American serial killer (born 1946)

Richard Francis Cottingham (born November 25, 1946) is an American serial killer and rapist who murdered a minimum of 11 young women and girls in New York and New Jersey between 1967 and 1980. He was nicknamed The Torso Killer and The Times Square Killer.In 2009, nearly 30 years after being convicted for five murders in trials in New Jersey and New York in 1981–1984, Cottingham admitted to a journalist that he had committed at least eighty to a hundred "perfect murders" of women in various regions of the United States, of which six were subsequently confirmed and cases closed to date between 2009 and currently.

In the most notorious of his murders, Cottingham tortured and murdered sex worker Deedeh Goodarzi, age 22, and a still unidentified teenage victim, severed their heads and hands, and set the mattresses under their torsos on fire. Cottingham fled the scene with the severed heads and hands, which were never recovered. He was eventually apprehended on May 22, 1980, in a New Jersey motel while in the act of torturing a teenage sex worker he had lured and driven to the location from New York City.

Cottingham was convicted of five murders, two in New Jersey and three in New York, plus multiple charges of kidnapping and sexual *ault and other charges. Four surviving victims testified against Cottingham and he was convicted in three of the abduction-rape survivor cases, but acquitted in one. In 2010, Cottingham pleaded guilty to the 1967 murder of Nancy Vogel. Subsequently, he confessed under immunity to the murders of New Jersey school girls Jackie Harp, Irene Blase, and Denise Falasca in 1968–1969 in Bergen County, New Jersey. In 2021 he confessed and pleaded guilty in the double abduction rape/murders of Lorraine Marie Kelly, 16 and Mary Ann Pryor, 17.

Cottingham is currently incarcerated in South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, New Jersey.

In 2021, Netflix created a limited series about Cottingham *led Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer.

Contents

• 1 Early life and education
• 2 Career
• 3 Marriage
• 4 First arrest and subsequent lesser offenses
• 5 Murders
• 6 Arrest
  • 6.1 Charges
• 7 Trials
• 8 See also
• 9 References
• 10 External links

Early life and education

Cottingham was born on November 25, 1946, in Mott Haven, Bronx, New York City, the first of four children (he has three sisters). In 1948, his family moved to Dumont, New Jersey, and in 1956 to River Vale, New Jersey. In 1964, Cottingham graduated from Pascack Valley High School in Hillsdale, New Jersey.

Career

After graduating high school, Cottingham worked at Metropolitan Life at their head office in New York City on Madison Avenue from 1964 to 1966 where his father was a vice-president. He started in the mail room and eventually became a mainframe computer operator, after being sent to take computer courses. In October 1966 he went to work as a computer operator at Blue Cross Blue Shield *ociation in New York until his arrest in 1980. At Blue Cross, Cottingham worked in the same office with fugitive serial killer Rodney Alcala, the "Dating Game Killer", who was in New York in 1969 under the alias "John Berger", but neither of them claimed to have been aware of each other nor is there any evidence they were familiar with one another prior to either's arrest.

Marriage

On May 3, 1970, Cottingham married his wife at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Queens Village, New York. They had three children, two boys and a girl. In April 1978 his wife filed for divorce on the grounds of "abandonment" and "mental cruelty" (refusing to have sex with her after the birth of their third child, staying out until early morning, and leaving her with insufficient household funds). His wife withdrew the pe*ion upon his arrest in May 1980, until after he was tried and convicted in the first trial in New Jersey, then refiled the pe*ion and completed the divorce proceeding.

First arrest and subsequent lesser offenses

Cottingham was arrested on several lesser charges throughout his killing spree; the police were not aware of his murders at the time nor were police aware there was an active serial killer at large in the New York - New Jersey area.

On October 3, 1969, Cottingham was charged and convicted of drunk driving in New York City, and sentenced to a $50 fine.

On August 21, 1972, Cottingham was charged and convicted of shoplifting at Stern's Department Store in Paramus, New Jersey and was sentenced to pay a $50 fine or ten days in jail. He paid the fine.

On September 4, 1973, Cottingham was arrested in New York City for robbery, " sodomy" and sex abuse on the complaint of a sex worker and her pimp; neither complainant appeared in further proceedings, however, so the case was dismissed.

On March 12, 1974, Cottingham was arrested in New York City for robbery and unlawful imprisonment on a complaint of a sex worker. Once again, the victim did not appear in further proceedings, so the case was dismissed.

Murders

Cottingham committed his first known murder when he was 21 years old.On October 28, 1967, he strangled Nancy Schiava Vogel, a 29-year-old married mother of two. Her nude body, hands bound in front of her, was found under a blanket behind the p*enger seat of her car parked in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey. She had last been seen three days earlier, when she left home stating she was going to play bingo with friends at a local church. The murder remained unsolved until Cottingham confessed and pleaded guilty to it in August 2010.

Starting in 2014, Cottingham confidentially admitted to Detective Robert Anzilotti of the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office New Jersey, to the murders of three teenage females in 1968 and 1969:

• Jacalyn (Jackie) Harp, 13, July 17, 1968, who was randomly ambushed by Cottingham as she walked home in the evening from school band practice in Midland Park, New Jersey and strangled with the leather strap of her flag;

• Irene Blase, 18, who vanished on April 7, 1969, in Hackensack, New Jersey, and was found face down in four feet of water in Saddle River, strangled with a wire, cord or perhaps the chain of a crucifix she was wearing;

• Denise Falasca, 15, abducted July 14, 1969, in Emerson, New Jersey while walking to a friend's home and found the next morning in Saddle Brook, New Jersey by the side of a road next to a cemetery, strangled with a cord or the chain of her crucifix.

The Bergen County Prosecutor's Office (BCPO) "exceptionally closed" the three cold case murders, but for several years kept this secret from the public, except for the victims' family members. In December 2019, forensic historian and author Peter Vronsky, on the eve of publishing the revelation in his second edition of Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters made it public, with BCPO cooperation, in a community meeting in Midland Park, the site of Jacalyn Harp's murder. Anzilotti and BCPO subsequently confirmed the 'exceptional closures' of the three schoolgirl murders from 1968 to 1969.

In April 2021 Cottingham confessed to the unsolved August 9, 1974, double-abduction, rape and forcible drowning murders of teenagers Lorraine Marie Kelly, 16, and Mary Ann Pryor, 17 in Montvale, New Jersey one of New Jersey's most notorious cold cases.

The confession was extracted by Chief of Detectives Robert Anzilotti weeks before his retirement and was facilitated by the work of forensic historian Peter Vronsky and a Cottingham victim family member Jennifer Weiss, the daughter of Deedeh Goodarzi, one of the New York torso killing victims. Vronsky and Weiss had been meeting with Cottingham in prison since spring of 2017, counseling him to make the confession. Anzilotti had spent 15 years interviewing Cottingham, working toward the confession, which raised the total number of victims attributed to Cottingham to 11. He claims to have committed between 85 and 100 murders.

Cottingham was tried for the subsequent five murders from 1977 to 1980 in a series of three trials, two in New Jersey, and one in New York.

On December 15, 1977, the body of x-ray technician Maryann Carr, 26, was also found brutally beaten and strangled in the parking lot of the Quality Inn motel in Hasbrouck Heights, but police did not link the murder to him until after Cottingham's arrest. Carr had marks around her wrists and ankles indicative of handcuffs and traces of adhesive tape around her mouth. She had been abducted from a Little Ferry apartment complex where Cottingham had previously lived with his wife and where he would later leave an unconscious victim that survived.

On December 2, 1979, firemen in New York responded to an alarm at the Travel Inn motel near Times Square. Inside they found the bodies of Deedeh Goodarzi and another unidentified woman. Both bodies had their hands and heads removed, been doused with lighter fluid and set on fire. The missing body parts were never found. As Cottingham was fleeing the scene of the torso murders, he briefly encountered the twenty-three-year-old Peter Vronsky, who was attempting to check into the Travel Inn while in New York on a film production *ignment. The brief encounter inspired Vronsky to later write his serial killer histories and paved the way for his prison meetings with Cottigham some forty years later. In 2009 in an interview, Cottingham admitted to the murders and claimed that he severed the heads and hands of the victims to prevent their identification as he was acquainted with one of them—Dedeeh Goodarzi—and had been seen with her in a bar the night before.

On May 5, 1980, police found the body of 19-year-old Valerie Ann Street in a Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. The victim's hands were tightly handcuffed behind her back and police would later lift a fingerprint matching Cottingham, the only fingerprint successfully found from any of his known murders. Street had been bruised and beaten around her head and body, bitten on the breast, and had traces of adhesive tape on her lips. Street had died of asphyxiation. This murder was later linked to the earlier murder of Maryann Carr who was left in the same motel's parking lot.

On May 15, Jean Reyner was strangled and her throat cut in the historic Seville Hotel. Cottingham severed the victim's breasts and posed them on the headboard of the bed, and set fire to the mattress under her body before fleeing similar to the Travel Inn torso killings.

Arrest

On May 22, 1980, Cottingham picked up 18-year-old Leslie Ann O'Dell, who was soliciting on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 25th Street. At some point she agreed to have sex with him for $100. Around dawn, they checked into the same Hasbrouck Heights Quality Inn where he had ten days earlier left Valerie Street's body, her hands tightly handcuffed behind her back, stuffed under a bed for housekeeping to find. Cottingham offered to give the girl a m*age and she rolled over onto her stomach. Straddling her back, he drew a knife and put it to her throat as he snapped a pair of handcuffs on her wrists.

He began torturing her, nearly biting off one of her nipples. She later testified that he said, "You have to take it. The other girls did, you have to take it too. You're a * and you have to be punished." O'Dell's muffled cries of pain became so loud that the motel staff, already spooked by the murder eighteen days earlier, called police and then rushed to the room demanding that Cottingham open the door. Cottingham was apprehended by arriving police officers in the hallway. When arrested he had handcuffs, a leather gag, two slave collars, a switchblade, replica pistols and a stockpile of prescription pills.

Charges

The charges listed in Cottingham's New Jersey indictment included kidnapping, attempted murder, aggravated *ault, aggravated *ault with deadly weapon, aggravated sexual *ault while armed (rape), aggravated sexual *ault while armed (sodomy), aggravated sexual *ault while armed (*), possession of a weapon, possession of controlled dangerous substances, Secobarbital and Amobarbital, or Tuinal, and possession of controlled dangerous substance, Diazepam or Valium.

After his wife initiated divorce proceedings in April 1978 he kept a locked room in a ba*t apartment of the house in which they lived in on Vreeland Street in Lodi, New Jersey. After his arrest police found a few personal effects traced to two of his victims in the room and in the trunk of his car.

Trials

In the early 1980s Cottingham was convicted of five murders, in two separate murder trials in New Jersey in 1981 and 1982 and in a single trial in New York City in 1984 for three murders. He pleaded innocent and insisted he was being "framed" for the next thirty years until admitting in 2009 that he had actually perpetrated the murders he was accused of. Cottingham was 'forensically aware' and in the 13-year period during which he is known to have committed 11 murders, in the pre-DNA era, only one fingerprint belonging to him was recovered, from the ratchet mechanism of handcuffs left behind on Valerie Street. A case based on 'signature pattern' was built against Cottingham along with the testimony of four surviving victims and pieces of jewelry and other items found in his possession after his arrest and linked to two of his eleven known victims.

In 2010 he pleaded guilty in the 1967 murder of Nancy Vogel.

In 2021, he pleaded guilty to double kidnapping, raping and drowning of Loraine Marie Kelly and Mary Ann Pryor in 1974.

He also confessed to three murders of New Jersey school girls in 1968–1969 in return for immunity from prosecution.

See also

• List of serial killers in the United States
• List of serial killers by number of victims

References

External links

• New Jersey Girl Murders Project
• Investigating the case of serial killer Richard Cottingham on YouTube
• The Torso Killer on YouTube