The parking ticket on a 1970 Ford Galaxie that led police to a suspected shooter

The parking ticket sat on the windshield of a 1970 Ford Galaxie.

It sat there near the final shooting scene in Brooklyn, on a street where a young woman had just been killed and her companion wounded.

A witness told police they had seen a man with a parking ticket on his car near the scene.

That witness account is in the investigation summary.

So is the next step: police traced the ticket to the car's registered owner.

The owner was a 24-year-old postal worker from Yonkers named David Berkowitz.

A slip of paper, a summons for parking, became the hinge of a manhunt that had run for a year.

Not because of ballistics.

Not because of a confession.

Because a car had been parked where it should not have been, and someone had written it down.

The ticket was the key break after a year of shootings.

Who exactly placed the ticket on the car, and the precise time it was issued, are not in the record.

That would require evidence.

What the record shows is the ticket itself, and the address it led to.

A year of fear, a city waiting, and then a parking violation.

It is mundane.

It is also the moment the case turned.

THE FIRST SHOTS

It begins on July 29, 1976, in the Bronx.

A woman and her companion were sitting in a car.

The woman was killed. The companion was wounded.

That was the first attack, according to the case summary.

Over the following year, seven more attacks followed.

Mostly they targeted young couples in parked cars in Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.

The shooter used a .44-caliber revolver.

It was an uncommon weapon.

Newspapers dubbed him the ".44 Caliber Killer."

That name came before the other one, the one the city would learn later.

The investigation was hampered by a lack of witnesses.

It was hampered by the random nature of the attacks.

Who shoots a stranger in a parked car?

Who picks that couple, that street, that moment?

The record does not itemize the seven attacks that followed the first.