In April 1978, after his wife had initiated divorce proceedings, he kept a locked room in a basement apartment of the house in which they lived in Lodi, New Jersey. Goodarzi, of Trenton, was a sex worker who had been traveling to the then-seedy streets of midtown Manhattan, Vronsky said. But on May 22, 1980 Cottingham's life as a predator came to light. On December 2, 1979, firemen in New York responded to an alarm at the Travel Inn motel[11] near Times Square. As the New Jersey press reported on Cottinghams arrest, the NYPD started to take notice. 0000000991 00000 n Serial Killer House in Lodi, New Jersey, United States. This is the house where the "Times Square Killer," Richard Cottingham, lived between 1975 and 1980. Knowing better, Harp, just 13 years old, refused. The case also had parallels to a previously unsolved murder of nurse Maryann Carr, who was found dead in the same motel three years earlier. Cottingham fled the scene with the victims heads and hands. On March 12, 1974, Cottingham was arrested in New York City for robbery and unlawful imprisonment on the complaint of another prostitute. He continued to live here until the police eventually arrested him on May 22nd, 1980. He described things only the killer would know, like where hed thrown her car keys afterward. Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters, List of serial killers in the United States, List of serial killers by number of victims, "New Jersey's 'Torso Killer' admits murdering 3 teenage girls over 50 years ago", "Justice Story: 'Times Square Ripper' revealed to be mild-mannered husband from suburban Jersey", "Long-Buried Secrets: The Serial Killer and the Detective", "First of Three Trials of Jerseyan in Prostitute Slayings Nears End", "Killer of 2 Is Guilty of 3 More Slayings", "Legislator Gaynor Honors Detectives Who Solved 50 Year Old Cold Case", "Mineola Woman's Murder 48 Years Ago Still Unsolved", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Richard_Cottingham&oldid=1142468060. 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. Hours later, her parents drove to the mall and found Dianes Plymouth Valiant in the parking lot, where her body was discovered in the backseat. He described in detail how, instead, he took the girls to a motel, held them captive and eventually drowned them in the bathtub. 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. Richard Cottingham of Lodi (NJ) is sentenced to 173-179 years in prison. 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. The police believed they had given up on the bus and were trying to hitchhike to a mall. She later testified that he said, "You have to take it. Richard Cottingham was born in 1946 and grew up largely in New Jersey. Which, of course, I wasnt overly interested in, the former chief said. It was Aug. 14, 1974, in Montvale, N.J., a suburb just over the New York state line. For more details, please read our Privacy & Cookie Policy. Through the years, other people were assigned. Right up to Mr. Anzilotti. After failing to return home from a trip to buy shoes at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, New York,[9] 23-year old Diane Cusick was found raped, beaten, and strangled to death in the back seat of her car, parked near the mall. [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. One would remind him of a TV actress. She had been tied up and strangled, authorities said. The New York Times, p. 26. 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. Select this result to view Richard P Cunningham's phone number, address, and more. This story has been shared 150,597 times. 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. And he sat there with literally no remorse. Cottingham, who is also nicknamed "The Torso Killer," moved into this rented three-bedroom house in February of 1975. Denise Falasca, 15, of Closter, New Jersey. In other words, he may have been content and/or preoccupied. [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". The New York Times, p. 2. H|U0+(QvG`b08NbHlSoZ2CRSs=* \e~ A third the killing of 13-year-old Jackie Harp seemed to be the work of another killer. He was a coward.. She had been a teenager when her sister was killed. Five months later, the serial slayer struck again, strangling Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves, an 18-year-old Manhattan woman originally from Puerto Rico. Despite the gruesome nature of his murders, the butcher, named Richard Cottingham, never warranted the breathless news coverage of David Son of Sam Berkowitz, who only three years prior paralyzed the Big Apple with fear. On one occasion, he dismembered two sex workers and set fire to their torsos at a hotel near Times Square. I have done many shows about serial killers, and I have always marveled at the fact that [Ted] Bundy, [John Wayne] Gacy, [Jeffrey] Dahmer and Berkowitz were all household names, perversely, Berlinger told The Post. WjgF\A9Ro9r/;l5Gh3h}NG2L -S$B{s"=z{ 0EaSe,&@yJQ>`n; ;dj7n (~>*}fEx*\W]xvpt]/k"0JTj4%`G?t$8I@FmYkr(_5_+ jfbXP{]~&I6"%}\STHD Ld2=ENhk$)HESdX,g o+IkRC~eC1 dm"GZBDM7~K&'/9"[{$AXH'my In a candid interview, the Bergen County chief who spent 20 years trying to wrangle new confessions out of serial killer Richard Cottingham revealed the 74-year-old prisoner has "regrets". Hes embarrassed by this case, he said. Before his arrest, he was a successful computer operator who worked at the Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurance company in Midtown Manhattan. Its hard to understand how someone could be like that. [4][5], After his graduation, Cottingham worked for Metropolitan Life, where his father was a vice-president, starting in the mail room at the firm's Manhattan headquarters and eventually became a mainframe computer operator upon taking computer courses. F! [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. He asked to quietly close their daughters murder case without formally charging the killer. Cottingham has been given various nicknames over the years. The schoolgirl murder confessions increased that to to nine. A horrible scene, the police commissioner said that day. 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. 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. 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. They'd left home for a trip 13 miles (21 kilometers) north to . The inmate, with no real incentive to say anything about that crime, had given the chief what amounted to a parting gift. Her glasses, a ring, a necklace, Ms. Mulder said. Those old enough to remember can recall the fear that many felt after the bodies of two girls from North Bergen whod gone missing after a shopping trip to Paramus were found raped, beaten and drowned in Bergen County. I never broke my promise to him, all these years later, the chief said. YouTubes privacy policy is available here and YouTubes terms of service is available here. Hed order pizza and play cards with the older man and other detectives. Over time, though, one investigator was slowly developing a theory. Just shy of his 21st birthday, Richard Cottingham began a vicious killing spree that tore through north New Jersey and New York City. 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.. 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. If hes going to confess to some others, if they can get him to talk, just for those families if he can confess to those, that right there would be I dont know the right word to say, Ms. Mulder said. 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. He tried a different approach. If you purchase a product or register for an account through one of the links on our site, we may receive compensation. In 1981, he was found guilty of her murder and sentenced to nearly 200 years in prison. (1981, June 25). 0000003202 00000 n 0000001982 00000 n Described as average and normal, New Jersey man Richard Cottingham was a father-of-three with a marriage that was slowly unravelling. (1981, June 25). These objects, along with his fingerprint on the handcuffs, were presented as evidence by prosecutors at his trial. ADVERTISEMENT. On the way out, he bumped the author on the shins with a bag that felt like it contained bowling balls, Vronsky said. 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. This is a somber day as we revisit the horrific acts and terror this man brought upon Bergen County nearly 50 years ago, the prosecutor said Tuesday. For a year, he refused to speak to Mr. Anzilotti. Among the other faces in separate windows on the Zoom screen was a 66-year-old woman, identified simply as Nancy. 0000003125 00000 n Over the months that followed, Mr. Anzilotti cultivated an unusual relationship with Mr. Cottingham, sometimes testy, sometimes closer to a sort of warmth. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Serial killer Richard Cottingham made his admission in the cold case murders of the high school girls, acknowledging that he kidnapped, raped and finally drowned the pair inside a motel room. I can go all the way back to the first detective on the case. Questioning Mr. Cottingham was complicated. 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. His search for a killer led him to a man already locked away, in New Jersey State Prison, 75 miles from his office. But Cottingham flew under the radar precisely because of how he chose his victims and who his victims were. Vronsky, who frequently visits Cottingham in prison, said he had a freak, random elevator encounter with the serial killer on the early morning of Dec. 2, 1979, as he tried to check into the Travel Inn Motel near a seedy and sex-crazed Times Square. 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. Richard Cottingham was born in 1946 and was raised mostly in New Jersey, according to the The New York Times. Between 1970 and 1974, Cottingham and his wife, Janet, lived at an apartment block called Ledgewood Terrace in Little Ferry, New Jersey. So we just stayed in the car and we kept talking to each other, getting to know each other and so forth., If the rain wasnt there, they would have just went to the mall and that would have been it, he said, And I would have went to work.. 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. Follow him on Twitter @rodrigotorrejon. In May of 1980, police arrested Cottingham while he was torturing a sex worker at a motel room in New Jersey. In 2009, decades after his first five murder convictions, Cottingham told a journalist that he had committed at least 80 to 100 "perfect murders" of women in various regions of the 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. On Dec. 2, 1979, fire alarms rang out at the Travel Inn Motor Hotel on West 42nd Street. The 45th year passed in the same way. You are in complete control of somebodys destiny, he told Fezzani in footage shown in the series. I just ruled him out. On Monday, July 13, 1969, at approximately 8:00 p.m., On March 1, 1970, a group of hikers came across a young woman's naked body in the woods to the west of Tweed Boulevard in, At approximately 7:00 a.m. on the morning of December 16, 1977, the body of X-ray technician, At 9:30 a.m. on May 22, 1980, police entered Room 117 at the same Quality Inn where Carr and Street were murdered and found 18-year-old, This page was last edited on 2 March 2023, at 15:20. He pleaded innocent and for decades insisted he was being "framed", until admitting in 2009 that he had actually perpetrated those five murders. The Google Street View image on the right was taken 38 years later, in June of 2018. I was shocked that one human being was capable of all this carnage, Moye said of Cottingham. On September 4, 1973, Cottingham was arrested in New York City for robbery, oral sodomy and sexual abuse on the complaint of a prostitute and her pimp. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement, Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement, and Your Privacy Choices and Rights (each updated 1/26/2023). Richard Cottingham, the notorious North Jersey serial killer known for dismembering the young women who were so often his victims, publicly confessed Tuesday to drowning two North Bergen girls. Their heads and hands had been cut off. Goodarzi had come to the United States years prior from Iran. The motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated. A few days later, Mr. Anzilotti visited Mr. Cottingham in his new surroundings and told him, I put you here.. A judge sentenced him to 25 years to life after Cusicks brother and only child read emotional impact statements in court. The police pursued a welter of tips, rumors and false alarms, The New York Times reported at the time. Twenty years later, he was reinvestigating several cold cases involving girls and young women who had been abducted, sexually abused and killed. Mr. Anzilotti, by then a sergeant, arranged a surprise search of the inmates cell the day after the Super Bowl. Everyone deserves justice under the law.. I knew, he recalled, that was Irene Blase.. The clever killer slipped up, leaving a fingerprint on the cuffs. 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.. But first, he wanted to return to those two murders from 47 years ago. Everything that I was taught about evil was evident in his presence, in his demeanor, in the gaze of his eyes, Moye told The Post. My whole life has been this, she said. Note that there seems to have been a "lull" between 1970 and 1973. Retrieved April 2nd, 2007, from Factiva database. So he would remember something on the way: a racetrack or a shopping mall. 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. It represented the opportunity to let the entire world know that Laverne Moye was a human being. Cookie Settings/Do Not Sell My Personal Information. Seth Wenig/Associated Press By Ed Shanahan Dec. 5, 2022 On a. It is not a public place. <<69EF7C237A736942AE760EBDB9B8F80B>]>> His yearbook photo shows a cross-country runner with blond hair slicked back. The house was built in 1974one year before Cottingham and his wife, Janet, moved in. This story has been shared 151,197 times. Feech La Manna's house from The Sopranos. The family lived in Lodi, and Mr. Cottingham commuted to a job as a computer operator at Blue Cross Blue Shield in Manhattan. 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. On February 15, 1968, Cottingham killed his second known victim. 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. Cottingham didnt like the idea, apparently wanting to continue their dialogue. Stumped, the police used mannequins from nearby department stores and dressed them in the victims clothing, hoping to spark an identification from friends or family who recognized the outfits. The confessed killer then fatally bludgeoned Sheila Heiman, a 33-year-old mother of three, in July 1973, at her North Woodmere, NY, home, where her husband found her upon returning from shopping, authorities said. 21 23 He began torturing her, nearly biting off one of her nipples. I was able to get almostany woman to do whatever I wanted them to do . Mr. Anzilotti insisted that this case be resolved in open court. The Blase family agreed. 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. The inmate made it clear that pressure would not work. 0000002435 00000 n Hes younger when all this is going on in Bergen County, he said. Cottingham had stuffed Streets body under the bed for housekeeping to find, Vronsky said. And thats what bothers me, because I probably didnt have to do anything to them., Mr. Anzilotti left the confession both exhausted and relieved. Berlinger said well never truly know how many women died at Cottinghams hands, but his story had long fascinated the director, who sees a social justice component aspect to telling his story. But he told Mr. Cottingham. 0000003431 00000 n 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. Vogel was found dead in her own car in Ridgefield Park, nude and bound. He enjoys our time together., The chief also had another theory. She agreed to have sex with him for money. At the mall, Cottingham, then a tall, brown-haired young man, met Vogel, a married mother of two. Hed been a married father of three, but the Lodi resident - who would brutalize his victims bodies, cutting off limbs, heads and breasts - would later become known as the Torso Killer" for what he left behind. On April 14, in a recorded interview, Mr. Cottingham said he remembered Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly, and Mr. Anzilotti asked why he knew their names, when he hadnt in past cases. 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. 0000003686 00000 n This is a "Then and Now" photograph of Cottingham's former house at 29 Vreeland Street. [6] The confession was extracted by Detective Anzilotti weeks before his retirement and was facilitated by historian Vronsky and by Jennifer Weiss, the daughter of Deedeh Goodarzi, one of Cottingham's later victims. 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. In March, looking back on 25 years with the office, Mr. Anzilotti decided it was time to move on from the job. The people listed below were born in, residents of, or otherwise closely associated with Lodi, New Jersey. Fifty years after his mother was strangled and thrown from a Long Island bridge, John Moye finally got a glimpse of the wickedness that altered his life forever. Its mind-boggling and very scary, especially to know theres more of them out there.. The police photograph on the left was taken in June of 1980. 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. The chief pressed ahead with his list. 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. )' Investigators noted the crime scene was devoid of evidence and they were unable to identify the victims. Irene Blase, Denise Falasca and Jacalyn Harp all girls whose murders were unsolved. 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.
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