Schreiber offers no actual evidence for his connection to the murders of the two boys. He was probably a psychopath who liked to manipulate people and enrich himself. He spent his remaining time in prison writing poetry and fixing shoes. How much of the published information about him is true is anyone’s guess. Schreiber’s hunger for another bestseller seemed to have diminished her journalistic capabilities.
Thrill Killers
IT’S RARE FOR TWO SERIAL KILLERS TO operate around the same time in roughly the same geographical location, but in areas with dense populations, there’s a higher probability. Here, I cover two cases that involved New Jersey murders during closely related time periods.
THE BODY OF A WOMAN was found in a parking lot of a Quality Inn in Hackensack. It was a cold December day in 1977. Police were called and they discovered that she’d been suffocated. There were indications that she’d also been bound, most likely inside one of the hotel rooms. The victim was identified as Maryann Carr, 26. She was a married X-ray technician from Little Ferry. How she’d crossed paths with a killer was unclear. So was the killer’s identity.
No one yet realized that two years later, another murder in a seedy motel in Manhattan would be connected. Smoke pouring from Room 417 of the Manhattan Travel Inn Motor Lodge drew the fire department. They broke into the room and saw a nude female on one of the beds. When they dragged her out of the smoke-filled space to resuscitate her, they discovered she had no head. Her hands had also been removed.
When police entered the crime scene, they discovered a second nude female body in the same room, similarly mutilated. Both had been bitten extensively and the bodies had been torched with lighter fluid. Their clothing was carefully folded in two stacks.
Both victims had been raped, tortured, and mutilated before being killed and dismembered. Only one was identified – Deedah Goodarzi, a prostitute. The heads and hands were nowhere to be found. It was hard to believe that a killer could have left the premises with two heads and two sets of hands, but a large enough suitcase would have hidden these items. (Crime writer Peter Vronsky recounts bumping into a sweaty man in the lobby at this hotel on the day of the fire and says the man carried a duffle bag or suitcase. He would later identify this man as the killer.)
The next scene for this killer was back in New Jersey. On May 4, 1980, the body of a 19-year-old prostitute from Manhattan was found under a mattress in a motel room in Hasbrook Heights. Like the others, she’d been tortured pre-mortem and mutilated. She’d also been strangled. Investigators estimated that this young woman, Valerie Ann Street, had been tormented over the course of at least six hours. There were numerous bite marks on her breasts and one nipple had been chewed off.
It was just eleven days before another woman, Jean Reyner, was similarly treated in a New York Hotel. She’d been set on fire. Both of her breasts were removed and her throat was cut so deeply she was nearly beheaded. Before the end of that month, however, the serial slayer made a mistake and got caught.
Richard Cottingham was torturing a prostitute, 18-year-old Leslie Ann O’Dell, in the same Quality Inn in Hasbrook Heights that he’d used previously. O’Dell screamed for help, which drew a maid’s attention. She called police. They found the girl and got her to a hospital. She’d been raped, sodomized, stabbed and severely bitten.
Cottingham had been apprehended in the hallway. In his possession were handcuffs, pills, a slave collar, and surgical tape. Cottingham did not resist arrest, but he tried breaking a lens from his glasses to cut his wrist. He failed in this suicide attempt.
This separated father of three, formerly a star athlete in high school, was from Lodi. He was a computer programmer for Blue Cross-Blue Shield. In his home was a trophy room that attested to his sadistic desires. He’d kept several items identified as belonging to victims. Police learned that his wife had recently filed for divorce, citing extreme cruelty.
Cottingham had a distinct signature that helped link him to the prostitute murders. He incapacitated his victims with a chemical restraint, bound and gagged them with physical restraints, battered or burned them in vulnerable areas, and cut or gouged them with sharp implements. Making them suffer as they died created an illusion of power. Two cases were linked by arson, the others by specific methods of restraint and abuse.
Because sexually sadistic torture-killers are rare, finding several brutalized victims in the same geographical area supports linking them to a common offender. Linkage analysis improves if the rituals are specific and unusual, such as linear incisions he made on the breasts and his cutting, burning, and battering of sexual areas. The bodies of each victim revealed methodical, prolonged, ritualistic torture, and the intensity was unmatched by any other killer in the northeastern U.S. at the time.
He’d also left fingerprints on a pair of handcuffs with which he’d bound Valerie Street, and four survivors came forward to testify about his brutality.
In 1981, Cottingham’s trial for the murder of Valerie Street and the abduction and assault of the four survivors lasted five weeks. During this time, he tried killing himself twice. Once convicted, he told the judge, “I am deeply ashamed and embarrassed for getting into these episodes.”
This statement is a far cry from remorse. Basically, he was embarrassed by his inept mistakes. He received a sentence for various charges of 173-197 years. Cottingham was never getting out of prison. He went to trial for other murders and received more prison time.
While in prison, Cottingham admitted to a 1967 murder, adding a sixth victim to his list. He pleaded guilty to killing Nancy Schiava Vogel, a mother of two, in Ridgefield Park. She’d been abducted on her way to visit friends. Cottingham had known her and apparently had followed her.
NOT LONG AFTERWARD, other murders turned up in New Jersey. In mid-January 1983, children playing in a wooded lot behind a Burger King along Route 35 in Ocean Township found the body of eighteen-year-old Anna Olesiewicz. She’d been shot four times in the head. Fully clothed, the body displayed no sign of sexual assault. Apparently, she’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time when someone decided to grab her and take pot shots. Police had no leads.
Then on January 22, they were tipped to a body in the home of a man in Asbury Park. Richard Biegenwald, his wife, and a friend named Dherren Fitzgerald lived there. Officers surrounded the home and used a ruse to get Biegenwald to come out. When he stepped onto the porch, they grabbed him and placed him under arrest.
Fitzgerald heard what was going on, so he hid inside a secret room where he had some guns. The detectives figured out where he was and demanded that he come out, but he wouldn’t budge.
“We’ll shoot you through the wall,” one of them stated. He meant it.
Fitzgerald reluctantly emerged and surrendered. The home yielded drug paraphernalia, sedatives, weapons, pipe bombs, date-rape drugs, floor plans for various businesses, and even a live puff adder.
Fitzgerald decided to save himself by sacrificing his “friend.” He told what he knew about the Ocean Township shooting victim, but he’d also seen another body and knew of a third one. He’d trade a reduced sentence for excursions to the dump sites.
Biegenwald, it turns out, had a record that started with a murder in 1958 when he was 18. A fire-setter as a child (a severely abused one), he became an alcoholic before puberty. When he was nine, he underwent electroshock therapy and was sent to a detention center for juvenile delinquents. He became a petty thief and then a car thief. On December 18, Biegenwald robbed a grocery store in Bayonne at gunpoint and shot the proprietor. Despite getting a life sentence, he was released in 1975. He’d escaped the death penalty due to the victim’s wife’s intervention. She couldn’t have known that she was ensuring that more people would die in the future.
Over the next few years, Biegenwald was suspected in several rapes, but never charged. He got married and moved to Asbury Park, where he befriended Fitzgerald. In 1983, he lured Anna Olesiewicz into his car and shot her. He then showed an acquaintance of his
wife’s the body of a young woman in his garage. She went to the police and he was soon under arrest.
Fitzgerald told police about Anna Olesiewicz and then described a female body he’d helped Biegenwald bury in the backyard of Biegenwald’s mother’s deteriorating blue house in Staten Island (by some accounts, in her garden). While he was digging, he turned up pieces of another body of someone Biegenwald had buried earlier. One of these victims was 17-year-old Maria Ciallella, from Brick, who’d gone out on Halloween in 1981 and never came home. The other girl was Deborah Osborne, also 17, who’d been missing over the past year.
As the yard was dug up, Biegenwald’s 68-year-old mother shook her head in dismay. He’d been trouble his whole life, she said. She hadn’t known that “the Jersey Shore Thrill Killer” had been using her yard as a private cemetery.
In addition, Fitzgerald led police to two other bodies. One was Betsy Bacon, 17, buried in Tinton Falls, and the other was a man buried in a shallow grave in a cemetery Neptune City. This person, William Ward, had once been Biegenwald’s friend. In 1982, Biegenwald had shot Ward four times in the head.
In 1993, Biegenwald pleaded guilty to killing Betsy Bacon. His reported motive for murder, according to the prosecutor, was simply to watch someone die.
Biegenwald was tried for five counts of first-degree murder and found guilty. At the age of 67, he died in prison from respiratory failure on March 10, 2008. Biegenwald once claimed to have killed over 300 girls with long dark hair. This claim was never corroborated.
Yuppie Ambition
JUST BEFORE 9 AM ON April 29, 1992, a jogger noticed a car at the end of the 200-foot driveway of the Morris Township mansion where Exxon International executive Sidney Reso lived with his family. The engine was running and the driver side door was open. But no one was inside the car. The jogger alerted the family and they called the police.
His wife, Patricia, was frantic. Reso had left at 7:30, she said. No one had heard from him since then. She believed that something terrible must have happened to him. It was his habit to collect the newspaper on his way out. Someone must have grabbed him when he was vulnerable.
Exxon had become a hate target. The company had destroyed the waters and wildlife in Prince William Sound in Alaska just three years earlier when an abundance of oil had leaked from a ship. Environmentalists (not to mention taxpayers) were angry at this inexcusable waste and corruption. Police thought that Reso, as Exxon’s representative, might have been kidnapped in some sort of revenge plot.
However, there was no ransom note within the first few hours. No directions about what to do. No terrorist group taking credit. Maybe the 57-year-old had just decided to leave his life altogether and start over somewhere else.
Finally, there came a note. It was left on a guardrail in a parking lot at the Livingston shopping mall. A female had called to give instructions on where to find it. Now the theory reverted to the environmental activism motive.
“We propose to make industry pay for this continuing campaign,” the note stated. “To ensure your contribution we have seized the President of your International Division. Our research, based upon your previous payments and other factors, indicates that you [sic] share will be $18.5 Million. Gather the money in used $100 bills.” The kidnapper urged Exxon to obtain a portable cell phone and place a disguised telephone number in a newspaper. “If you do not fully comply he [Reso] will most certainly die. We have observed and developed information on many of your personnel. If we do not hear from you we will sieze [sic] another of your employees.”
Over the next few days, several more letters arrived, along with a tape recording of the executive’s weary voice. He gave directions on where his family should leave the $18.5 million for his safe return, stuffed into Eddie Bauer laundry bags. Some of the notes were signed, “Warriors of the Rainbow.”
The kidnappers made eight separate calls to Mrs. Reso, instructing that some responses be published in the New York Times. Exxon prepared the money. On May 3, it was taken to the spot that the kidnappers had identified, but no one came for it. The Resos were frantic.
By this time, the FBI was involved, and it became the third largest kidnapping investigation in America, after the Lindbergh baby and Patty Hearst kidnappings. Agents installed devices in the Reso home to trace calls that might be made and analyzed the contents of the notes. On some, they found strands of dog hair. These were from a golden retriever. The kidnappers asked that the private cell phone number be published in the Newark Star-Ledger.
With content analysis, the agents were able to profile the incident. Since the kidnappers had demanded that the money be put in Eddie Bauer duffel bags, obviously had a golden retriever, and read the New York Times and Star-Ledger, they were probably upscale. They would reside in the general area. They probably weren’t a terrorist group, or even a group at all. From the way the notes were written, it seemed as if the kidnappers were trying a little too hard to prove that they were terrorists.
Eventually, the kidnappers dropped the eco-terrorism issues and emphasized the money. So the agents involved figured that they were a middle-class couple in some financial difficulty who’d thought they could make a quick buck.
Later that month, the kidnappers threatened to execute Reso and put his body on public display. They set the next attempt at an exchange for June 16, leaving a series of notes in various places. FBI agents in disguise went to the drop site, and ended up taking a rambling ride for several days into three counties as calls came in with new instructions. Dozens of agents were involved.
The surveillance team at the Chester Mall spotted a white man wearing gloves making phone calls at a pay phone. Then they saw a woman doing the same thing. Now they had them! The man got into a rental car, an Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera that they were able to trace to Bette’s Rent-a-Car in Hackettstown, discovering that it had been rented to former Exxon security guard Arthur Seale. He was currently unemployed. That fit the picture.
When Seale returned the car to Bette’s, the suspect woman who’d made calls picked him up in a white Mercedes. Upscale! They were followed and finally stopped. The FBI arrested and charged them with kidnapping Reso. Inside the Mercedes were a set of license plates, a pair of rubber gloves, a director that contained the home addresses of Exxon executives, and a briefcase that contained .38-caliber bullets.
Because Reso was still missing, it was paramount that these two “eco-terrorists” reveal where he was. Agents put pressure on this Yuppie couple from Hillside to tell what they knew. They didn’t budge. Days passed and Reso’s family could only hope that they’d provided for him. Surely someone was guarding him in their absence! He had a heart condition. They hoped he was okay.
IT TOOK TEN DAYS, BUT FINALLY Irene turned on her husband. She spilled the beans.
The couple, Arthur and Irene Seale, 45 and the parents of teenagers, were deep in debt – just as profiled. In fact, they were so destitute they had moved in with Arthur’s parents. Arthur’s job at Exxon had involved designing protocols to protect executives from kidnapping attempts, so he’d known the weaknesses. The couple was in debt to the tune of $750,000 from a failed business they’d attempted in a resort town after Arthur had left Exxon in 1986. (Some accounts say he was fired, some say he resigned.)
Arthur had concocted the kidnapping and ransom scheme. Irene had gone long with it. They considered two different targets, watched the Reso home to learn his habits, and forced him that morning at gunpoint into their rented van. (Four prior attempts had been thwarted when a limousine had picked him up.) Irene had blocked the driveway with a rented van while Arthur, in sunglasses and a ski mask, grabbed Reso. However, the gun had gone off when Reso struggled. He was hit in the forearm and seriously wounded.
The Seales drove him to a small self-storage facility in Washington Township, blindfolded, bound, and gagged him, and locked him into a pre-arranged, homemade six-by-three-by-three-foot box with air holes the size of an index finger. They provided only superficial medi
cal treatment and some Tylenol. They gave him no food and minimal water, because “it would cause problems.” They’d known from news reports that he had a heart condition. Nevertheless, they’d kept his arms and legs tightly restrained and his mouth duct-taped. Even a healthy person would have had a tough time surviving in these conditions.
Between dehydration, malnutrition, loss of blood, and heat exhaustion from the hundred-degree temperatures inside the unit, Sidney Reso died on May 2, after four terrible days of suffering. The Seales tried to resuscitate him, but failed.
Unsure what to do, they buried him in a shallow grave in a remote area of the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey and continued with the plan. They needed the money. Once they got it, they decided, they’d take off. The death was an unfortunate turn of events, but it couldn’t be helped. Arthur suggested kidnapping another Exxon executive, but Irene had refused to do it again.
She showed the agents where Reso was buried, so the body could be returned to the family. Arthur pleaded guilty to kidnapping, extortion, and murder. He received a sentence of 95 years and a fine of $1.75 million. The judge told him he was evil and should receive no more mercy than he’d shown his victim. Irene got 20 years, because she’d cooperated. Currently, she’s free. Many people, including the judge, believe she got away with murder.
The De-Humanizer
THIS CASE UNFOLDED NEARLY IN my backyard. I live within a mile of one of the crime scenes and have visited others. It started for me when reporter Rick Hepp called from the Newark Star-Ledger. He wanted me to comment on an interview that two detectives had just conducted with a suspected killer. I read the contents and immediately called my contact at the Philadelphia Inquirer. I told him to get someone on this story: it was going to make headlines. (In fact, this offender would end up becoming the only serial killer that 60 Minutes had ever interviewed.)
Shadows of Death (True Crime Box Set) Page 5
