On the morning of May 22, 1980, staff at the Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, heard an eighteen-year-old woman screaming in one of the rooms, and the police who answered the call arrested the man coming out of it in the hallway. Richard Cottingham, a thirty-three-year-old computer operator from Lodi, went on to be tried three times. A Bergen County jury convicted him in June 1981 of murdering Valerie Ann Street, nineteen, who had been found handcuffed under the bed of a room at the same motel on May 5, and of assaulting the woman in Room 117 and two others. A second Bergen County jury convicted him in October 1982 of murdering Maryann Carr, a twenty-six-year-old X-ray technician taken from the parking lot of her apartment complex in December 1977. In July 1984 a Manhattan jury convicted him of three more: Deedeh Goodarzi, twenty-two, and a young woman who has never been identified, both found beheaded in a burning room at a Times Square motel on December 2, 1979, and Jean Reyner, twenty-five, killed at the Seville Hotel on May 15, 1980.
Those trials left almost nothing in the law books. Three entries are all the official reporters of New York and New Jersey hold under his name, and together they come to 107 words. Two are orders of the Supreme Court of New Jersey, in September 1983 and January 1986, refusing in twelve words apiece to hear his appeals; if the Appellate Division wrote opinions in the cases that reached it first, none was published. The third is a 1981 order of the Appellate Division in Manhattan that affirms a judgment and lets his assigned lawyer withdraw under Anders v. California, the procedure a lawyer follows after telling the court there is nothing in the record worth arguing. No published opinion anywhere recites the evidence against Cottingham, names the women he killed, or explains how he was caught. Every account of the case, ours included, rests on press reports, books, the prosecutors' later announcements and his own confessions from prison.
The New York order carries a difficulty of its own. The judgment it affirms was rendered on March 13, 1980, more than two months before Cottingham was arrested, and his Manhattan murder convictions did not come until 1984. The order names no charge, and the earlier New York cases reported against him, a drunk-driving fine in 1969 and two arrests in 1973 and 1974 that were dismissed when the complainants stopped appearing, do not fit a 1980 judgment either. Nothing we have read identifies the case the order decided or proves that this appellant is the same Richard Cottingham. It is printed here because it is the only New York entry under his name, and it should be read with that doubt attached. Since 2010 he has pleaded guilty to four more murders going back to 1967 and confessed to others that were closed without charges, most recently the 1965 killing of eighteen-year-old Alys Eberhardt in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, which he admitted in December 2025. None of that produced a published opinion either. He was held at South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, New Jersey, as of January 2026.
These are court orders, not opinions, and the difference is the reason for the page. An opinion explains itself; an order records a result and stops. The 1981 New York entry says only that five judges read the record and agreed with the assigned lawyer that nothing in it could be argued. It does not say what the conviction was, what the sentence was, or who testified. The two New Jersey entries do not even name the judgment under review, and we have assumed, from the dates, that they follow the 1981 and 1982 Bergen County verdicts. As rulings of state courts they belong to the public, and anyone may copy them in full.
The substance of the case is in trial records that were never printed: the two Bergen County trials in Hackensack and the 1984 trial in New York County Supreme Court. Transcripts, where they survive, would be with those courts or their reporters, and the confessions he has given since 2010 sit in the files of the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office and the Nassau and Rockland County district attorneys. We have seen none of them. The women named in our opening are named from those prosecutors' announcements and the press coverage of the trials, not from this record, which names nobody but Cottingham. The survivor whose screams brought the police in 1980 is left unnamed here.
The text is the Caselaw Access Project's copy of the printed reports and needed no repair; we have even kept the reporter's run-together "March 13,1980" as it was set. The date is the thing to check, not the typography. We could not find, in any source we read, a New York conviction of Cottingham on that day, so the link between this order and the murder cases rests on the name alone. A certified copy of the New York County judgment, which the county clerk can supply, would settle which case it was.
The People of the State of New York, Respondent, v Richard Cottingham, Appellant.
Judgment, Supreme Court, New York County (G. Roberts, J.), rendered on March 13,1980, unanimously affirmed. Application by appellant’s counsel to withdraw as counsel is granted. (See Anders v California, 386 US 738; People v Saunders, 52 AD2d 833.) We have reviewed this record and agree with appellant’s assigned counsel that there are no meritorious points which could be raised on this appeal. Concur — Sandler, J. P., Sullivan, Carro, Markewich and Fein, JJ.
STATE OF NEW JERSEY v. RICHARD COTTINGHAM.
September 20, 1983.
Petition for certification denied.
STATE OF NEW JERSEY v. RICHARD COTTINGHAM.
January 13, 1986.
Petition for certification denied.