Richard Cottingham

What the record shows

Richard Francis Cottingham, known as the "Torso Killer" and the "Times Square Killer", murdered women and girls in New Jersey and New York between 1967 and 1980. Courts have convicted him of nine murders: five by trial verdicts in Bergen County, New Jersey (1981 and 1982) and Manhattan (1984), and four by guilty pleas in 2010, 2021 and 2022. Prosecutors have also accepted his confessions to 11 further killings closed without charges. NBC News reported that he has claimed up to 100 murders, a figure authorities have not confirmed.

The crimes he was tried for surfaced in 1979 and 1980. On December 2, 1979, Deedeh Goodarzi, 22, and an unidentified woman were found decapitated in a burning room at the Travel Inn Motor Hotel in Manhattan, the source of the "Torso Killer" name. In May 1980 Valerie Ann Street, 19, was found strangled under a bed at the Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, and Mary Ann Jean Reyner, 25, was found stabbed and burned at the Seville Hotel in Manhattan. The December 1977 strangling of Maryann Carr, 26, in Little Ferry was later tied to him as well.

On May 22, 1980, Cottingham brought Leslie Ann O'Dell, 18, to the same Hasbrouck Heights motel. According to the Wikipedia account, she escaped into the hallway and screamed, staff called police, and he was arrested as he tried to leave. Two women who survived 1978 attacks, Karen Schilt and Susan Geiger, identified him in a lineup, and he was indicted in Bergen County and charged in New York with the three Manhattan killings.

A Radford University case summary citing New York Times coverage records the three trials. In June 1981 he was convicted in Bergen County of murdering Street and of kidnapping and assaulting Schilt, Geiger and O'Dell, and on July 25, 1981 was sentenced to 173 to 197 years. On October 12, 1982, he was convicted of the Carr murder in what the summary describes as a non-jury trial and sentenced to 25 years to life. On July 9, 1984, a Manhattan jury convicted him of murdering Goodarzi, the unidentified woman and Reyner; he was sentenced to 75 years to life.

Interviews by Bergen County Chief of Detectives Robert Anzilotti produced later admissions. In 2010 Cottingham pleaded guilty to the 1967 strangling of Nancy Schiava Vogel, 29, found in her car in Ridgefield Park, and received a life sentence, according to New Jersey 101.5 and Oxygen. In January 2020 the prosecutor's office announced he had admitted strangling Jacalyn Harp, 13, Irene Blase, 18, and Denise Falasca, 15, in 1968 and 1969; those cases were cleared without charges. On April 27, 2021, he pleaded guilty before Judge Keith Bachmann to murdering Mary Ann Pryor, 17, and Lorraine Marie Kelly, 16, who vanished hitchhiking on August 9, 1974 and were found in Montvale five days later. The prosecutor's office said he admitted drowning them in a motel bathtub; NBC News reported the plea agreement called for two concurrent life sentences.

After a DNA match, Nassau County, New York indicted him in 2022 for the 1968 killing of Diane Cusick, 23, found in her car outside the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream. On December 5, 2022, he pleaded guilty before Judge Caryn Fink and was sentenced to 25 years to life, and the Long Island Press reported he admitted killing four other Nassau women in 1972 and 1973, Mary Beth Heinz, Laverne Moye, Sheila Heiman and Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves, under a non-prosecution agreement. According to the Wikipedia article, Rockland County accepted confessions to two more killings in 2022 and Bergen County added the 1967 killing of Mary Ann Della Sala in 2023. In January 2026, NBC New York reported that Fair Lawn police had closed the 1965 killing of Alys Eberhardt, 18, on his confession; he was not charged.

Cottingham was born on November 25, 1946 in the Bronx and raised in Bergen County. He worked as a computer operator in Manhattan, married in 1970 and had three children, and lived in Lodi, New Jersey when arrested. He is now held at South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, according to the Wikipedia article and 2022 court reporting.