Content note: this piece contains descriptions of sexual violence, torture, and dismemberment. It also names, at length, the women Richard Cottingham killed. That is a deliberate choice. If you need to skip specific descriptive passages, they are in the sections marked “The Torso Room” and “The Seville Hotel.”
Who Was Not Looked For
I need to tell you something up front, because it changes the whole shape of this case, and if you do not know it going in you will read this the wrong way.
Richard Cottingham did not get away with what he did for fifteen years because he was clever. He was not clever. He was arrested three times before 1980 — twice for “consorting with hookers,” once for robbery, sodomy, and sexual assault in New York City — and every single charge was dismissed. He killed women out in the open in Manhattan and New Jersey and Long Island. He left one body in a hotel parking lot in Little Ferry and came back to the same hotel with his next victim. He was, by any reasonable standard, terrible at hiding what he was doing.
He got away with it because the women he killed were the women no one looked for.
Sex workers. Teenage girls who ran with the wrong crowd. A young mother going to the mall for dancing shoes. A housekeeper. A 13-year-old. Working women in cheap hotels on cheap dates. In the language criminologists use for this — a language I hate but you should know — his victims were the “less-dead.” A category. A tier of dead. Women whose disappearances got a report but not a task force, a case file but not a manhunt. Women whose deaths, in the accounting of a system that could have stopped Richard Cottingham a decade earlier, were less expensive than his freedom.
He was finally arrested on May 22, 1980, in a Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. Not because a detective outsmarted him. Not because a task force closed in. Because an 18-year-old girl named Leslie Ann O’Dell screamed loud enough, in a hallway where a housekeeper named Eleanor happened to be pushing a cart, and Eleanor called the police, and the police showed up while Leslie was still alive.
Fifteen years. Fifteen years of dead women, and the whole thing ended in the four minutes it took a woman to answer another woman’s scream. I want you to hold onto that for the rest of this piece.
The Housekeeper Who Listened
May 22, 1980. Room 117 of the Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. Sometime around nine in the morning.
Eleanor was pushing a housekeeping cart down the corridor. This is a woman doing a job. She was not investigating anything. She was not part of a special task force. She was probably tired. She was probably thinking about lunch. And she heard screams from behind a hotel room door, and she stopped, and she made a decision that saved lives she would never meet: she went and got a phone and called the police.
Inside Room 117, an 18-year-old girl named Leslie Ann O’Dell had been tortured for hours. When police arrived they found Richard Cottingham there with her, shirtless, covered in her blood. In his bag they found handcuffs, knives, and drugs. Leslie was alive. Barely. She survived. She would later become the witness who testified against him in trial after trial after trial, for the rest of the 1980s.
I want to give Leslie Ann O’Dell her sentence in this piece, because most true-crime coverage does not. She is eighteen years old in the story of Richard Cottingham’s arrest. She screams. She survives. And then the coverage moves on to the killer’s biography, because that is what true crime does — the survivor is the plot device that ended the story, not a person the story is about. I refuse to write it that way. Leslie was eighteen. She had hours of her life — hours — taken from her in a room in New Jersey by a man who intended to add her to the count. She got them back and she used them, over years of court appearances, to help put him away for the rest of his life. That is not a plot device. That is a woman.
And the woman before her, in the same hotel — 19-year-old Valerie Ann Street — was already dead. And the woman before that, three years earlier — 26-year-old Maryann Carr, a radiologist from Little Ferry — had already been left in the same Quality Inn’s parking lot in 1977.
The same hotel. Read that again. He kept going back to the same hotel. And every time, the police did not connect it, until a housekeeper listened.
Fifteen Years Before Anyone Listened
Richard Cottingham was born in the Bronx in 1946. He worked as a computer operator. He was married. He had children. This is, I know, the exact biography cliché that every AI-generated true crime slop opens with — “showing no signs of the darkness that would later emerge” — and I am asking you to notice that the sentence is a lie every time it is written. He showed signs. There were always signs. The system dismissed them.
He started killing, that we know of, in 1965. He was nineteen. He kept killing through 1980. That is fifteen years of documented murders, plus at least two years of documented attacks before the first known death. Seventeen years of a man who was consistently violent, consistently arrested, consistently released.
In the early 1970s, Cottingham was arrested twice for what NYC records called “consorting with hookers.” Both charges were dismissed. On September 4, 1973, he was charged in New York City with robbery, sodomy, and sexual assault. That case was also dismissed.
Sit with that. A robbery, sodomy, and sexual assault case — three serious felony charges in one arrest — was dismissed by a New York City prosecutor in September 1973, and Richard Cottingham went right back to killing. There is no record that anyone did anything with the file. There is no record that anyone connected it to the reports of missing sex workers stacking up around the same neighborhoods. There is no record that anyone in the system, at any point, treated Cottingham the way they would have treated a man who had done these things to women who came from money.
I want to be careful here. I am not saying every cop in New York City in the 1970s was corrupt. I am saying something more depressing. I am saying that most of them worked inside a system that assigned different amounts of urgency to different women, and that the women Richard Cottingham chose were on the low end of that scale. Which means for fifteen years, he was allowed to keep going, not by any single official decision, but by a collective one that nobody had to sign.
The Torso Room
December 2, 1979. A Times Square hotel called the Travel Inn Motor Hotel.
Two young women were murdered in a room upstairs. One was Deedeh Goodarzi, a sex worker. The other has never been identified. She has been a Jane Doe now for 47 years. Cottingham killed them, dismembered their bodies, and set the room on fire. Their heads were never found. Nobody has ever found their heads.
This is where Cottingham got the name the press would use for him for the rest of his life: the Torso Killer. Because what was left behind in that hotel room, after he was done and after the fire had burned as long as he wanted it to burn, were bodies without heads. Torsos. That is what a torso is when it is on the news — a woman without her face.
I want to name the second woman here, even though I cannot. I want to say what she was, in place of who she was, because it is the only honesty available. She was, at some point in the years before December 2, 1979, someone’s daughter. She was someone’s friend. She was someone Deedeh trusted enough to be in a hotel room with. She had a name that her mother said the way mothers say the names of daughters. And forty-seven years later, we still cannot say it back.
If forensic genetic genealogy ever catches up to her — the same technology that gave Reggie Frisby’s name back to his family forty years after Wilseyville — she will get her name back too. That is a hope, not a promise. But it is not impossible any more.
The Seville Hotel
May 15, 1980. Exactly one week before his arrest.
The Seville Hotel, on Madison Avenue and 29th Street in Manhattan. 25-year-old Jean Reyner, a sex worker. Cottingham strangled her, mutilated her body — I will not describe the specific injuries; you can look them up if you need to, but they will not add anything to what you already know about him — and set the mattress on fire. Same pattern as the Torso Room. He was doing the same thing again, in a different hotel, in Manhattan, seven days before a housekeeper in New Jersey saved a girl.
He was convicted of Jean Reyner’s murder on July 9, 1984. Four years later. She got that much, at least, in the end.
I keep thinking about the fact that Cottingham had already killed Deedeh Goodarzi and her friend in December 1979, in the same manner, in a nearly identical hotel-room-fire setup, and there was still an active investigation into that case in Manhattan when he did it to Jean Reyner in May 1980. And then he did it to Leslie Ann O’Dell in New Jersey a week later. This is a killer on a pattern so obvious that when you read the timeline you cannot believe it was not connected. And it was not connected. Because Manhattan police and New Jersey police did not talk to each other. Because the victims were “the wrong kind.” Because when a sex worker’s body was set on fire in one borough, and another sex worker’s body was set on fire in another borough five months later, the two departments filed two separate case numbers and moved on.
The Women
I am going to say the names, and I am going to say them slowly, and I am going to give you a little of who each one was. If you need to skip this section, you can. But I am asking you not to.
Alys Eberhardt, 1965. Cottingham did not confess to her until January 2026. She waited 61 years in a file for her killer to say her name. She was his twentieth confession.
Nancy Schiava Vogel, October 28, 1967. 29 years old. A married mother of two. Little Ferry, New Jersey. Strangled. Cottingham left her nude, bound, under a blanket, behind the passenger seat of her own car, and parked the car in Ridgefield Park. Nancy’s case stayed unsolved for 43 years. It was solved in 2010, and here is the piece of this story you should carry with you: the reason it was solved is that a New Jersey detective named Frank Anzilotti spent six years visiting Richard Cottingham in prison and slowly, painstakingly, building enough of a relationship that Cottingham eventually confessed. Not DNA. Not a forensic breakthrough. A cop who kept showing up, for six years, for a dead woman he had never met. That is what it takes, sometimes. That is what these families have to depend on.
Jackie Harp, 1968. She was thirteen years old. Read that number back to yourself. Thirteen. She was a child.
Diane Cusick, February 15, 1968. 23 years old. A dance teacher at a school in Oceanside, Long Island. A mother. On that Thursday afternoon she told her family she was going to the Green Acres Mall in Nassau County to buy a pair of dancing shoes. She went to the mall. She never came back. Cottingham strangled her. Her case sat in a file for 53 years. It was solved in 2021, when a Nassau County detective decided to re-run the physical evidence against DNA databases that had not existed the first time around. The DNA hit Cottingham. He pleaded guilty in June 2022. Diane’s daughter, who was a small child when her mother was killed, is a grown woman now. She got the answer in her fifties, and her mother in her twenties.
Denise Falasca, 1969. 15 years old.
Irene Blase, 1969. 18 years old.
Mary Ann Pryor, 1974. 17 years old.
Lorraine Kelly, 1974. 16 years old.
Maryann Carr, 1977. 26 years old. A radiologist. From Little Ferry, New Jersey. Her body was left in the parking lot of the Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights — the same Quality Inn where, three years later, another woman’s body would be found on the property, and where a third woman, Leslie Ann O’Dell, would scream and be heard.
Deedeh Goodarzi, December 2, 1979. Sex worker. Times Square. Torso Room.
Deedeh’s friend, December 2, 1979. Never identified. Still waiting.
Valerie Ann Street, 1980. 19 years old. Quality Inn.
Jean Reyner, May 15, 1980. 25 years old. Sex worker. Seville Hotel.
And, from Cottingham’s later confessions on Long Island:
Mary Beth Heinz, 21, housekeeper. Laverne Moye, 23, a mother of two. Sheila Heima, 33, a mother of three. Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves, of Manhattan.
Lorraine McGraw, a more recent confession still working its way through the system.
And Leslie Ann O’Dell — survivor, witness, reason he was caught.
That is at least eighteen women, plus one whose name we still cannot say. Cottingham has claimed responsibility, at various times over the decades, for as many as one hundred. If the higher number is even close to true, he would be one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. The gap between the number he has confessed to (twenty-plus) and the number he has claimed (up to a hundred) is another silence in a case built on silence. Some of that gap is boasting. Some of it is not.
What the System Missed on Purpose
I want to come back to the “less-dead” idea, because I think it is the single most important thing to understand about how a Richard Cottingham exists for fifteen years without being stopped.
The term comes from a criminologist named Steven Egger, who wrote about it in the 1980s and 90s. It describes the way police and press treat the deaths of certain kinds of women — sex workers, drug users, runaways, undocumented women, poor women, women of color — as somehow less shocking, less urgent, less worthy of a task force, than the deaths of women who fit a particular middle-class white template. When one of those “proper” women is killed, the news calls it an outrage. When one of the other kinds is killed, the news calls it a body. The distinction is not written down anywhere. It is baked into the machine.
Every one of Cottingham’s named victims was, in some way, on the wrong side of that line. A dance teacher who was also a working mother. A 13-year-old girl. A 15-year-old girl. A radiologist — and even Maryann Carr, the most middle-class of them, was let down for three years while her killer went back to the same hotel. Sex workers whose names the press did not want to print. Housekeepers. Mothers doing errands. None of them was, in the calculus of a 1970s American police department, the kind of woman who got a task force.
You can see the shape of this whenever Cottingham was almost caught earlier. Two arrests for “consorting with hookers,” dismissed. A robbery, sodomy, and sexual assault charge in New York City, dismissed. He was in the system. His name was in a file. He was being reported by the women he attacked when they survived. And nothing happened, because their word did not count enough.
This is not a story about a clever monster. This is a story about a not-particularly-clever monster who got fifteen years of free hunting because the people he hunted did not qualify for protection. The horror is not that Cottingham was extraordinary. The horror is that he was not, and he still had a run this long.
The Confessions That Came Sixty Years Late
Here is the piece of this story that keeps me hopeful, and I do not say that lightly, because the rest of it is very hard.
The women Cottingham killed are, one by one, finally being counted. Not in 1980, when he was arrested. Not in 1984, when he was convicted for the first murder. In 2010. In 2021. In 2022. In 2026. Decades late, in some cases sixty-plus years late, by people who refused to close the file.
Detective Frank Anzilotti visited Cottingham in prison for six years to get Nancy Vogel her name back in the record as a murder victim rather than an unsolved question mark. Six years of a working man’s calendar, spent sitting across a table from a killer, for a woman he never met and a family he did not owe. He did it anyway. He got the confession in 2010.
A Nassau County detective in 2021 decided to re-test the physical evidence from a 53-year-old cold case using DNA technology that had not existed in 1968. The sample hit. Diane Cusick, who went to a mall to buy dancing shoes, got her killer named while her daughter was still alive to hear it.
In 2022, Cottingham pleaded guilty to Diane Cusick’s murder and admitted to four more Long Island killings on the same day — Mary Beth Heinz, Laverne Moye, Sheila Heima, and Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves — in exchange for immunity on those four. Those families, at least, know now.
In January 2026, he confessed to Alys Eberhardt’s murder from 1965. Sixty-one years. She was his twentieth known confession.
He is 79 years old. He is in a New Jersey prison. He is not getting out. He is, at the end of his life, still capable of being talked into giving another dead woman her name back — not because he has become a better man, but because a detective, somewhere, is still willing to sit across a table from him and ask.
Every confession is a woman whose family gets an answer. Not a happy answer. Not a redemptive answer. An answer, which is not nothing. There will, almost certainly, be more.
What Being Heard Costs
I want to end where I started, because I think the ending is inside the beginning if you look at it right.
Richard Cottingham was caught within four minutes of a woman being heard.
Leslie Ann O’Dell was 18. She had been in that room for hours. And when she screamed at the right time in the right place, and a housekeeper named Eleanor listened, everything ended. The bag of handcuffs, the knives, the fifteen-year run, the whole architecture of what he was going to do next. Over. Four minutes. That is what stopping him took, when a woman finally got heard.
Now think about every woman before her. Every scream that never reached a housekeeper. Every case file that never left a filing cabinet. Every “consorting with hookers” charge that a prosecutor dismissed on a Tuesday afternoon in 1972 because there were more important things to do. The reason Deedeh Goodarzi died, and her friend died, and Jean Reyner died, and Valerie Ann Street died, and Maryann Carr died, and Diane Cusick died, and Nancy Vogel died, and Jackie Harp died at thirteen, is not that Richard Cottingham was smart. It is that nobody was listening.
A housekeeper listened. She was the whole difference.
I want you to think about that the next time you hear someone talk about the criminal justice system as if it is a machine that catches killers because it is good at catching killers. It is not. It catches killers, when it does, because someone specific, in a specific hallway, on a specific morning, decided to stop pushing her cart and go get a phone. It is a system of individual women listening to other women. That has always been the whole story of this case, and probably a lot of others.
Say the names out loud. Not in the news-anchor voice. In your voice, in your kitchen. When you tell someone about this case, do not lead with the killer. Lead with them.
Alys Eberhardt. Nancy Schiava Vogel. Jackie Harp. Diane Cusick. Denise Falasca. Irene Blase. Mary Ann Pryor. Lorraine Kelly. Maryann Carr. Deedeh Goodarzi. The woman whose name we do not know yet. Valerie Ann Street. Jean Reyner. Mary Beth Heinz. Laverne Moye. Sheila Heima. Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves. Lorraine McGraw.
And Leslie Ann O’Dell, who lived, and who spent the rest of her twenties in courtrooms making sure he never got to leave one on his own feet.
Say them again next year, when the count goes up. Because it will go up.
Sources
- Rolling Stone — on Cottingham’s 2022 guilty plea for the 1968 Diane Cusick murder.
- CBS News — on the five Long Island murder confessions.
- CBS New York — on the Nassau County confessions.
- CNN — on the 2026 Alys Eberhardt confession.
- NBC News — on the Long Island confessions.
- A&E — on Cottingham’s 20+ murder confessions.
- All That’s Interesting — timeline and case summary.
- Violent Minds — on the arrest and Leslie Ann O’Dell.
- New York’s Dark Side Podcast — extended narrative reporting on the case.
- Nassau County District Attorney press release on the Diane Cusick guilty plea.
- ashmysteries.com — on Detective Anzilotti’s six-year effort to solve Nancy Vogel’s murder.
- ABC7 New York — on the Nassau County guilty plea in 2022.