On the morning of May 22, 1980, a maid at the Quality Inn on Route 17 in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, heard screaming from Room 132 and called the desk, and the desk called the police. Officers met a slim, balding man of thirty-three hurrying down the corridor with a briefcase. In the room they found Leslie Ann O'Dell, eighteen, handcuffed, bitten and bleeding. In the briefcase were handcuffs, a leather slapjack, adhesive tape, a toy pistol and a bottle of pills. The man was Richard Cottingham, a computer operator at Blue Cross Blue Shield in Manhattan, a husband and father of three from Lodi, and within a year the police had tied him to the murders of five women in New York and New Jersey. It took another forty years, a DNA database and a string of prison confessions to show that those five had been the end of his career rather than the whole of it.
He was born in the Bronx on November 25, 1946, grew up in River Vale in Bergen County, graduated from Pascack Valley High School in 1964, and went to work in computers, then a new field, at Metropolitan Life and then at Blue Cross, where he stayed sixteen years. He married Janet Cottingham in 1970. His night shifts explained his hours. The basement room in the house in Lodi that he kept locked, and that his wife was forbidden to enter, turned out after his arrest to hold jewelry, clothing and small keepsakes taken from dead women. She divorced him while he was in jail.
The women he was first convicted of killing had nothing in common with one another except that he found them alone. Maryann Carr was twenty-six, a nurse and newlywed from Little Ferry, taken from the parking lot of her apartment building in December 1977 and found the next day dumped outside the same Hasbrouck Heights motel where he would be caught, strangled, with handcuff marks on her wrists. On December 2, 1979, firefighters answering a call to the Travel Inn Motor Lodge on West 42nd Street found two women on the beds of a burning room, both decapitated and with their hands cut off; the heads and hands were never found. One was eventually identified from her fingerprints on an earlier arrest as Deedeh Goodarzi, twenty-two, born in Kuwait, who had come to New York and had a baby daughter she had given up for adoption. The other has never been identified. Valerie Street was nineteen and was found on May 5, 1980, stuffed under the bed of a room at the Hasbrouck Heights Quality Inn, beaten, bitten and strangled. Jean Reyner was twenty-five and was found on May 15, 1980, in a room at the Hotel Seville on East 29th Street, her breasts cut off and the mattress set alight around her. It was the dismemberments that gave him the newspaper name of the Torso Killer.
He was tried in Bergen County in 1981 for the Street murder and the attacks on O'Dell and on several women who had survived him in 1978 and 1979, and convicted, then separately in 1982 for Maryann Carr, and in Manhattan in 1984 for Goodarzi, the unknown woman beside her and Jean Reyner. At the first New Jersey trial he took the stand to say that he had been with prostitutes and remembered nothing; the jury did not believe him. In 1984, midway through the Manhattan trial, he tried to cut his wrists in court. The sentences added up to nearly two hundred years in New Jersey and twenty-five to life in New York, and for the next quarter century he said nothing about anyone else.
The first cold case opened in 2009. Nancy Schiava Vogel was twenty-nine, a mother of two from Ridgefield Park, who had driven to play bingo at a church on October 4, 1967, and was found three days later in the back seat of her own car in Little Ferry, bound and strangled. Bergen County detectives had kept the case, and in 2010 Cottingham, then sixty-three, pleaded guilty to it and told investigators that he had been killing since he was a teenager. Mary Ann Pryor was seventeen and Lorraine Kelly sixteen, schoolfriends from North Bergen who set off together on August 9, 1974, to hitchhike to the Garden State Plaza mall in Paramus to buy bathing suits; they were found four days later in the woods in Montvale, raped and drowned. On April 27, 2021, at seventy-four, he pleaded guilty to both murders in Hackensack, in exchange for a sentence concurrent with the ones he was already serving, and told the court he had tied them up in a motel room, assaulted them, and drowned them in the bathtub.
The oldest case to reach a courtroom was closed by DNA. Diane Cusick was twenty-three, a dance teacher from New Hyde Park on Long Island with a three-year-old daughter, Darlene, and on the evening of February 15, 1968, she left the child with her parents and drove to the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream to buy shoes for a class. Her father found her the next morning in the back seat of her car behind a steakhouse between the mall and a drive-in, beaten and suffocated. Cottingham had a habit, detectives later said, of posing as a mall security guard and approaching women in parking lots with a story about shoplifting. Nassau County investigators ran preserved evidence from the car in 2021 and got his profile; the district attorney, Anne Donnelly, said it might be the oldest DNA hit ever to lead to a prosecution in the United States. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in June 2022 and then, on December 5, 2022, appearing by video from a hospital bed, bedridden and hard of hearing, pleaded guilty to her murder and received twenty-five years to life. Darlene Altman, then fifty-seven, was in the courtroom in Mineola.
As part of that plea he admitted four more Nassau County murders, and the district attorney agreed not to prosecute him for them, on the reasoning that he would die in prison regardless and that the families would at least have a sworn admission in open court. Mary Beth Heinz was twenty-one and was strangled on May 10, 1972; Laverne Moye was twenty-three and was killed on July 20, 1972; he said he threw both women's bodies from the same bridge in Rockville Centre. Sheila Heiman was thirty-three, a mother stabbed to death in her home in North Woodmere on July 20, 1973, and for fifty years suspicion had rested on her husband, who died without knowing who had killed her; her daughter, Randi Childs, held up a photograph of both parents outside the courtroom. Marita Rosado Nieves was eighteen and was strangled in 1973. Asked whether he wanted to say anything to the families, he said no. Laverne Moye's son called him a coward from the gallery.
The confessions have continued. He has admitted to the 1970 murder of Lorraine McGraw in Rockland County, the 1967 murder of Mary Ann Della Sala in Bergen County and the 1975 murder of Rosalie Reisberg in New York City, and police have closed those cases on his word. Alys Eberhardt was eighteen, a freshman at the Hackensack Hospital School of Nursing who had been elected an officer of her class. On September 24, 1965, she left early to get ready for her aunt's funeral and drove home to Fair Lawn, and her father, Ross, came home later that day to find her dead on the living room floor, stabbed and beaten. The case sat for fifty-five years until a classmate of hers asked a Fair Lawn detective, Brian Rypkema, to look at it again in 2021. Rypkema and Sergeant Eric Eleshewich visited Cottingham in prison more than five times. When they asked how the killer had got into the house, he corrected them. On December 22, 2025, he confessed. By his account, relayed by the forensic historian Peter Vronsky, who assisted the detectives, he had spotted her in a hospital parking lot in Hackensack, followed her home, shown her a fake police badge at the door, and slipped out the back as her father arrived. He was eighteen too. Under an agreement between the Bergen County prosecutor and the Fair Lawn police, no charge was filed, and the case was closed in January 2026. It was his twentieth confession by one count. Some of those confessions came through, or alongside, a relationship he formed in prison with Jennifer Weiss, Deedeh Goodarzi's daughter, who had been adopted as a baby, learned as an adult who her mother had been, and began visiting the man who killed her. He has claimed at various times to have killed between eighty-five and a hundred women; the detectives who have spent the most time with him regard the confirmed cases as accurate and the total as unverifiable.
When the Eberhardt case closed in January 2026 he was seventy-nine and serving three life sentences at South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, New Jersey. The woman found beside Deedeh Goodarzi on West 42nd Street in 1979 is still unnamed, and her case, alone among the ones he was convicted of, cannot be closed with a family.