A friend told me that Son of Sam would pump himself up by listening to Hall and Oates–can that be true?

David Berkowitz’s musical tastes aren’t well-documented, but Daryl Hall certainly believes his music was on Son of Sam’s playlist (competing with the voices in his head). “What I was told is that during the police interrogations with Berkowitz, he said he listened to ‘Rich Girl’ to motivate himself,” Hall said to me in a rapid-fire cadence, referring to Hall and Oates’ single, which hit #1 during the spring of 1977, when Berkowitz was in the middle of his killing spree. “I don’t remember exactly how I heard–maybe one of the detectives.” Hall was sufficiently startled by the news that he wrote a song about it, “Diddy Doo Wop (I Hear the Voices).” It included lyrics such as “Charlie liked the Beatles / Sam, he liked Rich Girl / I’m still hung up on the Duke of Earl,” and provided the title for the duo’s 1980 album Voices. “People interpret things in crazy ways,” Hall mused. “Girls come up to me all the time and say, ‘I’m a maneater.’ And I’m thinking, ‘That’s disgusting, you don’t want to tell me that.'”

(Excerpted from the 2006 book Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John?: Music’s Most Enduring Mysteries, Myths, and Rumors Revealed, published by Three Rivers Press, written by Gavin Edwards.)