All these factors created this crucible in the center of Manhattan for Richard Cottingham to flourish.. Cusicks daughter, Darlene Altman, told Nassau County Judge Caryn Fink her late grandparents raised her after her mothers shocking slaying. 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. That night, city firefighters responded to a blaze at a motel in Times Square, the New York Daily News reported. 0000003431 00000 n [13][14] Anzilotti had spent 15 years interviewing Cottingham, working toward the confession. In May of 1980, police arrested Cottingham while he was torturing a sex worker at a motel room in New Jersey. It was an era when the sex worker was criminalized. It was a game to me. Soon, the chief closed that case two down. And before I go, I want to close out the Kelly-Pryor case., Mr. Cottingham urged the chief to reconsider leaving the force. On May 4, 1980, the body of Street, a sex worker, was found at the same Quality Inn where Cottingham had dumped Carrs body. 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. He drove his car ahead of Harp, pulled over and walked back toward her, Vronsky said. What they want is an outright statement and a sign-off of Yes thats me,' Vronsky continued. Ive never seen rain like that, he said. Its mind-boggling and very scary, especially to know theres more of them out there.. [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". Richard Francis Cottingham (born November 25, 1946) is an American serial killer and rapist who murdered at least eighteen young women and girls in New York and New Jersey between 1967 and 1980. Monday marked the first time Moye ever laid eyes on Cottingham, who dismembered some of victims, including two women whose bodies were found without their heads and hands in a Times Square motel in December 1979. There was also a lockbox filled with trophies from his murders, including Maryann Carrs apartment key and a necklace belonging to Jean Reyner. 0000000756 00000 n The police pursued a welter of tips, rumors and false alarms, The New York Times reported at the time. 0000013001 00000 n 0000003686 00000 n 0000006151 00000 n 0000009543 00000 n The newspapers called the murderer The Torso Killer. Then on May 22, 1980, a worker at a Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., heard a woman screaming. 21 0 obj <> endobj The Google Street View image above was taken in May of 2022. He would approach them in bars, drug them with the date rape drug Tuinal, take them to a remote locationtypically a motelwhere he would bind, gag, torture, and stab them before killing them by strangling them with a ligature. She was believed to have accepted a ride from a stranger, and her body was found on the side of a road near a cemetery. They have also lived in Manasquan, NJ and Ada, MI. Filming Location in Lodi, New Jersey, United States, Filming Location in Paterson, New Jersey, United States, Filming Location in Clifton, New Jersey, United States, Filming Location in Bloomfield, New Jersey, United States, Crime Location Wylie, Texas, United States, Crime Location Memphis, Tennessee, United States, Place of Interest Brooklyn, New York, United States, Crash Site Location Beaufort, South Carolina, United States. Mr. Cottingham had a vulnerability, the chief realized: After divulging nothing during hours of questioning, hed sometimes loosen up on the drive back to prison, sitting in the back seat and believing the day was done. She was stunned. And at the time, it was beyond our capacity to look beyond New York City, he told The Post. He asked to quietly close their daughters murder case without formally charging the killer. Cottingham, who is also nicknamed "The Torso Killer," moved into this rented three-bedroom house in February of 1975. 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. For over 40 years, its been folklore in this county.. Bergen County investigators realized there were numerous open sexual assault cases with similar hallmarks: Cottingham kidnapped them from Times Square, drugged and assaulted them. I just kind of looked at it and touched it and put it in a box where I had some dried flowers for my mother when she passed.. But he told Mr. Cottingham. To this day, their remains have never been recovered. Twenty years later, he was reinvestigating several cold cases involving girls and young women who had been abducted, sexually abused and killed. Richard Cottingham, 74, pleaded guilty Tuesday to murdering Mary Ann Pryor, 17, and Lorraine Marie Kelly, 16, both of North Bergen. Mr. Anzilotti and another investigator drove to the town of Reading, Vt., to deliver the news to Jackies older sister, Suzan Mulder, then 69. It was pure evil. Ms. And for Cottingham, every night was a full moon.. Instead, he drove her to the Quality Inn, where he tortured, beat and sexually assaulted her for hours, until a maid heard her scream. Absolutely, its completely plausible. 0000001425 00000 n Here are the nine victims Cottingham has confessed to or been convicted of killing: On Oct. 28, 1967, Vogel, 29, told friends she was going to play bingo at a local church. The Google Street View image on the right was taken 38 years later, in June of 2018. Click here to follow Daily Voice Hackensack and receive free news updates. It will take her a while to forget the habit of calling the detectives for updates a lifetime constant, through the deaths of her parents, her marriage and divorce, her second marriage and widowhood. In his possession, the 33-year-old had a stash of handcuffs, tape and sedatives. Furthermore, one of the women that he murdered in 1979 is still unidentified. Community Rules apply to all content you upload or otherwise submit to this site. But beneath the veneer of normalcy was a heinous double-existence as a serial killer. FPh_3Gj Nt%Q[r L`%/9QTh/| Q4_g8KI}u'?xbif`H>;wNQ|sd2(? Cottingham has claimed in the past he. The 22-year-old's death appeared brutal: she had been beheaded and set on fire and her skull has yet to be found. That was roughly one month after his arrest. And any new prison sentence would, practically speaking, be meaningless; Mr. Cottingham had no chance of ever being released. Cottingham's reign of terror on both sides of the Hudson River is the subject of Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer, whose tale begins on Dec. 2, 1979, with New York City police and fire. Then, with just days remaining before the chief retired, the inmate relented. The other girls did, you have to take it, too. These objects, along with his fingerprint on the handcuffs, were presented as evidence by prosecutors at his trial. Its not something you can ever get over, Altman, 58, told The Post. His search for a killer led him to a man already locked away, in New Jersey State Prison, 75 miles from his office. I was an immediate adult when it happened, she said later in an interview. Denise Falasca, aged 15, was abducted on July 14, 1969, in Emerson, while walking to a friend's home and found the next morning in Saddle Brook, by the side of a road next to a cemetery, strangled with the cord or the chain of her crucifix. 0000004577 00000 n Getting to that point wasnt easy, Anzilotti said. Then came Tuesdays pleas. More Local News to Love Start today for 50% off Expires 3/6/23, Rodrigo Torrejon | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com, discovery of a Ridgefield Park woman dead, nude and bound. 0000003202 00000 n It would take about five months after the grisly Travel Inn slayings for investigators to arrest their man, a married father of three from Lodi, New Jersey, who preyed on sex workers in Times Square, then a seedy nucleus of pornography, prostitution and crime. 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. Questioning Mr. Cottingham was complicated. This girl did everything right, Vronsky said. About a week later, Big Apple authorities would find Reyners body, but still, no one in New Jersey connected them to the Times Square killer, says former NYPD detective Malcolm Reiman in the series. Over the months that followed, Mr. Anzilotti cultivated an unusual relationship with Mr. Cottingham, sometimes testy, sometimes closer to a sort of warmth. PB| 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved, How a retired detective snared his seventh Torso Killer confession, Expert reveals biological reason why were obsessed with true crime shows. Anyone can read what you share. The schoolgirl murder confessions increased that to to nine. They captured Cottingham soon after. But he carried those cold cases with him literally, his thick files in cardboard boxes that he moved from office to office chipping away at the false leads, seeking similarities in the victims and in the crime scenes. The murder remained unsolved until Cottingham confessed and entered a guilty plea in August 2010. The victim, Valerie Street, had just been busted in Miami for prostitution, and was last seen getting picked up by a man in New York City. )' They were never able to fully recover from the monumental loss, she said. The plea leaves the question: Will they be Cottinghams final admissions? Their heads and hands had been cut off. He tortured women before he killed them and did terrible things to them, and yet we still dont know who he is because he preyed on sex workers, Berlinger said, adding that he hopes this series helps destigmatize sex work and potentially solve more cold cases. She, too, had been strangled. The potential payoff in return felt almost too important to describe. Everyone deserves justice under the law.. Since his conviction, Cottingham has pleaded guilty to 12 murders. This case was always haunting me.. He began to speak about a particular case, he said. Thats not the natural order its supposed to go in.. Because I was with them for a couple of days, he replied, according to a transcript, and got to know them., It was raining that day in August 1974, and Mr. Cottingham, then 28, was driving to work in Manhattan when he passed the two girls walking in the opposite direction. Its taken more than 46 years, but a Bergen County police veteran who is only days from retirement got one of the countrys most notorious serial killers to confess. It is not a public place. A local investigator began to wonder: Could there be a link to a series of infamous Times Square murders? At the time, Cottingham, who had not been arrested or identified, was dubbed the "Times Square Ripper.. Hes embarrassed by this case, he said. He had pornographic artwork, adhesive tape, books about S&M, said Geberth. They found an 18-year-old victim who'd been bitten and stabbed bound with handcuffs. [12] Both bodies had their hands and heads removed, and had been doused with lighter fluid and set on fire. In this image taken from a New Jersey Courts virtual hearing, Richard Cottingham, center, known as the "Torso Killer," pleads guilty Tuesday, April 27, 2021, to two 1974 murders. Richard Cottingham of Lodi (NJ) is sentenced to 173-179 years in prison. And considering the closure of yesterdays cases, I absolutely believe him.. Moye, 55, stared down serial murderer and rapist Richard Cottingham in a Nassau County courtroom Monday as the 76-year-old notorious Torso Killer admitted to five more sadistic slayings decades earlier, bringing his known tally to 17 although experts believe that figure could be as high as 100 victims. So he would remember something on the way: a racetrack or a shopping mall. He began torturing her, nearly biting off one of her nipples. I just ruled him out. Like a werewolf, Vronsky told The Post. endstream endobj 22 0 obj<> endobj 23 0 obj<> endobj 24 0 obj<>/ColorSpace<>/Font<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageC]/ExtGState<>>> endobj 25 0 obj<> endobj 26 0 obj<> endobj 27 0 obj<> endobj 28 0 obj[/ICCBased 41 0 R] endobj 29 0 obj<> endobj 30 0 obj<> endobj 31 0 obj<> endobj 32 0 obj<> endobj 33 0 obj<>stream 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. Vronsky, who aided investigators in obtaining Junes indictment, is trying to coax as many confessions out of the aging, 300-pound serial killer as possible, but the clock is ticking since he suffers from diabetes and kidney disease, he said. In 2010, Bergen County authorities announced hed pleaded guilty to a sixth murder, a 1967 strangling in Bergen County. He admitted that those two killings weighed on him more than the others. 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.. trailer 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. He described things only the killer would know, like where hed thrown her car keys afterward. Hearing prosecutors detail grisly crime scenes like where Laverne was found was especially difficult to endure, her son said. xref 0000003707 00000 n Between 1970 and 1974, Cottingham and his wife, Janet, lived at an apartment block called Ledgewood Terrace in Little Ferry, New Jersey. It was Aug. 14, 1974, in Montvale, N.J., a suburb just over the New York state line. [5] On May 15, 1980, Jean Reyner was strangled and her throat cut in New York's historic Seville Hotel. A friend of one victim came forward and the slain woman was later positively identified through a cesarean-section scar and chest X-ray as 22-year-old prostitute Deedeh Goodarzi. Among the other faces in separate windows on the Zoom screen was a 66-year-old woman, identified simply as Nancy. Three days later, Mr. Anzilotti walked out of his office for good. 0000002420 00000 n As he moved through Midtown undetected, Cottingham, a successful computer operator at Blue Cross Blue Shield in Manhattan, was also committing sadistic sexual assault and sometimes murder at the Quality Inn, a motel in Hasbrouck Heights, NJ. %PDF-1.4 % The series features interviews with former sex workers, including Barbara Amaya, who was raped and robbed at gunpoint by a man she believes was Cottingham, although she was inexplicably spared. startxref The family lived in Lodi, and Mr. Cottingham commuted to a job as a computer operator at Blue Cross Blue Shield in Manhattan. The photographs are ordered from left to right and top to bottom. Richard Cottingham, serial killer from New Jersey operating in New York between 1967 and 1980. 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. In 2022, Cottingham also confessed to the 1968 murder of Diane Cusick after DNA evidence linked him to the crime. He kept these "trophies" in a locked room in the basement. During his trial, he testified that he had been fascinated by bondage since he was a young child. The inmate made it clear that pressure would not work. He said he would talk about other murders only on the condition that the revelations would be kept out of the papers. 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. They have also lived in Whiting, IN. Justice was served and thats the end of it case closed. Richard Cottingham, 74, appeared virtually in court Tuesday to admit to the slayings of 17-year-old Mary Ann Pryor and 16-year-old Lorraine Marie Kelly. He didnt have the decency or the dignity to ask for forgiveness or to even address the victims families. Goodarzi had come to the United States years prior from Iran. 0000002865 00000 n Author Peter Vronsky, who has a forthcoming book on Cottingham, and was first to publicly announce that the imprisoned Cottingham was responsible for the three 50-year-old crimes, says authorities want to add more to the list. Then he followed with an unusual request. But in 2009, he surfaced to again make waves, when he gave a chilling interview to journalist Nadia Fezzani about his motivation and his body count. 0000003451 00000 n The little perks for the older man the pizza, the poker, the distraction from prison life were always in the service of the younger mans long game. But first, he wanted to return to those two murders from 47 years ago. Richard was arrested at a motel in Hasbrouck . Mr. Anzilotti insisted that this case be resolved in open court. [15], In 2022, Cottingham was arraigned from his prison hospital bed for the 1968 murder of Diane Cusick in Long Island, New York. Richard Cottingham was born in 1946 and was raised mostly in New Jersey, according to the The New York Times. The brief encounter later inspired Vronsky to write his serial killer histories and paved the way for his prison meetings with Cottingham four decades later. She agreed to have sex with him for money. [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. This murder was later linked to the 1977 murder of Maryann Carr, who was left in the same motel's parking lot. ADVERTISEMENT. Location of first contact Maryann Carr = her apartment; Prostitutes = street or bar . Mr. Anzilotti had begun to believe, he said in a recent interview, that Mr. Cottingham, between his history and the suspicions of detectives that came before me, could be responsible for one or more of those deaths. . The latitude and longitude coordinates for the house are: To view directions on how to get there, you can use the Google Maps shortcut below: 29 Vreeland StreetLodiNew JerseyNJ 07644United States. New documentary The 12th Victim: Is Fugate a Natural Born Killer or Starkweather victim? A maid heard the teenagers guttural screams and called police. The New York Times, p. 2. Retrieved April 2nd, 2007, from Factiva database. He called his detectives and gave the word: Bring in Cottingham. The items included necklaces, broaches, earrings, and other pieces of jewelry. This is possibly due to the fact that he got married in 1970. Straddling her back, he drew a knife and put it to her throat as he snapped a pair of handcuffs on her wrists. 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. His proclivity toward violence and the lack of solid profiling tactics for serial killers made Vronsky believe that Cottinghams claim of 100 victims was possible. 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. The body of Laverne Moye, of St. Albans, Queens, was discovered in a Rockville Centre creek on July 20, 1972. Although Cottingham has formally admitted to eighteen killings and has claimed to have killed as many as 100, he is known to have only murdered seventeen girls between 1967 and 1980 and attempted to kill a further four. Cottingham, a depraved killer already serving more than 200 years in prison, confessed to tossing the 22-year-old mother of two from a bridge ending her familys half-century quest for answers. It could only be Jackie Harp.. Cottingham, 75, admitted before state Superior Court Judge Keith Bachmann in April 2021 that he had killed Mary Ann Pryor, 17, and her friend Lorraine Kelly, 16, when the pair went shopping for. A number of killings of young women and girls in New Jersey and New York had gone unsolved for years before a night in May 1980 when a maid at a Hasbrouck Heights hotel called police saying shed heard a woman screaming. Prosecutors will seek dual life sentences to run alongside his current lifetime term when Cottingham is sentenced on July 9 for what Musella said were the willful, deliberate, and premediated murders of Mary Ann Prior and Lorraine Kelly. The motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated. [18], During the early 1980s, Cottingham was convicted of five murders in two separate New Jersey trials in 1981[19] and 1982,[20] and in a single New York trial in 1984 for three murders. 21 0 obj <> endobj Richard Cottingham was born in 1946 and grew up largely in New Jersey. The details stopped him cold. Then in exchange for immunity from prosecution, he confessed to murdering three New Jersey schoolgirls. 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. He forced his victims to address him as "master". The year 2020 arrived, and running his office through the coronavirus outbreak kept Mr. Anzilotti too busy for cold cases. But Cottingham had other victims, and he would later boast of killing 85 to 100 people. We've received your submission. He abducted Vogel and took her to a field in Montvale, where he strangled her.