0000003125 00000 n On Dec. 2, 1979, the murders that earned Cottingham the nickname the "Torso Killer took place in New York City. 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. 21 23 Thats not the natural order its supposed to go in.. Absolutely, its completely plausible. 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 The bridge where Mallory Beach died in a boating accident. They found an 18-year-old victim who'd been bitten and stabbed bound with handcuffs. The teenagers were last seen on Aug. 9, 1974, in North Bergen. A married father of three, he lived in the. In the new docuseries, the second in Netflixs Crime Scene anthology, director Joe Berlinger dissects the Torso Killers murder spree against the backdrop of the sexually charged, crime-ridden culture of 1970s Times Square and how it provided the predator with a fertile hunting ground. He recalled the exact place in the woods where he left the bodies. 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. This is a private property. 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. 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. You are in complete control of somebodys destiny, he told Fezzani in footage shown in the series. Therefore, you should be respectful and not step foot on the property without permission. I just ruled him out. These objects, along with his fingerprint on the handcuffs, were presented as evidence by prosecutors at his trial. Richard Cottingham who is already serving time in state prison for several . There were similarities in the two cases: the girls ages, the apparently hasty disposal of their bodies, even their appearance, both with long, dark hair. Its mind-boggling and very scary, especially to know theres more of them out there.. 0000006846 00000 n Cottinghamss name came up several times, but it didnt fit for me, she said. [22][23] He pleaded guilty in a December court appearance, and also officially admitted killing four other women in Long Island: Mary Beth Heinz,[24] Laverne Moye,[16] Sheila Heiman,[25] and Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves.[26]. His search for a killer led him to a man already locked away, in New Jersey State Prison, 75 miles from his office. 0000002420 00000 n Richard Cottingham of Lodi (NJ) is sentenced to 173-179 years in prison. It is situated at 29 Vreeland Street in Lodi, New Jersey. 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters, Times Square Torso Ripper: Sex and Murder on The Deuce, cataloging 17,000 years of pathological homicide. But Cottingham had other victims, and he would later boast of killing 85 to 100 people. A case based on his "signature pattern" was built against him, combined with the testimony of four surviving victims, as well as pieces of his victims' jewellery and other items found in his possession after his arrest. Once, he outright explained his hesitation: He said, I know once I give you that case, Ill never see you again, Mr. Anzilotti recalled last month. Richard Cottingham of Lodi (NJ) is sentenced to 173-179 years in prison. [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). And I said, Hop in., He drove to the mall. In other words, he may have been content and/or preoccupied. It is not a public place. He also claims that his true victim count is at least 85. Falasca was walking by the side of the road in Emerson on July 14, 1969, when Cottingham pulled up beside her and offered her a ride. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Thanks for contacting us. She had been tied up and strangled, authorities said. Goodarzi had come to the United States years prior from Iran. Cottingham, who is also nicknamed "The Torso Killer," moved into this rented three-bedroom house in February of 1975. The photographs are ordered from left to right and top to bottom. Mr. Anzilotti would arrange to have the inmate transported to his office more than hours drive from the prison. When the 40th year since the killings arrived in 2014, the local police asked the public for any new information. 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. It doesnt bring my mother back, but at least I have answers now. I think sometimes he grapples with his own gruesomeness back then., On March 12, a Friday, Mr. Anzilotti summoned the inmate. During a search of the house, investigators discovered personal items belonging to some of his victims. Richard Cottingham was born in 1946 and was raised mostly in New Jersey, according to the The New York Times. The clever killer slipped up, leaving a fingerprint on the cuffs. On February 15, 1968, Cottingham killed his second known victim. When reporters ran with the story, Mr. Anzilotti considered himself absolved from keeping his silence about the cases. For more information, please read our Privacy & Cookie Policy. Dont think youre going to mess with me and Im going to help you, Mr. Anzilotti recalled Mr. Cottingham saying. For a year, he refused to speak to Mr. Anzilotti. In May of 1980, police arrested Cottingham while he was torturing a sex worker at a motel room in New Jersey. But the arrest in 1980 changed everything, exposing Richard's double life and deadly exploits. The weather worsened. I lost so much more than just my mother that day, Altman said. 0000013001 00000 n 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. 21 0 obj <> endobj This girl did everything right, Vronsky said. A notorious New Jersey serial killer pleaded guilty Tuesday to the cold case murders of two teenage girls in 1974. Goodarzi, of Trenton, was a sex worker who had been traveling to the then-seedy streets of midtown Manhattan, Vronsky said. He also claimed to have committed 80 perfect murders no one knows about. Cottingham has claimed in the past he. I was an immediate adult when it happened, she said later in an interview. Little more than a week after Street was found, Reyner was found butchered in the Seville Motel in New York City. South Hackensack, Richard Cottingham, Lorraine Kelly, Mary Ann Pryor, Bergen County Prosecutor's Chief of Detectives Robert Anzilotti, Ecuadorian National Pleads Guilty To Brutal Stabbing Death Of Popular Bergen County Chef, Franklin Lakes Driver Indicted In Teaneck T-Bone Crash That Kil, Paterson Non-Violence Activist Shot Dead In Police Standoff Was, Man Killed By Amtrak Train In Central Jersey Was Family Breadwi, WATCH: YouTube Video Shows Rapper Assaulting Bergen Shop Rite W, Motel Guest Covered In Lotion Rescued From Knife-Wielding Woman, DWI Suspected In Horrific Route 80 Crash In Bergen County. 21 0 obj <> endobj His upcoming sentencing will add more time to a prison term that already extends beyond his remaining years. 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. 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. Vronsky, whose works also include an authoritative tome cataloging 17,000 years of pathological homicide, said Cottingham scouted his victims before transforming from a family man into a ferocious monster. Cottingham, who is already serving a lifetime state prison sentence for killing several other women and girls, was brought to the office of Bergen County Prosecutor Mark Musella in Paramus to enter his pleas before Superior Court Judge Keith Bachmann in Hackensack. 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. %PDF-1.4 % The motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated. 0000003431 00000 n I had long suspected that whoever killed Irene Blase also killed Denise Falasca, Mr. Anzilotti said. Again, he knew details from Ms. Falascas file. On May 4, 1980, the body of Street, a sex worker, was found at the same Quality Inn where Cottingham had dumped Carrs body. 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. He soon realized the woman had no head, the Daily News reported. He enjoys our relationship. Retrieved April 2nd, 2007, from Factiva database. 0000005280 00000 n On May 22, Cottingham then picked up Leslie Ann ODell, a 19-year-old runaway desperate to escape her pimp something he promised to help her do over drinks in Midtown. 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. Irene Blase, aged 18, vanished on April 7, 1969, in Hackensack and was found face down in four feet of water in the Saddle River, strangled with a wire, a cord, or perhaps the chain of a crucifix she was wearing. Mr. Cottingham was summoned before a judge on April 27, remotely, via Zoom, sitting in a wheelchair in a conference room at the prosecutors office. Cusicks daughter, Darlene Altman, told Nassau County Judge Caryn Fink her late grandparents raised her after her mothers shocking slaying. Correctional officers found contraband and evidence of bookmaking and transferred Mr. Cottingham to solitary confinement. The killer would suddenly recall picking a girl up from a store somewhere, and the chief, in the front passenger seat as a detective drove, surreptitiously took notes. He lived with his wife and kids in. The schoolgirl murder confessions increased that to to nine. The highly-respected law enforcement veteran knew the notorious killer was responsible for the deaths of the North Bergen teens, but Cottingham made him work for it. 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 [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". That night, city firefighters responded to a blaze at a motel in Times Square, the New York Daily News reported. Cookie Settings/Do Not Sell My Personal Information. 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. The New York Times, p. 2. You can set your cookie preferences below. In 1964, Cottingham graduated from Pascack Valley High School in Hillsdale, New Jersey. [3], 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. Then in exchange for immunity from prosecution, he confessed to murdering three New Jersey schoolgirls. Follow him on Twitter @rodrigotorrejon. The back and forth went on for weeks. The 45th year passed in the same way. A judge sentenced him to 25 years to life after Cusicks brother and only child read emotional impact statements in court. Years ticked past, 1974 into 1975, into the 1980s, the 1990s. Richard Cottingham, Lorraine . 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. Crime: Cottingham, a Lodi resident, killed six women in New Jersey and New York between 1967 and 1980. 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. Her glasses, a ring, a necklace, Ms. Mulder said. 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. Hed order pizza and play cards with the older man and other detectives. Neither complainant appeared in further proceedings, however, and the case was dismissed. Authorities believed it to be, thus far, the oldest criminal case to be solved and prosecuted by direct DNA evidence. She had been a teenager when her sister was killed. With Ms. Pryor and a judge watching on Zoom that day, Mr. Cottingham pleaded guilty to the two murders. He did, however, leave behind their clothing, including a pair of Bonjour jeans, white leotards and a black fur coat, neatly folded in the bath tub. He would describe to me certain routes he would drive, Vronsky said of Cottinghamm relaying his murderous spree in letters and interviews over the span of five years. This time, at the Seville Hotel, where he strangled Jean Reyner, a 25-year-old mother working in the sex trade to finance a child custody battle. 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. God rest their souls," Bergen County Prosecutor's Chief of Detective Robert Anzilotti said Tuesday after Richard Cottingham of Lodi admitted killing both in 1974. . 0 She was a mother, she was a wife, a daughter and a grandmother taken far too early. startxref Trophies like jewellery and other personal items belonging to his victims were taken by him. In the thirteen-year period during which he is known to have committed at least seventeen murders, only one fingerprint belonging to him was ever recovered, from the ratchet mechanism of handcuffs left behind on Valerie Street. Hackensack, 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. I never broke my promise to him, all these years later, the chief said. Richard Cottingham, New Jersey prison photo. The girls vanished Aug. 9, 1974, while hitchhiking to a mall in . Authorities tied him to the killings after police were called to a Hasbrouck Heights motel, where a maid had heard a woman screaming. Defense attorney John Bruno recited the details, which the white-bearded, 74-year-old killer acknowledged. They sat at the kitchen table, very professional, very polite, very considerate, Ms. Mulder recalled. In 2010, Bergen County authorities announced hed pleaded guilty to a sixth murder, a 1967 strangling in Bergen County. 0000001262 00000 n He admitted that those two killings weighed on him more than the others. 0000003183 00000 n The picture in the top left corner shows Cottingham during one of his trials. 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The body of Laverne Moye, of St. Albans, Queens, was discovered in a Rockville Centre creek on July 20, 1972. These include the Times Square Killer, the Torso Killer, and the Times Square Torso Ripper. Cottingham had stuffed Streets body under the bed for housekeeping to find, Vronsky said. He then left the scene with their severed heads and hands. Accused serial killer nurse allegedly tried to murder premature infant twice. %%EOF 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. She knew that Mr. Anzilotti had solved Denises killing, too. She was found strangled to death the next day in Saddle Brook. Like a werewolf, Vronsky told The Post. Jacalyn "Jackie" Harp, aged 13, was randomly ambushed as she walked home in the evening of July 17, 1968, from school band practice in Midland Park and strangled with the leather strap of her bag. Which, of course, I wasnt overly interested in, the former chief said. 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. And even worse, the rape laws were particularly onerous, and you had to provide a witness to bring an allegation of rape. Hes younger when all this is going on in Bergen County, he said. I thought he could be responsible for some, Mr. Anzilotti said. This is the house where the "Times Square Killer," Richard Cottingham, lived between 1975 and 1980. His crimes were discovered in May 1980, when a maid at a Hasbrouck Heights motel heard. And he sat there with literally no remorse. His murders were not the outcome of stalking or planning but of fleeting encounters. They were never able to fully recover from the monumental loss, she said. New Jersey . He was the Torso Killer. 0000003707 00000 n He was locked away to serve several life sentences, aging into a portly man with a thick white beard. 0000000756 00000 n Select this result to view Richard P Cunningham's phone number, address, and more. She, too, had been strangled. But Mr. Anzilotti kept pressing him: You know youre going to tell me.. Its an ongoing process, Vronsky said. She agreed to have sex with him for money. He married in 1970 and had three children. He was also known to threaten them with a plastic gun and leave it within their reach so they could try to grab it only to find out it was false, severely bite and scrape their nipples, cut around the breasts, and use other forms of torture. [6] In 2022, Cottingham officially confessed to the 1970 murder of Lorraine McGraw, under a non-prosecution agreement. 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 items included necklaces, broaches, earrings, and other pieces of jewelry. cleveland ohio jewelers,
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