in places where lovers typically liked to park. A number of patrolmen, likely to their chagrin, were dressed as women.

As many as 18 arrests were made in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Neither of the surviving victims recognized any of the arrestees.

Other than finding Noel Sowley's body keeled over in his car sometime that Tuesday, police had no luck.

*****

A few days after the Sowley murder, the man some reporters had dubbed the "massacre maniac" ("petterkiller" was another epithet) issued an apology in the form of a new letter to the Journal. He said he had marked another man for death, the murder to take place at 9 on the night of the 18th in College Point, Long Island.

That man, said 3X, had saved himself. The killer wrote:

Dear Sir: I beg to thank you for publishing the code message sent you. W. R. XVG of C. P. (College Point) has returned the Philadelphia XV 340 to me tonight -- also 37,000 dollars of blackmail money, thanks to God, if I may use his name.

According to 3X, "W. R." had also saved 5 other people, one of them a tall blond woman.

But it wasn't time for anyone in Queens or the surrounding boroughs to relax. 3X said he still had 7 victims to go. The killer provided a code for the identities of the victims he still planned to kill: X14, X21, Y2, O6, X7, S1, and V4.

All was not yet lost for these people, though. Three-X would let them live, he said, if they followed directions in yet another encoded message: N. J.--C. C. K.--2-33-A. V.-3X-R. G.-4 MLT-RP 49-6.

Handwriting experts and "war code" experts in Washington and Chicago were on the case. The handwriting analysts could, if nothing else, weed out fakes from the real thing, and the code experts might be able to tell if there was a real pattern to 3X's ciphers or if he was simply a lunatic spouting gibberish.

On or about June 19, another missive apparently authored by 3X was sent to the Journal. It was peculiar in part because it was reportedly written in ink on purple paper. In it he called himself "X -- the man behind the gun." The letter read:

Find the Woman

Where is X8 2-9? He is already dead. He is on the Boston Road. His name is Harold Bridenbach. Find the woman, old man, and you've got me.

One of the many remaining puzzles in the case of the 3X killer is this letter -- was it from the killer at all? There was an importer of precious stones named Harold Breidenbach living in the killer's general target area at the time. (The 1930 Federal Census had just been taken in April of that year.) A close look at several genealogical records seemed to indicate that this Harold Breidenbach lived to a ripe old age, passing away in California in the 1970s. As it was, the police never turned up a definitive third victim of 3X. They never even knew if they were searching on the right Boston Road -- the Boston Post Road inside Manhattan city limits, or the Boston Road further out from the metropolis.

There was a mysterious explosion in College Point on the very night police were searching there for the 3X victim the killer later said he'd decided to spare. The blast was heard by some of the cops on stakeouts at typical trysting spots (including the hapless guys in drag). Nervous locals were naturally thrown into a panic. But 3X was never actually linked to the explosion. Still, true crime writers and reporters in later years would assist in the ballooning of the 3X legend, turning him into not just a killer, but a "mad bomber."

The killer did threaten to expand his operations to Pennsylvania. His victim of choice there was none other than Joseph Mozynski's brother John, who lived in Port Richmond, PA. Sometime between June 19 and June 21, 3X mailed threats to John Mozynski. Understandably, John turned his home into a fortress for a time.

The surviving Mozynski brother was safe, though. By June 21, the 3X killer had sent what he said would be his final letter. In this rambling and disjointed message 3X outlined a scenario to explain his actions. It was straight out of a spy novel.

The killer said he was an agent of the "Russian Red Diamond Society." A plane had been secretly chartered to take him back to Europe. He wrote, "3-X is no more. My mission is ended."

Most of the letters from 3X had been signed with this strange set of symbols: Λ V 3X. Now that he was "leaving," 3X helpfully explained what the sign-off meant:

The first sign means A, the supreme tribunal of the order. The second V, its secret agent. The two combined form the Red Diamond of Russia, a secret order all over the world...

The writer segued into what appeared to be his justification for killing Joseph Mozynski and Noel Sowley:

Anyone breaking [the Red Diamond of Russia's] rules is marked for death. These men were dismissed from the order for treason. They were all our friends but came in contact with a gang of blackmailers and a drug ring and turned against us...

He continued in this vein, his story self-contradictory, confusing. He concluded with:

Quiet your people and tell them 3 X is no more. If any more letters come they are fakes. I am leaving today on my way back to Russia. (...) There is no one else to begin trouble. It is settled.

H. P. 12. W. A.

In another message 3X had referred to himself as a former German Army officer, and he'd given slightly different reasons for what he was doing -- none of it written with the specificity of his "final" letter.

The lunatic who called himself 3X vanished, as if the night that spawned him had called him home again.

*****

There were a handful of 3X suspects over the years. One was a former church worker from Long Island who'd had delusions similar to the phantom killer's -- of being an agent, of needing to recover something important like a document. Another suspect was an escapee from a mental hospital named Joseph Ustica. Ustica had homicidal tendencies, and the Italian-born inmate of Kings Park State Hospital had escaped around the time the 3X killings began. Many of Ustica's delusions were about being on some sort of mission involving special documents.

Ultimately, Ustica's physical description did not match the one given by either Catherine May or Elizabeth Ring.

A tie between the couples attacked by 3X that was not readily apparent in most of the news coverage at the time was adultery.

Though the killer allegedly raped Catherine May and wanted to rape Elizabeth Ring, a few newspapers referred to him as a "moral maniac." The assumption prior to May's rape being revealed was that 3X had taken offense at the couples doing dirty deeds in their cars, and that this had fueled his murderous rage.

That 3X eliminated the male and treated the females alternately as sexual objects then with something resembling courtesy seemed to fly in the face of any true "moral" sensibility contributing to his actions. Morality as understood by a clinically insane killer, perhaps, but not morality as it would have been perceived at the time.

It was known shortly after Mozynski's murder that he was cheating on his wife with Catherine May. However, the adultery embodied in Noel Sowley's relationship with Elizabeth Ring was not so obvious. No mention of it could be found in any of the reports published by wire services at the time. To any casual reader of a 3X story published at the time it seemed as though one couple was indeed an older man catting around with a hot young thing, but the other was just two fairly young people doing what young folks often do. In the 1930 Census Noel Sowley was not listed as a married man -- he had two boarders, Elton Hall and Fred Jiles, both 21.

A web search revealed that Elizabeth Ring was a different story.

At Bklyn-genealogy-info.com, someone has published old news briefs from the Brooklyn Daily Standard Union. An interesting article about Elizabeth Ring was posted there.

The following was originally published in the Daily Standard Union on March 20, 1931:

WITNESS IN 3X MURDER DIVORCED.

The marital bonds that joined Elizabeth RING LAUSTEEN and Vincent J. LAUSTEEN, 22 year old advertising solicitor, have been severed by Justice Mitchell MAY in the Special Term of the Queens Supreme Court, with the signing of a final decree of divorce.

LAUSTEEN, on Dec. 2, brought the action before Justice Burt Jay HUMPHREY, claiming that his young wife was in a wooded section in Creedmore with Noel SOWLEY on June 16, the night SOWLEY was murdered by the elusive 3-X.

LAUSTEEN testified that while her actions with SOWLEY were not known by him, he was sure that the pretty brunette was not in a parked car with SOWLEY talking about the weather. Justice HUMPHREY signed the interlocutory decree of divorce when Mrs. LAUSTEEN didn't appear in court to defend the case. Throughout the investigation of the murder, Mrs. LAUSTEEN was referred to as Betty RING, daughter of a policeman. Young LAUSTEEN gave his address as 93-10 206th street, Queens Village.

Vincent's last name may have been spelled "Laustein." When census takers came to the Queens home of Lauritz and Gisela Laustein two months before 3X first struck, 21-year-old Vincent, a "producer of advertising," was living there. No Elizabeth Ring was listed as a member of the Laustein household.

Yet when the census came to Jamaica Township (Queens County) and the home of city policeman David Ring, a 20-year-old Elizabeth was listed as living at home with her parents. Beside Elizabeth's name the census taker had added "Lawson."

It may be safe to conclude that the young couple was already having trouble when Elizabeth's fateful tryst with Noel Sowley turned into a living nightmare.

Still, it is hard to not wonder just how angry young Vincent might have been with his wife. And it is interesting that Elizabeth's father was a cop, and somehow her being married was kept out of most news reports about the 3X crimes. That may be no coincidence.

Further theorizing about the truth behind the 3X murders can be perilous, though. Far too little is known to develop theories that make much sense. The mind tends to wander in directions that seem as strange as those taken by 3X himself in his weird letters to the press.

But an underlying commonality between the couples attacked, where at least one partner in each pairing was cheating on someone else -- that's hard to ignore. It is also hard to ignore the fact that this went virtually unreported at the time.

Could it be that 3X didn't exist? It would have been interesting to know if there was some link between the couples themselves -- Catherine May knowing Elizabeth Ring, or Joseph Mozynski, perhaps. Even if it was just a casual, "hello, how are you" sort of thing.

If there had been some sort of prior acquaintance, could the women have cooked something up between them to escape cleanly from unseemly relationships? It seems far-fetched, but then again, so did 3X's actions and his letters.

If 3X did not truly exist, he could have also been created in another way.

It is worth noting that it was the New York Journal doing so much in-depth reporting of the 3X story. William Hearst had virtually invented "yellow journalism" with that paper. Scandals, gossip, lurid and sensational crime stories were the Journal's stock and trade. A long-standing theory about several letters from Jack the Ripper is that they were written by London newsmen trying to scare up more opportunities to sell papers. The theory has some solid grounding. Many Ripperologists do believe the real killer sent at least one letter (the one that begins, "Dear Boss..."), but they also tend to think most other Ripper notes were hoaxes.

What if the Journal took a page from that playbook? On one hand you could say that it made sense for a psycho killer to make it a point to send all his correspondence to the most high-profile scandalsheet in town, on the other hand, it would have also made sense for a paper run by the poster boy for yellow journalism to completely manufacture the most exotic element of this tale of murder.

Nearly 80 years after the fact, it is a virtual certainty that we will never know exactly what happened in June, 1930. 3X could have been burying tidbits of truth in his letters, if he was the real killer. His final message about "going to Europe" could have been euphemistic -- he might have committed suicide. In the letters reprinted by news services at the time there wasn't much of the cold-hearted but still legally sane psychopath -- that the letter writer was either making up an elaborate fiction or was truly delusional seemed more likely.

3X could have simply moved to another city, and decided that it didn't serve his best interests to taunt the police as he'd done before. Any subsequent murders would not have been easily traced to him -- not in 1930, with the Great Depression really starting to kick it into high gear.

3X could have also finally been brought under control by someone who recognized his insanity. A long-standing theory about the Cleveland Torso Killer (also called the Butcher of Kingsbury Run) is that he was the clinically insane scion of a very prominent Cleveland family, and he ended his days in an asylum. Could 3X's murderous spree have been stopped by similar circumstances?

One thing will always be true about 3X. It is another trait common to him and the Zodiac Killer. Because he was never caught, because his real name was never known, it doesn't matter if he was in whole or in part a fictional creation.

Whether he was flesh or dark, awful fantasy, the 3X Killer remains a true phantom to this very day.

Sources not otherwise linked in this post:

• The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes by Michael Newton;
• "Petterkiller," article first published in Time on June 30, 1930;
• Wire service reports from multiple sources, published between June 18, and June 30, 1930, accessed through NewspaperArchive.com;
• Genealogical records accessed via Ancestry.com.

Three months to the day after she was murdered, I received an e-mail from Tori Vienneau.

To be precise, the e-mail was from a website that purported to help people stay in contact with old friends from school, the military, even former places of employment. The words in my Gmail inbox raised the hair on the back of my neck: "Steve, You have mail from Tori Vienneau!"

In my own account with the reunion website I was to find what appeared to be a message from a dead woman.