Richard Cottingham was arrested on May 22, 1980, in a motel room in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, after a maid heard a woman screaming. He was 33, a computer operator at Blue Cross Blue Shield in Manhattan and a father of three from Bergen County. In the early 1980s he was convicted of murdering five women, two in northern New Jersey and three in New York City, and sentenced to prison for the rest of his life. The newspapers called him the Torso Killer, because some of the victims were dismembered, and the Times Square Killer, because he found some of them there.
For about thirty years that was the whole public record. Then, from 2010, a Bergen County detective named Robert Anzilotti began to draw confessions out of him in prison, one case at a time. Cottingham admitted killing a young mother in 1967, three teenage girls in 1968 and 1969, and two more teenagers in 1974. Nassau County prosecutors on Long Island matched his DNA to the 1968 murder of a dance teacher, and he admitted four more Long Island killings when he pleaded guilty to hers. In January 2026, at 79 and in failing health, he confessed to the 1965 killing of an 18-year-old nursing student in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Authorities have officially linked him to somewhere between a dozen and about twenty deaths, depending on the count. He has claimed as many as 100, a figure no investigator accepts.
Cottingham was born in the Bronx and moved to New Jersey with his family as a child. He grew up in River Vale, in the northern part of Bergen County, according to a Cox Media Group account of his case published in 2021. The historian Peter Vronsky, who has spent years corresponding with him and interviewing him, told Rolling Stone that Cottingham claims to have begun killing women while he was still a teenager in New Jersey, a high school athlete with slicked-back blond hair.
As an adult he worked as a computer operator for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Greater New York. Rolling Stone placed the job at the Empire State Blue Cross Blue Shield offices on Third Avenue in Manhattan, on a shift that ran from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. He was married and had three children. Anne Donnelly, the Nassau County district attorney, said in 2022 that he told his wife he was working nights while he went looking for women in Times Square. Rolling Stone described him as a regular in the sex clubs and bars there. By the time of his arrest in 1980 he was living in the basement of a house in suburban New Jersey; Rolling Stone called him a recent divorcee, while the Cox account describes him at the time as a married father of three living in Lodi.
His victims were not, as the trials of the 1980s suggested, mostly sex workers. Rolling Stone, drawing on the later confessions, listed sex workers, mothers, career women and children among them. Donnelly made the same point in 2022, stressing that not all of the women he killed had worked in the sex trade.
The earliest killing now attributed to him is the death of Alys Eberhardt, an 18-year-old nursing student at the Hackensack Hospital nursing school. She was found dead in her family's home on Saddle River Road in Fair Lawn on September 24, 1965. She had been beaten and stabbed. By 2025 it was the only unsolved homicide still open on the Fair Lawn police books.
The Fair Lawn police reopened the case in 2021, under Chief Glen Cauwels. Detective Brian Rypkema and Sergeant Eric Eleshewich led the work, and they spent more than 50 hours talking with Cottingham. "He would give us little clues, things of that nature," Eleshewich told ABC7 New York. In late 2025, as his health declined, Cottingham admitted the killing. He gave the detectives details about the house and the scene that had never been made public. He said he had first seen her outside Hackensack Hospital about two weeks before he killed her, and Rypkema said Cottingham told them there was "just something about her" that drew his attention.
The department announced the confession on January 6, 2026. "Alys was a vibrant young nursing student who was taken from our community far too soon," said the police chief, Joseph Dawicki, who said he hoped her family could find some peace. No charges were filed. Under earlier agreements with prosecutors, Cottingham was not charged, and the department closed the case. Alys Eberhardt's nephew, Michael Smith, whose mother is her sister, said the family had waited since 1965 for the truth. Eleshewich said Cottingham had told them many times that he would never give up his first murder, and that he did not believe this was it.
Nancy Schiava Vogel was 29, married and the mother of two, and lived in Little Ferry. She disappeared on October 28, 1967, and was found strangled in her car in Ridgefield Park three days later.
Her death was the first old case that Cottingham admitted. Rolling Stone reported that Anzilotti had spent about six years talking with him before he gave it up in 2010. The admission was made after hours at the courthouse, a time Anzilotti chose to keep the press away, and the judge was asked to keep the proceeding low key. It did not go smoothly. Cottingham began to sweat once the recorder was switched on, Mrs. Vogel's children were in the courtroom, and the judge had him turn to face the family and apologize. Afterward, Anzilotti recalled, Cottingham told him, "You'll never get me to do this again." It took about two years before he would talk again.
Reports describe the 2010 proceeding as a confession made in court. They do not say whether it ended in a formal conviction.
Cottingham later admitted killing three girls in Bergen County in the late 1960s.
Jacalyn Harp, called Jackie, was 13 and lived in Midland Park. She was killed on July 17, 1968, after he tried to lure her into his car. Irene Blase was 18 and lived in Bogota. She was killed on April 7, 1969, after accepting his invitation to have a drink, and her body was found in the Saddle River. Denise Falasca was 15 and lived in Closter. In July 1969 she accepted a ride from him in Emerson, and her body was left in Saddle Brook. All three were strangled.
Anzilotti identified the girls from small details Cottingham let slip in conversation, Rolling Stone reported. The cases were closed quietly, by agreement with the families and without a court hearing or an announcement. That ended in December 2019, when Vronsky, at the request of Jackie Harp's family and friends, held a news conference in Midland Park and said that Cottingham was responsible. Vronsky said the families had been frustrated that they could not speak publicly, and that innocent men had lived for years under suspicion. On January 3, 2020, the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office confirmed that the three cases had been cleared. Its spokeswoman, Elizabeth Rebein, gave no details, saying only that the families "were immediately and confidentially notified when the cases were solved."
Mary Ann Pryor was 17 and Lorraine Marie Kelly was 16, and both lived in North Bergen. On August 9, 1974, they set out for the Garden State Plaza mall in Paramus to buy bathing suits for a trip to the Jersey Shore. Lorraine's boyfriend, Ricky Molinaro, dropped them at a bus stop. Witnesses later told police that the girls had been hitchhiking and had got into a car driven by a man.
Lorraine had lost her mother to cancer two months earlier, and her father had died in 1969; she lived with her brothers and sisters. She wore a necklace inscribed with her name and her boyfriend's. Mary Ann wore a gold cross from her godfather. Her sister, Nancy Pryor, recalled in 2016 that Mary Ann had a 10 p.m. curfew that night because she was packing for the shore. When Nancy came home near midnight, their mother was waiting at the door, worried. The family called the North Bergen police and were told to wait 24 hours before filing a report. Police suspected the girls had run away. The family never believed it, and false sightings made the wait harder.
The girls' bodies were found on August 14, 1974, in woods in Montvale, about 25 miles from home. The Pryor family heard the news in a radio bulletin. Nancy identified her sister by her cross. The two girls were buried after a joint funeral.
Detectives in North Bergen and Montvale and county investigators worked the case for years, but the leads ran out. After Cottingham's arrest in 1980, investigators could not tie him to the girls' deaths.
On April 14, 2021, he gave Anzilotti, by then the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office chief of detectives, a detailed sworn statement confessing to both killings. On April 27, 2021, at 74, he pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder before Superior Court Judge Keith Bachmann. He appeared by video from prison, in a wheelchair and khaki prison clothes, and gave one-word and two-word answers. The Bergen County prosecutor, Mark Musella, said Cottingham had admitted kidnapping and raping the girls and murdering them between August 9 and August 14, 1974. He told the court he had held them in a motel room and drowned them there. Under the plea agreement he was expected to be sentenced in July 2021 to two life terms, to run at the same time as the sentences he was already serving.
Nancy Pryor watched the hearing. She said she had waited nearly 50 years for answers.
His lawyer, John Bruno, said Cottingham had confessed to bring the families closure and to keep a promise to Anzilotti, and that he had "deep regrets." Anzilotti, who was days from retiring, had interviewed him many times over about 15 years. He said Cottingham enjoyed making cold-case detectives work for each confession, and had told him he would not have confessed publicly if Anzilotti were not leaving. Alan Grieco, a retired Bergen County chief of detectives who helped convict Cottingham of a 1977 murder, said Cottingham had "played games" with investigators for years, trading information for better treatment in prison. "We had nothing, other than what he would tell us," Grieco said.
Diane Cusick was 23, a dance teacher at the Wakefield School of Dance in Oceanside, on Long Island. She had been separated from her husband for a couple of years and lived in New Hyde Park with her parents and her three-year-old daughter, Darlene. On the evening of February 15, 1968, after work, she drove to the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream to buy dancing shoes. Her mother had planned to go with her but stayed home sick. Diane did not come home. Her parents went looking, and just after midnight they found her white Plymouth Valiant parked outside the mall, with her body inside. She had been assaulted and suffocated. Investigators believe the man who killed her followed her to her car, posed as a security guard or police officer, accused her of stealing and overpowered her.
Police collected biological evidence at the scene, but DNA testing did not exist in 1968. The case went cold. Her parents and one of her brothers died without knowing who had killed her.
In July 2021, a tip from colleagues in Suffolk County pointed Nassau County detectives to a prisoner in New Jersey, according to UPI. Cottingham's DNA had entered the national database in 2016, according to CBS News. Renewed testing of the old evidence produced a profile, and in early 2022 the Nassau district attorney's office was notified that it matched him. Donnelly called it "one of, if not, the oldest DNA prosecutions in the United States." He was indicted on a charge of second-degree murder and arraigned on June 22, 2022, appearing by video from a hospital bed, and pleaded not guilty. "We make a promise to her surviving daughter today," Donnelly said that June. "We will bring her mother's killer to justice."
When charges were announced, Nassau prosecutors said they were reviewing other killings of young women from 1967 to 1980. Homicide detectives narrowed the list by interviewing Cottingham at length, and he confessed. Donnelly said the details of the other cases were withheld from him so that what he said could be checked. "We did not want a scenario where a serial killer claimed credit for a murder he did not commit," she said. "We are confident that he killed all five of these women."
Mary Beth Heinz was 21 and from Mineola, where her father was a retired New York City police officer. She worked as a live-in nanny and mother's helper in Bellmore and came home on weekends by bus. Her younger sister, Jeanne, who was 12 at the time, later described her as "a super sweet person with a huge kind heart," devoted to children and animals and often shy. She left work on a Friday night in May 1972, and her body was found five days later, on May 10, near a creek in Rockville Centre. Her father died in 1994 without an answer, and in 2020, with the case still unsolved, her sister was still seeking information from the Nassau police.
Laverne Moye was 23, a mother of two from Queens who was separated from her husband and living with family. She worked as a ward clerk at Nassau Hospital. An 11-year-old boy found her body on July 20, 1972, in the same brook in Rockville Centre. She was identified by fingerprints after a patrolman showed her photograph to a woman who turned out to be her mother. Both women's bodies had been thrown from a bridge on Peninsula Boulevard, the Long Island Press reported.
Sheila Heiman was 33 and the mother of three, and she worked for a book company in Brooklyn. In July 1973 her husband came home to their house in North Woodmere from buying presents for the children, who were away at summer camp, and found her dead.
Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves was 18, an immigrant from Puerto Rico who lived in Manhattan. Her body was found on December 27, 1973, in a weedy area on the north side of Ocean Parkway at Jones Beach. Police could not find her family.
On December 5, 2022, Cottingham pleaded guilty in Nassau County Court in Mineola to the second-degree murder of Diane Cusick. He was 76, in poor health, and appeared by video from the New Jersey prison, wearing a medical gown. As part of the plea he admitted the four other Long Island killings, and in exchange the district attorney agreed not to prosecute them. Judge Caryn Fink sentenced him to 25 years to life, to run after the life sentence he was already serving.
The courtroom was full. When Judge Fink asked whether he wished to address the court, he said, "No." The judge called him "purely evil" and told him, "No one has any sympathy for you."
Darlene Altman, Diane Cusick's daughter, has no memories of her mother. "I never thought I would see this day, but all these people got justice for my mom," she said. Seeing him on the courtroom screen was overwhelming, she said; she described "a dead stare" and said she felt as if he were looking right at her. Jim Martin, Diane's brother, spoke in court about what his parents had gone through. Randi Childs, Sheila Heiman's daughter, said her family had lived for decades without hope of learning who had killed her mother, and she thanked the detectives. John Moye, Laverne Moye's son, said that "today the sun shines brightly because justice has been served."
Donnelly called Cottingham a coward. "Richard Cottingham killed who he wanted, when he wanted, because he's a serial killer," she said. "That is what he is."
The cases that sent Cottingham to prison were among the last he committed. Maryann Carr was 26, an X-ray technician who lived at the Ledgewood Terrace apartments in Little Ferry. She was abducted from the complex on December 15, 1977, and strangled. Her body was found near the Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights, the Cox account says; a Townsquare Media account says it was left near Cottingham's former home. Alan Grieco, then a Bergen County detective, helped convict him of her murder.
On December 2, 1979, firefighters were called to Room 417 of the Travel Inn on West 42nd Street in Manhattan. They found the bodies of two young women. Both had been mutilated and the room had been set on fire. The man who had rented the room registered as "Carl Wilson."
One woman was identified as Deedeh Goodarzi, 22, an immigrant from Kuwait. The other, thought to be about 16, has never been identified.
Deedeh Goodarzi had a daughter, Jennifer Weiss, born in May 1978 and placed for adoption through an agency in Trenton, New Jersey, Rolling Stone reported. Jennifer grew up in Spotswood, New Jersey, learned at four that she was adopted, and as a young woman found out who her birth mother had been. She began writing to Cottingham in 2016 or 2017 (accounts differ) and later visited him in prison. Goodarzi is buried in a mass grave on Hart Island in New York City, according to Rolling Stone.
Valerie Ann Street was 19. On May 5, 1980, she was found under a bed in a room at the Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights. She had been bound and beaten, and she died of asphyxiation.
About ten days later, Jean Reyner, 25, was found in a room at the Seville Hotel on East 29th Street in Manhattan. She had been strangled, her body had been mutilated, and the room had been set on fire.
On May 22, 1980, Cottingham picked up an 18-year-old woman in Manhattan and took her to the Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights, the same motel where Valerie Street had been found weeks earlier. A maid heard her screams, the staff called police, and Cottingham was arrested as he tried to get away. The woman was found alive, handcuffed and injured. He had a stockpile of sedatives, and women who survived him described being drugged.
Cottingham pleaded not guilty to everything. He told Rolling Stone decades later that he had done so partly in the hope that his family would believe him.
Between 1981 and 1984, juries in Bergen County and in Manhattan convicted him of five murders: those of Valerie Street and Maryann Carr in New Jersey, and those of Deedeh Goodarzi, the unidentified young woman and Jean Reyner in New York City. He was also charged with crimes against several women who survived. His sentences have been reported as totaling more than 200 years, and he has been described in news reports since then as serving life sentences in both states. Associated Press reports say he has been in prison since 1981.
Robert Anzilotti began working cold cases for the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office in the early 2000s, and he worked on Cottingham for about 17 years, Rolling Stone reported. He rose to chief of detectives and retired in May 2021. He told the magazine that he loathed Cottingham and found him "without a soul," and that the prisoner had "a weird pride" in him. Cottingham, for his part, said he had agreed to meet Anzilotti because he found him "sincere (for a cop)." Cottingham told Rolling Stone that he had "always planned on confessing" after he was found guilty of the earlier crimes. Anzilotti said Cottingham had no remorse and treated the process as a game, and that each admission came with the question of what was in it for him.
Peter Vronsky, a historian and author associated with the history department at Ryerson University, has worked with Cottingham and with detectives in New Jersey and Nassau County. He credited Jennifer Weiss with keeping the confessions going after the 2019 news conference. Cottingham told Rolling Stone that Weiss's interest made him "want to please her more." Vronsky said the 2021 confessions were part of an arrangement that included the guilty pleas; Anzilotti disputed that account, and denied that his retirement explained the Pryor and Kelly confessions, though he called them a "retirement present."
Lorraine McGraw was 26 when she was found dead in 1970 on a lovers' lane near an abandoned water tower outside Nyack, in Rockland County, New York. Her daughter was a child at the time. Her granddaughter, Sonia Ruiz McGraw, who never met her, began writing to Cottingham. Vronsky said an arrangement was made with county officials for Cottingham to confess with her present. Rockland police acknowledged the link in a social media post honoring a detective, Rolling Stone reported. "I want him to be responsible for his actions," Sonia Ruiz McGraw said. NBC New York reported in 2025 that Cottingham had received immunity in Rockland County.
On February 27, 2022, Cottingham emailed Vronsky about an unsolved case from 1972, 1973 or 1974, near a mall in Suffern or Nyack: a teenage girl, attacked in daylight, perhaps on her way from the mall, PIX11 reported. Lisa Thomas, 15, walked along a wooded path behind her family's home in Nanuet toward the mall on October 7, 1974, and was found dead the next day in the woods behind the house by her father. Her mother, Barbara Thomas, said in 2014 that she had chosen to stay home and iron curtains that day and had always felt bad about it. No police confirmation of a link between Cottingham and her death has been reported.
Rolling Stone reported in 2021 that his memory was failing and that he had been moved from the prison infirmary at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton to a hospital and then to South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, in Cumberland County. He used a wheelchair at his 2021 plea and was arraigned on the Cusick charge from a hospital bed in 2022. NBC New York reported in July 2025 that his health had declined in recent years.
As of January 2026, Associated Press reports said he was 79 and serving three life sentences at South Woods State Prison. PIX11 reported that he was in the prison's medical unit, and Vronsky described him as in fragile health. As of October 21, 2026, no death or release had been reported.
Proven by final judgment: the murders of Valerie Street and Maryann Carr in New Jersey and of Deedeh Goodarzi, an unidentified young woman and Jean Reyner in New York City (trials, early 1980s); the murders of Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly (guilty plea, Bergen County, 2021); the murder of Diane Cusick (guilty plea, Nassau County, 2022).
Admitted but never tried: Nancy Schiava Vogel (admitted in court in 2010; whether a formal conviction followed was not reported); Jacalyn Harp, Irene Blase and Denise Falasca; Mary Beth Heinz, Laverne Moye, Sheila Heiman and Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves; Lorraine McGraw; Alys Eberhardt.
Unconfirmed: Cottingham's email about a teenage girl near a Rockland County mall in the mid-1970s, which has been compared with the death of Lisa Thomas; and the 1966 death of Marilyn Simons, who was found dead in her car in Suffolk County after going shopping. Her daughter, Linda Greco, has written to Cottingham since 2022 and told NBC New York in 2025, "I don't want him prosecuted. I just need to know so my mother can rest in peace." Cottingham has not confessed to her mother's death. He told NBC New York that he would say what he knows if Suffolk granted him immunity, and that he thought she "would be very happy" with what he had to say. The Suffolk district attorney, Ray Tierney, said his office does not grant immunity "in a vacuum" and would verify any statement rather than rely on it.
The count: his own claims have ranged from about 85 to 100 victims. Authorities in New York and New Jersey have officially linked him to "about a dozen," the Associated Press reported in 2026. Other reports have given 16 (Cox Media Group, December 2022, counting the five Nassau cases), 17 (Vronsky, 2022) and 19 (NBC New York, 2025). No official tally reconciling these numbers has been published.
September 24, 1965: Alys Eberhardt, 18, is found dead in her family's home in Fair Lawn, New Jersey.
October 28, 1967: Nancy Schiava Vogel, 29, of Little Ferry, disappears; she is found dead in her car in Ridgefield Park three days later.
February 15, 1968: Diane Cusick, 23, is killed at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, Long Island.
July 17, 1968: Jacalyn Harp, 13, of Midland Park, is killed.
April 7, 1969: Irene Blase, 18, of Bogota, is killed.
July 1969: Denise Falasca, 15, of Closter, is killed.
1970: Lorraine McGraw, 26, is found dead near Nyack, Rockland County.
May 10, 1972: Mary Beth Heinz, 21, is found in Rockville Centre.
July 20, 1972: Laverne Moye, 23, is found in the same brook.
July 1973: Sheila Heiman, 33, is killed in her home in North Woodmere.
December 27, 1973: Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves, 18, is found near Ocean Parkway at Jones Beach.
August 9 to 14, 1974: Mary Ann Pryor, 17, and Lorraine Marie Kelly, 16, disappear and are found in woods in Montvale.
December 15, 1977: Maryann Carr, 26, is abducted in Little Ferry and killed.
December 2, 1979: Deedeh Goodarzi, 22, and an unidentified young woman are found in the Travel Inn on West 42nd Street, Manhattan.
May 5, 1980: Valerie Ann Street, 19, is found at the Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights.
May 1980: Jean Reyner, 25, is found at the Seville Hotel in Manhattan.
May 22, 1980: Cottingham is arrested at the Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights.
1981 to 1984: convicted of five murders at trials in Bergen County and Manhattan.
Early 2000s: Robert Anzilotti begins working Bergen County cold cases and interviewing Cottingham.
2010: admits the killing of Nancy Schiava Vogel in a Bergen County courthouse.
December 2019: Vronsky announces the Harp, Blase and Falasca confessions in Midland Park.
January 3, 2020: the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office confirms the three cases are cleared.
April 14, 2021: sworn confession to the Pryor and Kelly murders.
April 27, 2021: pleads guilty to both murders before Judge Keith Bachmann.
May 2021: Anzilotti retires.
February 27, 2022: emails Vronsky about a mid-1970s case near a Rockland County mall.
June 22, 2022: arraigned from a hospital bed on a murder charge in the Cusick case; pleads not guilty.
December 5, 2022: pleads guilty to the Cusick murder in Mineola and admits four other Nassau County killings under immunity; sentenced to 25 years to life.
July 2025: NBC New York reports that his health has declined.
January 6, 2026: Fair Lawn police announce his confession to the Eberhardt killing and close the case.
October 2026: no death or release reported.