Most of the stuff never happened that way. You see, the police are the most corrupted in the world. They will plant evidence on you. They will hide evidence that’s in your favor. - Richard Cottingham

Richard Francis Cottingham is an [alleged] American serial killer from New Jersey perpetrating murders in New York and New Jersey between 1967 and 1980. He was nicknamed The Torso Killer and Times Square Torso Ripper after his dismemberment and decapitation of two victims on December 2, 1979, in a Travel Inn hotel on West 42nd Street and Tenth Avenue in the vicinity of Times Square.

According to the official story, he tortured and murdered sex workers Deedeh Goodarzi, age 22, and a still unidentified teenage victim, severed their heads and hands, and set their torsos on fire. Cottingham fled the scene with the severed heads and hands, which were never recovered. One detective said it was 'the cleanest crime scene he's ever seen.' There was no evidence except for their clothing, a pair of Bonjour jeans, a white leotard, patent leather boots and a black fur coat, which the killer had curiously folded neatly in the bathtub.

Confounded, investigators used mannequins from nearby department stores and dressed them in the victims' clothing, hoping someone might come forward with information.

On May 5, 1980, police found the body of 19-year-old Valerie Ann Street in a Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. The victim's hands were tightly handcuffed behind her back. She was covered in bite marks and was beaten across the shins. Street had died of asphyxiation. This murder was later linked to an earlier murder in the same motel.

The body of radiologist Maryann Carr, 26, was also found brutally beaten near the same hotel, but police could not positively link the crimes until after Cottingham's arrest. On May 15, Jean Reyner was strangled and her throat cut in the historic Seville Hotel.

Maryann Carr, a nurse for a prominent Englewood physician and the wife of only fifteen months to a young Little Ferry businessman.

Starting in 2014, Cottingham admitted to killing an additional three women (Jacalyn Harp, of Midland Park; Irene Blase, of Bogota; and Denise Falasca, of Closter, all of whom were strangled in the late 1960s).

In April 2021 Cottingham confessed to the unsolved 1974 double-abduction, rape and murder of teenagers Lorraine Marie Kelly and Mary Ann Pryor in Montvale, New Jersey. The confession was facilitated by Detective Robert Anzilotti of the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office shortly before his retirement. Anzilotti spent 15 years meeting with Cottingham, working toward the confession, which raised the total number of victims attributed to Cottingham to 11.

Cottingham was eventually apprehended on May 22, 1980, in a New Jersey motel in the act of torturing a teenage sex worker he had lured and driven to the location from New York City.

​​When arrested he had handcuffs, a leather gag, two slave collars, a switchblade, replica pistols and a stockpile of prescription pills.

In a series of trials in New Jersey and New York 1981 to 1984, Cottingham was convicted of five murders, two in New Jersey and three in New York, plus multiple charges of kidnapping and sexual assault. In 2010, Cottingham pleaded guilty to the 1967 murder of Nancy Vogel.

Officially, Cottingham killed 11 people, but he claims to have committed between 85 and 100 murders.

Cottingham is incarcerated in New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, New Jersey.

Deedeh Goodarzi - Sex worker, Had a pimp named called James Thomas, worked in mob-owned bars, familiar with Iranian drug deals.

Goodarzi and Jane Doe were tortured for about three days before being killed!

The bodies were left posed for maximum shock value.

Sergeant Beakmon, who would be called to tesitfy in Cottingham’s pending trials for three prostitute murders in 1979 and 1980, recalled with painful ease that the hotel rooms where Jean Reyner, Deedah Goodarzi, and the third, unidentified sex worker were butchered were also set on fire. He wondered if the latest prostitute murder might be a belated copycat who just didn’t have time to strike a last match before he finished his grisly deeds.

Cottingham worked for his father an executive at Metropolitan Life from 1964 to 1966 as a computer operator, while taking computer courses. In October 1966 he went to work as a computer operator at Blue Cross Blue Shield Association in New York until his arrest in 1980.

His bosses said he was one of their most productive and valuable employees, capable of doing the work of any two other workers.

During his thirteen years of service in the 200-member computer staff, Richard had acquired the reputation as an expert. His salary, while not outstanding, had risen gradually until he was earning about $25,000 a year.

Richard Cottingham was a married father of three from Lodi, New Jersey.

He liked to go to places like the Continental Baths & Plato's Retreat.

Richard told his colleagues at work about ''The Hellfire Club’’ and the Master & Slave acts inside.

In his basement he had a locked room. Cottingham was an avid reader. His collection included such sensations as, ‘’Harem Girls in Bondage,’’ ‘’Kidnapped by Bikers,’’ and one of a series of books on the subject called ‘’The Captive Bride.’’

But of far more troubling concern was the claim that Cottingham was an unofficial member of a growing sex cult.

Richard had 2 or 3 thousand dollars in each pocket and he waved it around to be noticed among sex workers.

Besides his ‘’fascination’’ with seeing women in leather, the defendant also acknowledged one of his other life-long dreams. He wished to become an accomplished gambler. ‘’I grew quite avid over gambling and quite good at it,’’ Cottingham said in an almost boastful tone. His real successes came with liar’s poker, he related, explaining why he carried a bundle of one-dollar bills, usually one hundred of them, with a twenty wrapped around the outside. He modestly admitted his weekly winnings at poker was about $75 to $80, but that betting on sports events would bring in $500 to $800. Even with these supposedly modest earnings, the defendant’s arrogance was barely concealed. ‘’I was one of the few people I’ve ever known to gamble and come out on the plus side,’’ he told the jury.

On October 3, 1969, Cottingham was charged and convicted of drunk driving in New York City, and sentenced to 10 days in jail and a $50 fine.

On August 21, 1972, Cottingham was charged and convicted of shoplifting at Stern's Department Store in Paramus, New Jersey and was sentenced to pay a $50 fine.

09/04/1973 New York City: Charged with robbery, sodomy, sexual assault, but case was dismissed

02/12/1974 New York City: Charged with unlawful imprisonment, robbery, but case was dismissed

In 1977, Cottingham had a friend and co-worker by the name of John Van Soest. Van Soest lived in New York and was anxious to move to the suburbs. Cottingham had known Van Soest for several years while the two men worked together in the computer department at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Greater New York.

Van Soest had a lot of expensive recording equipment–a hobby of his was sound recording.

Van Soest also testified that the two men talked about the disappearance of Maryann Carr. Van Soest knew Miss Carr. One of his closest friends, a policeman who lived in Building 462, had been at Michael and Maryann’s wedding in 1976. Van Soest socialized a great deal with others who lived in Building 462. Still, it was Richard Cottingham who thought it was odd the way Maryann was apparently abducted.

One other important factor in the Soest-Cottingham ‘’friendship’’ had to do with $15,000. Cottingham was going to loan Van Soest the money, but the two friends had a falling out over the terms of the loan. Judge Galda later acknowledged there might be some ‘’bias’’ in Van Soest’s testimony in court.

Cottingham testified in his own defense at his murder trial. Included details of his fascination with bondage ever since he was a child, but denied that he was into hurting others. Denied that he knew any of the women who claimed to be his victims except for Leslie O’Dell, for which he was caught.

The testimony of one of Cottingham’s earliest victims–a young housewife from New Jersey, who had been abducted from Manhattan, beaten, and dumped unconscious behind a garden apartment complex–was challenged by Donald Conway on grounds that a sheriff’s officer had barred him from watching the woman as she identified Cottingham in a lineup.

The defendant had been deprived of his legal right to representation at a crucial moment, Conway argued; his lawyer had been unable to prevent the police from coaching or otherwise influencing the woman. Who knew what had gone on? Conway asked that the woman not be permitted to identify Cottingham as her kidnapper before the jury. It was one of those legal technicalities that have set many other criminal defendants free.

Later in the trial, the judge threw out a rape charge because the state had no medical records to back it up. The county medical examiner had failed to write on the woman’s hospital chart that he had found signs of rape during a physical examination.

When the defense produced Blue Cross records indicating that Cottingham was at work when some of the crimes were committed, the prosecution unearthed an old co-worker who testified that Cottingham frequently disappeared from the office for hours at a time.

A former girlfriend said Cottingham had been with her on several days when the insurance company’s attendance logs indicated he was on the job.

Another former co-worker told the jury that Cottingham had once drawn a diagram of a New Jersey motel to show how he had sneaked out without paying the hookers he had lured there.

Anna Cottingham, a 73-year-old widow trying desperately to help her son, sells her Florida home to pay the final bill from Donald Conway. It cost the family more than $35,000 for the defense, and what had they received? Richard Cottingham, Anna’s only son, was given a jail sentence of 173 to 197 years for the murder of Valorie Street and the kidnapping, assault, and sexual torture of three other women. It was a bitter pill for Carol Jacobsen. She still insists that Conway ‘’sold out’’ her brother.

‘’My brother didn’t murder anyone,’’ she asserted. Although Carol conceded that Richard was ‘’involved’’ with prostitution, gambling, and loansharking, she stubbornly argues that her brother is the real victim. She even suggested that, because Cottingham brushed with serious criminal activity in New York, the Mafia was ‘’out to get him.’’ She speculated that Richard made enemies with his gambling by using his winnings to freelance as a loan-maker. If it is true he made loans and demanded high interest, or vigorish as the loan sharks call it, Cottingham would not have endeared himself to the underworld. But such small competition could be eliminated much easier and with greater swiftness than the slow, if deliberate, pace of the courts. Nevertheless, Carol Jacobsen believes someone did her brother in. If it wasn’t organized crime and Cottingham’s flirtation with their ire, then it was the people who run the criminal justice system. And her mother, if no one else, agrees. ‘’It’s the biggest farce I’ve ever seen,’’ Anna Cottingham tearfully declared on June 11, 1981, the day her son was convicted.

Carol Jacobsen, unrelenting in her belief that some conspiracy was behind her brother’s troubles, thought she could answer the question she posed not long before Bergen County was prepared to go int court on the second murder trial. ‘’It’s all a game being played by the prosecution.’’ she charged. ‘’We, the people, are the fools if we let this happen.’’ The gutsy Florida housewife accused the prosecutor by name, saying Dennis Calo was ‘’using his personal vendetta against Richard to further his career.’’

06/14/1981 Attempted suicide by drinking six ounces of a liquid antidepressant in his cell at the Bergen County jail

10/04/1982 Attempted to escape during Carr trial, but was quickly recaptured by authorities.

07/05/1984 Attempted suicide by slashing his left forearm with a razor before startled jurors.

(Sources: The Prostitute Murders: The People Vs. Richard Cottingham by author Rod Leith & Netflix's Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer)