The Ultimate Evil

Introduction by Joshua Zeman

I first learned of Maury Terry in the summer of 2008. At the time, I was directing my first documentary about five missing children and the man linked to their disappearances in my hometow of Staten Island, New York. My interest in the case was sparked by a local legend I d heard years before about a boogeyman named Cropsey. According to the kids in our neighborhood, Cropsey was an escaped mental patient who lived in the tunnels beneath the old abandoned Willowbrook State School and came out late at night to snatch children off the street.
     For most of my childhood, Cropsey remained nothing more than a cautionary tale until the summer of 1987. That was the summer I turned fifteen and Jennifer Schweiger, a twelve-year-old girl with Down syndrome, disappeared from our neighborhood. After more than six weeks of searching, her body was found on the grounds of the same Willowbrook State School. Though I didn t know it back then, Willowbrook had a nefarious history. For decades, the snake pit institution, as Bobby Kennedy called it, had been warehousing hundreds of developmentally disabled children in a real-life house of horrors, until a 1972 expos by Geraldo Rivera finally led to its closure. In the days following Jennifer s discovery, the police arrested a man named Andre Rand. He wasn t a mental patient, as the urban legend suggested, but a former orderly who often lived in a campsite on the school grounds. The police revealed that Rand was suspected in the disappearances of four other missing children going back to the early 70s. For the kids on Staten Island, the legend of Cropsey had turned into something very real and truly terrifying.
     Eventually, Rand was sent to prison for the kidnapping of Jennifer Schweiger, and I moved away. In 2004, Rand returned to Staten Island to stand trial for another missing child, and I came back as well, now as an adult and a filmmaker, to find out what really

Maury Terry was an award-winning investigative reporter whose work was prominently featured in both television and print media. He wrote for the Gannett newspaper chain, Vanity Fair, Gear, and Penthouse, among others. He reported on and coproduced nearly a dozen national TV specials about the Son of Sam conspiracy. Terry died in Yonkers, New York, in 2015.
 
Joshua Zeman has been at the forefront of the true crime genre for the past decade. He is the director of the critically acclaimed film Cropsey, the docuseries The Killing Season, and Murder Mountain.

If the details of the Son of Sam case have always left you wondering if there was more to it, then Terry s in-depth book will satisfy your curiosity. The Ultimate Evil is a true-crime classic that details one of the most notorious serial killings of all time, connecting the dots to a larger conspiracy. Geeks of Doom

This book isn t just about Son of Sam...It s about an author who drove himself into the ground trying to make sense of some of the most brutal crimes in American history. Is what he found true? That s for you to ponder. But I will tell you, I wasn t able to put this book down and neither will you. Billy Jensen, author of Chase Darkness with Me