This is the 'official' website on serial killer Richard Cottingham - the Torso Serial Killer - run by forensic historian Dr. Peter Vronsky (@dr.petervronsky) who has been interviewing Cottingham since 2017 and has assisted law enforcement in 10 of the 15 recent Cottingham cold case closures from the 1960s-1970s recently solved between 2010-2024 in Bergen County, New Jersey and Rockland County, Nassau County and New York County (Manhattan), New York.
Richard F. Cottingham, born November 25, 1946, is currently incarcerated in New Jersey for the murders of 20 women between 1967 and 1980 in New York and New Jersey.
He was randomly arrested in May 1980 and eventually charged and convicted in several trials (1981-1984) for five murders in 1977-1980 in Bergen County, New Jersey (2 murders) and in New York City (3 murders).
Cottingham was first sentenced to Life plus 117 years in New Jersey in two murder trials; and subsequently in New York in one trial to 75-years-to-Life for three murders in Manhattan. In total he had been sentenced to a minimum of 192 years plus Life. Sentences are to run consecutively, starting first with the New Jersey sentences, followed by the New York sentences.
The New York convictions included the infamous "Times Square Torso Killings" on December 2, 1979 in the Travel Inn Hotel on W. 42nd Street in Manhattan a few blocks away from Times Square and the notorious "Forty-Duece" or "The Duece." Cottingham lured two sex workers to his hotel room, where he tortured, raped, murdered, mutilated and severed their heads and hands. He then set fire to the mattresses under their bodies and fled with the severed heads and hands in a valise. FDNY firefighters responding to calls from the hotel of smoke coming from the room, discovered the torsos.
The valise with the severed heads and hands has not been found but in 2018 Cottingham revealed to Peter Vronsky and Jennifer Weiss the general location of where he asserts he buried the valise with the severed heads.
In 2009 Cottingham admitted on the record to having murdered between 85 and 100 women from 1963 until his arrest in 1980, mostly in New Jersey and New York, but in other states as well. The following year, he confessed to and pleaded guilty in the 1967 murder of Nancy Vogel in Bergen County.
Between 2010 and December 2026, Cottingham confessed to 15 more murders he perpetrated between 1967 and 1975. Cottingham pleaded guilty in four of the cases, including the notorious double murder of Maryann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly in New Jersey in 1974, and confessed in another ten murders in New York and New Jersey which were "closed exceptionally" -- without prosecuting Cottingham. The murders were perpetrated between 1967 and 1975 in New York and New Jersey.
Cottingham was first apprehended "red handed" in a random arrest on May 22, 1980, in a Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey motel when staff called the police to report a woman's screams emanating from one of the rooms. Law enforcement had not been aware that a serial killer was at large, and term "serial killer" was still not in popular use outside a small sector of the law enforcement behavioral sciences community alarmed and puzzled by a rising surge of 'sequential killing' or 'multiple murders' during the 1970s.
Richard Cottingham currently (in 2025) remains under active investigation in New Jersey, New York, and several other states, as a suspect in approximately 20 other unsolved murders between 1963 and 1980.
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