SERIAL KILLER SECRETS
RICHARD COTTINGHAM TERRORISED VULNERABLE WOMEN FOR YEARS
During the late 1970s, New York City’s famed Times Square, an area now populated by tourists, was the epicentre of the porn industry. With peep shows and sex clubs on every corner, and hustlers, pimps, and sex workers in abundance, it became fertile hunting ground for predators, including Richard Cottingham. During his killing spree, he would earn himself multiple disturbing monikers, including “The Torso Killer” and “The Times Square Ripper”. But it was years before he was apprehended and the true number of his victims may never be known.
ARRESTS
In December 1979, father-of-three Cottingham was commuting from his home in New Jersey, to his job as a computer programmer in a health insurance company located in Midtown Manhattan. Married to wife Janet, the couple had their share of marital woes, not least because Cottingham had consecutive arrests in 1973 and 1974, both for charges relating to unlawful imprisonment and abuse of a sex worker. In both cases, the charges were dismissed when the witness failed to appear in court, and Cottingham returned to his seemingly average suburban life.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Hudson River, horror was about to unfold. On 2 December, in the Travel Inn Motor Hotel in Times Square, a maid was cleaning on the fourth floor when she saw smoke coming from one of the rooms. Firefighters were called and on entering room 417, they were overcome by the smell of burning flesh. Laying on the twin beds were the decapitated bodies of two women. The hands of both had also been removed. The maid would later tell police that the occupant of the room, a Carl Wilson from New Jersey, had begun his stay on 29 November and had affixed the Do Not Disturb sign for the duration.
Authorities in NYC were accustomed to attending grisly crime scenes, but even by their standards, the homicides were horrific. For reasons unknown, the killer had folded the clothing of the two women and placed it neatly in the bathtub, and the scene was described as meticulously clean, devoid of any forensic evidence. By chance, a woman who had been standing behind “Carl White” when he checked into the Travel Inn had taken particular note of the man in front of her. She became the only witness to the prime suspect in the killing, and was able to describe a white male, around 35 years of age, 175lbs with brown hair. On the basis of her recollection, police were able to construct a crude E-fit, which they would distribute on 11 December.
Despite wide-scale distribution of the composite sketch and a tipline, police failed to garner any leads and were still no nearer to identifying the victims. And, with th
