It proved that the killer, if the cases did indeed align, was so brazen in his belief that he would not be caught that he took careless chances to test police.
“I think that he used the same hotel is narcissism,” said Dr. Katherine Ramsland, who said that Cottingham was so delusional in his narcissistic thinking that he truly felt that he was above the law.
“They’re so superior to everybody else that there’s no chance they’re going to get caught,” Ramsland said. “Some narcissists absolutely believe they are invisible, untouchable.”
Time between crimes escalates
As with most serial killers, the act of taking a life is seductive and addictive, and they crave more and more experiences, usually as a way to bring a long-held fantasy to life.
“With serial killers, there’s usually a cooling off period, and that cooling off period tends to get shorter and shorter as time goes on,” according to Dr. Michael Aamodt, head of the psychology department at Virginia’s Radford University and an expert on serial killers.
Cottingham’s cooling off period had decreased significantly, and just over a week later, on May 12, 1980, Cottingham dumped cocktail waitress Pamela Weisenfeld in a parking lot in Teaneck, New Jersey.
She had been drugged and beaten, and her breasts were also savagely bitten.
A gruesome second fire
It was only 10 days after Valerie Ann Street, May 15, 1980, that firefighters were again called to a hotel – this time the Seville on East 29th Street – where they again found a mutilated young woman with multiple, deep bite marks marring her body.
She had also been set on fire as a way to erase certain evidence.
And although the killer had left her head and her hands, her breasts had both been neatly sliced off and arranged on the headboard.
He had, like many killers, taken things a step further into depravity, in part to gain notoriety and attention, but also to satisfy urges that were becoming increasingly hard to satisfy.
“In almost all serial sexual murder cases they will go above and beyond killing the person and engage in postmortem activity that to them is sexually gratifying. This type of ritualistic behavior grows out of the suspect’s fantasy life,” said Schlesinger.
It grows more elaborate as the killer becomes more comfortable killing, especially as he brings his fantasies out of his head and acts them out on his unwilling victims.
“Very often as a series of murders occur, the individual’s behavior becomes much more elaborate as the offender becomes much more comfortable with killing. The ritualistic behavior is apt to become more personalized and embellished,” Schlesinger said.
They are working to get it right, experts say.
“Serial killers keep on killing because they develop and embellish this fantasy until they have the perfect murder,” added Dr. Ron Holmes, an Oregon-based coroner.
Fingerprints, photos lead to victim’s identification
Based on fingerprints, and after being identified through photos, the victim was later identified as 25-year-old Jean Reyner, a prostitute who worked the derelict Times Square area.
So strong were the similarities between Reyner’s murder and the earlier case that police had no doubt that it was the handiwork of the same killer.
The calling card was clear due to the bites and the fire that charred Jean’s flesh.
But the killer had also spent some time cleaning up after his crime, and had virtually sterilized the room in an effort to keep from leaving behind any identifying clues like some careless criminals.
One detective repeated the earlier words about Cottingham’s other crime scene that included fire, and said he had never seen a room so thoroughly cleaned.
Although police were sure the murder was the work of a man now dubbed the “Times Square Ripper” or “The Torso Killer,” depending on what news outlet was reporting on it, they had a sense of despair over how they were ever going to track their slippery, faceless suspect.
What they had – two hotels, at least four savagely mutilated women, three of them burned, and a suspect that might just as well be invisible.
But finally there was a solid link between Valerie Ann Sheet, the women burned in the NYC hotel room and the unsolved Carr case from back in 1977.
And police in both jurisdictions would not be puzzled for very long.
Trouble in ‘paradise’
As police began piecing together an artful, evil, and complex puzzle, at the Cottingham home, there were signs of trouble.
Perhaps the girlfriend of two years had gotten to Janet, because in April of 1980, Cottingham's wife had filed for divorce, charging him with “extreme cruelty,” especially for his refusal to have sex with her since late 1976.
By then, it was likely that he was only able to get off while in the throes of savage sex, and he couldn’t let Janet in on his secrets.
His wife alleged he at times left the family without money for essentials and would not come home until 4 a.m. or 5 a.m., even though his shift at Blue Cross Blue Shield ended at 11 p.m., and he had chosen to go on vacation alone, leaving his family at home to swelter in the New Jersey heat. The complaint also alleged he visited Plato’s Retreat, a heterosexual swingers club in Manhattan, and was a habitual patron of the gay bars and the bathhouses that peppered Manhattan.
Cottingham wasn’t happy at all about the unrest at home, and somebody would have to pay.
Chapter 9: Leslie Ann O’Dell suffers to save countless victims
Leslie Ann O’Dell, a blond who stood just 5’4”, had only been working the corner of Lexington Avenue and 25th Street for about a week when she encountered Richard Cottingham.
Just a few blocks from where Marilyn Monroe filmed her iconic subway grate scene in “The Seven Year Itch,” O’Dell had arrived in the Big Apple by bus, having left her home state of Washington four days earlier, making the cross-country journey in hopes of living a better life.
Unfortunately, she became one of the naïve girls picked up by pimps at the bus station and was immediately put to work in one of the seedier sections of town.
Like all the others, she’d arrived in town with very little money, just some long-held hopes for something different than what she’d known on the West Coast.
The pimps knew their targets, and Leslie was easy prey. Unfortunately, the pretty 18-year-old also fit the description of what Cottingham liked in a girl.
He called himself Tommy.
And when he offered to take her out first, the girl had no idea that she would soon be fighting very hard for her life, no matter how she’d felt about it a few weeks earlier, when she’d ditched everything she ever knew and took a risk on the Big Apple.
Cottingham first plied her with drinks as he droned on about his computer job and the house in the suburbs he had up until a month ago shared with his family, talking until nearly 3 a.m.
He then played upon her desperation and offered to help her escape her situation in New York City by taking her to a bus terminal in New Jersey, away from the dangerous and powerful pimps who already controlled her.
Hope, rising
The grateful girl accepting Cottingham’s offer, and was likely formulating a new plan for her life as they drove over the George Washington Bridge into Jersey.
They stopped at an all-night diner called New Star Diner where Cottingham bought Leslie a steak, and they talked some more, until eventually Leslie agreed to have sex with the man she now saw as her rescuer for $100, money that would help her get away from her dangerous situation.
She didn’t even think that what was to come would be worse than anything she had experienced in the past week.
The sun was coming up when Cottingham left Leslie in the car and checked into the Hasbrouck Heights Quality Inn Motor Hotel, the same place he had left his last victim, Valerie Ann Street, stuffed beneath the mattress less than three weeks early.
Unfortunately for Leslie, the clerk didn’t recognize Cottingham as he handed over the keys t
o room 117.
Keys in hand, Cottingham drove to the back of the motel and the two entered through a back door. He left Leslie in the room, telling her he wanted to move his vehicle to a more secure location, and he returned with a bottle of whiskey and a bag.
Cottingham offered to give the Leslie a massage before they got started, and the exhausted girl rolled onto her stomach.
“He said he wanted to be my friend,” she said. But friendship was the last thing Cottingham intended to offer the girl.
He straddled her back as if to begin massaging her, but instead pulled a knife from his bag and held it to her throat to subdue her while he handcuffed her wrists together behind her back.
He straddled her and began his torture routine, telling her that he derived pleasure out of torturing women, and that she was a whore and deserved every bit of the pain he was about to inflict upon her.
He flipping her over, made his first cut with his knife, and told her that he would soon be burning her breasts, her genitals, and her anus, taking delight in her pain and her struggles to escape.
This was the part Cottingham liked best, eliciting screams and terror from his victims, exacting a rage-filled form of punishment that he reserved for certain types of women.
He especially loved punishing prostitutes.
“Prostitutes are sexual service providers, and that offends many serial sexual murderers,” said Schlesinger. “As ironic as it sounds, many serial sexual murders view themselves as highly moralistic and want to degrade prostitutes for behaving in what they consider to be impermissible sexual conduct,” said Schlesinger. “They’re very mixed up sexually, so you would think they would understand prostitutes and relate to them, but they don’t. They have a very twisted sense of sexuality.”
During torture, Cottingham said he enjoyed it, making superficial teasing stab marks on the bodies of his victims.
“It’s a power trip, an adrenalin rush and aphrodisiac. You’re in complete control of someone's destiny,” Cottingham told Nadia Fezzani.
As Leslie struggled to understand what was happening to her, she felt Cottingham’s teeth on her nipple, drawing blood, as he sank himself into her, beginning what would be hours of torture.
He bit her savagely, nearly tearing her nipple off as he pulled, and then licked her blood.
Over the next several hours, Cottingham raped and sodomized Leslie, forced her to give him oral sex, beat her, sliced her with his knife, and escalated her levels of terror.
All the while he talked about the many ways she would suffer, much like the Toy Box Killer David Parker Ray did with his victims, who woke from unconsciousness, often strapped into a chair with their legs spread wide, to hear Ray’s voice on a tape recording, going into vivid detail about the rules he required his new slaves to live by unless they wanted to be whipped or tortured in other barbaric ways.
The talking turned Cottingham on, and played a role in his torture.
“He told me to shut up, that I was a whore and I had to be punished,” Nancy later recounted as she sat on the witness stand. “He said the other girls took it, and I had to take it, too. He said that uncountable times.”
Between bouts of torture, the rape, the sodomy, and forcing his penis down her throat violently, between the biting, the beatings, slashing her with his knife and whipping with a leather belt, Cottingham would take time to wipe Leslie’s face with a damp washcloth, either to sooth her or to bring her back from delirium so he could again take pleasure in her agony.
At one point when her hands weren’t handcuffed, Nancy reached under the bed to grab the gun Cottingham had threatened her with, and attempted to shoot the man who had been terrorizing her for hours.
The gun was fake and didn’t fire. It did give Cottingham an edge, however, and he grabbed the knife that he had put down in order to have his fill of Nancy sexually.
Nancy’s screams filled the room.
“I screamed, ‘Oh, God, no!’ I just screamed for my life,” she said.
Leslie had endured hours of unmentionable torture before her cries alerted another guest in the hotel. That person called the front desk and reported hearing screams coming from Room 117 at around 9:30 a.m.
Luck for Cottingham finally runs out
The front desk clerk responded quickly and called police, and then raced to the room and demanded that Cottingham, who had registered with a fake name, open the door.
“It took several minutes for someone to be coaxed to the door,” Grieco said.
When the door did open, only slightly, it revealed a terrified Leslie, who had been instructed by Cottingham to say that she was fine before he positioned himself behind her.
“Richard Cottingham was standing behind her where he couldn’t be seen, but he had a knife into her side,” Grieco said.
When asked if she was okay, Leslie said yes, but her eyes told a different story.
“With her eyes, she gave the impression that everything was not okay,” Grieco said. “She moved them right to left, indicated that there was a problem.”
“She couldn’t say anything because he was right there with her, but she managed to get a message out, and she outsmarted him,” reporter Rod Leith added.
Cottingham had gotten careless
This time, Cottingham had allowed the pleasure he received from hearing his victim scream override his desire not to get caught.
He was so aroused by Leslie’s cries of pain, anguish, and fear that he failed to register how loud they were, and that had made him careless.
“When they remain at large for weeks, months, even years, they can indeed feel superior to the police, so much so that they cut corners a little bit,” according to James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.
It was surprising, though, given the detail that Cottingham included in his crime scenes, like painting a deranged portrait in blood and dismemberment that required just one last sick element to make it memorable.
“When a serial killer is disappointed by a failure to experience his ultimate fantasy in real life exactly the way he envisioned it in his mind, he will continue to kill in an attempt to achieve the ideal fantasy. Such is the obsessive, compulsive and cyclical nature of serial murder,” said Bonn.
Leslie’s was likely going to be his piece de resistance, if only she’d kept quiet. But by making so much noise, she not only saved her own life, but also the lives of many of the other prostitutes working Times Square in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
“The number one way serial killers are apprehended is by a surviving victim, especially early on in a killing series, when the offender has not yet perfected his technique,” said Schlesinger.
The great escape foiled
Although Cottingham attempted to flee, and ran out the back door, his bag of torture devices clutched in his hand, he was apprehended by police before he got very far.
“At the time of his arrest, he had handcuffs, tape – it was either to place over their mouths or to bind their hands or feet or whatever,” said Dean Conway, who would become Cottingham’s defense attorney for his first of four trials in two states.
The bag also contained a leather gag, two slave collars, a switchblade, replica pistols, and a stockpile of prescription pills including Valium and barbiturates.
Based on much of the evidence, including the motel where Leslie was found – the same hotel where Mary Ann Carr’s body was found – arresting officers alerted Grieco, who felt waves of relief when the call came in.
“There was great deal of excitement when we got the call that a suspect had been apprehended attempting to leave the motel,” Grieco said.
Alan Grieco and Ed Denning had the pleasure of arresting Cottingham, a man they’d been haunted by ever since they’d found Mary Ann Carr’s lifeless body tossed carelessly against the Jersey parking lot’s chain link fence.
Chapter 10: The interrogation
Cottingham was read his rights and then told officers that the sex with
Leslie Ann was consensual, and that she had agreed to let him do anything he wanted for $180.
Certainly nearly biting off her nipple – a calling card that Cottingham seemingly required in order to achieve sexual satisfaction – was reasonable, given the free reign his $180 payment had given him over Leslie Ann’s defenseless body.
Grieco and Denning, experienced in the art of interrogation, tried to read their suspect.
When it comes to dealing with psychopaths, however, the rules are very different.
“Psychopaths are not sensitive to altruistic interview themes, such as sympathy for their victims or remorse/guilt over their crimes. They do possess certain personality traits that can be exploited, particularly their inherent narcissism, selfishness, and vanity. Specific themes in past successful interviews of psychopathic serial killers focused on praising their intelligence, cleverness, and skill in evading capture,” according to the FBI.
Essentially, telling offenders how smart they were for evading capture for so long sometimes feeds their egos enough that they spill their entire story.
Denning and Grieco tried to play on that by showing sympathy for Cottingham, who as a narcissist believed that nothing at all was his fault.
“He was sitting there with Alan and I, and I was holding his hand and trying to get him to confess,” Denning said. “His eyes welled up and he said, ‘I have a problem with women.’”
He said little more.
Attempted murder called consensual
He told officers that the encounter with Leslie was so savage because he was stressed about his divorce hearing, which he’d gone to the courthouse to attend, only to have it postponed.
He said he then went to see a movie – he didn’t remember what theater – and also went to a restaurant to grab a bite to eat.
Richard Cottingham: The True Story of The Torso Killer: Historical Serial Killers and Murderers (True Crime by Evil Killers Book 20) Page 5
