Background: Chief (retired) Anzilotti had been interviewing Cottingham since 2004 and in 2010 successfully persuaded Cottingham to plead to the 1967 cold case murder of Nancy Vogel.
Cottingham had first admitted to the murders of Nancy Vogel and the double murder of teenagers Lorraine Kelly & Maryann Pryor in 1996 to BCPO Chief of Detectives Alan Grieco and a secret "no-plea confession deal" was jointly approved by the New Jersey Attorney General and the Bergen County Prosecutor. At the last minute, the deal was confidentially vetoed by Governor Christine Todd Whitman. It would be another 14-years before the Vogel family, her son Bill and her daughter who were children when they lost their mother, would learn who murdered her in 2010. In 1996, Nancy's mother was still alive, but during the period that BCPO kept secret from the family that Cottingham had admitted to murdering Nancy Vogel's mother passed away, never learning who had murdered her daughter.
In 2009 Cottingham publicly admitted to journalist Nadia Fezzani that he murdered 85 to 100 women prior to his 1980 arrest and conviction in the murder of five.
By then Anzilotti had developed such a good rapport with Cottingham in the six years of visiting Cottingham in the Trenton State Prison and driving him up for overnight interviews in Bergen County, he now managed to persuade Cottingham to make a formal confession in 2010 and plead guilty and take a sixth count of murder on his conviction record.
But what about all the other murders? Cottingham back in 1996 had also off-the-record admitted to detective Alan Grieco there were multiples of other murders he had perpetrated over the years in Bergen County, including the most controversial cold case murder in modern New Jersey history: the unsolved 1974 double-abduction torture rape murders of teenagers Lorraine Kelly and Maryann Pryor whose bodies were found in Montvale two days after their disappearance while hitchhiking to a mall.
By 2004 fours have now passed since the Vogel confession and Cottingham has been in interviews like this describing to Anzilotti multiple cases in Bergen County from the 1960s and 1970s that he had perpetrated undetected.
Notes on victims and subjects raised in the video interview:
[Video 00:00 - 21:33 "The Three Dead Girls in the
Well" and the rescue of an abduction victim]
Cottingham draws a map for the detectives and describes a "killing field" -
a corn field near Montvale where during the late 1960s-1970s he murdered
multiple victims and dropped three bodies into a disused agricultural water
well.
Map and legend drawn by Richard
Cottingham given to Peter Vronsky in 2019
Copyright Peter Vronsky©2025 All Rights Reserved
In 1967 Cottingham had abducted Nancy Vogel from the Valley Fair store
parking lot in Little Ferry, drove her in her car to this corn field and
murdered her there. He then drove her body to Ridgefield Park across the
river from Little Ferry and left her on the floor in the backseat area of
her car parked on a residential street.
The cornfield was about a mile south down Chestnut Ridge Road from the
location in Montvale where Lorraine Kelly and Maryann Pryor bodies were
found in 1974, a case that would only be formally closed in 2021 when with
assistance from Peter Vronsky and Jennifer Weiss, Cottingham plead
guilty in the double murder of the two teenage girls.
Cottingham corn field murder site in Montvale
- See: https://www.nynjpd.org/casemap/
Cottingham told Anzilotti that there was an agricultural well next to the corn field and that he had dropped three victims on separate occasions into the well. It became known as the "three dead girls well."
Anzilotti had previously driven Cottingham to the location searching for traces of the well but the area had been so built over with stores, parking lots and housing developments since the 1970s it was impossible to ascertain its location.
In the video, Cottingham tells Anzilotti that there
were three old farm houses across the road from the well and cornfield, but
no trace of the three houses remain today.
Cottingham then tells Anzilotti that he had abducted a woman from one of the
malls in Paramus and brought her to this cornfield but before he could rape
and kill her, a passing police patrol seeing the woman's car parked by the
fields, stopped to investigate and the victim cried out for help.
Cottingham slashed her with his knife across the face and fled. The
police rescued her. Cottingham describes how he escaped and ran around
the back of the three houses and then crossed Chestnut Ridge Road and fled
across the cornfields in the dark on foot.
Cottingham tells Anzilotti, if he could find the police report on the rescue of the victim, he will find the exact location of where the three houses were and the "three dead girls well" across the road. But Cottingham cannot remember exactly when the abduction had occurred, having only a vague recollection it was some time he thought in the early 1970s.
Detective Anzilotti then surveyed the patchwork of several police departments in the area, including asking retired "old timers" if anybody could recall this dramatic occurrence. Nobody could recall this incident and there was no way for Anzilotti to easily search through the various police department files from the 1970s.
In 2019, five years after Cottingham described this incident, Anzilotti told forensic historian Peter Vronsky that he had been unable to find any traces of the incident or the "three dead girls well" and that he has come to believe that Cottingham "is full of shit." By then, Anzilotti had been promoted to Chief and was too busy to attempt to close more Cottingham cases and had not conducted an interview with Cottingham since 2017. But Anzilotti encouraged Vronsky to "take a crack at it."
Working from Toronto through resources at University of Toronto and Metropolitan Toronto University, Dr. Vronsky accessed an extensive array of satellite images, including infrared imagery and historical US Air Force aerial surveillance photos from the 1950s to the1970s, in search of traces of a water well. Whenever Vronsky would find something promising he would send Anzilotti the coordinates and BCPO and NJ State Police detectives would visit the scene on foot sending Vronsky back photos of what they saw on the ground.
"
Unfortunately, the promising well-like circular shapes occasionally seen in
satellite imagery turned out to be either decorative garden wells or buried
septic tanks. No accessible trace of the former well could be located.
Vronsky finally managed to extract from Cottingham in November 2019 a few extra details that
Cottingham had not revealed to Anzilotti about the abduction and located the
incident in newspaper archives. The abduction had occurred in the
winter, as Cottingham had told Anzilotti, but not in the 1970s. It was
in February 1968, in the Woodcliff Park section of Chestnut Ridge Road,
where ironically Anzilotti was a uniformed patrol officer before he was
hired as a detective at BCPO in 1996. Cottingham was not "full of
shit" as Anzilotti had come to believe.
When Anzilotti returned to search in the Woodcliff Park Police records for the case file, it had long ago been destroyed. Even the victim's identity is no longer known and was never reported in the newspapers. Knowing more precisely where the "three dead girls well" was located in 1968 revealed another problem. The well is somewhere under a big box store, a shopping mall parking lot or a housing development. During the development and construction there is no record of three bodies being found in an old well. Either the well had been filled in without its bottom being inspected, or the construction company hid the bodies on the assumption that the remains were of historical-archaeological value and would have resulted in a delay of construction while archaeologists inspected the site.
Cottingham describes how he would
drive as far as Long Island to leave bodies. He thinks that one of the
three girls in the well was a sex worker from Little Ferry and another was a
young waitress from the region but he does not recall what town. He thinks the third victim might be a
girl from Atlantic City but it is likely he is confusing the victim with one
he admitted to meeting and murdering in Atlantic City in 1978 during the
weekend that the first legalized gambling casino opened.
In the video Cottingham tells Anzilotti that killed his first victim in later
1966 or 1967. Later he will tell Peter Vronsky and some victim family
members, that he killed his first victim in 1962 or 1963, when he was
sixteen years-old.
[Video 22:10 - 23:00]
Cottingham states he killed "well over 80" in multiple states; in New
Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, in Florida. In Baltimore.
He says "My whole thing was not to make a pattern... I never killed them in
the exact same way, you know... leave a signature."
[Video 23:05 - 24:00] Cottingham refers to an incident he had
described in previous interviews. He was driving back from ["Longfield"?]
"down River Road." Cottingham had a body in the back seat of his car
under a blanket when police pulled him over for a traffic violation but
Cottingham said he stepped out of his car and approached the police officer
before he could get out of his vehicle. (Something that was possible
in the 1960s) The officer never got around to looking in the back of
Cottingham car.
[Video 24:10 - 30:15] Cottingham says, "I wasn't a serial killer." He let more victims go than he killed. Cottingham insists he never went out intending to kill somebody. He only killed those who might identify him or he might be somehow connected to. Asked what thrill was: the rape? Tying up. Control? Cottingham responds that the thrill was in "the game." "The stalking." "It was being able to get away with it... It was like the perfect murder every time." "There was no joy in the killing." Cottingham brags how he was able to "beat" (hustle) sex workers out of paying them.
[Video 30:30 - 32:25] Anzilotti returns back to the "three girls in the well." He tell Cottingham he will look again. Cottingham thinks it might have been in 1971 or 72 or 73... But he is not sure. Cottingham is worried that if police find the bodies, reporters will get on to the story. Cottingham's confessions are supposed to be secret. The press and public are not to know. Anzilotti assures him everything will be kept secret from the public and new media.
[Video 32:30 - 40:00 The interview turns to a victim that Cottingham had previously described resembling actress Shiri Appleby from the tv series Roswell. The victim will be later identified as Irene Blase, murdered in April 1969 in Bergen County.
Without knowing her name, Cottingham describes seeing Irene Blase in a
Sears store, following her out to the street and luring her go for a drink
and then into his car. He tells Anzilotti they went for a
pizza before he murdered her and that if they look in her autopsy report, it would indicate she had eaten a pizza a few
hours before her death. But her autopsy report according to Peter
Vronsky, listed rice, meat, broccoli and olives with red filling, only partially
digested.
Cottingham is likely confusing her with another
victim, that also looked like Shiri Appleby, Denise Falasca who he murdered
three months later, in
July 1969 and who he stated he took for a pizza just before raping and killing
her. But according to Peter Vronsky, Cottingham might be furthermore
confusing Falasca for yet another victim as Falasca's stomach contents indicated
she had ground meat, potatoes and spinach in her stomach and appeared to have
eaten them approximately two hours before her death, inconsistent with
Cottingham's recollection of them having a pizza.)
Cottingham then interrupts the
interview about the "Shiri Appleby" victim until they conclude the terms of
their deal for his confession.
[38:50] Cottingham's legs begin to move wildly - a "tell" that he is nervous and anxious about the topic of the conversation.
[Video 40:00 - 47:30 "I was out there every night like an animal."] Detective Anzilotti continues to press Cottingham on where he left the victim's body. Cottingham tells him in a river or stream. Would he have stabbed her? (Irene Blase was strangled and stabbed once in the back through her lung and found floating in a river.) Cottingham describes how he would use a knife to intimidate and torture his victims, how he would occasionally give them a shallow "puncture" with the tip of his knife. Cottingham complains that he cannot remember one victim from another. And for everyone that he killed, he says there were thirty he let go. "I was out there every night like an animal."
[Video 47:30 - 49:30 ] Cottingham names and describes his three girlfriends, including "Lynnell" (Lisa Z.) whose last name he mistakenly says he remembers was "Ziegler." "I didn't kill them," Cottingham says.
[Video 49:30 - 58:00 Anzilotti desperately asks the same question we all ask: Why? If you had a wife, three kids, a steady job, and three girlfriends, "What made you go out there to hurt a girl?" Cottingham can only say, "I was an animal." Cottingham digresses into a long account of his patronizing sex workers, their availability and his working and drinking habits.
[Video 58:00 - 1:01:15] Cottingham now tell the detectives that they have a cold case from years ago where the medical examiner got the cause of death wrong. He had drowned the victim in a bathtub he said; but the ME made a mistake in the autopsy and ruled suffocation as the cause of death. He never identifies the victim by name, but he is referring to the double murder of Lorraine Kelly and Maryann Pryor in 1974. Two victims! And everybody knows it between the lines. Cottingham has been trying to confess to the murders of Kelly & Pryor since 1996! And he had told Anzilotti the bathtub story before.
[Video 1:01:17 - 1:01:43] Anzilotti tries to goad Cottingham to say more:
Anzilotti: "You have to enlighten me so I can look at them. I don't know if I believe you."
Cottingham: "Well that's what I'm saying: If I tell you the truth you'll think I'm lying, so I can tell you a lie and you'll think I'm telling the truth."
[Video 1:01:45 - 1:03:22] Cottingham won't say more until they work out a deal. "What's in it for me?" Cottingham wants to know. They make plans for dinner. The interview is ended.
(The next day, June 20, 2014 Cottingham will make a formal on-the-record confession to the murder of Irene Blase in 1969.)
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