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Richard Cottingham Pleads Guilty to the 1974 Murders of North Bergen Teens Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly

The Torso Killer admitted abducting, raping and drowning the two girls in a motel room, closing a North Jersey cold case after 47 years.

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Richard Cottingham, white-haired and bearded, in light prison scrubs, seated in a prison room

For forty-seven years the deaths of Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Marie Kelly stood among North Jersey's most notorious unsolved crimes. On Tuesday, April 27, 2021, Richard Cottingham, the serial killer known as the Torso Killer, closed the case at a virtual court hearing, pleading guilty to kidnapping and murdering the two teenagers in August 1974.

Mary Ann was 17 and Lorraine 16. On August 9, 1974, they left their homes in North Bergen for a mall in Paramus, about 13 miles north, telling their families they would take a bus there to buy bathing suits for a trip to the Jersey Shore. Witnesses told police at the time that the girls had been hitchhiking and had gotten into a man's car. Five days after they vanished, their nude, battered bodies were found facedown in woods in Bergen County, and they were identified by their jewelry.

Cottingham, 74, was already serving a life sentence in a New Jersey state prison for other murders. He sat in a wheelchair in beige prison scrubs at a table with his lawyers, a Bergen County prosecutor and a detective from that office. He made no statement of his own and answered the questions of Superior Court Judge Keith Bachmann and the attorneys in one or two words. He admitted that he had kidnapped the girls, taken them to a motel room, tied them up and raped them, and then drowned them in the room's bathtub.

The plea was the work of one detective's long patience. Robert Anzilotti, chief of detectives for the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office, first met Cottingham seventeen years earlier while working through the county's cold cases. Over those years Cottingham told him about the killings of four women and girls, aged 13 to 29, in Bergen County, but he would never talk about Mary Ann and Lorraine. Their murders, Anzilotti told the Associated Press, "bothered him more than any other, probably because of the brutality of it," along with the girls' ages and the days he spent torturing them.

In March, Anzilotti announced he was retiring after twenty-nine years in law enforcement, and he said he did not want to leave until this case was finished. Three times in the month that followed he had Cottingham brought from state prison in Trenton to the prosecutor's offices in Paramus, a trip of about 75 miles each way. On April 14 Cottingham confessed. In that confession, the AP reported, he admitted forcing Lorraine into a motel room and threatening to hurt her if Mary Ann did not do as he said, raping them, tying them up while he slept so they could not escape, and drowning them in the bathtub before dumping their bodies. "He gave details about the murders that only the killer would know," Anzilotti said after the hearing.

Under the plea agreement, prosecutors said, Cottingham was expected to receive two life sentences in July, to run concurrently with the term he was already serving. His lawyer, John Bruno, said Cottingham felt "serious regret" and was relieved "that this cloud that's been hanging over his head for many, many years is now removed," and that he hoped to give the families some closure. Mary Ann's sister, Nancy Pryor, who had spent years working with detectives on the case, watched the hearing. Anzilotti's last day on the job was that Saturday.

What the plea does and does not settle. The account of the motel room and the bathtub comes from Cottingham's own admissions, in court and in his April 14 confession; no other account of those days was made public at the hearing. The sentence itself was still to come. Cottingham has claimed responsibility for as many as 100 killings, but authorities in New York and New Jersey had officially linked him to eleven, counting these two, and investigators said they believed there were more.

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