Richard Cottingham: The True Story of The Torso Killer: Historical Serial Killers and Murderers (True Crime by Evil Killers Book 20)

by Rosewood,Jack

  Cottingham himself said killing was little more than a game, but it was a high stakes game that was solely focused on his pleasure.

  “Killers who do not understand their victims’ feelings would be incapable of conning them effectively. For example, Theodore Bundy understood all too well the sensibilities of female college students who were taken in by his feigned helplessness,” Levin and Fox wrote. “He trapped attractive young women by appearing to be disabled and asking them for help.

  “Second, a well-honed sense of emotional empathy is critical for a sadistic killer’s enjoyment of the suffering of his victims. For sadistic objectives to be realized, a killer who tortures, sodomizes, rapes, and humiliates must be able to both understand and experience his victim’s suffering. Otherwise, there would be no enjoyment or sexual arousal. Thus, he feels his victim’s pain, but he interprets it as his own pleasure. Indeed, the more empathic he is, the greater his enjoyment of his victim’s suffering.”

  Don’t get it twisted. Empathy and sympathy are not the same

  But empathy, the understanding of the pain he was causing his victims, is not to be confused with sympathy.

  Cottingham understood that his victims felt pain, but that was his pleasure. He certainly didn’t feel bad about it.

  “Cottingham is pretty much a very classic serial sexual murderer,” said Schlesinger. “The best way to understand serial sexual murderer, sex and aggression become fused and the aggressive act becomes eroticized.

  “In regular sexual intercourse there is some level of pain,” Schlesinger added. For serial sexual murders, the erotic pain of a gentle bite, nails scratching across a back, for example, become the nipples Cottingham nearly severed from most of his victims as he watched their faces contort in pain, tears rain from their eyes. All of it gave him the arousal he needed to then continue the torture with brutal rapes.

  “These really take on a life of their own,” Schlesinger said of the paraphilia and erotic triggers that excite serial sexual murderers.

  “Years after Cottingham had been put away,” said Keppel, who studied numerous serial killers including Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgeway, “as I tried to figure out what could drive the sexually sadistic serial killer subtype, I kept asking myself what it was that ultimately intrigued me about the Cottingham cases. Partly it was the level of sadistic torture that Cottingham acted out on his victims. He didn’t kill them and desecrate their bodies, he forced them to experience pain and humiliation before he killed them. Then he desecrated their bodies.”

  Death wasn’t Cottingham’s true motivation, torture was, which is why some of his victims survived to take the stand after Cottingham was captured and put on trial.

  If the victim died before Cottingham was fully satisfied, he then turned his attentions to the corpse, defiling his victims’ bodies in unimaginably horrific ways.

  “I never had encountered this kind of dark evil in any of the subjects I covered. I had written about some deeply disturbed people, but not anyone who was as treacherous and deviant as Cottingham,” said Rod Leith, who covered the Cottingham case from start to finish for the Bergen County Record and later penned two books about his experiences.

  Chapter 7: A murder that became unforgettable

  If torture murders weren’t terrible enough, just over a year later, Richard Cottingham took his depravity to an almost unimaginable new level.

  Toward the end of November in 1979, a man registered as Carl Wilson of Merlin, New Jersey, had booked a room at the Travel Inn Motor Lodge, now the Travel Inn Hotel New York on 42nd Street, just two blocks from Times Square, making it a perfect spot for a guy looking to spend some private time indulging in some dark fantasies.

  The man, in his 30s, was tall with sandy hair, and staff remembered that he placed the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door of Room 417 and was not seen again.

  In fact, the room was quiet for four days, and hotel guests and staffers had no idea the depravity happening behind that closed door.

  After booking the room, Cottingham picked up two prostitutes, 23-year-old Deedeh Goodarzi, an immigrant from Kuwait with dark hair and high cheekbones who was working as a prostitute to make money to support herself and her infant child, and another woman in her teens or early 20s who remains a Jane Doe, and took them to his room.

  It was December 2, 1979, a cold day in New York City, and the two women were likely happy to get off the street for a while and get warm, even if it meant paying for their comfort by satisfying Cottingham’s carnal pleasures.

  Goodarzi, blessed with thick, dark hair with soft waves, was the mother of a four-month-old baby, and times were likely tough for the immigrant mom.

  But she and her fellow working girl likely had no idea the horrors they would experience in that hotel room before they died.

  Torture becomes a sick game

  Both women had been raped and tortured. Strange slash marks covered their torsos, but the wounds were shallow, done to cause pain and illicit fear but not to kill.

  “The thing that’s important, there were no penetrating wounds,” said forensic pathologist Dr. Louis Napolitano, who described seeing curved cuts around the women’s breasts, straight cuts beneath them.

  “There were no knife wounds that penetrated into the body. There were all superficial. He’s teasing them. ‘I’m not doing anything to you to kill you right away. I’m not putting a knife in your chest or cutting or making you die right away. No, I want you to know I’m here doing things to you,’” Napolitano said. “He’s doing things to them to make them afraid, to have them subjugate to him. ‘I’m doing this to you and I can make it worse.’”

  After Cottingham had had his fun torturing his victims, binding them together, inciting unimaginable fear, he savagely raped and murdered them.

  Cottingham then mutilated their bodies by removed their hands and heads, and placed the women separately on the room’s twin beds before he sprinkled an accelerant on the torsos and set fire to the hotel room.

  “The bodies had been desecrated,” said Grieco.

  There was some attention paid to detail, however, because the women’s clothes were folded neatly in the tub, the same level of attention he’d paid to the clothing of Nancy Vogel, although police did not make the connection at the time.

  “Nobody knew who was responsible,” added Colo. “It was a mystery.”

  For Nadia Fezzani, who booked the room prior to her interview with Richard Cottingham in prison to get a sense of how those last hours might have been for the women, the space immediately caused her to feel the hairs on the back of her neck rise as a shiver ran down her spine. She intuitively knew she was standing in a place of pure evil, sorrow and unimaginable horror.

  “This is where it happened. I don’t like it here,” she said in an episode of the French program “Investigations and Revelations,” which included much of her interview with Cottingham. “Not a good feeling. I feel like I’m in a horror film.”

  She was not far from wrong. Cottingham’s crimes seemed snatched from the screens of some of the goriest and grotesque of horror movies, and he reveled in attempting to make his scenes the most macabre the world had ever seen.

  All fun and games

  For Cottingham, however, the entire business was entertainment, a night of joviality in which he alone had the fun.

  “I enjoyed it. It was a game,” he told Fezzani. “It’s scary to a girl, to have something done like that, to be so close to a knife, so to speak, pressed against you. The situations that I was seeking were more of a power trip. What I was doing was something like a power trip. The power of holding someone’s fate in your hands is a very powerful aphrodisiac. The adrenalin rush is …. You’re in complete control of somebody’s destiny.”

  For the two prostitutes who’d hoped to get out of the cold and escape what was then a seedy Times Square, their destiny was death, and for the Jane Doe, it would be a death that would never be acknowledged.

  Deedeh Goodarzi, who had gon
e by the street names Jacqueline Thomas, Jackie Thomas, Sabrina Roberts and Crystal Roberts, would be identified through X-rays.

  The only thing anyone would know about the second victim was that she was young, she weighed approximately 110 pounds, and on the last day of her life, she had chosen a pair of Bonjour jeans, a mohair sweater in a shade of dark burgundy, and black patent leather boots as her outfit of choice, topped by a black, full-length coat.

  Police hung posters with photographs of Jane Doe’s clothing in hopes that someone would recognize them and help them identify the girl, but no one came forward with any information.

  Hiding evidence in plain sight

  While the slow cuts he made with his knife were his version of sensual foreplay leading up to a vicious rape, Cottingham cut off the victim’s heads and hands for more matter-of-fact reasons, so his victims would be harder to identify.

  “That was done only to prevent identification,” he said.

  These, he carried away in a duffel bag, as casually as if it was gym clothes or bowling shoes.

  “I had nerves of steel,” he told Fezzani, his voice proud as he remembered the incident, no trace of guilt or regret in his voice. “When I disposed of the heads, I took them out of the hotel. Two cops pull me over, they see me with a carryall bag at 3:30 in the morning, they asked me what I was doing. I said I was staying in the hotel and was going to get something to eat. Without batting an eye, they would believe me. They never asked what was in the bag or for any ID or anything like that. I could make people believe what they wanted to believe. It’s godlike almost.”

  Yes, it’s safe to say that Cottingham was the epitome of a narcissist.

  Firefighters arrive to find unspeakable horror

  By the time firefighter James Rogers had reached the fourth floor of the Travel Motor Lodge, the smoke was a thick, dark, impenetrable wall.

  He saw two bodies, one on each of the room’s twin beds, and he grabbed the one closest to the door first.

  “I carried her out the door and put her down on the hall floor,” Rogers told the New York Daily News. “I was preparing to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which is standard procedure, when I suddenly noticed there was no head.”

  The second victim had fared no better, and she, too, was without a head.

  “I’m used to seeing charred bodies,” Rogers said, “but this was the worst experience I’ve ever had in 12 years of firefighting. I’ve never come across something like that. I hope I never do again.”

  Rogers was a 15-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department when he entered that hotel room fire. He later underwent trauma counseling because of the horror of what he had seen.

  The blaze had started because someone had soaked what remained of the women’s bodies with lighter fluid and set them on fire.

  The head and hands had been removed with the precision of a surgeon, suggesting that the killer hadn’t rushed the job, but instead had savored every sick minute of it.

  Again, a detective told a reporter with the New York Times that the crime scene, despite the desecration, had been swept clean of clues and in terms of evidence, was one of the most effectively swept rooms he’d ever seen.

  The Times Square Ripper revealed?

  At the insurance company where Cottingham worked, everyone was talking about the gruesome murders.

  “This guy, his name is Rob, came in and said, ‘What sick son of a bitch would do something like this, take the heads and hands of a girl and set the beds on fire?’ I looked at Richard, and he said, ‘I don’t know Rob, it could have been you, it could have been me.’ I thought it was a joke,” said Dominick Volpe, shuddering slightly as he remembered that day in 1979.

  Meanwhile, police in New Jersey were not making any connection to Cottingham and the murder of Mary Ann Carr, because the cases were so very different.

  “It did not seem to have any connection to our case,” said Grieco. “With the bodies being desecrated as they were, there was no connection at the time.”

  The murder of Mary Ann was less savage, so Grieco had no real reason to think that the horrific crime scene so close to NYC’s Times Square was connected to his case.

  Escalating depravity a common trait

  But sexual serial killers usually have one terrible thing in common. What is arousing at the beginning – rape and murder, for example – becomes less so, and the murders that follow tend to be more savage and complex.

  That progression is normal for the majority of sexual serial killers, according to Louis Schlesinger.

  They are like drug addicts in that they need more and more to feed their habit.

  And sometimes their drug of choice, so to speak, changes.

  “About 70 percent of serial sexual murders will experiment at a crime scene and do something very, very different with one victim that they had not done with the others such as cut their eyes out or cut their vaginas out and so on,” he said. “When an investigator without extensive experience in this field looks at it, one victim looks so very different that they’re lead to believe, at least from their own experience, that it has to be someone else. That’s incorrect.”

  And that simple, understandable mistake is one of the myriad things that allow many serial killers to operate under police radar for years, leaving a trail of dead bodies behind them in their wake.

  Chapter 8: A return to hotel hell

  On May 5, 1980, Maryann Sancanelli, a housekeeper at the Quality Inn Motel in Hasbrough Heights, New Jersey, was cleaning Room 132 when she noticed that although one of the room’s two beds had not been slept in, the bedspread was crooked and pulled down at the foot.

  When she tried to vacuum beneath the bed, her vacuum hit something rather large, an object that was big enough to block the foot of the bed.

  It was then that she noticed a stench in the room that luckily for her, was unfamiliar.

  “She detected what she was a foul odor coming from the bed area. Lifting the mattress from the frame, she was startled to see the naked, handcuffed body of a naked, deceased female lying there,” said Grieco.

  The woman, who would turn out to be 19-year-old Valerie Ann Street, was a pretty girl with a slender waist and large, perky breasts that were jutting out as if she’d been arranged that way, her cuffed hands twisted beneath her. She was 5’4”, about 135 pounds, with faux strawberry blond hair that hung down to her shoulders. And she had clearly been through hell before she died.

  Street had been tortured severely, and the handcuffs that held her hands behind her back were so tight that they had left deep marks around her wrists – raw, red gouges that resembled gory bracelets. Her body was covered in an array of marks including bruises, slashes, stabbing cuts and bite marks that had nearly severed her left nipple.

  Her agony had likely lasted for hours, based on the marks left behind on her ravaged body.

  She’d likely wanted to scream, but if she had, her cries were muffled, because police later found the residue of tape surrounding her mouth, which was slightly open, partially covered by her dyed hair.

  Her neck had two ligature marks, suggesting that after her killer had finished torturing and raping her, he’d killed her by strangulation, intimately watching her as her eyes went slowly from desperation to death.

  “On her lower back, there was an abrasion which had been made by a sharp object that we thought at the time was a knife,” said Calo.

  “Those were torture marks,” said Schlesinger. “It’s eroticized, the power and control that the offender has over the victim, to make the victim realize that he, the offender, is in control of life and death. So oftentimes the offender will prolong her agony, to kill her in a very slow and deliberate way so that she’s aware that he’s going to kill her.”

  All her clothing and any identification that she might have been carrying with her were missing.

  “It was extremely frightening and disturbing to the chambermaid, to say the least,” said Grieco.

  Evidence begi
ns to add up

  When Dr. Louis Napolitano of the Bergen County Medical Examiner’s Office conducted his autopsy, he found that Valerie had suffered a severe blow to the right side of her head that had caused head trauma and had been tortured over a 24-hour period before her death, based on her wounds.

  For more than a month, Valerie was held in the Bergen County morgue, because the only evidence left behind in the room was a single latent fingerprint on the set of handcuffs and a broken piece of earring.

  The hotel registry provided no clues, and no one knew her identity.

  Although Valerie had registered for the room herself, she’d used the pseudonym Shelley Dudley. She’d checked in at about 4:30 p.m. on May 4, and never checked out.

  She was eventually identified by her fingerprints, which turned up in Florida crime files for a conviction on prostitution charges.

  Valerie had only been in New York City for four days. She’d left Florida on April 30, and on May 3 was working the corner of Madison Avenue and 32nd Street. A prostitute named China said she’d last seen Valerie on May 4, on the same corner.

  But in her death, Valerie offered a very big clue that would help speed police as they attempted to catch a killer.

  “That was the second case of a woman’s body being found on the premises of this particular hotel,” said Grieco, who had not forgotten that Mary Ann Carr’s body had been found in the parking lot of the same motel.

  This would be evidence that he would add to his burgeoning pile of information, and his cold case grew is little bit warmer.