♪
[Monitor continues beeping]
[Anzilotti] This is Richard Cottingham.
By all accounts, he's dying.
Personally, I think he's like a cockroach and
he just lives forever.
In the world of serial killers,
I would rank Richard Cottingham
up there with the worst of them.
[Reporter] ...firemen were the first to arrive on the
scene at about 9:30 this morning.
Two women were found decapitated,
with their hands cut off as well.
♪
It could be up to 100 women that he's killed...
New Jersey, and beyond.
He's flown under the radar all this time...
because he's not given up all of his crimes.
♪
After 18 years of time with this savage...
I've been able to get a number of confessions.
It was a flat-out negotiation.
He's the king of all deals.
It's all about, "What are you gonna do for me?"
That was a big thing for him, control.
♪
My game with him was to get him to confess...
To bring a measure of peace and
closure to the victims' families.
Their minds, over these decades,
race with theories and race with suspects,
some of whom were in their own families.
They want to know what happened.
♪
Richard Cottingham is responsible for a lot more.
♪
I was not done with him.
You can take all the serial killers there's ever been.
There's not been one like me.
♪
In the year 2000,
I was assigned a series of cold cases.
The majority of them were from 1974 through 1965.
♪
When I pulled the cases, the evidence officer
gives me boxes and boxes and boxes...
Report after report,
lab results after lab results,
crime scene photo after crime scene photo.
♪
I was pretty much the new guy in the homicide squad and,
this was an overwhelming and daunting task...
for somebody that was kind of
green around the gills.
What I didn't know when I first started digging through
those files was that it would ignite a fire inside of me.
♪
There were twelve cases.
There were a number of girls that were
either last seen hitchhiking...
or had been picked up by a stranger.
Ultimately, raped and then murdered,
dumped in and around Bergen County.
Bergen County is situated in the northern part of
New Jersey, and it is just across the Hudson River
from New York City.
♪
The whole community was in shock.
Kids stopped walking home from school.
All these girls were innocent.
Innocent kids.
You know, they had a life ahead of them.
There were a lot of theories.
They never found who did it.
And it went on for a long time.
♪
Everybody was a suspect.
Even back in the beginning days...
the priest of the church was a suspect.
♪
It never seemed to go anywhere.
Guy going around killing girls from Bergen County,
you figure somebody knew something.
My life changed immediately.
I had no more sister.
My family wanted answers.
Who, where, when, why? We had no idea.
You go from one as young as 13, and then,
you know, one as old as 29 years old.
They're wildly different in some aspects
of their victimology.
♪
At the time, the community of Bergen County is just really
on edge, and the police are just all-in trying to
figure out if there's any commonalities
between these killings.
They're not finding any.
♪
They had several main suspects...
who may or may not have been involved.
♪
There was a convicted rapist, Raymond Alves.
He claimed he'd killed 15 women,
and he was up for parole.
There was Robert Reldan, a former honor student
who had been involved in rapes.
Another suspect was Joe Kallinger,
who was known as 'The Shoemaker' for a knife that
he used in a murder spree in three states,
which ended in Bergen County...
with the death of a nurse.
I went through all these suspects.
I flew all over the country following leads.
And they all went nowhere.
The one name that I couldn't eliminate
was Richard Cottingham.
Richard Cottingham In 1980,
had been convicted of killing five women.
Three were in New York City,
two were in Bergen County.
Those killings in Times Square dubbed him
'The Torso Killer' by the New York media.
Because several of the victims had
their heads cut off, their hands cut off,
and the room lit on fire.
♪
He ultimately got caught in Bergen County
trying to rape and kill another woman...
at a local motel in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey.
[News] Cottingham is being held in a jail adjacent to
the Bergen County Courthouse.
He was originally charged with aggravated sexual
assault and attempted murder of a woman thought to be
a prostitute on May 22nd, in a Jersey motel.
[Anzilotti] Of these 12 cold case homicides that
I'm investigating, some of them were
all centered around this area.
Cottingham was incarcerated since his arrest in 1980.
In the years that followed, some NYPD detectives,
as well as Bergen County detectives attempted to
gain his cooperation in unsolved murders.
Unfortunately, it never materialized into anything.
♪
Everything I knew about him at that point was
focused in the late 70s, up until 1980.
Had no idea if he could have been operating
in the 60s or early 70s.
But certainly, it was a possibility
just based on his age.
So, he was always just lingering in the back of
my head as like, hey, one day, I gotta get to this guy
Cottingham and see if he's good for any of these.
♪
In 2003, I got promoted to sergeant,
and that's when I moved on to the street crimes unit.
It was known as the Special Investigations Squad.
And as a sergeant,
I was responsible for a number of detectives.
We were putting together really big cases.
But in between there, I made sure I always
found the time for my cold case work.
There was many a Sunday night
where I'd put the kids to bed and,
I would take an A to Z file full of reports and
crime scene photos...
and just pour a glass of wine at my dining room table
and just...
spend hours poring over the cases and taking notes,
just on my own time.
Doing these cold cases was not my only job or
my only assignment, by any stretch.
You've got a whole bunch of cases that you're assigned to.
You've got other homicides,
you've got active organized crime investigations.
Yet, you had to find time to work the cold cases
because we never, ever close them.
Never.
[Anzilotti] Having daughters...
and then investigating the rapes and murders of these
young girls, as teenagers, really hit home for me.
And I wanted to give these families
some sense of justice.
♪
I just grew so attached to these cases.
I knew them inside and out.
I had been studying them for years,
kind of on a part-time basis,
and got very passionate about it.
But I wasn't making any inroads,
and that really just nagged at me.
I never wanted to forget them,
I never wanted to give up on them.
♪
In just researching some different suspects...
the name Richard Cottingham kept coming up again.
♪
I was aware that other detectives before me had
tried to speak to Cottingham, and he never cooperated.
How am I going to get this guy Cottingham to talk to me?
♪
By sheer coincidence, Cottingham was housed in the
same prison, on the same wing with 'The Iceman'.
♪
Besides these 12 cold cases involving young females,
I was also looking into a number of
other cold case homicides...
some of which involved mob-style hits.
This led me to Richard 'The Iceman' Kuklinski.
The Iceman was at that time incarcerated for
a number of homicides that he had committed
in and around Bergen County.
He purported himself to be a hitman for the mob.
He was very boastful about his killings,
and his ties to the mafia.
It is New Jersey, and we're certainly well-known,
especially back then, for our traditional organized crime.
The typical La Cosa Nostra,
Soprano-style organized crime cases:
loansharking, illegal gambling,
extortion, prostitution.
Kuklinski got the nickname 'The Iceman'
because he actually killed somebody,
put them in a freezer to try and change the body
temperature to fool the medical examiner.
♪
Well, he got caught eventually for it so,
I don't know how much it worked, but...
All these guys think they're so ----ing smart.
♪
I spent hundreds of hours with him.
I'd have him transported up from the prison.
He'd stay at the Bergen County Jail.
Eventually, I developed a
relationship with him. really good
He began to trust me enough that I got a number of
unsolved homicides out of him.
♪
Rob built such a relationship with Kuklinski that
Kuklinski became Rob's informant...
on anything that Kuklinski could come up with.
I figured this might be a way to get to Cottingham.
One particular interview, I bring up his name.
And I'm like, "Hey, do you know this guy, Cottingham?"
And Kuklinski had the most, just vile reaction,
and he just was like, "I hate that scumbag."
And he's like, "What kind of an animal
does these things to women?"
♪
Richard Kuklinski, known as 'The Iceman',
was housed in New Jersey State Prison.
The Iceman is probably one of the most foreboding
individuals I've ever seen in my life.
He was like 6"8,
just a huge human being.
He had a hair-trigger temper.
This is unwarranted.
Unnecessary.
These guys watch too many movies.
He could be a really scary dude.
♪
The strange twist to my relationship with The Iceman
is that during our conversations...
when I asked Kuklinski about Cottingham,
it became quickly evident that he despised Cottingham.
To kind of get this from this big, giant of a,
of a guy who kills people,
and now he's got his own moral code
where he's disgusted by this other killer.
So, he began to cooperate with me and kind of
give me some dirt on Cottingham.
Turns out- Kuklinski explains to me-
Cottingham ran an illegal gambling operation
within the prison.
♪
So, he used to run like, like football and baseball and
all sorts of gambling through these tickets, right?
Like, like an illegal lottery.
And I decided that that would be my in.
♪
In early 2004, the Super Bowl
that year was in Houston, Texas.
I'd never been to a Super Bowl.
♪
I thought it'd be really cool if me and my dad
took the trip out there, and took in the game.
I had amazing seats.
The only thing that detracted from my Super Bowl experience
was the anxiousness and the anxiety...
wondering whether this plan that I had
was actually going to work.
♪
Having years of prior experience
in the Organized Crime Squad,
investigating illegal gambling,
doing undercover work, purporting to be a bookmaker,
I understand there's no crazier gambling day
than Super Bowl Sunday.
♪
In the weeks that led up to that Super Bowl Sunday,
I made all the arrangements with
the investigators at the prison,
gave them all the information they needed to...
enact my plan...
for Cottingham's cell to be raided by prison officials
the morning after Super Bowl Sunday.
When they searched his cell,
they found evidence of the gambling operation,
and Cottingham was thrown into the hole.
In the prison system, 'the hole' was
basically solitary confinement.
♪
You were removed from your cell,
all your privileges were revoked.
You didn't go outside, you had no fresh air.
There's no air conditioning.
The New Jersey prison at the time was old and,
it was not fun.
♪
Several days later,
I go down to the prison with my partner.
♪
They pull him out of the hole,
and bring him to an interview room.
I see this nearly 60-year-old guy,
long white beard... belly.
Looking like a Santa Claus with a really bad hangover.
You know, his eyes were bloodshot.
He's dripping in sweat.
And I just looked at him and told him,
"I'm the reason you're in there."
♪
He looked at me with some pretty wild eyes.
And I didn't even give him a chance to respond and was
just like, "I am going to make your life a living hell
unless we have a conversation."
He, of course, did not confess to anything.
Didn't agree to anything.
The only thing he would agree to is...
that he would be willing to have continued
conversations with me on one condition.
And that condition was,
if I ever tried to mess with him again like this,
our relationship would be over.
♪
Thankfully, my gut intuition told me
that he wasn't bluffing,
and that the right move was to just try and
begin to schmooze him and begin to develop a trust.
I needed to
take a different tact than that initial approach.
That the tough guy routine wasn't going to work with him.
♪
I started with Richard Cottingham in early 2004.
I had no idea what cases he might be responsible for.
It was just a feeling that maybe he was
responsible for some of them.
♪
I was visiting him at the prison.
I just told him, "Hey, I think you committed crimes
long before you were arrested."
I spent a lot of time with him to try and build a
relationship, but he refused to talk about anything new.
Anzilotti understood he was in it for the long game.
And that means he's going to spend a lot of time and
come away with nothing, time after time after time.
But, if he played it right and he stayed vigilant
for the weak spots,
the openings...
he would be able to get information.
♪
And it's difficult to...
spend hours with someone and feel like
you're not accomplishing anything.
But like water dropping on a rock, okay...
eventually the rock begins to smooth out and change.
You're going to crack it.
Rob was persistent, he never gave up.
Rob Anzilotti was handpicked because of
who Rob Anzilotti was. He was just a great cop.
♪
I did not always want to be a cop.
I was kind of a, you know, confused, mixed up teenager.
I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do.
My mom was a nurse.
I always kind of just had a thing about helping people.
So, I became a paramedic.
Worked in Newark for a while.
It was during the crack epidemic, very violent city.
Saw a lot of, lot of crazy stuff.
That's what brought me to law enforcement,
just seeing how hard the cops worked and
what they had to deal with.
I loved it from the minute I put the uniform on.
♪
That same passion that I felt when I first put the uniform
on was only amplified and magnified
when I became a detective.
In 2004, I was a sergeant in the
Special Investigations Squad.
The new chief formed that squad and hand-picked
the people that go into it.
I was given a lot of leeway to do...
whatever I felt, without anyone
interrupting me dealing with Cottingham.
♪
Once I was talking to Richard Cottingham
for those early months,
he would give me absolutely nothing.
It was worse than pulling teeth,
it was like just hitting a brick wall all the time.
There was no way for me to let it go,
because at some point, to let it go
would be a complete failure,
and I couldn't accept failure.
I really saw these baby steps as an opportunity to get
where I needed to go with these 12 cold cases.
The best way to get there was
to just get him talking all the time,
and he grew comfortable talking about crimes
that the world knew he committed already,
crimes he went to trial on, crimes he was convicted of.
Prior to his arrest, he went on this murderous...
frenzy, in just a handful of weeks,
when he was hunting prostitutes.
♪
I was on routine patrol that morning.
♪
And then, that first call on the radio came through.
♪
"Go down to the Quality Inn.
There's a report of a woman screaming in a room."
♪
As I pulled into the motel parking lot,
there was a man waving frantically.
He says, "There's a man with a gun."
♪ [Suspenseful] ♪
We received a radio message
about a woman screaming at the Quality Motel...
in Hasbrouck Heights, on route 17.
♪
When I came into the small lobby,
down the hallway from around the corner,
I saw a man running towards me.
He was carrying a satchel,
and he had a gun.
As he rounded the corner...
I yelled, "Stop, don't move!"
He stopped approximately one inch from the barrel.
Had he moved his right hand,
I would have pulled the trigger.
There was no ifs, ands, or buts.
He dropped all his parcels on the ground.
He says, "I didn't do anything.
I was with a hooker and got scared."
His name was Richard Cottingham.
♪
Inside the room, they found a young female
identified as Leslie O'Dell.
Leslie O'Dell was naked.
She had handcuffs on her ankles.
She recounted a story about
how she had met a male in New York,
and he had taken her to the motel.
Leslie O'Dell was working as a streetwalker
in New York City.
Cottingham was able to convince her to come with him
under the promise that he would give her money so
she could get out of the prostitution business.
So, she got into the car with Cottingham,
they went to New Jersey.
♪
Next thing you know, they end up in the Quality Inn Motel.
What started out as a simple sexual encounter
suddenly escalated with bondage and torture.
♪
He was just beginning.
♪
He handcuffed her on her ankles because
he was afraid she was going to escape.
She had adhesive tape on her mouth.
♪
He cut her in the area of her breasts,
burned her with a cigarette...
sodomized her.
At some point, he decides he wants a tongue bath,
which means he wants her to lick him all over his body.
But in order to do that,
he has to take the tape off her mouth.
She saw an opportunity, she lets out a scream.
♪
[Knocking]
Richard Cottingham is standing behind
Leslie O'Dell with a knife to her back:
"Tell her everything's okay."
"Is everything okay?" "Yes."
At this point, he realizes the jig is up.
♪
Everything begins to collapse.
Richard Cottingham's going to be under arrest.
♪
And now they have a living witness.
♪
After Leslie Ann O'Dell is rescued by the police,
they find a number of things.
They find a bottle of whiskey.
And he was known to be a big drinker.
And encouraged his victims to drink.
He would use drugs to drug his victims,
barbiturates and other downers, so to speak,
to kind of relax them, and then get them to pass out.
You know, clearly, this is a mouth gag.
Put it in, he would put it in somebody's mouth,
tie the collar around.
And, that would be a way to keep them silent.
These chokers that I assume he would put on
his victim's neck.
So, these two pair of handcuffs.
I have two daughters and, and for me,
it comes to like I just couldn't fathom, you know,
having one of my loved ones, one of my daughters...
be brutally attacked like this by an animal.
He's got kids.
He's got a girl, he has a wife that he didn't abuse,
as far as I know.
And yet, look at what he's doing to total strangers.
I think he thought he was untouchable.
♪
Having looked at the crime scene photos
of Leslie Ann O'Dell,
there were some similarities to some of the unsolved
cold cases that I had been looking at.
Some of the victims of these cold cases had ligature marks
on their ankles, on their wrists.
Some were found tied up.
By letting him just talk and ramble,
I'm learning what makes him tick...
and that was really, really important
in those early years.
He would talk in general terms about
what he would call 'hunting'.
So, I began to learn about, like,
some of his killing methods.
Does this guy have a beef with women?
Is there something in his past that led him
to become this killer that he is?
I really had no idea.
♪
Richard Cottingham was a young family man.
He lived in Lodi, New Jersey.
A wife, three children...
had a good job in the computer division of
Blue Cross Blue Shield in New York.
He was a smart individual, but very manipulative.
♪
His parents were decent people.
He didn't come from a bad home.
He comes from a Catholic background.
He's always told me that
he's not your typical serial killer.
Richard Cottingham oversimplifies
what it means to be a serial killer.
And he seems to think that they all enjoy killing,
and that isn't true.
Only some of them enjoy killing.
Many of them do exactly what he did- or said he did-
which is to torture someone, and then
remove the witness...
and that is a lot of serial killers.
He fits that.
Because of the way that
Leslie O'Dell was abused...
made us suspect immediately
that there was a connection to
a number of unsolved homicides
that occurred at the same motel.
♪
A maid cleaning room 132, while she's vacuuming,
bumps into something under the bed.
She looks under the bed, she lets out a scream.
♪
On May 22nd, 1980,
Cottingham is caught at the Quality Inn in
Hasbrouck Heights as he tries to flee the scene...
after attempting to kill Leslie O'Dell.
Staff had been totally on high alert,
as had the local police, because just weeks earlier...
another dead body was found stuffed under a bed
in that same Quality Inn Motel.
What the investigators find is 19-year-old,
Valerie Street...
a known prostitute who had just recently been arrested
for prostitution offenses.
♪
Valerie Ann Street was naked.
She had what appeared to be
adhesive residue around her mouth.
She had handcuffs on her wrists.
There was a latent fingerprint that was lifted
from the handcuffs,
and that print was retained.
Richard explained to me that he graduated-
so to speak-
to really focusing on raping and murdering prostitutes
because he felt that they were
less accountable in society.
He has a story where,
"Women would do anything I wanted."
Which just tells you
he would only go for women that would yield to him-
for money or because they were young and scared and
didn't know what else to do.
♪
Because of the similarities amongst those cases,
we weren't just interested in what occurred with
O'Dell, we were interested in other things.
Almost three years before Valerie Ann Street's murder,
another homicide had occurred at the Quality Inn.
♪
Maryann Carr was a young, attractive
x-ray technician...
who lived with her husband in an apartment
at Ledgewood Terrace in Little Ferry.
Her husband had been away on a business trip.
When he attempted to get a hold of her,
he wasn't able to.
And after several tries he became concerned.
♪
The next morning, I was notified
that a body had been found in the parking area
of the Quality Inn Motel in Hasbrouck Heights.
♪
Maryann was lying near the parking area,
next to a chain link fence.
She's wearing her white x-ray tech uniform.
She is lying and kind of curled up,
where she obviously had been dumped.
♪
There are ligature marks on her hands and her feet.
There are tears in her uniform.
Somebody had sexually assaulted her and then
redressed her.
She had been strangled.
♪
You know, of my 12 cold cases involving these young women,
the overwhelming majority of them were
either strangled or suffocated.
♪
It was a mystery.
And there was no connection whatsoever between
Maryann Carr and Valerie Street...
♪
Until they caught Richard Cottingham
running from the building.
♪
We compared Cottingham's fingerprint to
the latent fingerprint on
Valerie Ann Street's handcuffs.
♪
And it was a homerun.
We knew we had the right guy.
He would not admit his guilt in any of it.
It was like a game of cat and mouse between the two of us.
You can't feed anything to them and
put thoughts in their head.
And that's also part of what this whole
kind of grind is with him because, you know,
he had no fear in talking about the things
he was already convicted of,
but he refused to talk about anything new.
♪
He's not just willing to just sit there and say to me,
"In 1969, I remember killing this 15-year-old."
It's not like that with him.
You kind of have to just get
these little bits and pieces and put it together.
You're getting something, but you don't want the guy
to know you're getting something,
because he's trying to control that
piece of information.
And you have to be very cool about it...
because he could shut it down and say,
"That's it, no more talking."
'Cause he realizes he just lost leverage.
That's not okay for someone who needs control.
♪
We executed a search warrant at his house...
and on his vehicles.
He had a locked room in the basement.
His wife, Janet, was asked about that,
and she said, "Yes, that is his room.
I know nothing about it. He keeps it locked,
and I'm not allowed in there."
She was in the process of filing for divorce from him.
They had trouble in the marriage.
His wife had said she was going to leave him and
take his three kids with her.
He blames that for the reason why he got, "sloppy".
He doesn't want a divorce, necessarily,
but that he cannot let her be the one in charge of that...
and she was, she's the one who made the first move.
Someone who is a narcissist like he is,
his children are extensions of himself.
There's an ownership thing there.
She will not take them.
She will not take the stability of his life.
♪
Inside that locked room were a number of items:
money, some pornography magazines,
women's jewellery,
some articles of women's clothing.
♪
These were all books that were found in Cottingham's
residence when the detectives searched his house.
So, like, "Sex Victims: Stories of Surrender".
There's, "The Prisoner of the Sheik,"
and a woman tied up on the cover.
"Tied Up Teasers," with two women tied to a bed.
"The Boyfriend's Revenge".
Two men who look like they're about to rape a woman.
So, finding these books, I'm sure the detectives
when they found them were like,
"Wow, we just found gold here."
Once Bergen County connected those cases...
they're going to find out that
it was much bigger than they thought it was.
Firemen were the first to arrive at the scene
at about 9:30 this morning.
They were responding to a report of a fire in
a west side hotel room.
They find two young, nude bodies
with no heads and hands.
It was something out of a horror movie.
♪
The New York City Fire Department was called to the
Travel Inn Hotel on West 42nd Street
on a report of a fire.
♪
They went into the room, they dragged the
body of a nude female from the room.
♪
Pulled it into the hallway, was about to give
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but there was no head.
♪ [Suspenseful] ♪
And in an effort to cover up that homicide,
their heads and hands had been removed and severed and
taken from the scene.
To this day, they've never been found.
♪
There were marks on their legs, arm, back, buttocks,
incised marks, but also puncture marks.
♪
You're dealing with a psychopathic sexual sadist.
This was pure evil.
[News] Today police search for clues into the death of
the young women, both white and about
19 to 20 years old.
A spokesman said the cuts were very clean.
Probably inflicted with a butcher's tool,
a surgical instrument, or sword.
♪
These two women had been held in that room for three days:
November 29th to December 2nd.
♪
In an effort to identify the victims
from the Travel Inn hotel,
they came up with the creative idea of actually
putting the victims' clothes on a mannequin...
and then putting a picture of that in the newspaper.
The news was all over the place.
♪
He was called the 'Torso Killer'.
♪
After two months, someone from New Jersey
recognized the clothing of one person
from the Midtown Torso case.
♪
That resulted in the positive identification
of Deedeh Goodarzi.
She was a prostitute.
♪
[News] Miss Goodarzi was born in Kuwait and
came to the US when she was 14.
Her family lives in Trenton, NJ.
Police are still looking for information about the
other victim, last seen wearing these clothes.
♪
Unfortunately, the second victim- to this day-
remains a Jane Doe.
The investigators, despite their best efforts,
have never been able to identify her.
♪
Four months later, the body of yet another prostitute is
found murdered at the Hotel Seville in Times Square.
When the body was recovered, there were no clothes.
He had taken the clothes.
[Sirens continue]
Firefighters were called to the Hotel Seville,
which is at 29th Street and Madison Avenue.
Once again, a hotel room was on fire.
Inside the hotel room was a nude body of a victim.
♪
The body had been burned
with the same type of torture marks
that were on the girls at the Midtown Torso case.
♪
And this time, the offender had defeminized the victim,
removing both of her breasts.
And that was pretty shocking because the breasts
were then put on the headboard,
presented by the offender to the authorities.
♪
That was a hotel room from hell.
Only Satan could tell you what went on in there.
The victim at the Hotel Seville
was another prostitute.
She was identified as Jean Ann Reyner.
♪
As I researched the cases that Cottingham had been
convicted of, they were all so brutal in nature.
Decapitation, defeminizing.
And, those were very different than
the 12 cold cases of these young women in
Bergen County that I was investigating.
So, at times I questioned:
Am I wasting my time with Cottingham?
Is he even responsible for any of these?
But, as the interviews went on and on
over the months and years,
Cottingham would constantly explain to me that
he always changed up his MO.
So, he didn't want the police to think
any of these killings were related.
It didn't take the New York authorities less than a
New York minute to connect these cases.
And that's when New York communicated
with Bergen County.
A New York detective saw the paper, and said,
"Listen, this might be our case."
The New York City Homicide Task Force
wanted to come over and view our evidence
to see if there was a connection to three of
their open homicides that occurred
within months of Cottingham's arrest.
They had executed a search warrant
at his house in Lodi, New Jersey.
They came upon a room that
even Cottingham's wife was not allowed in.
His trophy room.
Serial killers, they collect
trophies of their victims.
Kind of like a hunting trophy,
proof of the kill.
That's how the cases were linked to New York,
with the trophy room.
So, this was big.
Our evidence was in New Jersey.
♪
After Cottingham's arrest,
a search of his residence finds
a necklace that ultimately is tied back to Jean Reyner.
♪
Jean Ann Reyner had been arrested
a few days prior to the homicide,
and in the BCI picture is the necklace on her neck.
It's an exact match.
♪
There's still a very sick, sick killer on the loose.
The man who cut off the, the heads and hands
of two women in a Manhattan hotel room.
Now, the police have a lot more questions than answers.
It was three days ago that News Center 4 told you
police in New Jersey believe they had a suspect in
the brutal killings of several prostitutes.
That report was confirmed today,
with the arrest of a man by the name of
Richard Cottingham.
[Laughing]
We never offered him a deal.
♪
We laid all of this out before the grand jury,
and the grand jury returned an indictment
for the crimes of assault and kidnapping
against Leslie Ann O'Dell,
with crime of murder against Valerie Ann Street.
♪
But it was entirely circumstantial against
Maryann Carr, but her murder was also included
in the same indictment.
♪
He pled not guilty and took every case to trial.
Would not cooperate, would not...
admit his guilt in any of it.
♪
The thing that put him at the scene of the
Valerie Ann Street case was the fingerprint
that had been taken off of the handcuffs
that were on her body.
♪
We brought in Leslie Ann O'Dell.
She was very reluctant to come to testify,
but she was cooperative.
She was very matter of fact, she remembered everything.
She got on the stand and just levelled him.
"He drugged me, raped me.
He, he cut my breasts."
And he just sat there stone-faced.
But it didn't seem to faze him.
He thought, "Ain't gonna matter.
I'm going to testify, and I'll explain all of this."
He was running the show, it was his show.
♪
So, he did take the stand.
His demeanor was very calm.
Mr. Cottingham thought somehow that
he was going to beat the wrap.
♪
He admitted that he engaged in
sadomasochistic sexual activity.
He claimed it was all consensual...
that this was all a game.
♪
He had lives within lives within lives.
♪
His mother came in every day.
And his sister, which was even worse,
because they still believed in him.
And I'd say, "Mrs. Cottingham,
this is not good."
"Oh, oh, no, no, no, he's innocent,
he's innocent." "Okay..."
♪
If Cottingham's mother dismissed...
the things she's learning that he did,
she is already the role model for
his minimization at what he did.
If it doesn't matter to her, and that's the woman
who raised him, it certainly does not matter to him.
If convicted on all counts,
Cottingham faces a maximum of
274 years in prison, plus life.
And he still faces trial in New York City for the murders
and mutilations of two Midtown prostitutes.
That trial comes after this one's finished.
The jury was not out very long,
about a day and a half.
The sentence he received really ensured
that he would never see the light of day.
After that, he was taken over to New York,
where he was tried for the homicides that
he had committed in New York City.
♪
By 1984, Richard Cottingham is
sentenced to five life sentences
between New York and New Jersey.
♪
Effectively put away for the remainder of his days.
♪
Fast forward to 2004.
I spent hundreds of hours with him at the prison.
♪
I had these 12 cold cases.
I thought he could be good for some of them.
And yet, I was just making no progress.
I tried everything I could think of.
Cottingham went to Catholic grammar school.
I've tried to play the religious theme on him
as well, knowing that he had that background.
Told him to cleanse his soul.
This is another way that he can...
kind of make peace with God.
I've played that theme over and over and over.
Trying to draw an ounce of empathy out of him
for the victims' families.
♪
The family members have a tremendous
thirst for information. It just never goes away.
They want to know what happened.
Over the years he would say,
"Why would I do that if it's going to hurt me?"
♪
The three children were obviously adults now.
He claimed that he had a sensitivity towards
his children reading about him in the newspaper.
Every time you think you're making progress
with this guy he throws another excuse on
why he's not willing to give you what you need.
Eventually he complained...
he didn't like when I visited him at the prison
because the other inmates knew that
he was getting pulled out.
♪
It looks like he's a rat.
I thought for sure at any given moment,
he's going to completely tank on me and stop it.
♪
Early on, Richard was complaining that
I was visiting him at the prison.
There's a process in a prison, right.
Just because I'm a detective, I didn't just get to walk in
the prison and go up to his cell and be like,
"Hey, Richard, how are you?"
They'd have to get guards to bring him down so,
he would walk past the prison population.
You know, it doesn't go over well with the
prison population, he's cooperating with the police.
Even if all he's telling on is himself.
He would have to walk past The Iceman,
and The Iceman would quietly chuckle to himself.
He knew exactly where he was going.
He wanted me to get him out of the prison and say,
you know, "Bring me up to Bergen County
where these guys don't see what I'm doing."
♪
It gave me an excuse to bring him onto my home turf,
where I can control the visit better.
♪
Just me and a partner would go down, pick him up,
drive him up to Bergen County,
talk to him for hours, drive him back.
♪
I would keep him overnight.
We put him in our own cellblock.
♪
The next morning, pull him out and start all over again.
Feed him an egg sandwich, a cup of coffee,
and we'd go at it again.
It was just a total cat and mouse game that we would play.
♪
Each of us was trying to play the other.
There was no way to talk about murders
all day long and...
think I would get anywhere with him.
If I was really going to build trust with this guy,
there had to be times where he felt like, you know,
I was just being his friend...
as despicable and disgusting as that is.
♪
We'd have him up and, sometimes just play cards.
♪
I'd have six detectives in my office,
and we'd sit around and play poker,
after we were done interrogating him for a day.
♪
Even though he's treating him like a human...
he's an animal.
It's hard to sit down with the devil and
make believe you're the same.
♪
He just kept putting obstacle after obstacle in front of me
on why he wouldn't talk about another case.
He's the type of offender who trusts in language.
He thinks that if he puts things into his
own narrative, he will control reality,
he will control what his crimes mean.
You're dealing with a clever, malignant narcissist.
Richard Cottingham is playing a game for,
"What can I get out of this?"
So, he wanted something back.
"What are you going to do for me?"
There were a few staples that Richard always wanted,
and that kept him happy.
And they were relatively simple,
so why not give them to him?
♪
He loved pizza from a certain pizza place.
I'd send detectives go pick up a couple of pies.
He loved sausage and extra cheese pizza.
♪
He liked donuts from Dunkin' Donuts.
There were times he'd ask for cheeseburgers.
If it starts with a deck of cards, or a pizza,
it's almost like a trading, a horse trading going on.
After I met his demands...
he began to cooperate with me.
He began to open up about the past.
This is where I would sense the opening to be like,
let me try and get something from him.
We did one day get to the point of
doing what we call like a 'queen for a day',
which is a proffer agreement where we say,
"You're going to come in, whatever you tell us today
is not going to be used against you
in a court of law."
During that proffer session,
he gave a little bit of detail...
that he killed a housewife in October of 1967.
He said that he believed that she had children.
This was the break I'd been waiting for.
♪
We're finally here. We're finally at this moment.
♪
Of all the unsolved homicides that
I had been looking at involving young women...
Nancy Vogel was really the only one that had children.
So, it was just that little tidbit that made me then
go get the file, look at it and
really start studying the Vogel homicide.
Nancy Vogel was a 29-year-old
married mother of two.
Her children were nine and five years old.
♪
1967 was a, was a different, different world.
♪
In Little Ferry, we had a...
a typical Italian setup- the two-family house
with the finished basement where everyone ate and my
grandmother lived upstairs, we lived in the middle.
♪
She was always happy,
she was always doing things for us.
She always- you know, she's the perfect mom.
We used to, every year, go to Wildwood and
having fun on the beach.
Always laughing.
♪
And then, it was a day or two before Halloween.
My life would change.
My sister went to my father about 2, 3 o'clock
in the morning and said, "Mommy's not home."
♪
By the time I woke up, it was, you know,
8, 9 o'clock in the morning.
People were at the house, and it was frantic, chaos.
♪
My father and my uncle- which is my mother's brother-
went to the police department.
They were driving around town looking for her,
calling friends and relatives that she might have been with.
She was missing for a day or two.
♪
I was in 6th grade, and I came home
from Catholic school with my friend.
And there was a car over here that did not look familiar.
And, we looked into the car, and we saw something
that looked like a mannequin.
It was indeed not a mannequin,
and it was a woman.
♪
She was wedged between the
back of the front seat and on the floor.
Her arms were tied, and she was naked.
♪
So, we ran in the house to call the police.
They're like, "A dead body?"
I'm like, "Yes, I think there's a dead body
in the car in front of my house."
They came immediately.
They dusted the door for prints.
And, news people came, and they were taking pictures.
♪
Neighbors from all over the place were down,
asking questions. Nothing happened here, ever.
So, it was huge.
♪
So my grandmother was making us lunch.
♪
And my sister opens the door,
and it was the newspaper, saying,
"Now that you found out that your mother's dead,
how do you feel about it?"
And my sister was like, shocked.
And then, they came into the house,
and they talked to my grandmother, my nanny.
And, in Italian,
she sent them to hell and cursed them out.
♪
It was bad.
I just remember just watching everybody yelling and crying
and not really understanding it.
So, that's how we found out.
♪
The cops, you know, worked diligently
on the case back in 1967.
Documentation of what was done
wasn't up to today's standards.
And we find this a lot of times in our cold case files,
that there's just not a lot of information about
what was done, and what,
what wasn't done. you know,
♪
She left her house,
telling her family she was going to
the shopping center in Little Ferry, New Jersey.
Three days later, her body was found
in the back seat of her car...
on a side street in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey.
Raped, beaten, and strangled.
In this case, we saw who they were going after.
There was nothing obvious.
It was a big story at the time,
and it also grew over time.
Cottingham was never considered a suspect
in the murder of Nancy Vogel,
until he directed me to that case.
When you solve a cold case, you don't just simply
take a person's word that, "I did it."
There were quite a few more details.
♪
She was acquainted with Richard Cottingham.
Cottingham lived in Little Ferry at the time.
In her own Rambler vehicle, there were brown
shopping bags in the back of the vehicle.
♪
There were relatively recent purchases at the Valley Fair.
♪
We knew that there was a
sexual overtone to the crime,
that she had been strangled.
Here was that independent proof,
along with other things.
Despite the fact that he pointed me in the direction
of the Nancy Vogel case and gave me some details that...
convinced me he was responsible for that murder,
he refused to give the full confession.
It was such a game of trying to be like,
who is in control of this relationship that we have?
He did not want to give this confession.
Every time I thought we were going to get there,
he would say,
"Well, you didn't come through with this for me.
What about the Attorney General's office?
How do I know that they won't step in?
What if...
What if your boss leaves and there's a new boss and
he says, 'No, I want to charge the guy'?"
And, "How are you going to prove to me that
you're going to keep it out of the media?
What about the family members,
when you tell the family?
What if they go to the press?"
It was constantly this back and forth
like bickering between the two of us over what the
"conditions" would be of this confession.
I came through on my end with all of his asks,
and it built up such a level of trust,
and then finally I was like,
"I'm not doing another ----ing thing for you
until we get one."
And then finally, back in 2010, one visit,
I just broke him down and he agreed to confess.
♪
We're going on the record.
I was literally...
----ing in my pants.
♪
It's time to pay the piper.
I'm finally going to learn how he killed this person,
in his own words.
It's now 2010.
I've spent the last six years
grinding away with this guy,
trying to solve at least one of these
12 cold cases that I have.
He balked and balked and balked,
and then finally I would say,
"We're doing it now. We're doing it right now."
And I would flip the switch, and be like,
"I've had enough, let's go."
When I put the tape recorder on the table,
he actually like, pushed his chair back and began to sweat.
♪
It was a visceral reaction on his part...
once we started going.
He looks like he's going to
back down from confessing to it.
He's shying away from the recorder.
It's six years in the making.
And now, you know, I'm praying that
he doesn't panic so much that he shuts down.
I kind of had to bring him back on track to
make sure that he didn't kind of, you know,
---- the bed on me and say, "I don't want to do this."
He's very calm and matter of fact,
and it's as if he has no feelings about it whatsoever.
He doesn't seem to have any remorse.
He doesn't seem to have empathy.
So, to sit across from somebody,
and hear them tell...
the story of a brutal rape and murder as if it's
an everyday occurrence in their life,
as if it's the same as me telling you a story about
going to the grocery store and buying a gallon of milk,
is, is disturbing.
♪
I didn't get him to confess to that case until 2010.
Six frigging years later.
And in between there was hundreds of hours.
And that's how obstinate the guy could be and how stubborn.
♪
We talked to the family after the confession.
I had Bill and his sister Karen,
and some other family members
come into the prosecutor's office.
We wanted the family to hear it first.
Never, ever, ever have them read it in a newspaper.
And because of this type of a case,
we wanted to meet them personally.
I didn't know who Richard Cottingham was or anything.
Rob reaches over, he goes, "Bill,
don't go home and Google Richard Cottingham.
Don't do that yet. It's not the same thing."
♪
You're now able to answer a lot of questions.
And sometimes I wonder...
Is it better sometimes to have the questions unanswered?
Or to get the answers, even though the
answers themselves may cause you more pain?
My mom was always watching out over me.
And that's my biggest thing, I really feel that
she was taken before her time.
And throughout the whole thing, they just kept saying,
"You have to keep it quiet, you have to keep it quiet.
You can't tell anybody." And I agreed.
♪
Keeping quiet is a- was hard.
Very, very hard.
♪
One of the reasons why we want to
honor Cottingham's request, as much as we don't
want to honor anything the man has to say,
is we want to do this for the next family,
for the next father, for the next mother,
for the next sibling.
We want him to continue to tell us things.
You always want to solve these cold cases.
After getting that first confession,
I was hoping that this was finally the moment
that the dam would break, and...
he would open up about other cases.
To get him to go to court was really important to me,
it was important to me for the victim's family.
This was the first one,
and I just wanted that foundation laid.
And that took some time and some convincing.
♪
Richard Cottingham was already serving
multiple life terms.
The plea deal was,
"You're going to get another life term.
Nothing less. A life for a life."
And he was okay with that.
♪
You know, he just didn't want to be in the public eye.
He didn't want his kids to know
the real, true monster that he was.
♪
I had to convince him that
we were not going to put out a press release,
we weren't going to make a big
dog and pony show about it.
♪
The actual court date was in August of 2010.
♪
In an effort to really keep it out of the newspapers and,
and quiet, we made it late in the day.
We can't keep the public out
or we can't keep the media out of the court,
but there was very, very little likelihood that the
press would be lurking around the courthouse at say,
4:30, 5 o'clock in the afternoon.
The only people that were really in the court was the
prosecutor, myself,
some other homicide detectives,
the Vogel family...
Of course, Cottingham, his defense attorney,
and Judge Venezia.
♪
My role was simple.
I was asked to take a plea.
And I was told,
"We'd like to make this short and sweet.
The plea, sentence, done."
And did I do that? For the most part, I did.
♪
Ah, it didn't exactly go as planned.
Your conduct and your history
is beyond appalling.
♪
Judge Venezia started really hammering him.
It doesn't detract from the fact that I think you are
an absolutely despicable human being,
and I use that word sparingly.
♪
I thought at any given moment he's gonna say,
"You know what, Judge, I'm not guilty.
I didn't do this,"
or somehow sabotage the confession he gave.
I was waiting for him to turn to me and say,
"I'm not doing this."
♪
So, we bring him into court
in front of Judge Donald Venezia.
♪
We explained it in no uncertain terms that...
we were not looking for fanfare in this thing.
We wanted to quietly give closure to the family.
♪
We needed it just quick and quiet.
♪
Bring him to the courtroom at a set time that we had
made arrangements for, sentence him right there.
Everything was perfect.
They want to get it over with, I get it.
And I was told, "We'd like to make this short and sweet."
♪
For the first time, I see Richard Cottingham
walking down the hallway.
♪
He looks like Santa Claus with his long, long beard.
He's overweight and whatnot.
This is nothing that I imagined.
So, you know, as a little kid,
you say your mother was murdered,
you think it's like a big monster, bad...
ugly, terrible person.
And here's... he's nothing.
He's a shell of a man.
It was, you know, kind of both exhilarating and
frustrating all at the same time.
It's hard to put into words.
The culmination of six years' worth of work
coming down to this.
I never thought that I'd have the opportunity there,
Mr. Cottingham,
to really witness somebody
who has the makeup that you do.
Your conduct and your history
is beyond appalling.
And that, very frankly,
when you end up wherever you end up,
I suggest you dress with light clothes 'cause it's
usually pretty hot where I think you're going.
In the middle of the court proceeding,
the judge just begins to berate him,
and I'm watching it go south.
And I'm just like, this is so ----ing bad.
I don't think I've ever had the ability
nor desire to ever, like...
witness the devil in my courtroom.
But I think I see him today in you.
You see me in the row, right behind him,
and I'm like literally slumping down
with the, "Oh, ----".
It doesn't detract from the fact that I think you are
an absolutely despicable human being and
I use that word sparingly.
Very difficult to look people in the eye,
who lost a loved one,
because of the outrageous deed of somebody
who's standing twelve feet from you,
and twelve feet from them.
Whether you're a judge or not, you're a human being.
♪
It wasn't, you know, typically what you see
out of a judge in a courtroom,
but I think in this particular case,
he needed to hear that.
♪
I'm glad he did that, I'm glad he stood up.
Then, the judge literally forced him to turn around and
apologize to Bill Vogel and his sister.
Why don't you turn around and tell them,
'cause what's left of 'em are in the audience over there.
Why don't you, why don't you man up a little bit there?
I want you to look at them in the eye and tell them.
Huh? How about that? Why don't you do that?
I am very sorry for all the pain I've caused you.
I really mean that.
His narrative is reality to him,
and the judge in the room punctures that...
because he was helpless.
♪
When it was all over,
I escorted him out.
Cottingham stopped, turned to me...
and says, "You will never get me to ----ing do this again."
♪
Six years of work.
2004 to 2010.
I finally get him to confess...
and I just lost this guy forever.
♪
After Cottingham confessed to the murder of Nancy Vogel,
he told me that murder was not his first.
It got my mind thinking of...
how many could be out there?
I'm convinced that he's good for more than just
the one that he's confessed to,
but I still have 11 of these cases unsolved.
♪
She would have fought for her life.
A rope was reportedly tied around
one of the girls' necks.
There's this fear that went through everybody.
She was just headed home.
Is there anything more powerful than
believing you are God?
Once he had them in the car...
they were his.
I was not done with him.
I'm not letting this guy get away with it.
It was the game.
It was like the perfect murder every time.
How am I ever going to get back on track?