They captured Cottingham soon after. The motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated. HKo0l06CYf,Y(v (I?0c9 Her youth and difference in appearance, with a boyish haircut, set her apart from the other victims. Among the other faces in separate windows on the Zoom screen was a 66-year-old woman, identified simply as Nancy. ,X3ieG(>]/TUW#gI" p&gGgy`Un(aE6e#./"e3 After their drink, Cottingham offered to bring Blase back to the bus station where they had taken the bus. With Ms. Pryor and a judge watching on Zoom that day, Mr. Cottingham pleaded guilty to the two murders. Richard is related to Rosemarie Marie Cunningham and Larry J Cunningham as well as 3 additional people. Knowing better, Harp, just 13 years old, refused. These include the Times Square Killer, the Torso Killer, and the Times Square Torso Ripper. K3nVxb;X)oxeHME~> And even worse, the rape laws were particularly onerous, and you had to provide a witness to bring an allegation of rape. In April 2021, Cottingham confessed to the unsolved 1974 double-abduction, rape, and forcible drowning murders of Lorraine Marie Kelly, 16, and Mary Ann Pryor, 17, in Montvale, one of New Jersey's most notorious cold cases. It was just shock all the way around.. 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. Little more than a week after Street was found, Reyner was found butchered in the Seville Motel in New York City. 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. A married father of three, he lived in the. Therefore, you should be respectful and not step foot on the property without permission. Its Godlike almost. 0000001082 00000 n It was an era when the sex worker was criminalized. And for Cottingham, every night was a full moon.. [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. Although Vogel was the earliest of Cottinghams murder victims, the killer has said she was not his first, according to Vronsky. 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. 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. 43 0 obj <>stream 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, publicized the confessions with the BCPO's cooperation, in a community meeting in Midland Park. She then grew up without a father because her grandparents did not like him, she said. Irene Blase, Denise Falasca and Jacalyn Harp all girls whose murders were unsolved. Six months later, Vronsky would learn that the man he encountered on the elevator was Cottingham as the killers face appeared in newspapers across the region. After dismembering Goodarzi, Cottingham lit her torso on fire, along with a second unidentified woman, who was found next to Goodarzi on the same bed. His murders were not the outcome of stalking or planning but of fleeting encounters. His yearbook photo shows a cross-country runner with blond hair slicked back. Much of Cottinghams crimes were not murders, but other violent crimes like abductions and rapes. That was less than a year after Cottingham and his wife had their first child. 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. 0000008735 00000 n He did a U-turn in a bank parking lot and approached, he said. 2023 Advance Local Media LLC. The items included necklaces, broaches, earrings, and other pieces of jewelry. But something a hunch, past investigative speculation, the proximity of the crimes drew Mr. Anzilotti to the prisoner. We've received your submission. 29 Vreeland St, Lodi, NJ is a single family home that contains 2,716 sq ft and was built in 1974. [1] He was nicknamed the New York Ripper, the Torso Killer and the Times Square Killer, since his crimes often targeted prostitutes and included mutilation. The plea leaves the question: Will they be Cottinghams final admissions? 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. Richard Cottingham, convicted of murdering prostitute and kidnapping three. Rodrigo Torrejon may be reached at rtorrejon@njadvancemedia.com. They'd left home for a trip 13 miles (21 kilometers) north to . She was found strangled to death the next day in Saddle Brook. He began to speak about a particular case, he said. Shed been abducted by Cottingham from the Ledgewood Terrace apartments, in Little Ferry, where Cottingham had previously lived, said Vronsky. In other words, he may have been content and/or preoccupied. 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. When you have a series of crimes today, everything goes through the computers, andwe have computer analysis and a wayof moving these through jurisdictionalboundaries. With Cottinghams next victim, a killers hunting ground of sorts began to form. 0000005253 00000 n In early December 1979, firefighters were called to the Travel Inn Motor Hotel on 42nd Street as a fire burned in room 417. 0000001982 00000 n Neither man has claimed to have been aware of the other, nor is there any evidence they were familiar with each other prior to their respective arrests. 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. On Dec. 2, 1979, the murders that earned Cottingham the nickname the "Torso Killer took place in New York City. Unfortunately, we were unable to find a photograph of Jean Reyner. Cottingham then confessed to more murders including Nancy Vogel, whom he killed in 1967, and five teenaged victims from New Jersey, none of whom were in the sex trade. 7{(~tm LB IBJ*ZB`0 After the hearing, the cameras off, Mr. Anzilotti approached Mr. Cottingham. 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. For years, the three confessions remained a secret, until January 2020, when a true-crime writer who had been visiting Mr. Cottingham in prison, Peter Vronsky, announced that the inmate had revealed his crimes in interviews for a forthcoming book. His additional confession to a 1974 murder was discounted by Rockland County police. He stood trial in New York and New Jersey in a coat and tie and denied everything, but he was convicted in all five killings. Cottingham primarily sought prostitutes who were petite blondes in their late teens to mid-twenties. The police believed they had given up on the bus and were trying to hitchhike to a mall. 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. 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. 0000002882 00000 n Richard was arrested at a motel in Hasbrouck . This case was always haunting me.. The Google Street View image on the right was taken 38 years later, in June of 2018. Cottingham fled the scene with the victims heads and hands. Cottingham was not charged with this murder until June 2022, when he was implicated by DNA.[10]. You are in complete control of somebodys destiny, he told Fezzani in footage shown in the series. Bergen County investigators realized there were numerous open sexual assault cases with similar hallmarks: Cottingham kidnapped them from Times Square, drugged and assaulted them. 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. This location belongs to the following categories: Follow us on Facebook or Twitter to see future locations. 3. Straddling her back, he drew a knife and put it to her throat as he snapped a pair of handcuffs on her wrists. His search for a killer led him to a man already locked away, in New Jersey State Prison, 75 miles from his office. [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). Just shy of his 21st birthday, Richard Cottingham began a vicious killing spree that tore through north New Jersey and New York City. I was shocked that one human being was capable of all this carnage, Moye said of Cottingham. Hes hedged around and all but confessed.. trailer Questioning Mr. Cottingham was complicated. 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. For more information, please read our Privacy & Cookie Policy. A killing in Somerset County a week after Cottingham got his drivers license may have been one of his first victims, Vronsky said. Cottingham has claimed in the past he. As Cottingham was fleeing the scene of the torso murders, he briefly encountered the 23-year-old Peter Vronsky, who was attempting to check into the Travel Inn while in New York on a film production assignment. 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. Detective Anzilotti was startled to discover the same man killed all three. Cottingham had just raped, tortured and beheaded two sex workers in a room at the motel before setting it on fire. You're a whore and you have to be punished." Sitting in a conference room, Mr. Cottingham calmly reached back more than 40 years and described how hed murdered a woman whose name he couldnt remember, a 29-year-old mother found strangled in her car in Ridgefield Park, N.J., in 1967. 0000002831 00000 n The potential payoff in return felt almost too important to describe. 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. trailer It also left enormous holes in the souls of family and friends of Mary Ann Pryor, 17, and Lorraine Kelly, 16. [2] Four surviving abduction-rape victims testified against Cottingham; he was convicted in three of the cases and acquitted in one. 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. 0000000016 00000 n 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.