Even if you haven’t seen the movie, you probably know the macabre legacy of Martin Scorsese’s early masterpiece Taxi Driver. Released 50 years ago this month, the tale of the eponymous cabbie Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, still has something potent to say about what can happen when a brooding loner finds himself adrift amid the menace and jammed chaos of New York’s streets with a .44 Magnum for company.

Perhaps one of the reasons Taxi Driver resonates with so many people is because of this human void that lies at its center. At one time or another, we’ve all felt as alone as Travis Bickle. Fortunately, most of us are better at dealing with it than Bickle, whose haunting line, “Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets” signals a climactic orgy of screen violence that delivers both a visceral shock and a sense of relief of the “It had to happen, and it’s happened” variety.

At one time or another, we’ve all felt as alone as Travis Bickle

At one time or another, we’ve all felt as alone as Travis Bickle

For at least two individuals, however, the human time-bomb played by De Niro proved to be the trigger that unleashed their own unmetered psychosis, with tragic real-life results.

One of those paying $2.40 to watch Taxi Driver during its run at the Elgin Theater in Manhattan in the spring of 1976 was a pudgy, 22-year-old New Yorker named David Berkowitz. Like Travis Bickle, he was an insomniac, socially inept........

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