richard cottingham lodi, nj address
The items included necklaces, broaches, earrings, and other pieces of jewelry. On May 5, 1980, a motel housekeeper found the body of 19-year-old Valerie Ann Street in the Hasbrouck Heights Quality Inn. Cottingham murdered at least twelve women between 1967 and 1980. Cookie Settings/Do Not Sell My Personal Information. 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. They'd left home for a trip 13 miles (21 kilometers) north to . He enjoys our time together., The chief also had another theory. Her killer, Richard Cottingham, was a computer operator, married with three children of his own, living a seemingly normal life. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. 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. His yearbook photo shows a cross-country runner with blond hair slicked back. One day, Cottingham told his co-worker that he had stolen a sex worker's money and clothes while she was sleeping. Since his incarceration, he has attempted suicide on two occasions. Straddling her back, he drew a knife and put it to her throat as he snapped a pair of handcuffs on her wrists. The house is close to Lodi High School, the Riverside Cemetery and Interstate 80. 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. When the 40th year since the killings arrived in 2014, the local police asked the public for any new information. Their murders shook the region. 0000006081 00000 n This is possibly due to the fact that he got married in 1970. That was less than a year after Cottingham and his wife had their first child. Richard Cottingham was born in 1946 and was raised mostly in New Jersey, according to the The New York Times. Its Godlike almost. %%EOF He had his list of names, each one a dead girl and a crime long unsolved. 21 23 Those cases were already closed. The public in Bergen County deserved to know the outcome of those girls, he said. xb```"WVf~g`0pt 9"~S?``Z V|bG!+N}TzYl@2 `QD2 @DACEDJaOs6x?+[Ihlrt ? 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. For decades, a string of killings of teenage girls haunted suburban New Jersey. 29 Vreeland St, Lodi, NJ is a single family home that contains 2,716 sq ft and was built in 1974. Later on, Richard took a job with Blue Cross Blue Shield in New York as a computer operator. Her youth and difference in appearance, with a boyish haircut, set her apart from the other victims. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. After years in prison, Mr. Cottingham began to open up to the detective about past unsolved crimes. Around dawn, they checked into the same Hasbrouck Heights Quality Inn where he had left Valerie Street's handcuffed body under a bed to be discovered by a housekeeper. He began torturing her, nearly biting off one of her nipples. The predator, dubbed The Torso Killer, would strike again in May 1980. The inmate made it clear that pressure would not work. She had been tied up and strangled, authorities said. 7{(~tm LB IBJ*ZB`0 (1981, June 16). A third the killing of 13-year-old Jackie Harp seemed to be the work of another killer. The Zestimate for this house is $598,600, which has decreased by $7,680 in the last 30 days. But eventually, their old give-and-take resumed. In 1981, he was found guilty of her murder and sentenced to nearly 200 years in prison. Knowing better, Harp, just 13 years old, refused. 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. Their heads and hands had been cut off. Cottingham was not charged with this murder until June 2022, when he was implicated by DNA.[10]. Mr. Anzilotti, doing his best not to betray any emotion, slowly pulled out his Blackberry and took notes. 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. Premiering on Dec. 29, the three-part season explores the case of Richard Cottingham, a New Jersey man who was dubbed "The Torso Killer" and found guilty of killing 11 women between 1967 and 1980. We've received your submission. When they arrived, one firefighter attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation of a woman they found on the bed. While some serial killers claim murders they have not committed, Mr. Anzilotti didnt believe Mr. Cottingham was that type, but still he meticulously lined up details of the admissions with facts that only the killer would know. 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. The potential payoff in return felt almost too important to describe. Richard Cottingham, New Jersey prison photo. 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. 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. 0000001262 00000 n When arrested, he had handcuffs, a leather gag, two slave collars, a switchblade knife, replica pistols, and a stockpile of prescription pills. I thought he could be responsible for some, Mr. Anzilotti said. And for Cottingham, every night was a full moon.. 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. She had been abducted while walking home from practice with her schools fife-and-drum team in 1968. 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 pleaded innocent and for decades insisted he was being "framed", until admitting in 2009 that he had actually perpetrated those five murders. She was Nancy Pryor, and she was 19 when her sister, Mary Ann, was found dead. He would let his guard down, Mr. Anzilotti said. Ms. A local investigator began to wonder: Could there be a link to a series of infamous Times Square murders? 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. Defense attorney John Bruno recited the details, which the white-bearded, 74-year-old killer acknowledged. 0000000756 00000 n [2], In 2010, he pleaded guilty to the 1967 murder of Nancy Vogel. How it ended was me literally shaking his hand and saying, Thank you, Mr. Anzilotti said. Anything that might close more cases, bring answers to more families. Richard Cottingham, serial killer from New Jersey operating in New York between 1967 and 1980. In March, looking back on 25 years with the office, Mr. Anzilotti decided it was time to move on from the job. In recent years, he had asked Mr. Cottingham about the case, and the inmate had simultaneously denied responsibility and let on that he knew more than he would share. In 2010, Bergen County authorities announced hed pleaded guilty to a sixth murder, a 1967 strangling in Bergen County. On August 21, 1972, he is charged and convicted of shoplifting at a Stern's department store in Paramus, New Jersey, and was sentenced to pay a $50 fine or ten days in jail. So he would remember something on the way: a racetrack or a shopping mall. 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. To this day, their remains have never been recovered. If you purchase a product or register for an account through one of the links on our site, we may receive compensation. Richard Cottingham, a family man who denied everything in court, was convicted of killing five women in the early 1980s. They were facedown, side by side, as if placed there with care. It was an era when the sex worker was criminalized. But the killer was a clever bastard, too. The police pursued a welter of tips, rumors and false alarms, The New York Times reported at the time. Richard Cottingham of Lodi (NJ) is sentenced to 173-179 years in prison. Rodrigo Torrejon may be reached at rtorrejon@njadvancemedia.com. I was an immediate adult when it happened, she said later in an interview. <<69EF7C237A736942AE760EBDB9B8F80B>]>> Retrieved April 2nd, 2007, from Factiva database. Hes been chief of detectives nearly five years. A real sick bastard did this, retired NYPD detective Jim Riegel, who was working as a beat cop that day, recalls his sergeant telling him in the new Netflix series Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer, out Wednesday. It was just shock all the way around.. In October 1966, he became a computer operator for Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, where he worked until his 1980 arrest. 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. 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 was eventually convicted of five murders in New Jersey and New York and sent to a New Jersey state prison in the early 1980s. Instead, she ended up shopping at one of Bergen Countys malls, according to Vronsky. [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. startxref He kept these "trophies" in a locked room in the basement. 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. I was able to get almostany woman to do whatever I wanted them to do . Richard was arrested at a motel in Hasbrouck . A notorious New Jersey serial killer pleaded guilty Tuesday to the cold case murders of two teenage girls in 1974.
