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

  “It’s common for narcissists to believe they’re better than others, and obviously at heart they’re insecure,” Ramsland said. “But he just has distain for what other people are doing and doesn’t really want to be invested in it. He thinks he’s superior to everybody else.”

  Narcissists don’t take responsibility for their actions and refuse to admit that they have faults or are ever at fault, even if they go on a years-long murder spree.

  Cottingham refused to plead guilty, despite the overwhelming amount of extremely incriminating evidence that was found when he was caught, and he made a point of blaming his victims, years after his arrest. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, he said, and that was not on him.

  Evil hiding behind a normal life

  In his senior high school pictures, Cottingham wore slicked back hair and a nice suit. There was no smile on his face or in his eyes, but to those around him he didn’t seem unlike any of the other guys graduating as a member of the class of 1964, with the Beatles as background music to the early days of both the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.

  After graduating from high school, Cottingham went to work as a computer operator at his father’s insurance company, Metropolitan Life, which for years used Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the rest of the “Peanuts” gang to sell life insurance.

  Seemingly innocuous, Cottingham used his nondescript work as a shield of sorts, and he melted into the business casual atmosphere of insurance.

  While at Met Life, Cottingham beefed up his resume by taking as many computer classes as he could, and after two years he moved on to Blue Cross Blue Shield of Greater New York.

  “He worked in midtown Manhattan in the heart of the business district, at Blue Cross Blue Shield, which is a very substantial insurance company,” said Donald Conway, who would eventually serve as Cottingham’s defense attorney at the first of his four trials.

  At Blue Cross Blue Shield, he shared a work station with Dominick Volpe.

  The two worked the 3 to 11 p.m. shift, which left mornings and nights free for Cottingham to feed his fantasies, hanging out at S&M clubs, learning the fine art of domination.

  “I and Richard worked on a console together, chatting a lot,” Volpe said. “He was well-read, up to date on current events. He was pretty smart.”

  He was also living a double life and was a Jekyll and Hyde beyond anything Volpe or anyone else in Cottingham’s inner circle had ever imagined.

  Chapter 2: Murder on his mind

  A year into the job at Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cottingham murdered Nancy Schiava Vogel, who was somehow sidetracked on her way to play bingo at her neighborhood church.

  It was on Friday, October 27, 1967, and 29-year-old Nancy told her husband of nine years, Henry, that she was going out to play bingo at St. Margaret Roman Catholic Church in Little Ferry, New Jersey.

  Henry wasn’t worried because bingo was a regular tradition in the predominantly Italian Catholic neighborhood. But when the late-night news was over and Nancy still wasn’t home, he started to worry.

  And when the mother of two still hadn’t returned home by the next day, which was totally out of character for the loving mom, a frantic Henry reported her missing.

  Police launched a search but turned up nothing in or around the neighborhood suggesting anything had happened.

  A gruesome discovery

  On Monday, however, two 12-year-old girls had just gotten home from school at St. Francis Parochial and were in the upstairs bedroom of one of the girls when they noticed what looked like a waxy mannequin in a car on the street below.

  They went to investigate, and after looking inside the vehicle and seeing that it wasn’t a mannequin after all, ran to the house of a neighbor, who summoned police.

  The 1960 four-door Rambler Nancy had been driving was parked on Homestead Place near a neighborhood park. Inside the car, police found the missing housewife, beaten and strangled. She was naked and her hands were tied in front of her, bound with a thin nylon cord.

  Her clothes were folded neatly and placed beneath her body.

  Nancy had apparently never made it to the bingo game. Packages from Valley Fair Mall in the trunk of the car containing two pairs of shoes and a blouse suggested that she had been sidetracked by the lure of shopping, and police now believed that someone she met at the mall likely had something to do with her murder, and they began to seek out witnesses.

  At the crime scene, evidence showed that Nancy had fought hard for her life. Her face was bruised, and there were signs of a serious struggle.

  Still, a rope or tie around her neck had led to her death from asphyxiation, according to the coroner’s report, and that was a fight she had not been able to win.

  Police centered their investigation on those who knew Nancy, including the friend she had planned to meet at bingo.

  That friend confirmed that Nancy had never turned up at the church.

  Other leads, including a man’s recollection that he’d seen Nancy talking to two men, one of them he described as a hippie, never panned out.

  A week after her body was found slumped over in her car, Nancy’s case went cold, and her family was left with questions they feared would never be answered.

  An unlikely suspect

  Cottingham was not yet 21 the year he killed Nancy Vogel.

  The two both lived in Little Ferry, New Jersey, and Nancy likely thought little of it when Cottingham approached her car after running into her at the mall. It might have been easy to talk her into driving somewhere other than bingo, given his silver-tongued approach to attracting his victims.

  “He had known Mrs. Vogel,” said Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli. “They were not strangers. He lived in Little Ferry, Mrs. Vogel lived in Little Ferry. So they did know each other.”

  While the particulars of the encounter aren’t known, Nancy was killed in her car, which Cottingham then drove to a different location in order to prevent her from being found for a while.

  “He did murder her in the vehicle and then park the vehicle,” Molinelli said.

  At the time, there was nothing about him that would make him appear to be a suspect, unless police were listening in on his conversations at work.

  At work, Cottingham talks a big talk

  At the console he shared with Dominick Volpe, Cottingham didn’t edit himself when he chatted with his coworker.

  “He talked about crazy things, but we never thought he would do crazy things,” Volpe said. “I get chills on my arms thinking about it now, 35 years later. It was a shock.

  “He was very upfront about it, bragging about prostitutes, S&M, gambling, all the vices that he had he bragged about,” Volpe added. “He liked the slave thing, the handcuffs…”

  Essentially, he took pleasure in having control over others, and that, combined with Cottingham’s love of living on the edge, made his an ideal candidate for murder.

  “He was a gambler, and he was not afraid to take chances on anything,” said Volpe. “He would always win, usually. He always said he could get out of anything. He used that gambling thing for everything that he did. He was a winner.”

  Or so he bragged, anyway.

  And while it would be more than 40 years before Cottingham would be connected to the murder of Nancy Vogel and forced to pay the price, eventually, that winning streak would come to an end.

  It’s a surprise that his fall from grace didn’t come sooner, giving his favorite topics of conversation with the guys he hung around with at work.

  “He was strange. Most of the stuff we would talk about, he’d talk about what he did after work,” Volpe said. “He’d talk about S&M clubs he’d go to, he talked about prostitutes. He used to talk about how he could lure prostitutes out of Manhattan, and he always had two pocketfuls of cash, thousands of dollars. He would show prostitutes cash and take them to New Jersey.”

  Still, stories of S&M clubs with bondage equipment, whips, and ball gags could have been just big talk fr
om the guy sitting next to him at the console, Volpe thought.

  “When you’re talking at work, some of it you take with a grain of salt. It goes one ear and out the other,” he said.

  But the narcissist in Cottingham felt so untouchable that he talked a totally truthful game at work about his nighttime escapades, and was not one bit shy about sharing his dangerous BDSM activities with his coworkers.

  Because he had more on his mind than sex, however, Cottingham felt more at home in his own New Jersey stomping grounds, where he knew the territory and the locations that were safest for him to carry out his crimes. Those flashes of cash were an easy draw for the desperate whores working Times Square and allowed him to entice them to places where he himself felt safer.

  As he told Nadia Fezzani, after it was over, it was if nothing had happened, and he erased it from his memory, except for the times he fantasized about bigger and better murder scenes.

  But even if his mind was able to put aside his crimes, his body sometimes gave him away.

  “The thing I remember most about him is that he couldn’t sit still,” said Volpe. “He would be sitting in his office chair shaking, his legs were shaking, his back was shaking, and he would keep that up for a whole shift, for eight, nine hours straight.”

  With an off-hours life like that of Richard Cottingham, anyone would be a bit jittery.

  It would also appear that Cottingham drank to quiet the demons raging inside him and keep his nerves in check.

  In 1969, he was arrested for drunk driving, an offense that earned him 10 days in jail and a $50 fine.

  Chapter 3: Would a wife mean a new life?

  On May 3, 1970, Cottingham married his wife, Janet, a pretty woman with long, thick, dark hair and the large breasts Cottingham favored, at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Queens Village, New York.

  The church was Roman Catholic and made of stone, suggesting strength that neither 23-year-old Cottingham nor his marriage would ever possess.

  And as for any trouble the new couple would someday have, for now, fuggedaboutit, as the Italians in his New Jersey neighborhood might have said.

  Cottingham and Janet moved into a cute little apartment at Ledgewood Terrace in Little Ferry, a borough in Bergen County, New Jersey, that’s likely today most famous for being the birthplace of “Cake Boss” baker Buddy Valastro.

  The move allowed the couple to live a safe, suburban lifestyle while he commuted to work in NYC, via one of two New Jersey Public Transport buses with lines that provided transportation to mid-town Manhattan.

  Of course, there were a few blips in their happy little marriage.

  On August 21, 1972, Cottingham was arrested and convicted of shoplifting at Stern’s Department Store in nearby Paramus, New Jersey. Again, he was ordered to pay a $50 fine.

  Plus, there were affairs. Apparently Cottingham’s sexual urges weren’t completely satisfied by his wife, who might not have been into the bondage and discipline fantasies he’d had since he was young, or by the prostitutes he bragged about picking up to his co-workers. He was, it seemed, always wanting more.

  On September 4, 1973, about a month before his first child was born, he was arrested on robbery, assault, and sodomy charges, although those charges were ultimately dropped.

  For many women it would have been enough to bring the marriage to an end, but Janet toughed it out, perhaps believing the stories her husband told her about how it wasn’t him, the police were wrong, it was all a terrible mistake. It was never his fault, after all.

  Their oldest son, Blair, was born on October 15, 1973, and it should have been a happy time for Richard and Janet Cottingham.

  But Cottingham, it seems, couldn’t manage to stay out of trouble.

  A few months after the boy’s birth, Cottingham was charged with unlawful imprisonment and robbery, but again, the case was dismissed.

  Setting off for a fresh start

  In 1975, likely as a way to give his family a new start after creating what was likely significant family stress over his arrest record, Cottingham moved them to a three-bedroom rental home at 29 Vreeland St., in Lodi, New Jersey, a place that currently rents for almost $2,500 a month.

  That same year, the Cottinghams greeted their second son, Scott, on March 28, 1975. Their only daughter, Jenny, followed soon after, on October 13, 1976.

  Between the births of his two children, Cottingham laid low, but that wasn’t going to last for long.

  He had a way about him

  Soon after their last child was born, Cottingham began an extra marital affair with a woman named Barbara Lucas. The relationship lasted for two years, ending in 1980. Throughout their affair, Cottingham was raping, killing, and mutilating women and then going home to either his wife or his girlfriend, without a care in the world.

  That was the psychopath in him.

  “Most serial killers are psychopaths. It is the personality disorder that can allow them to commit a homicide and, then deal with their family as if nothing has happened,” said FBI profile Mark Safarik. “One of the attributes that makes them successful in getting away with these crimes is not so much that they’re really smart - some are, but many are not - it’s that they’re psychopaths. They’re unaffected emotionally about the crime itself. Twenty minutes after murdering and raping somebody and dumping their body in a ditch, they can act completely normal and be unaffected by the crime. It’s this appearance of normalcy that enables them to blend into society. It’s not that they’re really intelligent. It’s just that they make a plan and learn to be better killers from their mistakes.”

  And if a wife, a girlfriend, and victims weren’t enough, Cottingham still had a certain charisma that allowed him to attract other women, who never felt apprehension when approached by the sexual sadist.

  “I always had the ability as a young fellow to attract women,” he told Fezzani when she visited him at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, New Jersey.

  He attributed his way with the ladies to his fearless approach.

  “You know, it’s one of those things you can’t explain. If I went to a bar, very rarely would I walk out without a woman. Because I could understand the psychiatry, the psychological effect of how to pick up women, what they were looking for. I would always go to the prettiest ones because most men were afraid, and they’d go to the average-looking girl or the average person, the heavyset one that they figure would be an easy catch. I would go for the sharpest girl in the place.”

  And as his former coworker said, he usually scored. Cottingham was, for whatever reason, a winner.

  “Sometimes I’d go out with girls for two, three months, then we’d just part ways,” he said casually, not in any way hinting at the words that would follow.

  “But sometimes I would kill them. And nobody knew a thing.”

  A madman hiding in plain sight

  That confidence, along with his underlying psychopathy, the characteristic that allowed him come home and eat dinner with his family after committing a murder, made it easy for Cottingham to live a double life.

  “Many serial killers hide in plain sight within their communities,” according to the FBI. “Serial murderers often have families and homes, are gainfully employed, and appear to be normal members of the community. Because many serial murderers can blend in so effortlessly, they are oftentimes overlooked by law enforcement and the public.”

  Because they can go quite some time living completely under the radar, it makes them brazen, and that is usually when they slip up.

  “As serial killers continue to offend without being captured, they can become empowered, feeling they will never be identified. As the series continues, the killers may begin to take shortcuts when committing their crimes. This often causes the killers to take more chances, leading to identification by law enforcement. It is not that serial killers want to get caught; they feel that they can’t get caught,” according to the FBI.

  It would take Cottingham quite some time to slip up, however.
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br />   Chapter 4: Woman’s disappearance triggers concern

  It was just a few weeks before Christmas of 1977 when Mary Ann Carr went missing from the Ledgeview Terrace apartments where she lived with her husband.

  The 26-year-old X-ray technician had been planning to meet with her mother-in-law while her husband was away from home on business, but she never showed up.

  By the time her husband returned home family members were frantic, and immediately called the police.

  “We received a call that a young married woman was reported missing from her Little Ferry, New Jersey, apartment complex under suspicious circumstances,” said Lieutenant Alan Grieco of the Bergen County Sheriff’s Department in New Jersey.

  When police arrived at the scene, there were no clues as to what might have happened to the pretty X-ray technician.

  “There did not appear to be anything broken in the apartment, and we had no indication at all as to what had happened,” said Grieco.

  There was a witness, a neighbor who lived in the same garden apartments as the Carrs, who saw something strange, however, that for a time put Mary Ann’s husband squarely under the police microscope.

  “He saw a person in his rear view mirror that he thought was Mary Ann Carr’s husband,” Grieco said.

  Her husband, however, had a solid alibi, and the lead went cold.

  It would be years before police realized that Cottingham looked a lot like Mary Ann’s husband and connected her murder to him through the calling cards he left behind.

  Mary Ann’s horrifying last hours

  No one knows how Cottingham was able to entice Mary Ann Carr into his vehicle on the day she disappeared. Maybe they talked about the apartment complex, maybe he used Ted Bundy’s ruse and pretended to need some help. Whatever the case, Cottingham abducted Mary Ann from the apartment parking lot and then took her to a hotel where he raped, tortured, and murdered her.