A True Crime Writer Encounters The Times Square Torso Ripper
YouTube/Best DocumentaryRichard Cottingham was a mild-mannered computer technician for Blue Cross Blue Shield in New York. He was also a serial killer who murdered, dismembered, and burned prostitutes in seedy Times Square hotel rooms.
Before the “Times Square Torso Ripper” was identified, Richard Cottingham terrorized the seedy streets of 1970s New York and brutally murdered prostitutes.
Author and investigative historian Peter Vronsky detailed his chance encounter with the killer in his book The New York Ripper. When Vronsky found himself stranded in town without much cash in 1979 he settled on a cheap hotel in Times Square.
As the 23-year-old walked into the Travel Inn Motor Hotel, Cottingham was on his way out. He had just murdered, raped, and mutilated two women, and was carrying their heads and hands in a bag. Their torsos were burning, set ablaze, on the twin beds in an upstairs room as he waited for the elevator to take him down.
Vronsky was waiting for the elevator to come down, but it seemed stuck upstairs. He posited later that Cottingham was holding it open to verify whether the fire he had set would be sustained.
“It was a reckless thing for him to do,” he wrote. “I would have taken the stairs. But that’s how serial killers are: intrinsically reckless. His need for control over the crime scene, to enjoy it, even as he was fleeing from it, exceeded any sense of caution he might have.”
“Eventually his reckless daring would lead to his ultimate downfall some six months later.”
Indeed, Cottingham would be apprehended the following year. According to The New York Daily News, police responded to a report of screams and shrieks from Room 117 of New Jersey’s Quality Inn hotel on the morning of May 22, 1980.
It was 18-year-old Leslie Ann O’Dell who was making the dreadful noises. The teenage runaway had only started prostituting herself a few days earlier when Cottingham picked her up in Manhattan and drove to the neighboring state.
After hours of torture, she realized the end was nigh, and thus began screaming her lungs out. The cops caught him running down the corridor shortly after, and finally, put an end to his grisly killings.
Ultimately, Cottingham was convicted of five murders across three trials in New Jersey and one in New York. In addition to the kidnappings, rapes, and assaults, his sentences in both states reached nearly 300 years.
He attempted suicide behind bars twice, but has since accepted his sentence and has grown his beard out. In 2010, he confessed to the murder of another woman — a cold case from 1967 that the New Jersey police have finally closed.
