He then tossed her body away like so much trash.
On December 16, 1977, Mary Ann Carr’s body was found in the parking lot of the Quality Inn Motel, her body dumped between the curb and the chain-link fence surrounding the motel parking lot, Grieco recalled.
“Mary Ann Carr’s body had ligature marks on the wrists and the ankles from handcuffs, and she had a ligature mark along her neck,” said Philip Calo, who would later serve as the district attorney who prosecuted Richard Cottingham.
Her body was covered in bruises, on her arms, her shoulders, her breasts and thighs, and her right cheek had hemorrhaged, as though she’s been struck in the face with a blunt object.
The left leg of her crisp white pants had been cut, and a bunch of her hair, also cut, had fallen onto her right thigh, stark against her light-colored uniform.
According to reports, her shoes, her coat, and her purse were all missing, and residue from tape was found around her mouth.
The most telling evidence, however, was a severe bite mark on her breast, but it would be years before police would be able to recognize that savage bite mark as their killer’s gruesome calling card.
Still, the bruises and evidence of sexual assault did not yield enough clues to give officers the solid evidence they needed to track down Mary Ann’s killer.
“You have to have the investigation to lead you in a particular direction. Without that direction it’s like a shotgun blast,” Grieco said.
And it wasn’t until later that anyone remembered that Richard Cottingham, who bore more than a striking resemblance to Mary Ann’s husband, and his wife, Janet, had lived in the Ledgewood Terrace apartments.
Cottingham flies under the radar, but only for a while
After Mary Ann Carr’s murder, police were finding multiple victims of sexual assault near the airport, either along the side of the road or in motel rooms. Some, but not all, of the victims were prostitutes.
All of them, however, had been tortured in a similar way, although police in the neighboring jurisdictions where victims were turning up had not yet connected the dots.
On September 23, 1978, Cottingham again felt the need to satisfy his urges, and barmaid Karen Schilt was his unlucky victim.
The pregnant woman had spent the day working at a bar and grill on Third Avenue called Tuesday’s, but she left work at about 6:30 p.m. to visit her boyfriend before returning to work until 8 p.m.
Karen had a few drinks before leaving for another bar on Third Avenue, arriving there at about 8:30 p.m.
It was at this establishment that she struck up a conversation with a guy who called himself John Schaefer, who asked her if she was “a working girl” at some point in their conversation. She said she wasn’t, but Schaefer, the pseudonym of choice for Cottingham that night, must have been taken with the girl’s looks because it didn’t deter him from his mission at all.
Karen tried to ask her drinking companion some questions of her own, but by 9 p.m., just a half hour after sitting down with Cottingham, who attempted to disguise himself by wearing a shaggy wig, she began to feel sick, as though she’d been drugged.
She felt woozy and weak, her stomach was upset, the room had started to spin, and she thought perhaps she was about to faint.
She put down her drink and left the bar, planning on heading home to her apartment. She assumed the man called John Schaefer would stay behind. But he, of course, was already too invested in his victim. His fantasy was already raging in his head, so he got into his car and followed her down Third Avenue.
The chase begins
As he watched her walk, stumbling a bit as she headed for home, he pulled over and asked her if she needed a ride, pretending to be nothing more than a caring new friend.
Karen, too disoriented to make her way home, said yes, and got into Cottingham’s car, almost immediately passing out.
When she woke up, they were on the New Jersey turnpike, and Cottingham was shoving three blue and red capsules call Tuinal – the date rape drug of choice before Rohypnol came along - in her mouth and forcing her to swallow them. She then felt a burning pain in her breast before she passed out again.
She was still unconscious at 9 a.m. the next morning, when Little Ferry Police Department Patrolman Raymond Auger found Karen’s near-lifeless body stuffed in a drainage ditch behind a car at the Ledgeview Terrace apartment building, the same one where Richard Cottingham had once lived.
Her shirt was pulled up, exposing her breasts, one of which had been burned by a cigarette and brutally bitten, and her pants were undone and pulled down around her ankles.
She was missing her coat, scarf, and purse, and police would later find out a prized ring was also gone.
The 5’5” woman was 22 and pregnant, and her life would never be the same.
Police immediately started CPR, bringing her back from the brink of death, and when Karen finally awoke in a bed at Hackensack Hospital, she could barely remember anything about the night before, thanks to the drugs Cottingham had given her.
Tests concluded she had a cocktail of both secobarbital and amobarbital in her system. Today, secobarbital is one of the most commonly-used drugs in physician-assisted suicide, and was linked to the death of Judy Garland, made famous for her role as Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.”
With no real clues and little more than a vague description of the man at the bar, police were stymied, and Karen’s case would soon grow cold.
Hers would not be the only one.
Another woman survives torturous night with Cottingham
Susan Geiger could have gotten away with never spending “quality” time with Richard Cottingham if she hadn’t given him her phone number on October 10, 1978.
But on the night he approached her for a “date,” offering her $200 for sex, she was all booked up for the night, so she handed him her digits.
He called the next day, and they set up a time and place to meet.
At midnight in front of the Alpine Motel, Susan met Cottingham. They headed over to the Irish pub Flanagan’s on First Street, not far from the Queensboro Bridge.
Once they got settled, Cottingham told Susan his name was Jim, and then offered the truths that he was married with three kids and lived in New Jersey.
He also said he worked in computers, and had won a bunch of money gambling. He showed her his haul, and when she left to visit the restroom, he ordered screwdrivers, thinking the orange juice would mask the taste of the drugs he’d dropped into the drink while she’d been away from the bar.
Almost immediately, things got hazy for Geiger. She remembered riding in a dirty green Thunderbird, she remembered waking up in a hotel room with the man she knew as Jim sexually assaulting her, she recalled being whipped severely with a piece of green garden hose.
She woke up the afternoon of the 12th on the floor of Room 28 of the Airport Motel in Hackensack, New Jersey, bleeding from her vagina, rectum, breasts, face and mouth. Her earrings had been ripped from her ears, and they were also bleeding. Her purse was missing.
Susan called police, and then stumbled out into the sunshine to wait for them to rescue her.
Police again make horrific find
When Captain John Agar of the South Hackensack Police Department pulled up, he saw a woman with her clothing torn and ragged, her lips swollen and bloodied from being savagely beaten, her thoughts incoherent and rambling from having been drugged.
In the room, crime scene analysts found towels stained with semen, which they quickly sent off to the crime lab. The towels revealed a single clue - their suspect was a man with Type O blood.
At Hackensack Hospital, Susan, who was also pregnant, was linked to Karen because her breast had also sustained a serious injury that was clearly a bite.
She was also covered with bruises, likely from the stretch of green garden hose that had been Cottingham’s weapon of choice that night.
But bite marks and type O blood were little to go on. Police were again at a dead end.
Chapter 5: Prostitutes made for easy prey
Times Square was a seedy underworld during the years when Richard Cottingham was on the prowl.
And although he sometimes had a specific type that he choose when he went hunting for victim – and many of his first victims were the brunettes with long hair and voluptuous breasts that he loved – he later specifically targeted prostitutes, which were easy to find in nearby New York City, the city that never sleeps.
The city was just recovering from near bankruptcy, and the Rogers and Hammerstein era of “Oklahoma!” had given way to drug dealers, dive bars, hookers, and hourly hotels where they could make a living.
“New York City at that time was a very different place than it is now. The Times Square area was a virtual cesspool,” Calo said. “Porno houses up and down the block and streetwalkers for blocks around.”
The city’s heartbeat was the epitome of urban decay.
Allan Tannenbaum, who worked as a photojournalist for the Soho News around the time that Cottingham was also taking advantage of the girls’ desperation, recalled the NYC that was Cottingham’s playground.
“It was quite funky, very seedy,” he said. Prostitution, “was rampant, it was all over the place. The girls would work on these corners by the subway entrances, close to the peep shows. It was pretty obvious who was a working girl.”
But the city was still a draw despite its new dangers, and many of those girls working the streets were from the Midwest and were aspiring to be actors or dancers or singers on Broadway thanks to movies that had glamourized the city as a place where dreams are made.
Midwestern girls were particularly vulnerable
Most of the women working Times Square were Midwestern girls who still harbored hope that they could live the dream life offered by the enticing Big Apple, as intoxicating as Eve’s Garden of Eden fruit for those with lives had nothing really going for them. The starry-eyed girls stepped off the bus with super-sized dreams but usually wound up with a pimp instead of a producer.
That’s because super-sized dreams come with super-sized budgets, and a lot of those girls arrived with very little money. That made them easy recruits for the pimps who populated the bus stations looking for naïve girls who really had no place to go.
“Many girls would get off the bus nearby and get enticed by pimps who would put them to work,” said Tannenbaum, who snapped more than a few documentary-style photographs during his time with the Soho News.
Those girls were often naïve or on drugs, both of which made them easy targets – first for pimps, then for murderers.
They were happy to call Cottingham “master” for a few hours if it meant they were off the streets, and some never imagined that the nondescript guy, slightly pudgy with brown hair cut into a classic ‘70s style with a deep part, side-swept bangs, and short sideburns was evil incarnate.
Sex workers at high risk for murder
That vulnerability makes sex workers 18 times more likely than other women to be murdered, according to statistics.
“Prostitutes are very common victims. Why? The hardest thing in getting a victim is the abduction,” said forensic psychologist Louis Schlesinger. “How do you get a woman to go with you? You have to talk to her, and even if you could talk well and are somewhat articulate and charming and engaging, not all women are going to go with a stranger. The problem with the abduction is eliminated it when targeting a prostitute. Part of their job description is to go with a stranger and take their clothes off and have sex with them.”
Gary Ridgway, a truck painter better known as the Green River Killer, chose prostitutes for exactly that reason, because they were easy targets and were unlikely to be immediately missed.
“I picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed,” he said. “I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”
Their cases are also much more likely to go unsolved, experts say.
According to a 2011 study by Kenna Quinet, a professor at Purdue University Indianapolis’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, called “Prostitutes as Victims of Serial Homicide,” not only are prostitutes easy targets for serial killers, almost half of murders where the victim was a prostitute remain unsolved, allowing the killers to continue flying under the radar.
“Prostitute killers amass a greater average number of victims than do non-prostitute killers and when analyzed by decade, those who kill primarily prostitutes, kill for slightly longer periods of time,” Quinet wrote in the report.
Cottingham favored prostitutes because they were lured by easy money, and he too believed that they usually had few, if any people who would miss them.
That, of course, is simply not true.
“They’re not nobodies,” said Lori Townsend, mother of Indiana serial killer Darren Deon Vann’s final victim. “They’re somebody's daughter, somebody’s mother, somebody’s sister.”
For Cottingham, however, none of that mattered. He didn’t care about the families of his victims or the pain he would cause them by taking the life of their loved one. The only thing that was important to him was that he had available to him a victim initially willing to go along with his depraved acts, and that if he hurt them enough, they would struggle in vain to get away. Their desperate contortions, their tears, and their screams silenced by gags, were fast becoming the only thing that aroused him.
Chapter 6: The torture killer
While Richard Cottingham had many depraved qualities – he was a psychopath, a sadist, and a narcissist – he was also a torture killer, a subgroup of sexually sadistic killers who are particularly brutal.
“In reality, killer Richard Cottingham belonged to a subgroup of sexually sadistic serial killers who try to satisfy their self-consuming need for sexual arousal through torturing their victims. The victim’s pain and terror are a stimulus to the killer, driving him to a greater frenzy that only serves to intensify the level of the victim’s torture until the killer’s lust is momentarily satisfied,” wrote Robert D. Keppel and William J. Birnes in their book, “Serial Violence: Analysis of Modus Operandi and Signature Characteristics of Killers.”
“To get to this level of sexual gratification, torture killers are most adept at luring victims, capturing them and then springing their traps. Most are smooth talkers and beguilingly charming but deceitful and ultimately lethal. Torture killers use all sorts of conventional and innovative approaches to con their victims into a false feeling of safety. They flatter and flirt, offer rewards – especially money – hold out the promise of satisfying exactly what they perceive the victim wants, and speak directly to the victim’s needs. It’s all a ruse made to look innocent to trick a potential victim into stepping into the killer’s world.”
Since Cottingham targeted prostitutes, he was able to lure them first with money, wads of cash he said he’d won playing poker, then by offering false sympathy – he was incapable of feeling sympathetic about his victims’ pain – and then by telling stories about himself that made him seem safe and nonthreatening.
The games sadists play
According to Dr. Elizabeth Yardley, Director of the Centre for Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University in England, that ruse – appearing friendly, perhaps vulnerable – is all part of the twisted game torture killers play.
“Apparent vulnerability and the need to please have been used effectively time and time again by serial killers as a way of hiding a sinister personality,” she said. “Some of the world’s best known serial killers have a frightening ability to manipulate those around them, pressing the right buttons in order to present themselves in a false light.”
Of course, with prostitutes, the offer of money – especially generous amounts of money for what they perceived to be a little bondage and sex with a guy who liked to be called “master” – was an easy
way to lure victims, even seasoned prostitutes who have learned a thing or two about who to trust and who represents danger out on the streets.
It is then that the killer begins what Keppel and Birnes call “the three D’s: dependency, or forcing the victim to rely upon the killer in order to survive; dread, which is an obvious result of the terror a victim must feel over the pain and torture their captor is reveling in; degradation, which is common for torture killers who want to humiliate their victims as they force them to do whatever deranged thing fills his fantasy life; and drugs, which are commonly used to keep victims from having the strength or wherewithal to escape.
Cottingham was seen as the ultimate torture killer.
“His crimes – violent attacks and murders – are some of the cruelest I’ve ever come across,” said Nadia Fezzani.
Empathy? Surprisingly yes, say two experts
While it would seem unimaginable that a torture killer – a person who revels in the agony of others – could possess empathy, that particular quality is what makes their crimes so devious and dark.
According to Jack Levin and James Alan Fox in the book “Serial Murder and the Psychology of Violent Crimes,” sadistic serial killers have to have empathy for their victims, even a heightened sense of empathy, because understanding their pain is what gives them so much pleasure and allows them to more easily coerce their victims.
“We believe that lack of empathy is one characteristic of sadistic killers that has been accepted far too uncritically by psychologists and criminologists alike,” the two wrote. “Many investigators have indeed argued, based on superficial familiarity with serial murder cases, that sadistic serial killers are incapable of appreciating their victims’ pain and suffering.”
Richard Cottingham: The True Story of The Torso Killer: Historical Serial Killers and Murderers (True Crime by Evil Killers Book 20) Page 3