Heriberto Morales, a 50-year-old Hispanic/Latino man, was killed in New York City on December 22, 1981, inside his apartment at 1035 Haven Avenue. The night began in the glow of the season: a Christmas party, the easy drift afterward back to familiar rooms, the small domestic details that make a holiday feel safe. Later, the apartment would be left fire-damaged, and Morales would be found shot to death.
In the weeks that followed, investigators began to see a grim pattern forming across
the city. Police described a “common thread” running through multiple killings—similar methods, similar brutality, and in several cases a connection to the victims’ sexual lives. Some victims were shot in the head, and in more than one apartment killing, a fire was set afterward, as if the flames could erase what had happened. A special detective task force was assembled, and authorities said they received support from members of the gay community as they tried to understand what they were facing and who might be responsible.
The investigation narrowed sharply in mid-January 1982, when police arrested David Bullock in the basement room where he lived at 1937 Madison Avenue. He was taken into custody while being questioned in connection with the disappearance of his roommate, and police said weapons were seized during the arrest, including a loaded sawed-off shotgun. Prosecutors said Bullock admitted to a string of killings and additional shootings, and authorities charged him with multiple murders, including Morales’s. In court filings and police accounts at the time, Morales’s death was presented as one piece of a larger spree—an apartment killing followed by arson, consistent with the pattern investigators believed they were seeing.
By the fall of 1982, the case had moved from investigation to courtroom reckoning. Bullock pleaded guilty in State Supreme Court in Manhattan to six counts of second-degree murder. During the plea proceeding, he described returning with Morales to Morales’s apartment after a Christmas party and then shooting him during a moment that, by any normal measure, should have been harmless and ordinary—holiday conversation, a Christmas tree, the soft rituals of the season. The court record and contemporaneous reporting depicted a chilling lack of remorse as he spoke about what he had done.
Sentencing followed with consecutive prison terms intended to ensure he would never be free again. The convictions closed the question of who killed Heriberto Morales, tying his death to a broader series of murders that had terrified parts of the city through December 1981 and into early 1982. Even with a guilty plea, the details of Morales’s final night remain stark: a holiday visit that ended in gunfire, and an apartment left scorched in the wake of an attempt to burn away evidence—leaving behind a crime scene that would later fit into the larger shape of a spree.
