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

by Rosewood,Jack

  While Leith’s first beat was mental health, he eventually moved to organized crime, so taking on the Cottingham case was no big stretch for the seasoned reporter.

  He almost immediately found himself immersed in the world that was Richard Cottingham’s.

  “I went to as many scenes as I could, hotels, motels, restaurants, and bars where he had been,” he said, adding that the prostitutes he interviewed were terrified that they would end up the next victim. “Police never found the heads. But they knew he normally went to hotels.”

  Leith became almost as immersed in the sordid underbelly of Cottingham’s world as police, and his investigative work led to a change in career path for the former crime reporter.

  “During those years, I learned about courthouse procedures and forensic police investigations - an area of law enforcement before DNA evidence was around,” he said.

  Armed with those tools, he founded Rod Leith Investigations LLC, based out of Rutherford, New Jersey. The firm focuses on business intelligence and due diligence services for both corporate and individual clients.

  “My reporting days taught me a great deal about people and human nature. It helped tremendously in the investigative work I've done,” Leith said.

  Sitting down with danger

  Canadian journalist Nadia Fezzani, she herself the victim of a violent crime as a teen, spoke to Cottingham at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, New Jersey, on February 25, 2013, in hopes of understanding why he would have committed such reprehensible acts.

  “I don’t comprehend how anyone could enjoy doing these things to other people, so I want to understand why,” she said in a documentary that featured a portion of the interview.

  It took two years for her to negotiate her visit with Cottingham and to talk the man serving a life sentence into sharing his story.

  During that time, the two exchanged letters, fifteen in all, including one letter wishing Fezzani a happy birthday. He signed them all Ritchie, but was nervous about writing, because he knew investigators would want the letters, especially if he said too much.

  In his first letter to her, he wrote: “I usually refuse interview requests. In fact, on the day I received your letter, ‘20/20’ asked me for an interview. I did not even respond to them. I have turned down many lucrative proposals, for two reasons. First, I have always kept my life secret. Second, I have three children I have sworn to protect. I can only do that by remaining silent.”

  As she relays in her book, “Through the Eyes of Serial Killers: Interviews with Seven Murderers,” Cottingham said he didn’t really know why he responded to Fezzani’s letter in the first place, but as an outsider looking in, the answer is quite obvious. Fezzani is pretty with long, dark hair. She was just the type that would have attracted Cottingham’s attention while he was on the hunt, and clearly, his tastes hadn’t changed, even after years behind bars.

  She used it as an opportunity to get as much information as possible from Cottingham.

  “I didn’t let up. The more time that passed, the more I was driven to make him talk,” she wrote.

  As a way to establish a sense of trust, Cottingham asked Fezzani numerous questions about herself, including some she found embarrassing.

  “He said he wanted to know more about me. It was an exchange. If he was to confide in me, I would have to do the same. I was afraid he would ask me some very personal questions, but he did not. The few times he did try, I was able to evade the question or give a vague answer,” she wrote.

  A fascination with danger

  Fezzani had researched her serial killers well. In addition to correspondence with Cottingham, she was also exchanging letters with Joel Rifkin, Patrick Kearney, and other serial killers, trying to get into the minds of some of the worst men to ever set foot on American soil.

  And there are many. Fezzani said that every year in the United States, between 50 to 100 serial killers are busy at work, taking the lives of approximately 400 victims annually. Many, such as runaways or prostitutes or hitchhikers, are never identified.

  It’s fascinating fodder, and in the letters he exchanged with Fezzani, Cottingham hinted that there was much more to his story than the media or the police knew, but he never delved into any details.

  Face to face with a madman

  Before the Cottingham interview, the experienced reporter was a bit edgy, knowing she would be sitting down with a man with the past of a barbarian.

  “I’m usually not nervous like this, but if he’s never spoken to the media like this, I’m really scared. He could get angry by one of the questions, he could get aggressive, or want to leave,” she said.

  But the two had a history, and Cottingham was happy to share his story with his longtime pen pal, especially so if he would have a chance to talk about himself.

  Like Santa, but with a sadistic side

  Once the two were sitting down, Cottingham with a white beard that made him look for all the world like Santa Claus, Fezzani immediately got down to business, and asked Cottingham to estimate how many women he had killed.

  Cottingham was pleased but still slightly evasive about the question.

  “I won’t give an exact figure, but I will say this. I’m in jail for five murders, but I started to do this kind of thing twelve years before, so you do the math. Or to put it another way, the figure is higher than your age.”

  Times Square was Cottingham’s hunting ground of choice. At the time, prostitution was prolific, so he never had any trouble picking up hookers to take to hotels and torture until he was sexually satisfied.

  As to why that sexual satisfaction required the agony he’d inflicted on his victims, his answer was equally coy.

  “I wanted to create a sensationalism,” he said.

  He told Fezzani that he cut off some victims’ hands and heads with a hacksaw not only to hide their identities, but also to draw attention to his crime by putting a personalized stamp on the crime scene.

  And as for the time he sliced off a prostitute’s breasts in the hotel room, leaving them on the headboard like macabre décor, it was “to do something different.”

  He was able to do something so evil so easily, because “it’s not a person anymore,” he said. “It’s a body. You don’t feel anything.”

  In other words, the narcissist – like virtually every killer that takes multiple lives in deranged, twisted ways – wanted to be famous for his highly individualized crimes, which were truly as sick as they come.

  “I wanted to be the best at whatever I did and I wanted to be the best serial killer. Yes.

  “Even as a child I had to be the best at whatever I did, or I wouldn’t do it. Subliminally, I was a manipulative control freak. It was my way or the highway.”

  But what remained then was the reason why.

  Cottingham doesn’t wonder ‘why me’

  According to Fezzani in her book, police called Cottingham “the enigma,” because his childhood didn’t seem to contain an obvious incident, molestation or severe abuse for example, that would have triggered the man’s rage.

  Cottingham was a good kid in school, and during his earliest years, he was well liked among his peers.

  A move to a new school, however, led him to be ostracized by the other students in his class, and the rejection stung mightily.

  While most serial killers require something much more serious to send them off the rails, Cottingham was a psychopath, so the smallest slight was enough to trigger a desire for revenge.

  After that, he kept to himself, and he turned his rage inward, taking all the pain he felt over being rejected by his peers and using it to forge diabolical plans.

  Still, he was initially unwilling to admit just what triggered his prurient desires and compared his future bad behavior to a love of living on the edge.

  “I don’t think there’s been any one event,” he said. “It’s just how I grew up. I mean everything just evolved into what happened. I’m the type of person who liked to take a lot of
challenges. Like I said, I’m a gambler, and I’ve always been a gambler. It’s in my blood. And any kind of risk-taking, anything to defy the norm, I will try, I would do. And that led to one thing on and on, until I started getting brazen. But there was no specific episode or anything like that. Never got in any trouble as a kid. Never. I was an anonymous-type person, a loner. And I’m the type that has to win all the time to come out on top no matter what I’m doing. I tried to be the best at it.”

  And as far as the prostitutes and other women who were unfortunate enough to encounter Richard Cottingham, well, that was really more their faults than his, he said.

  “A lot of them were just at the wrong place at the wrong time,” he told Nadia Fezzani in the jailhouse interview. “If I would have went down a different block, or if I wouldn’t have gone out that night, or if I didn’t go into that particular bar, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  But as it was, he did go out, he did visit Times Square, he did like to go out for drinks after work, and he did pick up prostitutes, many of whom died after hours of brutal suffering.

  And that was all on Cottingham.

  With only a few signature calling cards – the biting of the nipples, the cigarette burns, the handcuffs, the escalating mutilation of the bodies – he was fast becoming one of the most notorious, and had all of the prostitutes working Times Square totally on edge.

  “Some of the prostitutes were completely frozen with fear over this guy. One woman wondered whether he was trying to make a Frankenstein whore,” said Rod Leith.

  Cottingham, like so many serial killers before and after him, didn’t see his victims as fellow human beings and instead viewed them as toys, playthings that were there solely for his pleasure.

  “I’ve probably done everything a man would want to do with a woman,” said Cottingham, who clearly has some trouble understanding the basics of human relationships, or what real men want from their relationships with women.

  Communal with madness a way to solve unanswered questions

  For Nadia, the talk was painful and sometimes left her questioning why she continued to pursue serial killers and their stories.

  “Sometimes I want to stop, and then my friends encourage me to go on,” she said, “I think about the families and their suffering and the innocent victims. Like Cottingham, for example. I know I am the only one that he talks to, so I feel like I’m the only one who can help the victim’s families. He’s spoken to me about crimes he’s never confessed to, and that’s my victory.”

  While he talked about his murders, blithely and casually as if he was counting how many eggs he’d eaten for breakfast that morning, the room likely turned chilly for Nadia as she understood that the man sitting across from her, despite his jovial look, had no emotion that suggested compassion or sympathy for his victims.

  And he was evasive when she asked again how many people he had killed over the years.

  “Oh, I know exactly how many,” he told her, chuckling to himself. “Over 85. Under 100.”

  His voice sounded proud as he spoke, although there was a twinge of disappointment, as if he’d wished he’d have reached a nice round even number of kills, until fate – and officers – intervened.

  “I was doing this for years. Hardly a week or two went by without something happening,” he said.

  Cottingham was, however, despite his psychotic nature, able to establish relationships that allowed him to see others as human beings, and when Nadia asked him, “Richard, would you be able to kill me?” his answer was immediate.

  “No,” he said, even though there was much about Fezzani that fit his victim profile.

  She asked him a second question: “Why not?”

  “Because I like you,” Cottingham said. “You’re tough. You don’t take no crap. I respect you. You would be the type I would have as a girlfriend. At least on my end. I don’t know about you.”

  Most likely, her answer would be no, although she did visit the house Cottingham was living in during the bulk of his murders, two two-story duplex with a two-car garage and the basement with the locked room.

  The surprised family that was living there had no idea about the depraved mind that had once occupied their space, and they were a bit startled by the news.

  While there, Caro and Fezzani looked over photographs of Cottingham as a family man, including one with his firstborn son on the day of his baptism.

  “It’s strange to see that he had a human family side, that he took care of his children,” Fezzani said.

  Caro talked about the trial and the madness of having to show crime scene photographs to the families of victims who had suffered unimaginable torture at the hands of Cottingham, including one of Valerie Ann Street that he showed her horrified sister.

  “These people’s lives were just ruined,” Caro said. “I showed her the photograph, and asked her if she recognized the girl in that photograph and she just broke down in sobs and said ‘my sister.’”

  The memory caused Caro to also tear up, and Fezzani’s tears soon followed, imaging the horror of seeing one’s sister, someone you’d grown up with, played with, gone to school with, gotten in to trouble with and loved deeply, mutilated and in handcuffs, dead at the hands of a man too cowardly to admit his guilt.

  As for the people left behind in the aftermath of it all, they had trouble understanding how the man they knew could have been such a monster.

  Question of ‘why’ will never have answers

  “What makes them think they’re going to get away with it? That’s what I dwell on more than anything else,” said his childhood friend, Richard Neumann. “What makes them think they can continue to do it and have this smug attitude and excise this awful power over people? There are lots of things inside our mentality that tell us not to do it, if only that that’s a fellow human being, and they have loved ones at home.”

  But that’s the thing about psychopaths.

  There is no thought about another person’s place in the world, or the damage that spreads like rings on water when a rock is tossed over a bridge.

  “Those who are psychopathic absolutely have no remorse for what they are doing,” said Ramsland. “They don’t really care about people being in pain, unless they’re a sadist, then they care because they want them to be in pain. A psychopath and a sadist are not one in the same, but if you get the two in combination, you have a very, very dangerous person.”

  Richard Cottingham was very dangerous indeed.

  “He was far different from people that I’ve met and I’ve met some people from all kinds of bad backgrounds or bad situations, but he I think he’s intrinsically evil,” said his defense attorney Donald Conway, long after Cottingham was safely secured behind bars.

  Added his former coworker, Dominick Volpe: “He fooled around with hookers, a lot of people do that. Nobody kills people. Nobody decapitates people. Nobody rips people’s hands off. I think he’s a sick son of a bitch.”

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  More books by Jack Rosewood

  Among the annals of American serial killers, few were as complex and prolific as Joseph Paul Franklin. At a gangly 5’11, Franklin hardly looked imposing, but once he put a rifle in his hands and an interracial couple in his cross hairs, Joseph Paul Franklin was as deadly as any serial killer. In this true crime story you will learn about how one man turned his hatred into a vocation of murder, which eventually left over twenty people dead across America. Truly, Franklin’s story is not only that of a true crime serial killer, but also one of racism in America as he chose Jews, blacks, and especially interracial couples as
his victims.

  Joseph Paul Franklin’s story is unique among serial killers biographies because he gained no sexual satisfaction from his murders and there is no indication that he was ever compelled to kill. But make no mistake about it, by all definitions; Joseph Paul Franklin was a serial killer. In fact, the FBI stated that Franklin was the first known racially motivated serial killer in the United States: he planned to kill as many of his perceived enemies as possible in order to start an epic race war across the country. An examination of Franklin’s life will reveal how he became a racially motivated serial killer and the steps he took to carry out his one man war against the world.

  Open the pages of this e-book to read a disturbing story of true crime murder in America’s heartland. You will be disturbed and perplexed at Franklin’s murderous campaign as he made himself a one man death squad, eliminating as many of his political enemies that he could. But you will also be captivated with Franklin’s shrewdness and cunning as he avoided the authorities for years while he carried out his diabolical plot!

  GET IT HERE

  The world can be a very strange place in general and when you open the pages of this true crime anthology you will quickly learn that the criminal world specifically can be as bizarre as it is dangerous. In the following book, you will be captivated by mysterious missing person cases that defy all logic and a couple cases of murderous mistaken identity. Follow along as detectives conduct criminal investigations in order to solve cases that were once believed to be unsolvable. Every one of the crime cases chronicled in the pages of this book are as strange and disturbing as the next.