Richard Cottingham

Victims

At least 9 KILLINGS COVERED BY CONVICTIONS: five at the 1981 to 1984 trials, Nancy Vogel by plea in 2010, Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly by plea in 2021, and Diane Cusick by plea in 2022. FOUR MORE WERE ADMITTED UNDER A GRANT OF IMMUNITY in the 2022 plea and carry no conviction: Mary Beth Heinz, 21, Laverne Moye, 23, Sheila Heiman, 33, and Marita Rosado Nieves, 18. A further ten or more, including Alys Eberhardt in 1965, were CONFESSED AND CLOSED WITHOUT PROSECUTION. He has claimed 85 to 100 killings, which detectives regard as unverifiable. THE FIGURE OF 13 PREVIOUSLY GIVEN HERE IS NOT SUPPORTED by any source consulted; press accounts say authorities have officially linked him to about a dozen, which is not the same as convicted

Years active

1967 / 1977-1980

Location

New York/New Jersey, USA

Method

Strangulation

Status

Arrested on May 22, 1980 at a Hasbrouck Heights motel after staff heard a woman screaming; she was found alive, handcuffed and injured. Sentenced to 173 to 197 years in May 1981, to 20 years to life in 1982, and to 75 years to life in 1984, for five killings, three in New York City and two in northern New Jersey. HE HAS CONTINUED TO PLEAD GUILTY AND TO CONFESS FROM PRISON FOR FIFTEEN YEARS: to the 1967 murder of Nancy Vogel in 2010; to the 1974 murders of seventeen-year-old Mary Ann Pryor and sixteen-year-old Lorraine Kelly on April 27, 2021; and on December 5, 2022 to the 1968 murder of twenty-three-year-old Diane Cusick, for which he received twenty-five years to life. IN THAT SAME PLEA HE ADMITTED FOUR FURTHER NASSAU COUNTY KILLINGS AND WAS GRANTED IMMUNITY FROM PROSECUTION FOR THEM. IN DECEMBER 2025 HE CONFESSED TO THE 1965 MURDER OF ALYS EBERHARDT, an eighteen-year-old nursing student found dead at her family home in Fair Lawn, after detectives visited him in prison more than five times; the case was closed in January 2026 AND NO CHARGE WAS BROUGHT. He appeared for the 2022 arraignment by video from a hospital bed, bedridden and hard of hearing. He remains in custody in New Jersey.

Richard Francis Cottingham was born in the Bronx on November 25, 1946 and grew up in River Vale, New Jersey. He spent sixteen years as a computer operator in the data processing department of Blue Cross Blue Shield in midtown Manhattan, married in 1970, had three children, and lived in a house in Lodi with a locked room in it that his wife was not allowed to enter. He worked night shifts, which accounted for his hours.

He is called the Torso Killer for two nights' work. On December 2, 1979, firefighters at the Travel Inn Motor Lodge on West 42nd Street found two women in a burning room, both decapitated with their hands removed. One was eventually identified as Deedeh Goodarzi, a twenty-two-year-old from Kuwait; the other never was. In May 1980 Jean Reyner was killed and mutilated at the Hotel Seville. Between and around those he killed Maryann Carr, taken from her apartment block in Little Ferry in 1977, and Valorie Street in 1980.

He was caught by a scream. On May 22, 1980, a desk clerk at the Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights heard a woman screaming in a room and called police, who found Leslie Ann O'Dell handcuffed and being assaulted. Cottingham tried to walk out through the lobby and was arrested with a bag containing handcuffs, a slapjack, adhesive tape and pills. The locked room at home held jewellery and clothing belonging to women who were dead.

He was convicted in New Jersey in 1981 of the O'Dell attack and the murder of Valorie Street, in 1982 of the murder of Maryann Carr, and in New York in 1984 of the murders of Deedeh Goodarzi, the unidentified woman with her, and Jean Reyner. The sentences ran to nearly two hundred years.

He said nothing for a quarter of a century and then began talking. In 2010 he pleaded guilty to the 1967 murder of Nancy Vogel, a young mother from Little Ferry, and told investigators he had been killing since his teens. In 2021 he pleaded guilty to the 1974 murders of Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly. In 2022 he pleaded guilty in Nassau County to five murders committed in 1972 and 1973, among them Diane Cusick. He has claimed a total of eighty-five to a hundred, and detectives who have spent time with him regard the confirmed cases as accurate and the total as unverifiable. He remains in New Jersey State Prison.