Richard Cottingham

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Cottingham, an American serial killer born in 1946, claimed in 2009 that he had committed at least eighty "perfect murders" of women in various regions of the United States. By then he was already serving multiple life sentences in New Jersey prisons. Newspapers had long since given him two nicknames, the Torso Killer and the Times Square Ripper, because some of the killings he was convicted of involved mutilation and dismemberment.

  The official tally is smaller, but still staggering. He is tied to ten murders in New York State between 1972 and 1980, plus ten in New Jersey between 1965 and 1980. His confirmed killings produced nine convictions, and eleven further confessions were accepted under non-prosecution agreements.

  Those numbers emerged slowly, across many decades. What kind of boyhood produces a man like this? How did he hold down an office job and a marriage while the killings went uncounted? What finally stopped him, and why did a convicted man keep talking to detectives long after the courtroom doors had closed?

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• 2. A Suburban Upbringing

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  Richard Francis Cottingham was born on the 25th of November 1946 in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx, the oldest of four children. His family moved to Dumont, New Jersey, in 1948, then twelve miles north to River Vale in 1956. In River Vale he developed a fascination with bondage pornography. He later recalled, "The whole idea of bondage had aroused and fascinated me since I was very young."

  Historian Peter Vronsky is writing a biography of Cottingham and has spent more than 50 hours interviewing him. Vronsky found nothing in the boy's early years that pointed easily toward extreme violence. He describes the childhood as "absolutely idyllic." Cottingham's father was a vice president at Metropolitan Life Insurance in New York City, his mother kept house, and his three younger sisters adored him. The children attended Catholic parochial schools.

  Vronsky has asked more than once whether Cottingham suffered abuse of any kind. Cottingham always flatly refuses, and sometimes jokes that Vronsky will have to invent a story about the priests who taught him.

  One possible explanation Vronsky raises is physical. At the age of four, Cottingham was hit by a car and suffered brain damage to his frontal lobe, an area of the brain associated with aggression.

  Pascack Valley High School in Hillsdale, New Jersey, graduated Cottingham in 1964. His yearbook listed him as a member of the cross country and track team. He was close to his mother but reportedly struggled to make friends as a teenager. After graduation he took a job at Metropolitan Life, where his father worked. He started in the mail room at the Manhattan headquarters and became a mainframe computer operator after taking computer courses.

  In October 1966 Cottingham moved to the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association as a computer operator, a position he held until his arrest in 1980. His office there also employed Rodney Alcala, a fugitive child molester and serial killer living in New York under the alias "John Berger." Neither man claimed to know of the other, and nothing suggests they were acquainted before their arrests.

  Cottingham married at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Queens Village, Queens, on the 3rd of May 1970. The couple had three children, two boys and a girl. In April 1978 his wife filed for divorce, citing "abandonment" and "mental cruelty." She withdrew the petition when he was arrested in May 1980, and finished the divorce only after his 1981 conviction.

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• 3. Lesser Charges, Final Arrest

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  On the 3rd of October 1969, a New York City court convicted Cottingham of drunk driving and fined him $50. On the 21st of August 1972 he was convicted of shoplifting at a Stern's department store in Paramus, New Jersey, and sentenced to a $50 fine or ten days in jail. Police had no idea a serial killer was active in the New York metropolitan area, so these charges were treated as minor.

  Two later arrests came closer to the truth. On the 4th of September 1973, New York police arrested him on the complaint of a prostitute and her pimp, alleging robbery, oral sodomy and sexual abuse. Neither complainant appeared in further proceedings, and the case was dismissed. On the 12th of March 1974 he was arrested again, accused of robbery and unlawful imprisonment by another prostitute. Once more the victim did not appear, and the case was dismissed.

  In the early morning of the 22nd of May 1980, Cottingham picked up 18-year-old Leslie Ann O'Dell, who was soliciting at the corner of Lexington Avenue and 25th Street in Manhattan. They checked into Room 117 of a Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. When she rolled onto her stomach for a massage he drew a knife, held it to her throat and handcuffed her. He then tortured her. By her later testimony, he told her, "The other girls did, you have to take it, too."

  Cottingham had threatened O'Dell with a fake gun. She reached under the bed, took it believing it was real, and tried to shoot him. It did not fire, and he came at her with the knife. Her screams drew motel employees to the room, and they summoned police. Officers arrested Cottingham in the hallway at gunpoint.

  Police found a leather gag, two slave collars, a switchblade, replica pistols and a stockpile of prescription pills on him. His indictment listed kidnapping, attempted murder, several counts of aggravated assault and armed aggravated sexual assault, and possession of a weapon. It also listed possession of the controlled substances secobarbital, amobarbital and diazepam.

  Around the time his wife began divorce proceedings, Cottingham had been keeping a locked room in the basement apartment of the Lodi, New Jersey, house where they lived. Police searched that room and the trunk of his car after the 1980 arrest. They found personal effects they traced to several of his victims, and the objects led investigators to women who had not lived to testify.

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• 4. Survivors on the Stand

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  At the 1981 trial, three more women who had survived abduction and rape took the stand alongside O'Dell. They said Cottingham had also tortured and sexually abused them. Two of them, Susan Geiger and Karen Schilt, picked him out of a police line-up.

  At 9 p.m. on the 22nd of March 1978, Karen Schilt, a 22-year-old pregnant waitress, met Cottingham as she walked home from a bar on Third Avenue. He forced her to swallow sleeping pills and drove her to New Jersey on Route 80, where he sexually assaulted her. The next morning a patrolman found her in a sewer outlet, close to the Ledgewood Terrace Apartments where Cottingham had previously lived.

  On the night of the 10th of October 1978, Cottingham approached 19-year-old Susan Geiger on West 47th Street, between Broadway and Seventh Avenue. She told him she was booked for the rest of the evening but left her contact details at the Alpine Hotel. The next evening he phoned and asked her on a midnight date. After he collected her in his car, he gave her several drugged drinks. She woke covered in her own blood in Room 28 of the Airport Motel in South Hackensack, New Jersey. He had beaten her repeatedly with a garden hose and torn out her gold earrings.

  Pamela Weisenfeld was found beaten in a parking lot in Teaneck, New Jersey, on the 12th of May 1980. Police and medical reports noted that her attacker had bitten her several times. After meeting Cottingham, she had been drugged and beaten, with injuries across her body.

  He was convicted in the Schilt, Geiger and O'Dell cases and acquitted in the Weisenfeld case. Two murder cases from the same Hasbrouck Heights area were still waiting to be tried.

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• 5. Convictions for Murder

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  Two separate New Jersey trials, in 1981 and 1982, also produced murder convictions, for the deaths of Maryann Carr and Valerie Street. Both women died in Hasbrouck Heights.

  At about 7:00 a.m. on the 16th of December 1977, someone found the body of 26-year-old X-ray technician Maryann "Marzi" Carr between a parked van and a chain-link fence in Little Ferry, New Jersey. She still wore her white nurse's uniform, but her shoes were missing. She was last seen on the 15th of December in the parking lot of the Ledgewood Terrace Apartments, from where Cottingham kidnapped her and took her to the Hasbrouck Heights Quality Inn. Handcuff bruises marked her wrists and ankles, and adhesive tape residue clung to her mouth. She had been strangled with a ligature. Cottingham was convicted of her murder on the 12th of October 1982.

  On the 5th of May 1980, a motel worker found the body of 19-year-old prostitute Valerie Ann Street at the same Quality Inn. Using an alias, Street had checked into Room 132 with Cottingham. He killed her and pushed her body under the bed for housekeeping to find. Investigators found her handcuffed, gagged with white adhesive tape and marked by two ligature impressions on her throat. A single fingerprint of Cottingham's remained on the ratchet mechanism of the handcuffs. He was convicted of her murder on the 12th of June 1981.

  A single trial in 1984 added three more convictions, for the deaths of three women in New York City between 1979 and 1980. A jury convicted him of all three on the 9th of July 1984.

  At around 9 a.m. on the 2nd of December 1979, staff at the Travel Lodge Motor Inn called the New York City Fire Department about heavy smoke in Room 417. A "do not disturb" sign hung from the door latch, and a guest named "Carl Wilson" had rented the room since the 29th of November. Firefighters found two women's bodies on separate beds. Both had been burned, their hands had been severed, and they had been beheaded. The missing parts were never found. An autopsy showed that both women had been tortured and sexually assaulted while alive over several days.

  Police soon identified one victim as Deedeh Goodarzi, a 22-year-old Iranian immigrant who worked as a prostitute. The other remains unidentified. She is estimated to have been between 16 and 22 and is known as "Manhattan Jane Doe." In a 2009 interview Cottingham admitted the murders. He said he removed the heads and hands to prevent identification, because he knew Goodarzi and had been seen with her in a bar the night before.

  Mary Ann Jean Reyner, aged 25, was discovered on the 15th of May 1980 at the Seville Hotel in New York City. Her throat had been cut and her body mutilated. Her attacker set her body on fire in an attempt to destroy evidence.

  Cottingham himself claims he began killing as an adolescent and has killed as many as 100 women. He has been linked to killings in Florida, Pennsylvania and Maryland, in addition to Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. He often sought sex workers in their late teens to mid-twenties, approaching them in bars and drugging them. He took them to remote places, where he bound, gagged, tortured and stabbed them before killing them by strangulation or asphyxiation. He kept trophies, such as jewelry and other personal items, from his victims.

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• 6. The Cold Case Confessions

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  For decades, Cottingham insisted he had been "framed." In 2009 he finally admitted that he had committed the five homicides for which he had been convicted.

  In 2000, Robert Anzilotti, a detective in the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office, was assigned to review cold cases from the 1960s and 1970s. Anzilotti came to believe that Cottingham, "between his history and the suspicions of detectives that came before me," might be responsible for one or more of them. He began interviewing the prisoner in 2003. In 2010 Cottingham pleaded guilty to a 1967 murder. In 2014 he confessed to killing three teenage girls, in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

  The prosecutor's office, with the agreement of the victims' families, "exceptionally closed" those three murders. It kept the news quiet for several years so that Cottingham would keep talking about other cases. In December 2019, forensic historian Peter Vronsky was about to publish the revelation in the second edition of his book Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters. With the office's co-operation, he made the confessions public, and Anzilotti and the office then confirmed the closures.

  In April 2021, Cottingham confessed to an unsolved 1974 double homicide in Montvale, one of New Jersey's most notorious cold cases. Anzilotti extracted the confession weeks before his retirement. It was made possible by Vronsky and by Jennifer Weiss, the daughter of Deedeh Goodarzi. The two had been meeting Cottingham in prison since the spring of 2017, counselling him to confess. In March 2023 Anzilotti drew out another confession, to the murder of a 17-year-old who vanished in 1967.

  At 9 p.m. on the 24th of January 1967-17-year-old Mary Ann Della Sala disappeared at the end of her shift at a Shop-Rite store at 330 Essex Street in Hackensack. Her body was found three months later, on the 20th of April, in the Passaic River in Hawthorne. She had been strangled. Police concluded she was killed elsewhere and thrown into the river, and found no sign of sexual assault.

  On the 30th of October 1967, a bound, naked body was found in a car in Ridgefield Park. It was 29-year-old Nancy "Bubby" Schiava Vogel, a married mother of two who knew Cottingham. Three days earlier she had left her home in Little Ferry to play bingo with friends at a local church. Instead she went shopping at a mall in Bergen County, where Cottingham kidnapped her. He strangled her in a field in Montvale. A court convicted him of her murder on the 25th of August 2010.

  On the 17th of July 1968-13-year-old Jacalyn Leah "Jackie" Harp vanished in Midland Park after failing to come home from band rehearsal at her school. The next morning her body was found at Goffle Brook. She had been beaten about the face and strangled with the leather strap from her flag sling. Cottingham claimed he tried to persuade her into his car and she resisted. He said he caught her as she fled, dragged her into bushes and killed her.

  Irene Blase, aged 18, was reported missing on the 7th of April 1969. The next day she was found face-down in four feet of water in Saddle River, strangled with the chain from a crucifix she wore. Cottingham confessed that he spotted her shopping in Hackensack and talked her into joining him for a drink. They took a cab to another place. He then offered to take her back to the bus station, but drove her to a remote spot against her will, raped her and killed her.

  Around 8:00 p.m. on the 13th of July 1969-15-year-old Denise Falasca left her home on Bergenline Avenue in Closter to meet friends in Westwood. She was due back at 11:00 p.m. and never arrived. Around 9:00 p.m., witnesses had seen her heading along Old Hook Road in Emerson toward Westwood. Her body was found on the 14th of July on Westminster Place in Saddle Brook. According to Cottingham, he offered her a ride and drove to the parking lot of his former school, where he assaulted and then murdered her.

  On the 9th of August 1974-16-year-old Lorraine Marie Kelly and 17-year-old Mary Ann Pryor left North Bergen to shop at the Garden State Plaza in Paramus. Kelly's boyfriend dropped them at a bus stop on Broad Street in Ridgefield, from where they planned to hitchhike. Searchers found their bodies on the 14th of August in woods near the Ridgemont Gardens complex in Montvale. The girls lay face-down, bound to one another at the wrists and ankles. In court, Cottingham admitted kidnapping them, assaulting them in a motel room and drowning them in the bathtub. He was convicted of both murders on the 27th of April 2021.

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• 7. Long Island and Rockland

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  On the 26th of August 2022, officials in Rockland County, New York, accepted Cottingham's confession to the 1970 murder of 26-year-old Lorraine McGraw, under a non-prosecution agreement. Rockland police discounted a second confession, to a 1974 murder.

  In June 2022, Cottingham was arraigned from his prison hospital bed for the 1968 murder of Diane Cusick. Authorities believed it to be the oldest criminal case solved and prosecuted through direct DNA evidence. He pleaded guilty on the 5th of December. He also formally admitted killing four other women in 1972 and 1973 on Long Island: Mary Beth Heinz, Laverne Moye, Sheila Heiman and Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves.

  Diane Martin Cusick, a 23-year-old Long Island dance teacher, was found dead on the 16th of February 1968. She lay in the back seat of her 1961 Plymouth Valiant outside the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, New York, with adhesive tape around her mouth and neck. She had been beaten, raped and strangled, and her hands bore defensive wounds. DNA from semen at the scene matched a sample taken from Cottingham. The mall stood near a drive-in theater he frequented, and authorities believe he approached her while pretending to be a mall security guard.

  On the 1st of March 1970, a group of hikers found a young woman's naked body in woods west of Tweed Boulevard in South Nyack, New York. Marks on her neck showed she had been strangled. The FBI identified her as Lorraine Montalvo McGraw, 26, of Long Island, who had been missing since the 27th of February. She had a history of drug and prostitution offences, many recorded under false names.

  Mary Beth Heinz, aged 21, was discovered near a creek in Rockville Centre, New York, on the 10th of May 1972. She had vanished on the 5th of May while boarding a bus to a nearby dance. Heinz had grand mal seizures and a diagnosis of epilepsy. Cottingham claimed he threw her body from the Peninsula Boulevard Bridge. Laverne Moye, a 23-year-old from St. Albans, Queens, was found strangled in a Rockville Centre creek on the 20th of July 1972. He claimed he threw her from the same bridge.

  Sheila Heiman, aged 33, was found bludgeoned and stabbed to death in her North Woodmere home on the 20th of July 1973. Her husband returned from a shopping errand that morning and found her in the master bathroom. No other room showed signs of a struggle, and no neighbor reported anything strange. On the 27th of December 1973, park maintenance personnel found 18-year-old Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves, a native of Puerto Rico, in Wantagh, New York. She had been strangled in a weeded area near a bus stop on Ocean Parkway, wrapped in a grey blanket and covered in plastic bags.

  At 3:30 p.m. on the 7th of October 1974-15-year-old Lisa Thomas left her Nanuet, New York, home and walked to the Nanuet Mall to buy a blouse. Her father found her body the next morning in the woods behind the mall, about 700 feet from their home. She was blindfolded with a crimson rag from her own purse, and her head had been bashed in. She had not been sexually assaulted. Cottingham admitted the murder on the 26th of August 2022, but he has not been charged, and the investigation is still ongoing.

  On the 22nd of December 2025, Cottingham confessed to the 1965 murder of 18-year-old Alys Eberhardt in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. The city's police chief said he will not face charges and closed the case after the confession.

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• 8. On Page and Screen

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  Rod Leith's 1983 book The Prostitute Murders: The People vs. Richard Cottingham, from Lyle Stuart Inc., was one of two works devoted entirely to the case. The other was Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer, a Netflix release from 2021. Several other books and documentaries on serial killers have also discussed him.

  In 2023, Investigation Discovery aired "The Times Square Killer," a two-hour special episode of People Magazine Investigates. That same year Hulu released the two-part The Torso Killer Confessions, which centered on his later prison confessions to cold case murders.

  The most recent project came in 2024, a podcast titled "Denise Didn't Come Home." It follows the murder of Denise Falasca, the 15-year-old who set out for Westwood on a July evening in 1969.

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