Sadistic Dismembering Murderer | Crime Up Close | Born To Kill?
In the late7s, a merciless serial killer began to strike in New York and New Jersey. It was a very big story because of how gruesome it was. His methods heenous and extreme. These were very bizarre and bloody crimes. Beheaded, burnt, chopped up. He killed with callous confidence. Some narcissists absolutely believe they are invisible.
They’re untouchable. It was the second case of a woman’s body being found on the premises of this motel. But who was this serial sadist? What sick son of a would do something like this? And was he born to kill? [Applause] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. God. [Music] In 1977, New Jersey detective Alan Grio was about to be confronted by a mystery. We received a call that a young
married woman was reported missing from her apartment complex in Little Ferry, New Jersey under suspicious circumstances. [Music] Maryanne was an X-ray technician who had uh been married a short period of time. They lived in a garden apartment. There were very strange circumstances in that uh uh the report came from her husband who was away on a business trip.
Maryanne had failed to keep an appointment that evening with her mother-in-law. concerned. Maryanne’s husband had called the police. There did not appear to be anything broken in the apartment. No broken uh glasses, no forced entry on the door, and we had no indication at all as to what had happened to Maryanne car. Despite her husband’s apparent absence, there had been a suspicious sighting at the time of Maryanne’s disappearance.
We had a witness who lived in the same apartment building who said that as he was backing his car out of the uh parking lot, he saw a person in his rear view mirror that he thought was Maryanne Carr’s husband. Although they didn’t know it at the time, Maryanne’s husband bore a likeness to a former resident of the Little Ferry Apartments, a successful New York computer operator, Richard Francis Cotttingham.
He worked in what they refer to as Midtown Manhattan, right in the heart of the um business district for Luke Cross Blue Shield, which is a very substantial insurance company. Fellow computer operator Dominic Vulpe worked with Cotttingham for 13 years. I and Richard worked on the console together, chatting a lot. He was well read.
He was uh up to date on current events. He was uh he read a lot of stuff about medicine. He was pretty smart at the time. A console operator was a big thing. It took four floors of complete square block of a city for 17 megs of memory. Okay. No one ever heard of a gigabyte then, but it was the cutting edge at the time.
The thing that I noticed most about him is he couldn’t sit still. He was always uh I called him the leg shaker. He was always sitting in his office chair shaking. His legs were shaking. His back was shaking. And he would he would keep that up for the a whole shift for 8 n hours straight. [Music] Across the river in New Jersey, investigating the disappearance of X-ray technician Maryanne Carr, Detective Grio was called to a motel near the airport.
In the parking lot, a body had been discovered. She was clothed in a white nurse’s uniform. Maryanne Carr was no longer a missing person, but now the victim of a homicide. We could observe Maryanne Carr’s body lying in this area between the curb and the fence. Maryanne Carr’s body uh had ligature marks on the uh wrists and the ankles from handcuffs.
So, we know that uh we knew that handcuffs were used in Maryanne Carr’s murder. And she had a liature mark along the aspect of her neck. Investigators speculated Maryanne had been dumped from the trunk of a car, but had no solid leads. We had no idea of how she had gotten to where she was found, nor why she was there, nor who would have been responsible for removing her from her apartment and taking her there.
However, it wouldn’t be the last time they would be called to that location. A tale of terror and torture had only just begun. In December of 1977, the body of married X-ray technician Maryanne Carr had been discovered dumped in the parking lot of a New Jersey motel. With no real leads, Detective Alan Grio was facing frustration as the investigation began grinding to a standstill.
You need to have the investigation lead you in a particular direction. Without that direction, it’s like a shotgun blast that you’re covering all of these uh different things that 99% of them have no connection whatsoever. While Maryanne Carr’s case stalled, police were kept busy by a series of violent attacks in the airport area.
There were actually a number of incidents of sexual assaults that had taken place within that time period in which victims were either found on the side of the roadway or reported to be in motel rooms semiconscious. The attacks were perpetrated on prostitutes that had been picked up in New York City, where New Jersey resident Richard Cotttingham worked as a computer [Music] operator. He was strange.
I mean, most of the stuff we talked about other than the job uh at the time was stuff that he uh he did after work supposedly. You know, he talked about S&M clubs he’d go to. He’d talk about prostitutes. Cotttingham made no secret of his enjoyment of New York’s dark entertainments. New York City at that time was a very different place than it is now.
The Time Square uh area was a se virtual cesspool. Forno houses uh up and down the block. street walkers uh for blocks around photojournalist Alan Tannenbalum captured the prostitution industry at the time whilst working for the Soho news. It was rampant. It was all over the place but especially concentrated in the few blocks around here. It was quite funky, very seedy.
I can I can give you an example. Right around the corner. We got three strippers right here. Strip together. You stick together. Everybody loves a stripper. Come on in. All right. The girls would work on these corners by the subway entrances in doorways close to the peep shows and solicit asking uh men going out on a date and or the men would approach them.
It was pretty obvious who was a working girl. 8th Avenue was one of the more uh seedy parts of this strip. In fact, it used to be called the Minnesota strip. Uh that’s because girls would uh come to New York City from the Midwest, get off at the Port Authority, and they would immediately uh get hustled by pimps who would put them into prostitution.
I think a lot of them were were runaways and a bit naive and probably not arriving with a lot of money so that they would get trapped into this kind of situation. Now these young women were being plucked from the city streets and brutally assaulted. Prostitutes are very very common victims.
Why? The hardest thing in getting a victim is the abduction. How do you get a woman to go with you? Um, you have to talk to her. And even if you could talk well and you’re somewhat articulate and charming and engaging, not all women are going to go with a stranger. The problem with the abduction is eliminated by targeting prostitutes.
That’s part of their job description, to go with strangers, take their clothes off, uh, and have sex. The victims were being drugged, beaten, and dumped in an area just across the river in New Jersey. not far from where the body of X-ray technician Maryanne Carr had been found. There’s a lot of motel in the area and they’re not highass motel.
They’re uh places that are used for uh hour traffic, much of it from New York City. One of the patrons of those motel was computer operator Richard Cotttingham. He used to talk about uh how he would be able to lure a prostitute out of Manhattan, showing them he always had two pockets full of cash and tons of cash, thousands of dollars.
He would show a prostitute the cash. He would take them to New Jersey. But Cotttingham, it seemed, didn’t like the idea of paying for his pleasure. He talk about not letting anybody uh get the best of him. One time we had a long discussion about this hotel that he went to and how he could slip out of the place, you know, when she was asleep and take her.
He said he took her clothes and her money and left her in the room. You know, when you’re at work and you talk, some of it you believe, some of it you don’t believe. Take you take, you know, goes in one ear, out the other. You take it with a grain of salt. Meanwhile, the attacks on the New York working girls continued. Dumped, discarded, and left for dead.
One of the girls was left in this motel on the corner here called the airport motel. She had been picked up. She was brought to a bar in New York City called Flanigans. And that’s the last thing she could recall. Near a major hospital, Flanigan’s bar was a popular haunt for Richard Cotttingham. An analysis of her blood and urine uh indicated that she was drugged.
The young victim had been subjected to a horrifically violent ordeal. When she was found, she was unconscious in the room and uh she was in pretty bad shape. He sodomized her. Um he beat her um very very severely, bit her breasts very uh severely. Prostitutes are sexual service providers and that offends many serial sexual murderers.
As ironic as it sounds, many serial sexual murderers view themselves as highly moralistic and they want to degrade prostitutes who are behaving in what they consider to be um an unpermissible sexual conduct. They’re very very mixed up sexually. And so you would think that they would understand prostitutes and relate to them and understand but they don’t.
They have very very twisted sense of sexuality. In December 1979, someone would strike out against prostitutes in a way that would send shock waves through the city. It was a very big story even for Manhattan. It was very big. I clearly remember it because if only because of how gruesome it was. Emergency services had been alerted to a fire in a room at the Travelin Motor Lodge near Times Square.
There they found 23-year-old DD Gazi and another unidentified young woman. They were two alleged prostitutes that were discovered in beds in a motel room and the bodies had been desecrated. Each woman’s head and hands had been cut off before the beds were ignited. Beheaded, burnt, chopped up, and nobody knew who was responsible. It was a mystery.
The dreadful nature of the crime led to the mystery perpetrator being dubbed the Times Square Ripper, and news soon hit the Manhattan computer room where Dominic Vulp and Richard Cotttingham worked. This guy, his name was Rob. He came in, he said, “What sick son of a would do something like this? Take the heads and the hands off a girl and burn them in.” All right. So, I looked at Connie.
I mean, he shook his head like this. Well, Rob, could have been you, could have been me. I thought he I thought it was a joke. The depraved crime appeared to have no connection to the murder 2 and a half years earlier of X-ray technician Maryanne Carr. Her body found in the parking lot of a New Jersey motel.
It did not seem to have any connection to our case. Uh it happened in New York City. uh with the bodies being desecrated the way they were, New York City had a tremendous amount of homicides every day. So there was no direct connection made at that time. This is an important point because we found in our research that about 70% of serial sexual murderers will experiment at a crime scene and do something very very different with one victim that they had not done with the other, such as cut their eyes out, cut their vagina out, and so on. Now, when an investigator
without extensive experience in this field looks at that, one victim looks so very different, they’re led to believe, at least from their own experience, that it has to be someone else. That’s incorrect. However, detectives were about to be called to a scene with a similarity that couldn’t be ignored. [Music] At the same location that Maryanne Carr had been found two and a half years earlier, a chilling discovery had been made.
A chambermaid was cleaning the room and uh thought she detected what was a foul odor coming from the bed area. lifting the mattress from the frame. She was startled to see the uh naked handcuffed body of a female deceased female lying there. [Music] It was extremely frightening and disturbing to the chamber mate to say the least.
We uh sometime later learned was Valerie Street who had been a prostitute in New York City. On her lower back there was an abrasion uh which had been made by a sharp object. Uh we thought at the time it was a knife. That was torture marks. It’s eroticized the power and control that the offender has over the victim to make the victim realize that he, the offender, is in control of life and death.
And so very often the offender will prolong her agony to kill her in a very very slow and deliberate way so that she’s aware that he’s going to kill her. a monster was on the loose and it was clear he wasn’t afraid to return to the scene of his crimes. That was the second case of a woman’s body being found on the premises of this particular motel.
I think that the fact that he’d use the same hotel is narcissism. And that brings us to the concept of narcissistic immunity. Some narcissists absolutely believe they are invisible. They’re untouchable. They’re so superior to everybody else that there’s no chance that they’re ever going to get caught. As if to prove the killer right, identifying a suspect was proving impossible.
We had no idea who the perpetrator of the murder of Valerie Street was. In just a matter of days, the Times Square Ripper would strike again across the river in New York. During May 1980, 2 and a half years after the murder of X-ray technician Maryanne Carr, a New Jersey motel had become the scene of a second brutal killing with the discovery of prostitute Valerie Anne Street.
Meanwhile, in the computer room of a large New York insurance firm, Dominic Vulpe would listen in disbelief to fellow operator and family man Richard Cotttingham as he openly discussed his desires for the city’s dark [Applause] entertainments. He was very upfront about it. bragged about prostitutes, SNM, gambling, all those vices that he had, he bragged about.
Cotttingham claimed to be a regular visitor to Sato masochistic clubs. He would describe things that went on there. He talked about a woman that was was walking around with a guy on a leash. He was on his knees. He would walk into the bathroom. Cuttingham would follow him and watch this. The girl made him lick the urinals with his tongue.
He liked the slave thing, you know, handcuffs and treating people, you know, that that had no way of helping themselves. It seems from an early age, Richard Cottingham had liked being in control. Back in Pasak Valley, New Jersey, Richard Newman was on the same high school track team. I met Richard on the athletic field.
Richard stood apart in the sense that he wasn’t always at practice as I remember. He um wasn’t a joiner. He didn’t have a nickname. He wasn’t part of our little click. He had a kind of wise guy attitude about him. Dismissive of teachers and of school in general. I don’t think he was crazy about authority. He would stand out from groups.
It’s common for narcissists who believe they’re better than others and obviously they’re at heart insecure, but he just has disdain for what other people are doing and doesn’t really want to be invested in it. He thinks he’s superior to everybody else. He was kind of a big guy, several inches taller than me, I’m sure.
Broad shoulders. I don’t remember him menacing students in general. I do remember that the two or three friends of his that he seemed to lord it over them a bit like he was the leader of the pack so to speak. He was certainly attracted to women but my recollection is that he did not have a girlfriend.
When he spoke about women it was kind of in a negative way. Being in the locker room reminds you of the expression locker room talk. I certainly remember him talking among his friends and perhaps in gym class if I remember about what girls were attractive to him. And the only inkling you would have of the way his mind works is that he would talk about um the girls in class or I guess the girls out on the street too who were perhaps uh were better endowed uh you know larger breasted.
That just seemed to be sort of a key attraction for him. It’s one thing to have an interest in large breasted women because you think they’re attractive. It’s another to have an obsession with the breasts, not the women, the breasts. And that then becomes what we call a paraphilia or an abnormal um sexual interest that is needed for arousal.
Now in his mid30s, Richard Cotttingham would brag to his co-workers about his use of prostitutes. But it seems Cotttingham didn’t enjoy all aspects of the vice trade. I heard one conversation about he had an aerial disease that he contracted through a prostitute. And at that point he was he was he was sounded angry when he mentioned the hookers.
Less than 2 weeks after the discovery of the second body of the New Jersey Motel, the Times Square Ripper struck again in New York. In a burning hotel bedroom, the body of another young working girl was found. Both breasts had been sliced off and taken away. In almost all serial sexual murder cases, they will go above and beyond killing the individual and engage in postmortem activity that to them is sexually gratifying.
This type of ritualistic behavior grows out of the offender’s fantasy life. And very often as a series of murders occurs, the individual’s behavior becomes much more elaborate. As the offender gains much more comfort in killing, the ritualistic behavior is apt to become more personalized and more embellished.
With a depraved killer on the loose, police in New York and New Jersey were in a state of frustration. But then one week later, the killer would make an uncharacteristic mistake and reveal himself for the first time. Yet again, the motel in New Jersey would be thefocus. There was a great deal of excitement uh when we got the call from the Hasbro Police Department, which said that they had just apprehended a suspect attempting to flee from the motel.
The motel front desk was alerted to a disturbance in one of the rooms. They decided to send one of their representatives to make sure that the occupants were okay. It took several minutes for someone to be coaxed to the door. Verbally she said, “Yes, everything is okay.” but with her eyes gave the impression that everything was not okay.
The motel staff immediately called the police and an officer was dispatched. And when he responded, he responded to that area of the motel towards the farthest corner where there is an entrance. A man was observed running out of the building in a suspicious manner carrying a bag in his hand and at the time of his arrest he had the handcuffs tape used to either place over the mouths of the women or bind their hands or feet or what have you.
So all of these items were incriminating and he had no real explanation for it. The fleeing man was identified as Richard Francis Cotttingham of Loi, New Jersey. He had a wife and children, was a computer operator in New York City. He was in his mid30s. He was kind of stocky. He was at at least average looking except again, as I say, he was kind of stocky.
Well built, you might say. his wife. She described him at to my recollection as a devoted husband. Uh she said that he was very attentive uh to his children. Despite being virtually caught in the act, Richard Cotttingham professed his innocence. He just flat out denied it. And I, you know, I found it very difficult to accept.
They sort of caught him red-handed, as one might say. He was somewhat smug in his attitude and his answers. Although at one point he indicated, “The only thing I’ll say is that I have a problem with women.” Investigators immediately moved to search Cotttingham’s New Jersey home. We prepared a search warrant to look for any evidence that might be associated with female abduction, rape, murder.
This is the street that Richard Cottingham lived on. Cotttingham resided with his wife and children in a two family home in a pleasant suburban setting. There’s a middle-ass neighborhood. I would describe it as uh workingclass people. Nothing would stand out of the ordinary. He seemed to be a normal dad and husband.
It’s what we didn’t know was hidden underneath. He truly was a monster. Inside the family home, detectives would discover evidence of a man who reveled in sadistic murder. in the lower basement of his home. He had a large room which was locked which his wife or his children did not have access to. Now his guy married with three children but he has in this room I suppose one could refer to them as souvenirs or memorabilia or whatever you want to call items that he took from these women after he tortured them and and murdered them.
People that we call organized serial killers often take trophies. They will take something from victims uh like an earring or a shoe or a piece of clothing, a purse. They’re like big game hunters. The trophy room helps them to relive those moments where they felt most in control. The trophy room is a nice metaphor for this compartmentalized life.
This is the place where they go to just completely fully indulge in their narcissistic fantasies of what they’ve done to other people. Now the successful computer operator, husband and father was identified as the Times Square Ripper and murderer of the women at the New Jersey Motel. His capture stunned those that had known him at work.
It was like it was unbelievable. No one talked about anything else. He cutting him got arrested and blah blah blah. And it was articles in the newspaper being copied every day. He talked about crazy things, but we never thought he would do crazy things. You know, I got chills on my arm just thinking about it now, 35 years later.
So, so I mean it was a complete shock. Amongst his co-workers, Cotttingham had never made any secret of his vices of prostitution, Sedo masochism, and gambling. He was a gambler. Uh he was not afraid to take chances on anything. He usually won I would say 95% of the time he was a winner. He always said that he can get out of anything.
There was nothing to take him over. In other words, he would always win. He used that gambling thing in his head for everything that he did. He was a winner. [Music] Now, Richard Cotttingham was about to gamble on being able to outwit his accusers and beat the legal system during his trial. He seemed to be a uh very conscious participant uh along with his attorney, taking notes, paying very close attention to the testimony of the victims and of the witnesses against him.
You could sense that he was calculating all the time. I came to the conclusion that he was um devious at best. After several weeks in court, everybody, of course, the the jury, the judge, court officers, everybody sort of had the same impression. Mr. Codingham was a very intelligent man. He was not as intelligent as he thought he was.
He thought he was more intelligent than everybody else. That was that was part of his personality. Cotttingham denied all the crimes and claimed that on the one occasion that he had been caught at the motel with prostitute Leslie Odell, the activities had been consenting. What’s more, despite the advice of his lawyers, Cottingham insisted he wanted to personally take the stand.
That was explained to him. you’re going to be cross-examined and uh there are a lot of holes in your story that probably will be exposed, but he he wanted to testify. A guy like Cunningham enjoys being smarter than other people, particularly the law enforcement. He thinks he’s the smartest person in the room, no matter where he is.
He wants to show everyone his brilliance and how smart he is. I started my cross-examination by getting him to admit the things that he could not deny as any good prosecutor would do. He could not deny that he was arrested with multiple pairs of handcuffs. Handcuffs were used in the murders of Allerianne Street and Maryanne Carr.
They were used in the assault on Leslie Odell. He could not deny that he had mouth suppressants. He could not deny that he had a knife and a knife was used against Valerie Street to torture her on the lower back. Could not deny that. He could not deny that he had the barbiterate pills in his satchel. Barbbiterates were used on one of the uh victims that he had uh sexually assaulted and thrown on the roadside.
He could not deny that he bit Leslieanne Odell’s breasts. He could not deny it because it was in the photographs part of the assault on Valerie Anne Street. On the stand, Cotttingham was forced to admit that he had a fascination with bondage. But as the pressure intensified, no one could have predicted the extent to which he would go to avoid imprisonment.
After taking the stand in his own defense for multiple assaults and murders, New York computer operator Richard Cotttingham was faced with intense cross-examination. Under increasing pressure, the defendant had revealed a fascination with bondage since his childhood. From everything that we were able to piece together, he had a typical upbringing, a middle class, lower middle-ass family, very close to his mother.
Cotttingham had been born in New York’s Bronx neighborhood before moving with his family to the leafy Pasak Valley in New Jersey. His home was about 2 miles from where I uh lived. It was a great area to grow up in. There was plenty of parks and open space. Yeah, this is it here. This is where he lived.
A modest home set back from the road. Um, I didn’t go in the house, but um, but I remember that this was where he lived. I know his mother was devoted to him. These individuals are in very dark and perverse, sexually sadistic fantasies from very, very early on. The fantasydriven crimes like serial sexual murder begins 10, 15, 20 years earlier in the offender’s mind.
Cotttingham would claim that his deviant desires had grown out of the use of pornography. It’s a common trajectory with sadistic sexual serial murders is to begin with ordinary pornography, even just erotic literature, even just cataloges that show women in underwear. Some people stop at various stages because they don’t really like the rest.
They they’re fine with the tame stuff. Others want more. And if that is what appeals to them and excites them and arouses them, they will continue to get more and more extreme with it. Not all serial killers are sadistic sexual murderers. Those who are tend to become very extreme with what they do to their victims.
A portrait developed of a monster with a devious method of operation. He would go out on the street, meet these girls, say to them, “I want to take you out, not just to have sex in a car or some such thing, but I’d like to take you to a restaurant. I just want a lot of money uh in a card game or gambling.
” And he would show them a wad of money with a $100 bill around it. And of course, I guess these girls were impressed. They would go to dinner with him and at some point he would drug them and then he was able to lead them out of the place into his car and take them to a motel and sexually assault them plus cut them and try to torture them. That’s the kind of person he is.
As the evidence mounted, Cotttingham faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. Still, by hook or by crook, the killer was determined to avoid incarceration. I had briefly left the courtroom and gone downstairs to my office. And as I came back into the courtroom, I immediately saw the matron in a frenzy running from the area of the holding cell.
And without her saying a word, I knew that he escaped. During a break in proceedings, Cotttingham had decided to make an audacious bid for freedom. Took a jacket and threw it uh against the sheriff’s officer’s face, befuddled the sheriff’s officer, and went about uh one of the back stairways. I could see him running from the courthouse across the street.
We chased him uh across the street. A another sheriff’s officer had spotted him as well and we both tackled him on the street and uh put him in handcuffs and restrained him and brought him back to the courthouse. Richard Cuttingham would not elude authorities again. He was found guilty and condemned to spend the rest of his life in prison.
But was this serial sadist mad, bad, or born to kill? What makes them think they’re going to get away with it? That’s what I dwell on more than anything else. What makes them think they can continue to do it and have this smug attitude and exercise this this awful power over people? There’s lots of things inside our mentality, inside our personality that tell us not to do it.
If only that that’s a fellow human being and that they have loved ones at home. Those who are psychopathic absolutely have no remorse for what they’re doing. They don’t really care about people being in pain unless they’re a sadist and they care because they want them to be in pain. Um, so they’re a psychopath and a sadist.
not one and the same, but if you get the two in combination, you have a very very dangerous person. Some people might have trophies for uh their exploits in baseball or basketball or golf um or awards that they get for community service. These were his trophies. These were his conquests. These were uh his criminal activities which he had gotten away with.
And these were his trophies of how intelligent he was, uh, how charming he was, and how smarter than everyone else he was. Codingham is is pretty much a very classic serial sexual murderer. The best way to understand serial sexual murder is to view it as a deviant sexual arousal pattern where sex and aggression become fused and the aggressive act itself is eroticized.
Whether it’s choking or cutting or stabbing in regular sexual intercourse in normal conditions, there is some level of pain inflicted a and received and there’s some level of biting a and these sorts of things. In serial sexual murder, those particular behaviors are exaggerated enormously and really take a life on of their own.
I think there is something in their genetic makeup. I think it is a twisted mind that associates sex with harm, hurt, injury, and death. I think uh someone who’s a psychopath already starts at a disadvantage um as he then gets exposed to things that lure him into wanting power over other people and in particular being a sadistic type of person.
Um the the idea of being born to kill comes pretty close to him. In 2010, the incarcerated Cotttingham admitted to the murder by strangling of 29-year-old mother of two, Nancy Vogle, in 1967 when he was just 20 years old. And Cottingham is suspected of several other possible slayings. One thing is for certain. For those that met him and were lucky enough to survive, Richard Cotttingham, torturer, murderer, mutilator, will never be forgotten.
He was far different than people that I’ve met. And I met some people from all kinds of bad backgrounds or bad situations, but he I think is intrinsically evil. You know, you fool around with hookers, you fool around with nurses, you fool around with this, you fool around with that. Fine. 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
