Richard Cottingham

By Peter Vronsky

I bumped into Richard Cottingham for about ten seconds one early Sunday morning in New York City in December 1979.

I was working as a production assistant on a movie being shot in Toronto. My job was to fly out to New York every few days and personally deliver our exposed film for a special type of processing at a laboratory located near the Times Square area. It was a great gig: I would fly into New York in the morning and quickly drop off the film, and then I was on my own until it was ready for pick up the next day.

Usually I would be handed an airline ticket and an envelope of cash, and I was expected to arrange my own hotel and meals. Film crews routinely stayed at good business-class hotels—Sheraton, Hilton, and so on— and I’d be given enough cash to stay and eat in those kinds of places.

Young, punkish, having backpacked to New York previously and slept on the floor of CBGB’s on the Bowery and fed myself on cheese and wine by attending gallery openings, I couldn’t care less about upscale accommodations. I was content to routinely book cheap tourist-class hotel rooms on my film deliveries. I would spend the cash I saved on clubbing, record albums, books, and electronics. But on one such trip I went too far.

An unforeseen technical delay at the lab forced me to stay an entire weekend in New York. In order to stretch out my expense cash for the extra unexpected nights, I decided to check into a really marginal hotel on the last day.

Early on a Sunday morning, I walked over to a nondescript medium-sized hotel on West 42nd Street, about two blocks from the Hudson River near the collapsed husks of the West Side Highway. Offering bargain rates, the hotel was located near nothing—no convenient subway station, no tourist sites, no office buildings—in what was at that time a derelict neighborhood around Tenth Avenue deserving of its historical name, Hell’s Kitchen.

The hotel was even inconvenient for the junkies and hookers who hung out in Taxi Driver country a few blocks west on what was then called the forty-deuce—a sleazy stretch of West 42nd Street lined with porn shops, live sex shows, and knife stores that ran from Broadway and past the bus terminal toward Eighth and Ninth Avenues. The hotel had bargain rates but for the price it appeared to be clean and secure enough, and within quick walking distance of the film lab I would have to go to early the next morning.

I showed up without a reservation and was told that a room would be ready for me shortly if I would wait about half an hour, as people were checking out. I decided that in the meantime I would go up and wander around a few floors just to see how bad the place might really be. As I waited at the elevator, I was mildly annoyed to see that it had stopped for what seemed an eternity on the top floor.

Finally the stalled elevator began to come down, and when the doors opened, presumably the jerk who had held the elevator on the upper floor got off. He almost walked over me like some kind of glassy-eyed zombie, looking right through me and brushing me aside as if I were not there. As he passed me by heading into the lobby he lightly bumped my leg with a bag or a suitcase or something.

I never noticed what exactly he carried, nor could I today describe the feel of it against my leg. The only other thing I would later remember was that he seemed to glow with a thin sheen of perspiration and he had this really bad moplike haircut. He appeared to be in his midthirties with sandycolored hair and looked like a junior pasty-faced office worker—which was precisely what he turned out to be later (although he was described by other witnesses as having an “olive” complexion).

By the time the elevator doors closed behind me, I had forgotten all about him. I took the elevator up and got off on one of the floors at random. I immediately noticed a faint but distinct odor of something burning, but I did not see any smoke and thought it was the natural smell of the hotel. As I walked around the halls I did not detect anything particularly nasty about the place, but I did notice the smell getting stronger, and now with an unmistakable underlying back-odor of burnt chicken feathers or hair. I did not know it at the time, but that was the smell of roasting human flesh.

In the corridor my eyes were drawn to several elusively small, dark, greasy slivers of sooty substances floating and circulating in the air like tiny black snowflakes. When I caught one, it stained my fingers black. As I moved along the hall it seemed to get lightly misty and the smell was now unquestionably that of a building fire—that kind of woody-paint burning smell. I heard all sorts of commotion and shouting in the stairwells and fire alarms began ringing. I quickly made my way down to the lobby, emerging just as the fire department was pulling up in the street outside.

All this gave me a bad vibe about the place (to say the least) and I left almost immediately to seek out another hotel without a glance backward.

The next morning I read in the newspapers that firemen responding to flames in one of the rooms of the hotel had discovered the corpses of two murdered women laid out on twin beds that had been set on fire. A firefighter had dragged one of the women out of the smoky room into the hallway and attempted to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation only to discover that she had no head or hands. At first he thought it was a mannequin.

A fifteen-year veteran of the NYFD, the firefighter said he nearly had to undergo trauma counseling afterwards: “I’ve never come across something like that. I hope I never do again.”

The victims’ clothing was found folded in the bathtub in two neat stacks with their platform shoes on top of each pile. Except for blood on the mattresses, the hotel room was remarkably free of any bloodstains, fingerprints, or any other evidence. Whatever the killer used to dismember the bodies, he took it with him. In addition to the mutilation, the bodies showed signs of horrific torture—cigarette burns, beatings, and bite marks around the breasts.

At the time I never made the connection with the man I bumped into at the elevator. I did not even remember him. Somehow my wandering around the hotel in the black floating flakes, the fire alarm going off, and finding the fire engines outside all overwhelmed the minor memory of him.

He came to me only later when Richard Cottingham was arrested and tried for the mutilation murders of young women, mostly prostitutes in New York and New Jersey, including the two victims at the hotel. Seeing his picture in the paper, I immediately recognized him: the bad haircut and pasty face.

Since then I always assumed that when he stepped by me in the elevator that Sunday morning, he must have been carrying the severed heads and hands with him. I could not imagine him taking the risk of leaving two headless corpses unattended in the hotel room to go out and dump the heads and hands and then return to set fire to the room.

Whatever he had transported the heads in, it must have been what he brushed my leg with as he stepped by me in the elevator doors. (On the other hand, did he kill one woman and leave her body in the room, then go out to seek out another, or were they both alive together before he killed them? Cottingham never said.)

Richard Francis Cottingham, age thirty-four, I learned, was the recently separated father of three children and lived in suburban New Jersey. Neighbors typically described him as aloof and private but a doting father who always took his children out trick-or-treating on Halloween.

The son of an insurance industry executive, a high school athlete but nonetheless a lonely boy, Richard had been steadily employed for the last sixteen years as a computer operator at Empire State Blue Cross–Blue Shield insurance company on Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan. He was a valued and dependable employee. Choosing the 3:00–11:00 P.M. shift, he would do his killing in the morning, after work at night, or on the weekends.

The heads and hands from the victims in the Times Square hotel were never found despite an extensive search by police of the river area nearby.

One victim was identified through hospital X rays as Kuwaiti-born Deedah Godzari, a twenty-three-year-old prostitute from New Jersey and mother of a four-month baby. The other victim, estimated to be in her late teens, remains unidentified to this day.

Six months later, Cottingham killed and mutilated another New York prostitute, twenty-five-year-old Jean Mary Ann Reyner. She was found in the historic but declined Seville Hotel on 29th Street near Madison Avenue.

This time he severed the victim’s breasts and set them down side by side on the headboard of the bed before setting fire to the room.

Cottingham actually preferred to do his thing closer to home in New Jersey. He would either pick up his victims on the streets of Manhattan or meet them in bars. Either way, he would buy them drinks or dinner and slip a date rape–type drug into their glass. He then would maneuver or lure the semiconscious victims to his car and drive them across the river to New Jersey to cheap motels that lined the complex of highways there. He carried them in through motel back doors and then molested and tortured them in his room for extended periods of time.

The lucky ones would later awake from the effects of the drug finding themselves raped and sodomized and covered with horrific wounds, dumped naked by a roadside or on the floor of a motel room with little memory of what had transpired.

They were alive because Cottingham was a particular type of serial killer—an angerexcitation or sadistic-lust offender. Cottingham did not derive his pleasure from killing, but from torturing the victim. He couldn’t care less whether the victim lived or died once he was finished with his torture—and if the victim did die during the attack before Cottingham was satisfied, he would continue abusing the corpse until satisfied. Once done, he would abandon the victim like “trash,” and whether she was dead or alive was inconsequential to him. Some victims were lucky to survive, but others were not.

The body of nineteen-year-old Valerie Ann Street was found in a Hasbrouck Heights Quality Inn in New Jersey by housekeeping staff. A cleaning woman was attempting to vacuum the floor under the bed but something was jammed under it. Lifting up the mattress, she found a hideously disfigured corpse stuffed underneath the bed.

The victim’s hands were tightly handcuffed behind her back; she was covered in bite marks and was beaten across the shins. Valerie Street had died of asphyxiation and traces of adhesive tape were found on her mouth. Cottingham had carefully taken it away with him after killing the girl. He must have lost the key to the handcuffs, as he left them behind still restraining the victim—a fatal mistake, as police would lift his fingerprint from the inner ratchet of the cuffs.

One of the victims was not a prostitute. Twenty-six-year-old radiologist Mary Ann Carr had been found dumped by a chain-link fence near the parking lot of the same New Jersey motel two years previously. She had been cut about the chest and legs, beaten with a blunt instrument, and covered in bites and bruises. Her wrists showed marks from handcuffs and her mouth had traces of adhesive tape. She had been strangled and suffocated by the adhesive tape.

Cottingham was arrested on May 22, 1980, about six months after my encounter with him. He had picked up eighteen-year-old Leslie Ann O’Dell, who was soliciting on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 25th Street. She had arrived in New York on a bus from Washington State four days earlier and was quickly turned to street prostitution by bus station pimps.

Cottingham bought her drinks and talked to her about his job and house in the suburbs until about 3:00 A.M. He then offered to take her to a bus terminal in New Jersey so that she could escape the pimps in New York.

Leslie appreciatively accepted. After crossing the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey, he bought her a steak at an all-night diner. He was charming, generous, sympathetic, and helpful. At some point she agreed to have sex with him for $100. It was around dawn when they checked into the very same Hasbrouck Heights Quality Inn where he had left his last mutilated victim stuffed under the bed eighteen days earlier. Nobody recognized Cottingham.

After getting a room, Cottingham drove to the back of the motel and they went in through a rear entrance. Leaving the girl in the room alone, Cottingham returned to his car, telling her he wanted to move it to the front. He came back carrying a paper bag with whiskey and an attaché case. It was now nearly 5:00 A.M.

Cottingham offered to give the tired girl a massage and she gratefully rolled over onto her stomach. Straddling her back, he drew a knife from the attaché case and put it to her throat as he snapped a pair of handcuffs on her wrists. While Leslie attempted to persuade Cottingham that all that was unnecessary, he began torturing her, nearly biting off one of her nipples.

She later testified that he said, “You have to take it. The other girls did, you have to take it too. You’re a whore and you have to be punished.”

The charges that would be listed in Cottingham’s New Jersey indictment give us some idea of how the next four hours passed for O’Dell:

Kidnapping, attempted murder, aggravated assault, aggravated assault with deadly weapon, aggravated sexual assault while armed (rape), aggravated sexual assault while armed (sodomy), aggravated sexual assault while armed (fellatio), possession of a weapon; possession of controlled dangerous substances, Secobarbital and Amobarbital, or Tuinal, and possession of controlled dangerous substance, Diazepam or Valium.

Between bouts of rape, sodomy, forced oral sex, biting, beating, cutting with the knife, and whipping with a leather belt, Cottingham would pause to gently wipe down the face of his victim with a cool, damp washcloth.

Then he would begin anew. O’Dell’s muffled cries of pain became so loud that the motel staff, already spooked by the murder eighteen days earlier, called the police and then rushed to the room demanding that Cottingham open the door. Cottingham gathered up his torture implements and dashed out of the room but was apprehended by arriving police officers in the hallway.

That was the end of Cottingham. For his crimes in New Jersey, he received several terms ranging from sixty to ninety-five years, a term of twenty five years to life, and another term to run consecutively of a minimum of thirty years. And then he was extradited to New York to stand trial for the “torso” homicides there. We won’t be seeing Richard again.

Cottingham denied committing any of the murders to the bitter end, despite the fact that some of the victims’ property was found in his home and his fingerprint was found on the handcuffs restraining one of the victims.

The only thing Cottingham admitted was, “I have a problem with women.”