American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  The crime statistics may indicate something else, but that is when it really started to feel bad and out of control: in November 1963. It was precisely around that time, on the second day after the assassination, that the Boston Strangler was raping and killing the twelfth victim of his eventual thirteen, a twenty-three-year-old Sunday school teacher. Twelve is a lot even by today’s standards—academics studying serial homicide describe it as an “extreme” case: more than eight. (How did they come up with that number—why not seven or nine?)

  The Boston Strangler stood out, as the press maintained a “scorekeeping body count” of his murders, one by one, as they occurred—or allegedly occurred. There are reasons to believe that Albert DeSalvo did not commit all thirteen murders that he confessed to—if any. In fact, DeSalvo pleaded guilty to assault and armed robbery of four women in 1967, and his attorney F. Lee Bailey claimed his murder confession was entered into the record to support an insanity plea. Instead, DeSalvo was sentenced to life in prison without ever standing trial for a single murder.

  Susan Kelly, in her book The Boston Stranglers: The Public Conviction of Albert DeSalvo and the True Story of Eleven Shocking Murders, and other critics, including Robert Ressler and John Douglas, argue persuasively that many of the Boston murders did not fit DeSalvo’s profile, or the profile of any single murderer, including DeSalvo’s last claimed murder of nineteen-year-old Mary Sullivan on January 4, 1964.

  For decades, none of the Boston Strangler murders had been conclusively confirmed as DeSalvo’s, until 2013. Boston, Suffolk County, and Massachusetts State law enforcement officials jointly announced that DNA testing confirmed that Albert DeSalvo was the source of seminal fluid recovered at the scene of Mary Sullivan’s murder, the last in the canonical series of thirteen murders attributed to Albert DeSalvo.

  While we were conscious of the Boston Strangler case as it was happening, at the end it melted away into the fog of the inclusive legal maneuvering behind DeSalvo’s 1967 plea. And by then we were in a whirlpool of all kinds of new killers.

  The times that followed the Boston Strangler and JFK assassination became unusually hyperviolent. People were being killed everywhere: in their homes, in church, at work, in the streets, in parks and schoolyards, overseas at war in rice paddies, in Third World missions, on college campuses at home, in Cotton Belt bayous, in shopping centers, in riots and cult killings. It was confusing. It was coming to and from all over, and out of it throughout the 1960s would spring forth an occasional new monstrous episode of murder and terror that captured people’s paranoid imaginations as to how bad things can go.

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  In 1964, twenty-eight-year-old Kitty Genovese, a bar manager, was stabbed to death in the entryway of her apartment building in Kew Gardens, Queens, a relatively safe New York neighborhood. The story that was told by the newspapers was that thirty-eight witnesses heard Kitty screaming for help and none called the police, let alone intervened to help her, as the killer returned three times to continue stabbing her. One witness was described as raising the volume on his radio to drown out the sound of the girl’s screaming. It would even become a theme in psychology textbooks and spawned a number of experiments and hypotheses on “bystander apathy.”54

  As a kid growing up in Toronto, Canada, in the 1960s, I was well versed in the Kitty Genovese case, and around the age of thirteen, my friend from across the street and I conducted our own psychological experiments on bystander apathy, covering ourselves in ketchup and staging assaults on each other in front of people passing in the street. Very few intervened. But that was a 1960s Toronto thing, an austerely inhibited Protestant city in those days. New York was nothing like that, and the Kitty Genovese story was bullshit. In fact, on my first day in New York in the 1970s, when I carelessly parked in the Bowery, people chased me down two blocks to tell me my car was being towed. Nobody would do that for you in my safe but coldhearted hometown, Toronto, even today. When Kitty Genovese was attacked, people did call the police, and some shouted at the perpetrator to leave the girl alone, and as the ambulance was coming, they cradled and comforted her as she bled to death, but we did not learn that until the 2000s.55 Kitty Genovese was an urban myth spawned by bad reporting in the New York Times (according to the New York Times itself, reporting decades later).56

  The Kitty Genovese story became a double parable in the early sixties: first, warning young single women that they are not safe alone and should stay close to home, and second, that nobody will “get involved” if something happens to them in the new apathy and anonymity of big urban life. Genovese was particularly pretty in that doe-eyed Audrey Hepburn way, and the press made sure to make no mention that she was apparently gay.57 Who’d care to get involved if they knew that? was the thinking then. The stories focused on Kitty coming home alone late at night in a safe neighborhood and that she was murdered by a marauding African American male perpetrator from a “bad” neighborhood.

  Then, in the summer of 1966, it was reported that in Chicago, an alcoholic pillhead skid row drifter, twenty-four year-old Richard Speck, killed eight student nurses in an amphetamine-fueled night of binding, strangling and stabbing.

  Three weeks later, twenty-five-year-old Charles Whitman, an ex-Marine mechanical engineering student in Austin, Texas, stabbed his wife and mother to death in their homes, then climbed the University of Texas clock tower with a high-powered rifle and gunned down forty-five people, killing twelve victims on the campus and streets below (including an unborn child whose mother survived and a man who died in 2001 of long-term complications as a result of his wounds) and three victims in the tower observation deck.

  Then Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated months apart in 1968, with more race riots in between.

  And when our boys came home from My Lai as accused baby killers and pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her houseguests were hacked to death in her home in the Hollywood Hills by a howling tribe of Charlie Manson’s apocalypse cult hippies, all the groovy summer of love flower power sixties choked in its own blood, in both the literal and the metaphorical senses.

  After that, we could not imagine it getting any worse.

  But it was already worse than we imagined.

  We just did not quite pick out the serial killers around us from all the reports of other threats coming at us from all those directions and places.

  The real story was that Kitty Genovese had been murdered by a necrophile serial killer, Winston Moseley, who had killed at least two other women in New York, but somehow the press did not latch on to this. Newspapers casually and skeptically reported that Moseley had confessed to two other murders. Moseley was married and had two children; his wife later said he just sat around staring off into space. Speaking for himself, Moseley said he just had an “urge to kill.” (He died in prison in 2016.)

  There was Jerome Henry “Jerry” Brudos, “the Shoe Fetish Murderer,” a serial killer necrophile who murdered four women in Oregon between 1968 and 1969—a case I describe in detail in Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters. Brudos was Harvey Glatman and Ed Gein combined, except that like Moseley, he too was married and had two children. In the spring of 1969, when Brudos was arrested, the media did not report the horrific extent of his violence, in the way that newspapers did a decade earlier in the cases of Glatman and Gein. Brudos quickly pleaded guilty without a trial and was sentenced to life imprisonment and was soon forgotten. It was later that Ann Rule dug into the details of his case for her second true-crime book, Lust Killer (1983). In it she recounted the details of Brudos’s fetish for female apparel going back to his childhood and described how he went over the edge in 1968 and began abducting women from the street or from his front door (an encyclopedia saleswoman) and strangling them, dressing up their bodies in his favorite items of clothing from his collection, photographing them and having sex with them before harvesting body parts like their feet a
nd breasts. Brudos attempted to animate one corpse with jolts of electricity, he explained to police puzzled by two strange postmortem burn marks on each side of a victim’s rib cage.

  There were the six Ypsilanti Ripper or Michigan Murders of young women in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti between 1967 and 1969. The female victims, who ranged from thirteen to twenty-one, were abducted, beaten, raped and murdered by stabbing or strangulation, and some mutilated. Eventually, twenty-two-year-old John Norman Collins was charged in one of the murders and convicted. Authorities were confident that he killed the other five victims (and one in California on a trip he took there). With only one conviction, he is not “officially” a serial killer, and to this day Collins claims innocence. He remains incarcerated in the Marquette Branch Prison in Michigan.

  The Cincinnati Strangler raped and strangled seven mostly elderly women in Ohio between 1965 and 1966. Cabdriver Posteal Laskey Jr. was charged in one of the murders in 1967 and convicted, and the murders stopped after that. Laskey died in prison in 2007.

  And of course, always on the list of the most notorious unidentified serial killers, the Zodiac Killer murdered his five confirmed victims between December 1968 and October 1969.

  Many other cases just slipped by without a lot of press, like Antone Charles “Tony” Costa, a carpenter accused of murdering and dismembering eight women in Massachusetts in 1968 and 1969; he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in only two of the murders in May 1970 and hanged himself in his cell in 1974.

  Lee Roy Martin in Gaffney, South Carolina, a thirty-year-old married textile mill worker with three children, was charged and convicted in 1969 in four strangulation murders of women in 1967 and 1968.

  Some “epidemic” killers, like Ed Kemper, who began his killing precociously early in the 1960s, were interrupted by incarceration and then restarted their serial murders in the 1970s. Vaughn Orrin Greenwood, “the Skid Row Slasher” in Los Angeles, for example, killed two victims in 1964, spent six years in prison for an assault, and then killed nine more victims in 1974 and 1975. Kenneth McDuff, “the Broomstick Killer,” abducted and murdered three victims, raping and strangling one with a broomstick forced across her throat, in 1966. He was sentenced to death, then had his sentence commuted and eventually was paroled in 1989 and went on to rape and kill an additional six women from 1989 to 1992. He was suspected in a total of fourteen murders.

  Others began their killing in the 1960s but were not detected or apprehended until the 1970s, like Patrick Wayne Kearney, “the Freeway Killer” or “Trash Bag Killer,” who between 1965 and 1977 was confirmed to have murdered twenty-one male victims, and was suspected in a total of forty-three murders. Kearney was a necrophile who would target young gay men hitchhiking or in gay clubs. As he drove his car with his left hand, he would use his right to shoot his victims in the passenger seat with a .22 derringer and then have sex with their corpses. Afterward, he would dismember the bodies and dump the pieces in industrial garbage bags.

  Between 1963 and 1978, Rudy Bladel, a disgruntled, laid-off railway worker, ambushed and shot seven railway employees before he was indicted in 1979 for a triple murder of railway workers in a railway station in Jackson, Michigan, on December 31, 1978.

  Richard Cottingham, “The Times Square Torso Ripper” or “The Times Square Torso Killer,” 1967–1980

  And then there was “my serial killer.” This is the serial killer that started me writing about serial killers after my brief encounter with him on December 2, 1979, as he was fleeing the scene of a double murder. He had decapitated two female victims, severed their hands, set their mutilated torsos on fire and fled with their heads and hands in a valise. As he exited the elevator in the lobby, I entered it to go upstairs and we ended up bumping into each other, an encounter I described many times in detail in my previous books. The murders became known as the Times Square Torso Murders.

  Richard Francis Cottingham, thirty-three years old, was arrested in May 1980. He was a computer console operator at an insurance company in New York and commuted daily from his home in New Jersey, where he lived with his wife and three children. He was eventually convicted in five murders in New Jersey and New York between 1977 and 1980, including the infamous torso killings. What nobody knew at the time was that Cottingham had started killing much earlier than 1977: at least since 1967, and I suspect perhaps as early as 1963 in his junior year of high school. Most people have not heard of Cottingham because he never gave any interviews and his victim count—five—wasn’t spectacular enough to attract attention in the 1970s, when the “average” was eight or nine victims per serial killer.

  In 2009, after thirty years of silence, Cottingham gave his first interview, telling Canadian journalist Nadia Fezzani that he had committed at least eighty to a hundred “perfect murders” of women in various regions of the United States. They were “perfect” because he was never linked to them.58

  At first, nobody took Cottingham’s claim seriously, but in 2010, he confessed and pleaded guilty to the murder of Nancy Vogel, the twenty-nine-year-old mother of two children whom he had killed in 1967—ten years before the known 1977 to 1980 series. This raised his total to six confirmed victims in thirteen years and suddenly extended his killing period by ten more years. In order to kill one hundred victims in that length of time, Cottingham would have had to kill one victim almost every seven weeks. An entirely plausible scenario, especially in the 1960s and 1970s when police were uneducated and naive in linking serial homicides.

  Cottingham claims he methodically and intentionally “switched up” his MO, its geographical clustering and victimology. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Cottingham killed schoolgirls as young as thirteen, teenage street sex workers, a twenty-two-year-old upscale escort and every kind of woman in between, including the twenty-nine-year-old mother and homemaker Vogel and a twenty-seven-year-old X-ray technician. He alternately battered, strangled, asphyxiated, drowned and stabbed his victims. He transported the bodies of some victims to other locations where he would dump them, while others he left where he killed them. He left bodies outdoors, in victims’ own cars, by roadsides, in parking lots, floating in rivers, or inside New Jersey motels and New York hotels. He decapitated at least two of his victims whose heads were never found and cut the breasts off a third. He set mattress fires under three of his victims’ mutilated bodies. Some he handcuffed and gagged, tortured and raped, beat, burned with cigarettes; others he did not. He was unusually versatile and rapacious, and the various police jurisdictions in New Jersey and New York, and newspapers that rarely fail to jump to conclusions, mostly failed to link the string of murders to a single perpetrator. Of course, this was a time before profiling, before the term “serial killer” was even introduced into our vocabulary; we lacked the understanding that serial killers almost always change their MO because that’s how they get to be serial. As in any successful undertaking, serial killing is a learning experience combined with dumb luck.

  In 2018, I was contacted by Jennifer Weiss, the daughter of one of Cottingham’s victims. She had been given up for adoption a year before the murder and beheading of her biological mother, sex worker Deedeh Goodarzi. Jennifer had been visiting Cottingham in prison in an attempt to get him to reveal where he’d put her mother’s head. She was finding it challenging to assemble a coherent geographical and chronological narrative from what Cottingham was telling her. At her behest, Cottingham agreed to meet with me for a series of one-on-one prison interviews about his life and crimes that are still actively ongoing as I write this.

  On December 30, 2019, I announced in a community meeting organized by a local citizen John Bandstra in Midland Park, New Jersey, that Richard Cottingham had confessed to police that he had committed three unsolved murders from fifty years ago and that the cold cases were now “exceptionally” closed:

  Jacalyn (Jackie) Harp, thirteen, who was randomly ambushed by Cottingham as she was walking home from a dr
um and bugle corps practice in Midland Park and strangled with the leather strap of her flag sling on July 17, 1968;

  Irene Blase, eighteen, who vanished on April 7, 1969, while shopping in Hackensack, and was found facedown in four feet of water in Saddle River, strangled with a wire, cord or perhaps the chain of a crucifix she was wearing, and stabbed once in the back;

  Denise Falasca, fifteen, abducted July 14, 1969, in Emerson/Westwood while walking to a friend’s home and found the next morning in Saddle Brook by the side of a road next to a cemetery, strangled with a cord or the chain of her crucifix.

  Robert Anzilloti, a detective and now chief of investigators in the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, has been doggedly working the Cottingham cases since 2004 and elicited the three formal confessions in the cold case murders during his interviews with him, without the benefit of DNA evidence, which would not have been collected or preserved in the 1960s.

  Midland Park, where Jackie Harp was murdered, was and still is a small, idyllic town north of Paterson, New Jersey. Jackie had gone to an evening practice of her drum and bugle corps—the Midland Park Imperial Knights—at the town’s athletic field. In 1968, small towns like that were still considered safe from the crime and violence that afflicted big cities, but several parents offered her a lift home. She declined. All the kids were out and about on that warm summer evening, hanging out at the root beer joint on the main street, going on dates, visiting one another, buying ice cream, watching firemen putting out a practice fire and fishing in the creek that ran through town (near where Jackie’s body would be found the next morning). Later, police pieced together her route, as she stopped and chatted with friends she encountered on her walk home. It was an enchanted midsummer’s night in July, a gathering of innocent lambs when a wolf slipped in among them and killed Jackie as she strolled away from the gathered flock.