SID: Hello, Sid Roth here with Don Dickerman. Do you remember Son of Sam, David Berkowitz, the mass murderer from the New York area? Well, Don wrote a letter to David. How did he respond to your letter while he was in prison?
DON: That was in 1978. He’d just been sentenced. I didn’t know the guy; I just knew what the headlines in the papers were. But I’d seen people saved in prisons, so I wrote David a letter. I said “David, God still loves you, and Jesus can save you.” He wrote me right back and said, “If I get out here, I’ll kill you.”
Sid Roth: Well he didn’t get out of there, but you went back into the prison to speak, and he came up to you. What did he tell you?
DON: This was ten years later. I was in his prison, not knowing he was there. After the service… I didn’t know what he looked like. After the service he came up to me and put his arm around me and said “I want you to know, I appreciate you being faithful over these years, coming into these dark places with the light of the gospel. By the way, my name’s David Berkowitz.” I could look in his eyes and tell something had happened. I said, “David, are you saved? Are you born again?” He said, “Yes sir, I got saved a couple of years ago.” No one knew his story. He said, “I know the media will get a hold of it and twist it. But yeah, I love Jesus.”
Sid Roth: Then you became friends. One prisoner can’t write to another prisoner, so he asked you to write to one of the most hardened prisoners in Ireland. Tell me about that.
DON: He had read in some paper about Eddie Ferncombe, the most notorious criminal in Ireland. A feared criminal. He said, “Would you write to this man and witness to him like you did to me?” Well, of course I did. Over a period of several weeks of writing, Eddie accepted Christ by mail. He asked me if I had any tapes of services or teachings. He said, “I have a little tape player. Can you send me some?” So I gathered a handful of tapes and mailed them to Eddie. He wrote me. In a couple of weeks I got a letter from him. On one of the tapes, I had done a corporate deliverance. Kind of silently address those issues in your mind and choose to be free from them. I’m going to bind them… So I sent him that tape, and as he was listening to it, demons began to manifest in him. They couldn’t be still. He was trembling and sweating. So he told his chaplain about it the next day and asked the chaplain if he’d help him. He said, “The chaplain laughed at me.” Well, he asked me in the letter if I would consider coming to Ireland to minister deliverance. He said, “I know what my problem is.” Well, I didn’t know how I’d get to Ireland, but I felt God’s Spirit telling me to go. So I went to Ireland, eventually met with Eddie. I told Eddie “There’s a qualification. You can’t have any unforgiveness in your life”, because as we talked, I could sense he did. He said, “I can’t do that, brother Don. I can’t.” He was going to kill the man that snitched on him. That was his plan, to get out of prison and do that. I said “Eddie, I can’t help you if you can’t forgive. I went back two days later, and he came out with a big smile on his face. We’re in a super isolation area, he’s got four officers escorting him, he’s in waist chains and ankle chains and handcuffs. But he had this big smile on his face.
SID: What did the prison think about you going there?
DON: They couldn’t understand why I was there, and I wasn’t sure I could explain it to them.
SID: “I came to set someone free of a demon.”
DON: One officer that was escorting me back to that area… And it was a dungeon. It’s where they kept the IRA prisoners in Portlaoise, Ireland. He said “Are you like David Wilkerson?” Well I knew what he meant. I said “Yeah I am.” He said, “Well you’re welcome here lad.” We went back to Eddie’s area. They had a plexiglass booth where an officer sat to overlook, to make sure nothing went wrong. So while they’re bringing Eddie back to that area, I looked at that officer and thought, “I don’t know what he’s going to think if Eddie screams or makes some kind of noise.” So I went over and tapped on the glass. I said, “Sir, I just want to explain to you what I’m here for, what I’m going to do.” I explained the deliverance process. As I was warning him of what might happen, he said, “Help yourself lad, help yourself.” Eddie came in, and we sat down across from each other, just like you and I are. He said, “I did it, brother Don. I forgave.” And you could see in his eyes, it was real. We went through the process of binding demons and commanding them to leave, and they did. And Eddie’s been out of prison for…
SID: I tell you what… He’s been out for how long??
DON: I think for maybe six years.
SID: I caught up with Eddie, and he is out of prison, and I interviewed him by way of radio. I asked him some questions about what it was like to be set free of these evil spirits. Let’s go to that audio interview.
SID: What was it like before you went through deliverance?
EDDIE: I was just on a road to destruction. I was very violent and very evil.
SID: Describe to me what you felt like right after you went through deliverance.
EDDIE: Ah, I felt peace straight away. Peace. I was in a bad place at that time – mentally. After the deliverance everything just kind a lifted.
SID: And you also told me you felt really drunk in the Spirit. Explain that.
EDDIE: Yeah, I was actually giddy – happy!
SID: Imagine that. This is what he said to me. When I said, “What does it feel like?” he says, “It feels like I’m stoned.” Here he is in the worst prison of prisons, with no hope for any future, hating, just wanted to get out to murder another person. And he feels the love of God. God is so good.
DON: Yes He is. We see that all the time. Not to that extreme, but when someone’s in bondage and they’re freed, while it may be relative, it’s freedom nonetheless. My experience is that most Christians are in some kind of bondage.
SID: Either they’re oppressed or they have some sort of addictive part of their personality.
DON: Generally, I think the rule of thumb is… A question I get a lot is how do you know if it’s the flesh? Sometimes you can’t know, but when it becomes irrational anger, irrational fears, anything to the extreme, generally that’s a demon spirit.
SID: One thing I read which was interesting, even fear that God isn’t going to forgive you of your sins. That is demonic. I’ll tell you something. I am so excited to make his new book available to you, because it’s so simple. The only fear you have of a demon is the fear the demon gives you. When you have faith, you understand that the demon is far more afraid of you than you’re afraid of that demon. I urge you to get a hold of this book, because it is going to transform your life. It’s one of those mentoring tools that’s necessary.
