106. Alys Eberhardt

Part 3 of the Richard Cottingham Victim Series  Please listen to episodes 104 & 105 first.

In September of 1965, 18-year-old nursing student Alys Eberhardt was murdered inside her family’s home in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Despite an extensive investigation, the case remained unsolved for decades. More than sixty years later, serial killer Richard Cottingham, known as the “Torso Killer”, confessed to the crime, providing details only the killer could have known.

In this episode of Method & Madness, we look back at Alys’s life, the investigation that followed her death, and the confession that finally brought long-awaited answers to her family.

Thank you to Dr. Peter Vronsky for lending his expertise and for helping to facilitate the closure of Alys Eberhardt’s case. Thank you to Jennifer Weiss, late daughter of victim Deedeh Goodarzi.

Method & Madness is researched, written, hosted, & produced by Dawn Cate

Music by Tymur Khakimov from Pixabay

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode contains graphic details of violence. Please listen with care.
Investigators Eric Elswich and Brian Ripkima sat across from the
man they believed held answers to a long list of
unsolved murders. It was December of twenty twenty five, and

(00:23):
getting to this moment had taken years. They weren't looking
for speculation. They needed something solid, a detail that had
never been made public, something only the killer could know.
And then it came. He described the layout of the
victim's home. He knew what she'd been wearing that day,

(00:44):
and he mentioned something investigators had kept quiet for six decades.
The backyard swimming pool had no water in it. That
was the moment they knew, after sixty years, the man
sitting across from them, serial killer Richard Cottingham, had just
confessed to the murder of eighteen year old Alice Eberhardt.

(01:06):
A murderer that had haunted investigators and a grieving family
since nineteen sixty five, was finally solved. And strangely, that
confession came just two months after Alice's story was told
here on Method and Madness. In October, I featured Alice's
story in an episode about Joan Freeman, a young woman

(01:27):
who was killed at her workplace in nineteen sixty eight,
a murder that is still unsolved. Alice's murder, which occurred
three years earlier, had similar details and also took place
in northern New Jersey. This past December, I heard from
Alice's great niece, who informed me that Alice's murder had

(01:49):
been solved and that the official news was coming soon.
Two weeks later, the Fair Lawn Police made the announcement. Alice,
the nursing student who fought for her life inside her
own home, had been murdered by a man who was
already serving several life sentences for multiple murders. Richard Cottingham

(02:09):
a serial killer who preyed on women and children from
nineteen sixty five until his capture in nineteen eighty. Today
he lies bedridden in ill health at Southwood State Prison
in New Jersey as he continues to confess. To understand
why this confession mattered so much, we'll have to go

(02:29):
back to nineteen sixty five. Welcome to method and madness.
This is Confessions Alice, the name he couldn't bury. I'm

(02:50):
your host, Don. This is the third part of a
mini series and if you haven't already, I suggest listening
to episodes one O four and one O five for
some background. Just a note, if you like listening to
Method and Madness, be sure to leave a review or
a rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favorite

(03:11):
podcast platform. Eighteen year old Alice Eberhardt had just graduated
from Fairlawn High School that June. More than anything, she
wanted to become a nurse, and by September of nineteen
sixty five, she was already on her way to making

(03:32):
that dream a reality. Alice was born on April eighteenth,
nineteen forty seven, to Ross and Jean Everhart. She was
the youngest of four children, her siblings Susan, Theo, and Lynn,
all several years older. The family lived in a white
ranch house on Saddle River Road in Fairlawn, New Jersey,

(03:54):
about eighteen miles from Manhattan. It was the kind of
home where friends stopped by unannounced and were always welcome inside.
Alice loved playing hostess. Those who knew her described Alice
as intelligent, cheerful, and kind, someone who genuinely looked for
the good and others. Her senior photo in the Fair

(04:16):
Lawn High School yearbook shows a young woman with a
soft smile and bright eyes, her hair styled in a
perfect nineteen sixty five flip with a headband. She had
many talents. Alice was involved in theater and played several instruments,
including the saxophone, guitar, and even the tuba. She was

(04:37):
a member of the high school band, the glee club,
and the ski club. By the end of summer in
nineteen sixty five, America was smack in the middle of
Beatlemania and the song Yesterday was rising to the top
of the charts. Fair Lawn, New Jersey, was an idyllic
suburb with a deep sense of community, the kind of
town you see depicted in old sitcoms like Dennis the Menace.

(05:02):
Friends met at the corner drug store's soda counter for
a cherry coke, and the pharmacist knew all the customers
by name. Children rode their bikes to the local luncheonette,
spinning atop stools until they became dizzy, before heading to
the candy store for jawbreakers and Swedish fish. Autumn arrived
and Alice Eberhardt had begun classes at the Hackensack Hospital

(05:26):
School of Nursing where she'd already been elected president of
her nursing class. On Thursday, September twenty third, she spoke
with a friend's mother about how much she was enjoying
her studies, and the next day, Friday, September twenty fourth,
Alice left the nursing school at Hackensack Hospital around two

(05:46):
thirty and headed home. She and her father had plans
to leave later that evening for Oswego, New York, where
they would attend an ant's funeral. Alice's mother had already
traveled ahead and was expecting them. What Alice didn't know
was that someone had noticed her outside the hospital. Years later,

(06:08):
Richard Cottingham would admit that he had been watching her,
noticing the way she carried herself, the way she spoke
with friends as they left the building. To him, the
young woman had stood out. Alice, of course, had no
idea that a stranger was paying attention to her, watching,
and she certainly had no way of knowing that the

(06:29):
young man who had taken that interest would follow her home.
One chilly, rainy afternoon, around five thirty p m. Ross
Eberhardt left his job as a painting contractor and hurried
back to his house so he and Alice could begin
the drive north. He walked through the front door and
immediately saw his daughter lying on the floor of the den.

(06:53):
A kitchen knife had been left embedded in her throat,
A dagger lay next to Alice's body, and blood covered
the floor and the walls. The Eberhardt home was in
complete disarray. Furniture had been overturned in several rooms, evidence
that Alice had fought desperately for her life. None of

(07:13):
the neighbors had heard a thing, most likely due to
the noise of the thunderstorm. Ross Eberhardt was still wearing
his work attire when the police arrived. He was now
covered in his daughter's blood. It was later determined that
Alice had been stabbed more than sixty times. Her official
cause of death, however, was a fractured skull, most likely

(07:36):
caused by a blunt force object. Although she was found
half dressed, the medical examiner found no evidence of sexual assault,
and her time of death was said to be sometime
between four thirty and six p m. Just two days later,
on Sunday, friends, neighbors, and members of the community all

(07:57):
came to the memorial service to pay their respects. More
than one hundred people stopped by the murder of the
bright determined nursing student had sent shock waves through fair Lawn,
New Jersey. Parents were terrified, becoming more protective of their
children's comings and goings. Teens and young adults were terrified

(08:19):
that a killer was on the loose. There was indeed
a killer on the loose, and he was just getting started.
More than one hundred of Alice's friends and acquaintances had
been interviewed in the days after the murder. Some were

(08:40):
called back for second or third rounds of questioning, but
investigators were struggling to find a motive, a piece of
evidence that would break the case open, anything that would
get them one step closer to an arrest. It didn't
seem to be a burglary gone wrong. If anything, it
seemed quite personal. There was no sign of a break in,

(09:02):
which led police to speculate that the killer was most
likely someone that Alice knew, that she had let the
killer into the house. Other theories were that the killer
was already inside the house when Alice got home. The
knife that was in Alice's throat was a kitchen knife,
and the dagger left beside her body was a four
inch curved souvenir letter opener. Only one thousand of them

(09:26):
were made and sold at three locations, the Jordanian Pavilion
at New York's World Fair Drive or at one of
the House of Jordan's stores in New York City. The
sheath to the knife was never located. Two detectives from
the Prosecutor's office and one detective from the Fair Lawn

(09:46):
PDE were assigned to the case. Three months after Alice's murder,
Bergen County Prosecutor Guy Cullissey told reporters, quote, if we
didn't think we'd solve this case, we wouldn't keep at it.
In the years that followed, local newspapers continued to honor
Alice with articles marking the anniversary of her death, but,

(10:08):
to the dismay of her loved ones, no suspects were named.
One person of interest was a man named Richard Speck.
Speck had broken into a town house in Chicago's Geoffrey
Manor neighborhood on July thirteenth, nineteen sixty six. There, he
committed a mass murder. The home at the time was

(10:29):
being utilized as a dormitory for student nurses working at
South Chicago Community Hospital. Speck had spent most of that
afternoon and evening drinking at a pub near by. He
met a woman there and later robbed and sexually assaulted her.
After that assault, Speck broke into the town house at

(10:49):
East one Hundreth Street, where eight student nurses were living.
He robbed the women, tied them up, and held all
of them in a bedroom for hours. One by one,
he led each woman out of the room and killed them,
either by strangling or stabbing. A ninth woman, a guest

(11:09):
who was just visiting, made it out alive by hiding
under a bed. Speck was arrested the following day, and
the news of the mass murder caught the attention of
authorities in New Jersey. They looked into whether Richard Speck
had traveled to the East Coast in the fall of
nineteen sixty five. Ultimately, though, the police could not link

(11:31):
Richard Speck to Alice's murder, and then there were the rumors.
Of course, armchair detectives were quick to blame Ross Eberhart,
as he was the one who found his daughter. Ross
fought publicly to clear his name from the rumor mill
and died in nineteen eighty six without ever finding out
who killed his youngest child. Others pointed fingers at Alice's boyfriend, Lou,

(11:55):
who was cleared of any wrongdoing early in the investigation.
By ninetheteen seventy one, it was reported that nine women
and girls had been brutally murdered in Bergen County, New
Jersey in the past eleven years. None of those murders
had been solved, but six of those cases had similarities.

(12:16):
Five of the six victims were teenagers, petite with brown hair.
While they hadn't all been sexually assaulted, there were indications
of the crime scenes that there was a sexual motivation. Initially,
investigators were certain the murders were not related, and Prosecutor
Guy Callissi dismissed the notion that one killer could possibly

(12:39):
be responsible. The differences in the victims and the circumstances
around their killings seemed to outweigh any similarities, but by
nineteen seventy one, Prosecutor Callissi became more open minded and
admitted it was a possibility the murders were committed by
one person. Bergen County Prosecutor Alfred Genton was confident enough

(13:04):
in the similarities that He went through all six of
the case files meticulously, and of those six cases, five
of them were eventually solved, although it took decades for
the confessions to come. The victims were Alice Eberhardt, seventeen
year old Marianne de le Sala, thirteen year old Jacqueline Harp,

(13:26):
eighteen year old Irene Blaze, and fifteen year old Denise Velaska.
The closing of these cases offered hindsight that would haunt authorities.
There had been a serial killer right under their noses,
and he was never on their radar. Those five victims
were in fact killed by the same man. He lived

(13:49):
in Bergen County in the sixties and seventies. He worked
in New York City as a computer operator doing overnight shifts.
He was married with children. His name was Richard Cottingham,
and between twenty ten and twenty twenty five he confessed
to each of those five murders. Richard Cottingham was eighteen

(14:11):
years old when he murdered Alice Eberhardt, his oldest confirmed homicide.
He was working at MetLife in New York City at
the time. That office building, located at two hundred Park Avenue,
was within walking distance of both shops that sold the
dagger that was found next to Alice's body. From nineteen

(14:31):
sixty six until his capture in nineteen eighty, Cottingham worked
at Blue Cross Blue Shield, also in New York City.
In a twisted sort of coincidence, another killer also worked
at that same location. Rodney Ocala, the so called Dating
Show killer, was working at Blue Cross Blue Shield under

(14:52):
an alias in the nineteen seventies. When later questioned about this,
both Alcala and Cottingham denied being familiar with each other.
Living in northern New Jersey and working in Manhattan, Cottingham's
commute covered a lot of ground In and around those neighborhoods.
Girls and women began to go missing, turning up dead

(15:13):
days later, but without DNA testing and without cameras everywhere,
it seemed impossible that these five murders would ever be solved.

(15:42):
In twenty twenty five, as Richard Cottingham's health began to decline,
author and friend of the podcast, doctor Peter Vronsky, reached
out to detectives in Fair Lawn with a message Cottingham
wanted to talk. Sixty years after Alice was killed, investigators
would once again find themselves interviewing the man they believed
was responsible, and this time he was ready to admit it.

(16:06):
He told them that he first noticed Alice outside of
Hackensack Hospital. According to Detective Brian Ripkima, Cottingham said, there
was simply something about her that caught his attention. She
carried herself with confidence, and as she stood there talking
with friends, she seemed to draw people in. In Cottingham's words,
she stood out, so he followed her. Cottingham also shared

(16:31):
details that had never been released publicly, the layout of
the Eberheart home, an article of clothing Alice had been
wearing that day. He told the detectives that he was
still in the house when Ross Eberhart arrived home. Cottingham
had run out the back door, noticing that the swimming
pool had been drained, before fleeing the scene, and he

(16:53):
gave an answer to the burning question of how he
got inside the house. Cottingham had knocked on the front door,
shown Alice a fake badge, and impersonated an officer telling
her he needed to speak with her father. Those details
confirmed what investigators had suspected. The man sitting across from

(17:14):
them knew exactly what had happened inside that house. When
the interviews were over, Cottingham provided both a verbal and
written confession. He's already serving several life sentences and will
not receive additional time for Alice's murder. When the news
was announced in January of this year, I spoke briefly

(17:36):
with Fairlaw detective Eric Elswich. He agreed to speak with
me about Alice's case, which he had worked on from
twenty twenty one to twenty twenty five. Ultimately, though, the
prosecutor's office gave Elswich a gag order and we were
unable to have our sit down conversation. Here's what he
told journalists during the time the news broke.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
He would give us little clues things of that nature,
and he would react to certain questions. And it was
just constant communication with him over the years, and we
knew that he would have waste our time. He had
come right out and said on numerous occasions, I won't
waste your time. If I didn't do your murder, I
wouldn't waste your time.

Speaker 1 (18:20):
For the town of fair Lawn, residents expressed their relief
as the only unsolved homicide was now closed. Chief Joseph
Dewickie later reflected on the loss, saying Alice was a
quote vibrant young nursing student who was taken from our
community before we ever got to see the great things
she could accomplish. Graduates from Alice's class of nineteen sixty

(18:44):
five spoke fondly of the young woman whose murder they
had never forgotten. For the Eberhearts, losing the youngest member
of their family to an act of senseless violence carried
trauma and emotional wounds that would never go away. It
was a profound law a young woman who never had
the chance to experience adulthood, never had the chance to

(19:05):
become a nurse, or to get married, have children, or
fulfill any of the goals she had set for herself.
It was agony for a family that woke up countless
mornings with no answers, For a father who was falsely
blamed for his own daughter's murder and had to carry
that until his own death in nineteen eighty six, A

(19:26):
whole left in the heart of a mother, Jeane Eberhardt,
who passed away in nineteen ninety eight, not knowing who
spent those final moments with her youngest child, not knowing
who took Alice away from the world and why. During

(19:47):
multiple interviews, Cottingham told detectives he had never intended to
kill his victims. He often claimed the deaths just happened,
or that he killed because he believed the victim would
be able to identify him. I suppose it's his way
of taking accountability while also separating himself from his own
crime for his own self preservation or for the sake

(20:10):
of his family. Cottingham has said he understands that each
murder affected many people, but as we explored in the
last episode, remorse is an emotion he simply does not feel.
At the start of a new year twenty twenty six,
for the surviving members of Alice's family, the confession brought
a complicated mix of emotions. In a statement, Alice's nephew

(20:34):
Michael Smith described Richard Cottingham as quote the personification of evil,
but he said the family was grateful that, after decades
of unanswered questions, the truth had finally come out. They
may never fully understand why Alice was targeted, but after
sixty years, the family now knows who was responsible. Coming

(20:58):
up next on Method and Madness will continue to dive
into the stories of Cottingham's victims and will highlight the
cases that may be attributed to him. Special thanks to
the following individuals who were among the many who fought
to solve Alice's case. Chief Glenn Cowells who reopened Alice's

(21:19):
case in twenty twenty one, Eric Elswich and Brian Ripkima,
who worked tirelessly on the case over the past five years.
To doctor Peter Vronsky, author and historian, and to the
late Jennifer Weiss, daughter of Dida Gardazi, a Cottingham murder victim.

(21:40):
Thank you so much for listening. Method and Madness is
a completely independent podcast, written, produced and hosted by me.
To find out more about the show, including access to
all episodes, visit Method and Madness podcast dot com. To
support the show, consider leaving a rating or a review,

(22:00):
and to connect them on Instagram at Method and Madness Pod.
And you can find me on TikTok and on Facebook
to chat, suggest a case, or to discuss this episode.
Reach out to me at Methodonmadness pod at gmail dot com.
That's it for this week. Until next time, take care
of yourself. You matter. For crisis support text hello to

(22:24):
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