Richard Cottingham Wiki
Richard Cottingham Biography
Who is Richard Cottingham ?
The Netflix documentary Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer examines the notorious case of Richard Cottingham, also known as ‘The Torso Killer,’ who claimed to have raped, massacred and mutilated more than 100 women between 1967 and 1980.
The series begins with a gruesome discovery at the Travel Inn Motor Hotel in Times Square on December 2, 1979. Police responded to a fire in room 417, where two women had been discovered in a pair of twin beds. But when rescuers attempted CPR, they realized that the bodies had no heads or hands.
With only torsos, the police could not identify the victims. One detective said it was “the cleanest crime scene I have ever seen.” Splashes, blood, fingerprints, pools of blood, there was no evidence except for his clothes, a pair of Bonjour jeans, a white leotard, patent leather boots and a black fur coat, which the killer had curiously folded neatly in the bathtub .
Investigation
Confused, the investigators used mannequins from nearby department stores and dressed them in the victims’ clothing, hoping someone could give them information.
A murdered woman was positively identified through a cesarean scar as 22-year-old Iranian prostitute Deedeh Goodarzi. The other female victim has never been identified and to this day she remains a Jane Doe. Her skulls were never found.
Later, Cottingham claimed that Times Square police officers detained him when he carried the severed heads in a large sack of potatoes to his car before letting him go. He returned to the hotel to soak the crime scene in lighter fluid and set the room on fire.
The crime scene was particularly gruesome
Six months later, in early May 1980, the ‘psychopathic s*xual sadist’ who had been officially dubbed in the press as ‘The Torso Killer’ struck again. This time, he strangled and slit her throat 25-year-old Jean Reyner, a single mother who had been working as a prostitute to finance a custody battle.
The crime scene was particularly gruesome. “It was pretty much the hotel room from hell,” Detective Malcolm Reiman said in the documentary. The killer had cut off her breasts and placed them on the headboard, “for impact value,” recalled Vernon Geberth, a former Bronx Homicide commanding officer.
As before, the murderous butcher had set the room on fire, immediately warning authorities that they had a serial killer on his hands. “When you look for a murderer in 1970s Times Square, you look for a needle in a haystack,” Geberth said.
His monster would end up being Richard Cottingham, 33, a married father of three from Lodi, New Jersey, who worked as a computer operator for BlueCross BlueShield in Manhattan. He later admitted that his psychopathic pastime of hunting down s*x workers in Times Square “was a game.”
By all accounts, he was “an average guy who drove an average car and lived in an average house,” explained reporter Rod Leith on the series.
No one at the time suspected that the Cottingham murder spree had started more than a decade earlier with the murder of Nancy Vogel in 1967 and five New Jersey high school girls in 1968 and 1969.
Despite the obvious similarities
A week before Jean Reyner’s body was discovered in a Manhattan hotel, an employee at the Quality Inn in New Jersey found the naked body of Valerie Ann Street under the bed, her hands tightly handcuffed behind her back. She had recently been arrested in Miami for prostitution and was last seen when a John picked her up in New York City on May 5, 1980.
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Valerie Street’s body was covered in bite marks and brutally beaten in a chilling manner similar to the murder of 26-year-old Maryann Carr, which had occurred at the same motel three years earlier.
Despite the obvious similarities, “no one in New Jersey linked them to the Times Square killer,” explained former NYPD detective Malcolm Reiman in the documentary. Criminal profiling was still in her infancy and it was before CCTV footage was common and the use of computers helped detectives share information between states.
Cottingham shed the noose of law enforcement by deliberately targeting marginalized s*x workers during a time when crime-ridden New York City was plunged into anarchy.
It was the time when the Big Apple was dubbed ‘City of Fear’ and Times Square was a deviant drain on illicit emotions, pornography, prostitution and criminals, providing the s*xual predator with the perfect hunting ground.
Richard Cottingham was detained by police
Cops had a fluke in the case nearly six months after the two headless torsos were first found in Times Square. On May 22, 1980, Cottingham picked up Leslie Ann O’Dell in Midtown Manhattan and dragged her back to the same New Jersey motel where she mutilated her last victim just 18 days earlier.
At knife point, he proceeded to torture, beat, and s*xually assault the 19-year-old fugitive for hours (almost biting one of her nipples) until a maid heard her gasp for her. When hotel staff investigated further, Leslie Ann O’Dell opened the door and silently called for help.
Richard Cottingham was detained by police while he was trying to flee. In his possession were handcuffs, a leather gag, two slave collars, a razor, replica pistols, and a stock of sedatives.
After his arrest, the NYPD drew comparisons to the numerous unsolved s*xual assault cases with similar characteristics to New Jersey crimes. They executed a search warrant at the Cottingham family home, where they found a secret and locked ‘trophy room’ hiding memories of his wrongdoing. Among the S&M books and pornographic works of art were the key to Maryann Carr’s apartment and jewelry that belonged to her other victims.
Richard Cottingham was found guilty of five murders and numerous counts of kidnapping and s*xual assault using evidence found in his ‘trophy room’ combined with a matching fingerprint left on the handcuffs used in the Valerie Street murder. He was sentenced to 173 to 197 years, which he is currently serving at Trenton State Prison in New Jersey.
‘It was a game for me. It was mainly psychological. I was able to get almost any woman to do what I wanted them to do, psychologically, ” the sinister 75-year-old woman said in a recent prison interview with journalist Nadia Fezzani. He is almost like a god. You are in full control of someone’s destiny. ‘
Victim
Weiss was put up for adoption when she was less than two weeks old. It wasn’t until she tried to reconnect with her biological mother in 2002 that she discovered the disturbing truth of her violent disappearance through old newspaper clippings. Looking for more answers, she reached out to Richard Cottingham in prison and has visited him more than 30 times.
“All the women Richard killed left this world in a horrible way,” she said in the document. It always weighs heavily on me.
‘So now I have a relationship with Richard because I want the names of the unidentified victims that he took. Lives that never materialized. I think we should remember them because they deserve justice. ”
Richard Cottingham Quick and Facts
- A new Netflix docuseries details the notorious case of ‘The Times Square Torso Killer’ who hunted and preyed on NYC prostitutes between 1967 and 1980
- Richard Cottingham earned the moniker the ‘Torso Killer’ for cutting off the limbs of victims and decapitating their heads
- He is currently serving a 200-year prison sentence and says he’s raped and killed over 100 women – but has been convicted and charged of 11 murders
- Richard Cottingham was a married father of three from Lodi, New Jersey, who worked as a computer operator for BlueCross BlueShield during his killing spree
- Cottingham claimed that he committed murder every other week for 13 years: ‘It was a constant type of thing,’ he said. ‘I flew under the radar, nobody knew’
Source: https://wikisoon.com/
