endstream endobj 34 0 obj<>stream And even though Harp ran, Cottingham soon overtook her and dragged her into a grouping of bushes where teens would often go to smoke and make out, he said. Furthermore, one of the women that he murdered in 1979 is still unidentified. Altman, who was just 3 years old at the time, said her parents had separated prior to Cusicks killing. Location of first contact Maryann Carr = her apartment; Prostitutes = street or bar . 0000009992 00000 n A woman walking to her car found them: two teenage girls, naked and dead in a sliver of woods behind an apartment parking lot. On Tuesday, Richard Cottingham, 74, sat in a wheelchair in beige prison scrubs as he pleaded guilty to kidnapping the teenage girls and raping them for days before he drowned them in a motel room bathtub. His crimes were discovered in May 1980, when a maid at a Hasbrouck Heights motel heard. Two focused entirely on him: Rod Leith's The Prostitute Murders: The People vs. Richard Cottingham (Lyle Stuart Inc., 1983) and Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer (Netflix, 2021). I was shocked that one human being was capable of all this carnage, Moye said of Cottingham. Mr. Anzilotti would arrange to have the inmate transported to his office more than hours drive from the prison. Cottingham had kept these items as souvenirs so that he could remember his victims and relive his attacks. They'd left home for a trip 13 miles (21 kilometers) north to . Retrieved April 2nd, 2007, from Factiva database. She was Nancy Pryor, and she was 19 when her sister, Mary Ann, was found dead. Cottinghams luck began to unravel in early May 1980 when the maid at the Quality Inn found the naked corpse of a handcuffed woman under the bed. [12] Both bodies had their hands and heads removed, and had been doused with lighter fluid and set on fire. Hes hedged around and all but confessed.. 0000003707 00000 n Mr. Cottingham at his virtual hearing on April 27 in Bergen County Superior Court, where he pleaded guilty to killing Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly 47 years later. Starting in 2014, Cottingham confidentially admitted to Detective Robert Anzilotti of the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office (BCPO) to being the perpetrator of the murders of three teenage females between 1968 and 1969. The inmate, with no real incentive to say anything about that crime, had given the chief what amounted to a parting gift. xb```"WVf~g`0pt 9"~S?``Z V|bG!+N}TzYl@2 `QD2 @DACEDJaOs6x?+[Ihlrt ? On December 2, 1979, firemen in New York responded to an alarm at the Travel Inn motel[11] near Times Square. Photos of the house and other related images. On August 21, 1972, he is charged and convicted of shoplifting at a Stern's department store in Paramus, New Jersey, and was sentenced to pay a $50 fine or ten days in jail. He forced his victims to address him as "master". Over decades, through his rise from sergeant to detective to chief of detectives, Robert Anzilotti plugged away at cold cases in New Jersey involving young womens murders.CreditBryan Anselm for The New York Times. Then, in January of this year, the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office made an announcement: The notorious serial killer Richard Cottingham, known as "The Torso Killer," had confessed to the murders. Its an ongoing process, Vronsky said. Seth Wenig/Associated Press By Ed Shanahan Dec. 5, 2022 On a. New documentary The 12th Victim: Is Fugate a Natural Born Killer or Starkweather victim? %%EOF I lost so much more than just my mother that day, Altman said. His name had floated around in the lore of Bergen County cold cases.. The bodies of the women had no heads and no hands. Like a werewolf, Vronsky told The Post. The police hunted for leads, questioning prostitutes about suspicious men, examining the handwriting of the guest who had checked into Room 417: Carl Wilson of Merlin, N.J., a fake name from a fake place. But first, he wanted to return to those two murders from 47 years ago. Richard Cottingham, 76, pleaded guilty to the February 1968 murder of Diane Cusick, 23, and admitted to strangling four additional women in the 1970s in Nassau County. There were at least five unsolved killings of girls, each an open wound for families seeking resolution. )' On December 15, 1977, the body of X-ray technician Maryann Carr, 26, was found brutally beaten and strangled in the parking lot of the Quality Inn motel in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, but police did not link the murder to Cottingham until his 1980 arrest at the same motel. 0000006846 00000 n When you have a series of crimes today, everything goes through the computers, andwe have computer analysis and a wayof moving these through jurisdictionalboundaries. Cottingham was indicted in Cusicks killing in June after DNA evidence linked him to the cold-case slaying believed to be the oldest match to ever lead to a prosecution, Nassau County prosecutors said. In 1948, Cottingham's family moved to Dumont, New Jersey, and in 1956 to River Vale, New Jersey, where he began his fascination with bondage pornography. Their murders shook the region. [4], The BCPO "exceptionally closed" the three cold case murders with agreement from the victims' families and evidence corroborating the confessions, but for several years kept this secret from the public to keep Cottingham talking about other cases. Which, of course, I wasnt overly interested in, the former chief said. He said he would talk about other murders only on the condition that the revelations would be kept out of the papers. The back and forth went on for weeks. These objects, along with his fingerprint on the handcuffs, were presented as evidence by prosecutors at his trial. A third the killing of 13-year-old Jackie Harp seemed to be the work of another killer. She was stunned. The police photograph on the left was taken in June of 1980. Mr. Anzilotti and another investigator drove to the town of Reading, Vt., to deliver the news to Jackies older sister, Suzan Mulder, then 69. On February 15, 1968, Cottingham killed his second known victim. But the killer was a clever bastard, too. Find NJ.com on Facebook. %PDF-1.4 % Hes younger when all this is going on in Bergen County, he said. [16], In the early hours of May 22, 1980, Cottingham picked up 18-year-old Leslie Ann O'Dell, who was soliciting on the corner of Manhattan's Lexington Avenue and 25th Street. And considering the closure of yesterdays cases, I absolutely believe him.. 0000006081 00000 n If they came forward and said theyd been assaulted, they would be arrested for prostitution, so there was no reason to come forward, Berlinger said. Richard Francis Cottingham was born on November 25, 1946, in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City, the first of four children. They have also lived in Manasquan, NJ and Ada, MI. Cottingham was convicted of five murders and numerous counts of kidnapping and sexual assault and sentenced to 173 to 197 years, which he is serving in Trentons New Jersey State Prison. Blase was found strangled to death in 4 feet of water in Saddle River the next day. He continued to live here until the police eventually arrested him on May 22nd, 1980. He did not know the names of those he killed. After nearly 15 years of interviews by Anzilotti and Detective Capt. But there was an even bigger problem. Again, he knew details from Ms. Falascas file. [7] In a 2009 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 Goodarzi and had been seen with her in a bar the night before.[2]. Mr. Anzilotti, doing his best not to betray any emotion, slowly pulled out his Blackberry and took notes. Cusick, an instructor at a dance school in the Oceanside community of Long Island, went to Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream to buy a pair of shoes. Much of Cottinghams crimes were not murders, but other violent crimes like abductions and rapes. Inside they found the bodies of 22-year-old sex worker Deedeh Goodarzi[9] and an unidentified woman estimated between 16 and 22. In August 2022, with a non-prosecution agreement, officials in Rockland County, New York, corroborated and accepted Cottingham's confession to the murder of 26-year-old Lorraine McGraw, who was beaten and killed March 1, 1970. He admitted that those two killings weighed on him more than the others. Moye, who traveled from Georgia to see Cottingham confess to killing his mother and four other women as part of a plea deal, said he leaned heavily on his Catholic faith as the unrepentant killer watched via video feed from South Woods State Prison in New Jersey, where hes serving multiple life sentences. But he told Mr. Cottingham. 0000009264 00000 n That made 11 murders Cottingham that admitted since his arrest more than 30 years ago. 0000001982 00000 n He was imprisoned. They found an 18-year-old victim who'd been bitten and stabbed bound with handcuffs. That night, city firefighters responded to a blaze at a motel in Times Square, the New York Daily News reported. Geberth noted that this was a time before the proliferation of surveillance cameras and the use of computer analysis to establish patterns and share information across jurisdictions. Although first responders encountered thick smoke in the room, one noticed the shape of bodies on the pair of twin beds and attempted to administer CPR. According to his neighbors, he seemed like a regular family man. Accused serial killer nurse allegedly tried to murder premature infant twice. Blase was 18 when she was found strangled in Saddle River in 1969. Now I just have to go on with my life.. In the 1970s, he had preyed on prostitutes in Times Square 30 miles but a world away from Montvale not just killing them, but torturing and dismembering them. Cottingham, a former computer programmer whose wrath of terror spanned from 1967 to 1980, also copped on Monday to strangling Mary Beth Heinz, 21, in May 1972, three months before he killed Moye and dumped her body in the same creek. I think it was just an evolution in his killing.. 0 The plea leaves the question: Will they be Cottinghams final admissions? The schoolgirl murder confessions increased that to to nine. He had not yet put in for retirement, or even told his boss he planned to do that the following week. [21] Cottingham was apparently "forensically aware" in the era before DNA analysis. The family lived in Lodi, and Mr. Cottingham commuted to a job as a computer operator at Blue Cross Blue Shield in Manhattan. Police were not aware of his murders at the time, nor were they aware that an active serial killer was at large in the New York-New Jersey area. This girl did everything right, Vronsky said. On July 17, 1968, Harp, of Midland Park, was walking home from band practice when a strange man, Cottingham, tried to coax her into his car, Vronsky said. The people listed below were born in, residents of, or otherwise closely associated with Lodi, New Jersey. I thought he could be responsible for some, Mr. Anzilotti said. He drove his car ahead of Harp, pulled over and walked back toward her, Vronsky said. Thats not the natural order its supposed to go in.. Those cases were already closed. To this day, I dont even think they would have ever said anything. Soon, Cottingham persuaded Blase to go for a drink with him. 0000003125 00000 n It represented closure, Moye said of this weeks hearing. [6] At Blue Cross, Cottingham worked in an office with Rodney Alcala, the fugitive child molester and future serial killer who lived in New York under the alias "John Berger". She agreed to have sex with him for money. [6] In 2022, Cottingham officially confessed to the 1970 murder of Lorraine McGraw, under a non-prosecution agreement. Taking a bus to another location, Cottingham and Blase spent some time together. In the case of Diane Cusick, it was a drive-in that no longer exists there He remembers the victims characteristics, but he doesnt remember their names.. O'Dell's muffled cries of pain became so loud that the motel staff, already uneased by the previous two murders of Carr and Street, called police and then rushed to the room demanding that Cottingham open the door. He began torturing her, nearly biting off one of her nipples. His additional confession to a 1974 murder was discounted by Rockland County police. 0000007874 00000 n It was an era when the sex worker was criminalized. And he sat there with literally no remorse. Cottingham was convicted of five murders in a series of three trials between 1981 and 1984 (two in New Jersey and one in New York). The following is a chronological summary of Cottingham's seventeen identified murder victims and four identified survivors: Cottingham's case has been discussed in several books and documentaries on serial killers. He kept his glasses case tucked in a vest pocket of his prison scrubs, beneath his white beard, and folded his hands over his broad belly. I just ruled him out. We've received your submission. 7{(~tm LB IBJ*ZB`0 He had pornographic artwork, adhesive tape, books about S&M, said Geberth. You are in complete control of somebodys destiny, he told Fezzani in footage shown in the series. On one occasion, he dismembered two sex workers and set fire to their torsos at a hotel near Times Square. Goodarzi, of Trenton, was a sex worker who had been traveling to the then-seedy streets of midtown Manhattan, Vronsky said. But eventually, their old give-and-take resumed. Other locations that are relatively close to this place. She then grew up without a father because her grandparents did not like him, she said. To Mr. Anzilotti, what had once seemed like a great disparity between the two series of murders one a group of suburban teenagers and the other mostly sex workers in the city now made sense. Authorities executed a warrant on his Lodi home, which had a private room containing evidence linking him to the Torso Killer. Absolutely, its completely plausible. What started in 1967 with the discovery of a Ridgefield Park woman dead, nude and bound in her own car continued until 1980, when the hulking Cottingham, then 33, was arrested after the screams of a would-be victim pierced the walls of a Hasbrouck Heights motel room. 0000006151 00000 n Irene Blase, Denise Falasca and Jacalyn Harp all girls whose murders were unsolved. startxref He then drowned them in a bathtub, he said, and dumped their bodies in the woods in a wooded area behind Rolling Ridge Road in Montvale. Cottinghamss name came up several times, but it didnt fit for me, she said. You can set your cookie preferences below. 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. Cottingham primarily sought prostitutes who were petite blondes in their late teens to mid-twenties. I didnt know what to expect. Cottingham had stuffed Streets body under the bed for housekeeping to find, Vronsky said. He worked hard on this., There were never any meaningful updates, until a Monday this April, when detectives knocked on her door in Ocean County, N.J., and said they had obtained a confession. His "justification" for doing this was that he "didn't like anyone getting one over" on him. He needed a way to approach Mr. Cottingham and found an opening in 2003, when he got a tip: Mr. Cottingham was taking bets on sporting events from his cell. [5][17], The charges listed in Cottingham's New Jersey indictment included kidnapping, attempted murder, aggravated assault, aggravated assault with deadly weapon, aggravated sexual assault while armed (rape), aggravated sexual assault while armed (sodomy), aggravated sexual assault while armed (fellatio), possession of a weapon (switchblade knife), and possession of controlled substances (secobarbital, amobarbital and diazepam). But Cottingham flew under the radar precisely because of how he chose his victims and who his victims were. Serial Killer House in Lodi, New Jersey, United States. I had long suspected that whoever killed Irene Blase also killed Denise Falasca, Mr. Anzilotti said. Im leaving, he said. The potential payoff in return felt almost too important to describe. After their drink, Cottingham offered to bring Blase back to the bus station where they had taken the bus. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. 0000007078 00000 n He had his list of names, each one a dead girl and a crime long unsolved. I took over handling the calls, the arrangements. Cottingham was apprehended in the hallway by arriving police officers. The girls vanished Aug. 9, 1974, while hitchhiking to a mall in . 43 0 obj<>stream He also claims that his true victim count is at least 85. With Ms. Pryor and a judge watching on Zoom that day, Mr. Cottingham pleaded guilty to the two murders. She had been a teenager when her sister was killed. 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. His yearbook photo shows a cross-country runner with blond hair slicked back. If you purchase a product or register for an account through one of the links on our site, we may receive compensation. [4], On October 3, 1969, Cottingham was charged and convicted of drunk driving in New York City and was fined $50 (equivalent to $400 in 2021).
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