New Jersey 'Torso Killer,' 73, confesses to 50-year-old unsolved murders of three teenage girls
BERGEN COUNTY, NEW JERSEY: A convicted serial killer who is serving 200 years behind bars over six murders, and was nicknamed the 'The Torso Killer' due to his habit of dismembering his victims and leaving nothing but a torso behind has confessed to three more murders.
Bergen County Prosecutor Mark Musella confirmed to the NJ Advance Media that Richard Francis Cottingham, 73, had admitted to killing three teenagers, Jackie Harp, Irene Blase and Denise Falasca in 1968 and 1969, bringing closure to cases that had been open for more than five decades.
In July 1968, Cottingham said he had strangled Harp, of Midland Park, as she was walking home from band practice.
On April 7, 1969, Blase, 18, of Bogota, disappeared from Hackensack and was found strangled to death in Saddle River the next day.
He also confessed to the murder of Falasca, 15, who was abducted from Emerson on July 14, 1969, and found strangled the next day in nearby Saddle Brook.
The closure to the cases has been the culmination of over 15 years of work, with author and historian Peter Vronsky, who wrote about Cottingham and other serial killers in his 2018 book 'Sons of Cain,' stating that the confessions had been obtained sometime between 2004 and 2019.
Cottingham had previously pleaded guilty to the 1967 killing of Schiava Vogel, a 29-year-old married mother-of-two whose nude, bound body was found in a car nearby Ridgefield Park.
Vogel had last been seen three days earlier when she left home to play bingo with friends at a local church. She had been found strangled to death, and it had long been suspected that Cottingham was behind the murder.
Cottingham, who had operated in New York between 1967 and 1980, claims to have killed as many as 85 and 100 victims and was caught in 1980 while attempting to murder 18-year-old prostitute Ann O'Dell.
He had taken Dell to the Hasbrouck Heights Quality Inn, the same motel where he had left his previous mutilated victim 19-year-old Valerie Ann Street, bound her, gagged her, and started torturing her.
Her muffled cries of pain were so loud that the motel staff, already spooked by Street's murder 18 days prior, called the police and rushed to the room.
He was eventually apprehended in the hallway and was found to carrying handcuffs, a leather gag, two slave collars, a switchblade, replica pistols and a stockpile of prescription pills. During a search of his house, investigators also uncovered a 'trophy room' where he kept personal effects from some of his victims.
Cottingham was eventually convicted of multiple murders as well as charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated sexual assault while armed (rape), and possession of controlled dangerous substances and was given a sentence of 173 to 197 years in prison.
The 73-year-old was eligible to apply for parole in August 2025 and is currently unclear if his most recent confessions will affect his existing prison terms or his parole eligibility.