Richard Cottingham:
The True Story of
The Torso Killer
by Jack Rosewood
Historical Serial Killers and Murderers
True Crime by Evil Killers
Volume 20
Copyright © 2016 by Wiq Media
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
DISCLAIMER:
This serial killer biography includes quotes from those closely involved in the case of American serial killer Richard Cottingham, also known as the Torso Killer, and it is not the author’s intention to defame or intentionally hurt anyone involved. The interpretation of the events leading up to Cottingham’s arrest and capture are the author’s as a result of researching the serial killer’s story from a variety of different sources including newspaper stories and interviews, televised interviews and documentaries about the case. Any comments made about the psychopathic, narcissistic or sadistic behavior of Cottingham – one of the most deranged murderers to prowl Times Square - are the sole opinion and responsibility of the person quoted.
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Contents
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Introduction
Chapter 1: A murderer is born
The making of a paraphilia
Tales of a dark side
More, more, more
The calling card is like a fingerprint
The meaningless of others
Evil hiding behind a normal life
Chapter 2: Murder on his mind
A gruesome discovery
An unlikely suspect
At work, Cottingham talks a big talk
Chapter 3: Would a wife mean a new life?
Setting off for a fresh start
He had a way about him
A madman hiding in plain sight
Chapter 4: Woman’s disappearance triggers concern
Mary Ann’s horrifying last hours
Cottingham flies under the radar, but only for a while
The chase begins
Another woman survives torturous night with Cottingham
Police again make horrific find
Chapter 5: Prostitutes made for easy prey
Midwestern girls were particularly vulnerable
Sex workers at high risk for murder
Chapter 6: The torture killer
The games sadists play
Empathy? Surprisingly yes, say two experts
Don’t get it twisted. Empathy and sympathy are not the same
Chapter 7: A murder that became unforgettable
Torture becomes a sick game
All fun and games
Hiding evidence in plain sight
Firefighters arrive to find unspeakable horror
The Times Square Ripper revealed?
Escalating depravity a common trait
Chapter 8: A return to hotel hell
Evidence begins to add up
Time between crimes escalates
A gruesome second fire
Fingerprints, photos lead to victim’s identification
Trouble in ‘paradise’
Chapter 9: Leslie Ann O’Dell suffers to save countless victims
Hope, rising
Luck for Cottingham finally runs out
Cottingham had gotten careless
The great escape foiled
Chapter 10: The interrogation
Attempted murder called consensual
Questioning goes cold
A treasure trove of trophies
Souvenirs of death
Charges pile up quickly
Cottingham was all the buzz at Blue Cross Blue Shield
Chapter 11: Cottingham on trial
A surprising suspect
Chilling since childhood
The timeline of Valerie Ann Street’s death
Girlfriend talks
Survivors’ testimony leaves courtroom reeling
Prosecution takes on psychopath
An inside look
Cottingham goes on trial for murder of Mary Ann Carr
Mary Ann Carr trial beings again
Curses, escape attempt foiled again
Chapter 12: New York trial
Chapter 13: Cottingham confesses to first murder, solving cold case
Other cold cases could have been Cottingham
Chapter 14: The Aftermath
Two books are born
Sitting down with danger
A fascination with danger
Face to face with a madman
Like Santa, but with a sadistic side
Cottingham doesn’t wonder ‘why me’
Communal with madness a way to solve unanswered questions
Question of ‘why’ will never have answers
More books by Jack Rosewood
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A Note From The Author
The making of a serial killer
It leaves us always asking why
Serial killers think they’re unique – but they’re not
Nature vs. nurture?
Going inside the mind: Psychopathy and other mental illnesses
Top signs of a serial killer
Trademarks of a serial killer
A Note From The Author
Introduction
His sadistic side made sex-crazed serial killer Richard Cottingham notorious from the start.
“It was a very big story because of how gruesome it was,” said New Jersey resident Richard Neumann, who ran high school track with Cottingham, a sexual sadist whose desires were fueled by the pain he inflicted on women he thought were his for the taking.
Arrested for the murders of five women although he has admitted to killing almost 100, Cottingham has never expressed a shred of remorse for the torture he forced his victims to endure or the pain he brought to the families of the women whose lives he took, robbing them of years of memories.
In fact, he expressed nothing at all.
“No feeling,” he said to Canadian journalist Nadia Fezzani, who in 2011 snagged the only interview Cottingham ever gave aside from police interrogations. “Nothing. I forgot. Like it didn’t happen. I could put myself into a zone to do something like that.”
In the media, he became known as the Torso Killer for the gruesome dismemberments of his victims’ bodies, conducted as his crime scenes escalated and he required more and more deviant behavior in order to satisfy his sexual urges.
A psychopath with little regard for human life, Cottingham was one of those guys who was truly born to kill.
“A psychopath already starts at a disadvantage,” said forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland. “And as he then gets exposed to things that lure him into wanting power over other people, the idea of being born to kill comes pretty close to him.”
And it was just a matter of time until his proclivity for pornography, prostitutes, and S&M led him to take a step into a dark side that coworkers and his devoted family never expected.
But then, they didn’t really know him all that well.
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They just thought they did.
Chapter 1: A murderer is born
Richard Cottingham was born on November 25, 1946, in the Bronx, New York.
Harry S. Truman was president, the Vincente Minelli movie “Undercurrent” starring Katharine Hepburn, Robert Taylor and Robert Mitchum was playing at theaters and the songs listeners heard most on the radio were the two tunes topping the charts, Hoagy Carmichael’s “Huggin’ and Chalkin’” and “It’s All Over Now” by Peggy Lee.
His was a typical New York childhood, although he was lonely when he was away from home, as he had trouble making friends with his classmates and was considered a bit of an odd boy out.
That’s the thing with psychopaths, though. While manipulative and charming, they have little regard for others, so they have trouble forming genuine relationships. When they do, they are superficial at best, and the psychopath feels completely superior to the others around him.
When Cottingham was 12 years old and in the seventh grade, his family moved to River Vale, New Jersey, a small township in Bergen County that was an idyllic location to grow up. (It remains so. In a 2007 survey appearing in Money magazine, it was ranked number 29 on the list of 100 Best Places to Live.)
Again, his was a normal middle-class household. His father worked in insurance, and his mother was a homemaker who, according to Trumann, doted on her son and his two younger siblings.
They lived in a large split-level house with plenty of space for three kids on Cleveland Avenue in River Vale.
“It was a great area to grow up in,” said Neumann. “There were plenty of parks, open space.”
And his was a family full of love, Neumann added.
“I know his mother was devoted to him,” Cottingham’s former classmate said.
Cottingham attended St. Andrews, a co-ed parochial school, but continued to struggle with establishing friendships, so instead of hanging out with his classmates, after school he spent time at home, where he had a hobby raising homing pigeons.
The solitary activity suited him, and it kept him from dwelling on his loneliness at school.
It wasn’t until he enrolled at Pascack Valley High School that he finally made a few friends.
“I met Richard on the athletic field,” said Neumann, who was numb with horror after learning that the classmate who’d lived just two streets away from him had taken the lives of at least five women. “Richard stood apart in that he wasn’t always at practice, he wasn’t a joiner, he didn’t have a nickname, and he wasn’t part of our little clique. He had kind of a wise guy attitude about him. I don’t think he was crazy about authority, I believe.”
Cottingham did have a group of three friends, Neumann said, and in that group, Cottingham stood out as the clear leader.
Again, that would be normal for a psychopath with grandiose ideas about themselves that usually lean toward narcissism. It’s just that others never really saw him in the same light.
“There was really nothing extraordinary about him, except that he was kind of removed from the mainstream,” another classmate said in an interview with the Record, a newspaper based in Bergen County, New Jersey that covered the Cottingham case extensively.
Although Neumann remembered Cottingham being attracted to women, he didn’t remember him ever having a girlfriend.
“When he spoke about women, it was kind of in a negative way,” Neumann said. “I certainly remember him talking among his friends and perhaps in gym class about what girls attracted him.”
Cottingham, it seems, liked a certain type of woman.
“He would talk about the girls in class or the girls out on the street who were better endowed, larger breasted. That just sort of seemed to be a key attraction for him,” his former classmate remembered.
While most guys have preferences like Cottingham’s (there aren’t numerous porn magazines and websites devoted to girls with big boobs for nothing), most will say, “I’m a breast man” or “I’m all about the booty,” but won’t take it further than that.
In Cottingham’s case, those large breasts he coveted would eventually become fetishized, a paraphilia necessary for arousal, and the women he encountered who had the look he liked would suffer for it. And so would their breasts, which Cottingham bit like a calling card, leaving a lasting mark of his depraved nature for the women who survived.
The making of a paraphilia
Psychologists describe paraphilia as abnormal sexual desires that may include extreme or dangerous activities.
According to experts, paraphilias can include fetishes, such as Cottingham’s penchant for large breasts, exhibitionism, pedophilia, frotteurism (the desire to rub one’s genitalia against a non-consenting person such as someone on a crowded subway, for example), transvestitism (the desire to wear women’s clothing), voyeurism, sexual masochism (the desire to be humiliated, abused or subjugated during sexual activity as a way to achieve sexual excitement) and sadism (the desire to inflict pain or injury on another in order to be aroused).
While some are perfectly harmless, others, such as frotteurism, sadism or necrophilia, for example, can be illegal or deadly.
“In most cases, the individual with a paraphilia has difficulty developing personal and sexual relationships with others,” say the experts at WebMD.com, who added that most paraphilias turn up during the teen years, and can last into adulthood, often diminishing over time.
Men are 20 times more likely than women to develop a paraphilia, and although experts are not certain how they develop, most people can live normal lives, saving their paraphilic desires for either fantasies to accompany masturbation sessions or as part of mutually satisfying sex with a partner.
For the dark, demented, and evil side of paraphilia, however, fetishes and desires often show themselves at a very early age, and rarely diminish, but instead bubble beneath the surface until erupting in a blood-soaked burst of violence.
Cottingham, for example, had two forms of paraphilia, his fetish for large breasts and his desire for sadistic sex that continued to escalate. He did not share his fetishes with a partner, but instead initially satisfied his urges with fantasy, until those fantasies were no longer sexually satisfying for him.
He was then forced to bring his fantasies demonically to life through a series of savage murders that only grew more and more diabolical in nature.
Eventually, Cottingham’s list of fetishes, each one more cruel and barbaric than the one before, would lead to crime scenes that left even the most hardened police detectives and other law enforcement officials nearly speechless.
“These were very bizarre and bloody crimes,” said Bergen County District Attorney Dennis Calo. “Beheadings, burnt, chopped up.”
For Cottingham, it was nothing more than a game he played, albeit with completely unwilling partners.
Tales of a dark side
“These individuals hare very dark and perverse sexual fantasies from very early on,” said forensic psychologist Louis Schlesinger, an expert in the field of serial killers. “Usually, 10 to 20 years before any real activities take place, fantasies are born.”
Cottingham eventually blamed his own sexual sadism on pornography, which often starts with a Playboy magazine hidden beneath a mattress and evolves into other forms.
More, more, more
“It’s a common trajectory with sadistic sexual serial murderers,” said Ramsland, who said that their fantasies can be inspired by something as simple as a catalogue of women in their underwear – think the Victoria’s Secret and Frederick’s of Hollywood circulars that once arrived in many a mailbox – and continue to grow as they require more and more stimulation to reach the same levels of arousal.
Part of that need for more stimulation stems from the way sexual serial killers fantasize.
According to the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, many sexual serial killers obsess over their fantasies, spending more and more time preoccupied with the fantasy, which becomes more detailed with passing ti
me.
“Many serial killers have confessed to a morbid preoccupation with fantasy during childhood,” said Scott A. Bonn Ph.D., in an article appearing in Psychology Today. “For example, Ed Kemper, the ‘Co-ed Killer,’ who was severely abused as a child by his mother, has said, ‘I knew long before I started killing that I was going to be killing; that it was going to end up like that. The fantasies were too strong. They were going on for too long and were too elaborate.’”
Add masturbation to the mix, and the fantasies, which in Cottingham’s case included images of himself torturing women who were at his mercy, become mingled with the sexual desires of the sexual serial killer, and they in almost all cases grow more and more intense.
The calling card is like a fingerprint
Just as important as the compulsion to bring the fantasy to life is the element or elements that are unique to a particular murderer, experts say.
“As a person dreams and thinks of his fantasies over time, he develops a need to express those fantasies. Most serial killers have been living with their fantasies for years before they finally bubble to the surface,” according to Robert Keppel in the book “Signature Killers,” an exploration into why serial sexual murderers develop personalized elements that are present at every crime scene, as important as a signature on a piece of art.
For Cottingham, the most common signature was savage bite marks on the breasts of his victims, which became more horrific with each incident.
“Others want more, and if that is what arouses them, they will continue to get more extreme,” said Ramsland. “Not all serial killers are sadistic sexual murderers. Those who are tend to become very extreme with what they do to their victims.”
Cottingham went over the edge.
The meaningless of others
A man who also was gifted with the tendencies of a narcissist who felt he was above the world, Cottingham believed that his needs trumped those of others, so he had no trouble seeing his victims as little more than toys put on earth solely to fulfill his own sadistic desires.
Richard Cottingham: The True Story of The Torso Killer: Historical Serial Killers and Murderers (True Crime by Evil Killers Book 20) Page 1
