Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  Gradually, Cottingham revealed to her that Deedeh was not a random prostitute he had picked up and lured to his room, but had been one of his “favorite girls” for several years. He described her as an “upscale escort” he had met in a downtown club in New York. This was an unknown element in the case. Apparently, he had specifically called her to come to New York from New Jersey when he booked a “sex weekend” at the hotel. Witnesses reported to police that Deedeh had left Trenton on the Friday prior to the weekend, the same day that Cottingham checked into the hotel. Cottingham then lured from the nearby neighborhood the second victim to the hotel room. Cottingham said he regretted killing Deedeh and blamed the inexperience of the unidentified teenage prostitute he had picked up, claiming that she was an “amateur” causing him to “go too far” and resulting in the deaths of both women. In that, he remains typically a serial killer; it’s not his fault, but the victim’s. In this case, one victim is held responsible for both her own and another victim’s death.

  We know that Cottingham was killing random women he picked up, while at the same time maintaining relationships with two mistresses in New York, all the while he had a wife in New Jersey. He also had a series of more casual girlfriends, “friends with benefits” and regular escorts he favored. Most of them survived his bouts of sadistic sex and torture; however, sometimes he ended up killing the women, including those he knew, indeed “going too far” as he had put it. In addition to Deedeh, Cottingham had been acquainted with at least two of his other victims, Nancy Schiava Vogel and Maryann Carr, prior to their murders.

  It wasn’t necessarily that Cottingham set out to kill; killing was not his fantasy—torture was. He simply just couldn’t care less whether his victims lived or died. Several of his victims were found dumped by roadsides or in parking lots, bruised, cut and battered and drugged into an unconscious state, but alive. Others were found in similar conditions, but dead. He would rape and torture until he was satisfied, and if the victim survived, then fine; if not, then fine too. Cottingham probably is not much help to police in closing many more cold cases because he does not know himself how many of his victims he left dead or alive. He never cared enough about it to know.

  Between what we think was his first murder, in 1967, and his arrest in 1980, there could be hundreds of women who were lured, drugged, raped and tortured by Cottingham but never reported it, especially if they were prostitutes. And among them, several dozen in New York and New Jersey and elsewhere in the vicinity could have been murdered and remain cold cases to this day. For example, on August 9, 1974, seventeen-year-old Mary Ann Pryor and sixteen-year-old Lorraine Kelly vanished while on their way to a mall in Bergen County. Their bodies were found five days later. They had been tortured with a lit cigarette, raped and strangled. Cottingham has been long suspected in this double murder, but if he did it, he might not ever admit to it because of the young ages of the victims. It could potentially affect his status in prison, where fellow inmates might become hostile to somebody who killed teenage girls.

  Cottingham’s revelation that he knew Deedeh answers one of the questions forensic psychologists have been puzzling over for decades about this case. His beheading and mutilation of the two victims in the hotel was not his usual signature. This appeared to be the first time he perpetrated that level of mutilation. Was he escalating? Was it “pathological” or was the mutilation “functional,” to conceal the victims’ identities? The severing of the heads and hands (along with the fingerprints that came with them) pointed in the “functional” direction, but if he had picked the women up at random on the street, why bother concealing their identities? They could never be linked to him. But if indeed he knew Deedeh for several years as he claims, then it made sense to remove the head and hands.

  Complicating matters for forensic psychologists and profilers, Cottingham’s next murder was in New Jersey, but the victim was not mutilated like the two in New York. Then Cottingham returned to kill another prostitute in New York, at the Seville Hotel, again setting the room on fire, but this time he cut her breasts off and left them behind on the bed board. Why do that? All this now, with his revelation, suggests that Cottingham staged the mutilation in the Seville Hotel to persuade police that the beheading of the victims in the previous double murder was the work of a crazy, pathological “ripper” rather than a “functional” act to disguise their identities. Cottingham was a deranged serial killer posing as a different type of deranged serial killer. It worked. Until his arrest, police had not linked his murders in New Jersey with those in New York, and until Cottingham revealed to Jennifer the extent of his previous relationship with Deedeh we were never sure what exactly had motivated the mutilations in New York.

  Since discovering the identity and fate of her birth mother, and that Cottingham had actually known Deedeh for several years before killing her, Jennifer had been struck by not only her own close physical resemblance to her biological mother and even to some of her reported behavioral traits, but to her killer’s as well. As Cottingham began recounting his friendship and long relationship with Deedeh before and after her pregnancy, Jennifer came to be haunted by the possibility that Cottingham actually might be her biological father. She produced a number of photomontages revealing a disturbing combination of similarities between her own face and both Deedeh’s and Cottingham’s.

  When she broached the topic with Cottingham, he thought it was unlikely, but acknowledged that it was a remote possibility. Cottingham recalled that Deedeh had contacted him to tell him she was pregnant, which he thought at the time was an unusual thing for an escort to do. Back then he did not give it any further thought, but now he too wonders whether Jennifer is his own daughter. It is not outside the realm of possibility. Cottingham has agreed to supply her with a DNA sample for a paternity test.

  Jennifer had asked Cottingham to reveal to her where he secreted her mother’s severed head and hands and she pledged to him that she would forgive him for what he had done and be his friend (perhaps even daughter, if the DNA test is positive) until his death in prison.

  Although obviously wary of his past and his capacity as a psychopath to deceive and manipulate, Jennifer has in a way “adopted” Cottingham and taught him how to address, write and send e-mails. They correspond almost daily. She told me it is hard for her to continue to hate this aged, seemingly helpless man confined in a wheelchair behind bars. The closer she comes to forgiving him, the more liberating of her past it becomes. Forgiveness and kindness heal, she said, not only the recipient but the giver as well.

  Recently she had been approved for contact visits. Unlike regular visits, where inmates interact with visitors through glass windows and speak through monitored phone handsets, contact visits allow for a brief hug and direct private conversation and contact without glass. On her first contact visit, Jennifer sat with Cottingham, holding the hand of the serial killer who had killed and beheaded her mother. She affectionately calls the white-bearded monster “Snowflake” and the two sometimes quarrel like a cantankerous father and his restless daughter. It’s a modern tale of Beauty and the Beast.

  Jennifer started up a Facebook page called “Serial Killers Need Hugs Too” on which she shared with followers (and Cottingham) brief accounts of her visits with him and her suspicions that he may be her birth father and her willingness to forgive him for the murder of her mother, which she sees as a way of freeing herself from her past. One of her coping mechanisms is her irreverent “serial killers need hugs too” sense of humor. She shares “inappropriate” pictures and serial-killer jokes with Cottingham, many heavily laced with innuendo and crude locker-room humor. She sends him Photoshopped gag images of them together arm in arm, vacationing at a casino or her sitting on the lap of Santa Claus, with Cottingham’s white-bearded face pasted in. She sends him pictures of her modeling “serial-killer design” T-shirts she produced featuring Cottingham quotes, like “With a hacksaw, very easy” (a comment he had made about cutting off th
e heads of his victims).

  When Cottingham was at large as a serial killer, he had a history of illicit relationships with women, including several prostitutes. He spoke of “tutoring” them in their business and partnering in scams with some of them. Something drew Cottingham to troubled and nonconformist women, but if they crossed him or somehow “betrayed” his friendship with them by lying to him, he tortured and killed them. Cottingham once described how a simple thing like a woman lying to him about being a vegetarian resulted in his torturing and killing her. Whatever it was that drew Cottingham to befriend those troubled women is no doubt drawing him to Jennifer, herself a tortured soul. He warns her, however, if he catches her lying to him, he will cut off all contact, the closest he can come to “killing” her, should Jennifer betray him.

  While Cottingham is both amused and titillated by Jennifer, he is also disarmed by her black sense of humor and has been made to feel that nothing he says will shock her or result in judgmental condemnation from her. She speaks with him in the same locker room vernacular that Cottingham uses, persuading him that nothing that he admits to having done to her mother will shock her or change her friendship and willingness to forgive him.

  Because of my own encounter with Cottingham in the hotel when he was fleeing the scene, I found myself drawn to Jennifer’s unfolding story. Being among the last people near whom Deedeh’s head had passed on the way to its current secret hiding place, I feel a need for some closure myself, and perhaps this is it: to help Jennifer recover her mother’s head.

  Jennifer has told Cottingham that she is communicating with me about her visits with him and has cleared the way to my having exchanged several e-mails with him in which he has assured me he would do almost anything for her, but he himself is not seeking any notoriety. I told him it was too late for that. After her visits with Cottingham, Jennifer calls me to recount what they talked about, and I caution her on the propensity of psychopaths to dissemble and lie, to connive and control those around them. In assessing his accounts, we try to fish out anomalies contradicting the record and my own recollections of the timeline of the fire in the hotel, trying to ascertain whether Cottingham is genuinely confessing the truth (or confessing the truth as he may remember it and think it was), or just plain making up things that he thinks Jennifer wants to hear.

  I was writing these last lines of this book when Jennifer called in a more excited state than usual. Cottingham had just revealed to her where her mother’s head and hands are buried.

  Cottingham said he wanted to find a respectful way to part with Deedeh’s severed head and hands the morning after killing her. He intended to put them in a river so that they would float out into the ocean. He said, “I thought that would be something nice that she would have appreciated.” Arriving at his chosen location, a riverside parking lot at the end of a dead-end road, Cottingham decided that the tide was not favorable for the remains to float out to the ocean. Instead, he chose to bury Deedeh’s severed head under a nearby “beautiful tree.” (He did not say whether he buried the other victim’s head and hands, the unidentified “Jane Doe,” in the same place, but it is likely he did for convenience.)

  It is a location I am coincidentally very familiar with, one that I had scouted years before as a possible film location, lonely and isolated but easily accessible by car, with a dramatic vista of the city near a prominent New York landmark. The location would be ideal to bury severed heads on a cold December Sunday morning. There would have been nobody there, and any approaching vehicles could only come from one direction and be visible at a distance. Historical weather reports indicate no major cold spells before that December 2, 1979, and the ground would not have been frozen hard, although Cottingham said it was difficult to dig because “The soil was tough, full of rocks.”

  Cottingham could of course be lying, because that’s what serial killers do, but if he’s not, and if animals did not get to the remains, there is no reason that the skeletal heads and hands of both women cannot be found and recovered. Cadaver dogs specially trained in scenting traces of old human remains and decomposition absorbed by soil decades previously have been successfully locating the resting places of missing US soldiers killed as long ago as seventy years, during World War II, and are being used in the search for the remains of the pilot Amelia Earhart, who went missing in the Pacific in 1937.2 Perhaps, although a long shot, “Jane Doe” could still be identified.

  Jennifer contacted the law enforcement agencies that had prosecuted Cottingham; however, they have not responded enthusiastically to her information. Cottingham has already been convicted for the murders, and for the authorities, there is no upside to spending resources to recover heads buried nearly forty years ago in a closed case.

  Jennifer is now intent on recovering her mother’s head and reuniting it with the rest of her body on Hart Island, one way or another. She invited me to come down, meet Richie in person and write one more time about him and her mission. In February 2018 I flew to meet Jennifer and to visit with Richard Cottingham in prison, a kind of “reunion” since briefly running into him at random thirty-nine years ago that fateful morning in 1979 which had so much changed my life. I suppose now, there is going to be another book after all.

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