Sadistic Dismembering Murderer - True Crime Documentary

Sadistic Dismembering Murderer - True Crime Documentary

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
In the late seventies, a merciless serial killer began to
strike in New York and New Jersey.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
It was a very big story because of how gruesome
it was.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
His methods, keenness, and extreme.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
These were very bizarre and bloody crimes. Beheaded, burnt, chopped up.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
He killed with callous confidence.

Speaker 4 (00:23):
Some narcissists absolutely believe they are invisible, They're untouchable.

Speaker 5 (00:28):
It was the second case of a woman's body being
found on the premises of this motel.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
But who was this serial sadist?

Speaker 6 (00:38):
What sick son of a bitch would do something like this?

Speaker 1 (00:42):
And was he born to kill? In nineteen seventy seven,

(01:21):
New Jersey detective Alan Grico was about to be confronted
by a mystery.

Speaker 5 (01:31):
We received a call that a young married woman was
reported missing from her apartment complex and Little Ferry, New Jersey,
under suspicious circumstances. Mary Anne was an X ray technician

(01:53):
who had been married a short period of time. They
lived in a garden of apartment. There were very strange
circumstances in that the report came from her husband, who
was away on a business trip.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Mary Anne had failed to keep an appointment that evening
with her mother in law concerned mary Anne's husband had
called the police.

Speaker 5 (02:19):
There did not appear to be anything broken in the apartment,
no broken glasses, no fourth entry on the door, and
we had no indication at all as to what had
happened to mary Anne.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
Carr despite her husband's apparent absence. There had been a
suspicious sighting at the time of mary Anne's disappearance.

Speaker 3 (02:46):
We had a witness who lived in the same apartment
building who said that as he was backing his car
out of the parking lot, he saw a person in
his rear view mirror that he thought was Marianne Carr's husband.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
Although they didn't know it at the time. Mary Anne's
husband bore a likeness to a former resident of the
Little Ferry Apartments, a successful New York computer operator, Richard
Francis Cottingham.

Speaker 7 (03:20):
He worked in what I referred to as Midtown Manhattan,
right in the heart of the business district the Luke
Cross Blue Shield, which is a very substantial insurance company.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
Fellow computer operator Dominic Volpe worked with Cottingham for thirteen years.

Speaker 6 (03:38):
I am Richard worked on the console together, channing a lot.
He was well read and he was up to date
on current events. He read a lot of stuff about medicine.
He was pretty smart. At the time. A console operator
was a big thing. It took four floors of complete
square block of a city for seventeen megs of memory. Okay,

(04:03):
no one ever heard of a gigabyte ben. But it
was the cutting edge of the tire. The thing that
I knows most about him is he consists still. He
was always I called him the lake shaker. He was
always sitting in his office chair shaking. His lads was shaking,
his back was shaking, and he would he would keep
that up for the whole shift, for eight nine hours straight.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
Across the river in New Jersey, investigating the disappearance of
X ray technician Mary Anne Carr, Detective Griico was called
to a motel near the airport. In the parking lot.
Her body had been discovered.

Speaker 5 (04:46):
He was clothed in a white nurse's uniform. Mariann Carr
was no longer a missing person, but now the victim
of a homicide. We could observe Mary Anne Carr's body

(05:10):
lying in this area between the curb and the fence.

Speaker 3 (05:18):
Marianne Carr's body had ligature marks on the wrists and
the ankles from handcuffs, so we know that we knew
that handcuffs were used in Marianne Carr's murder, and she
had a ligature mark along the aspect of her neck.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
Investigators speculated mary Anne had been dumped from the trunk
of a car, but had no solid leads.

Speaker 5 (05:46):
We had no idea of how she had gotten to
where she was found, nor why she was there, nor
who would have been responsible for removing her from her
apartment and taking her there.

Speaker 1 (06:02):
However, it wouldn't be the last time they would be
called to that location. A tale of terror and torture
had only just begun. In December of nineteen seventy seven,

(06:24):
the body of married X ray technician mary Anne Carr
had been discovered dumped in the parking lot of a
New Jersey motel. With no real leads, Detective Alan Grico
was facing frustration as the investigation began grinding to a standstill.

Speaker 5 (06:45):
You need to have the investigation lead you in a
particular direction. Without that direction, it's like a shotgun blast
that you're covering all of these different things that ninety
nine percent of them have no connection whatsoever.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
While mary Ann Karr's k stalled. Police were kept busy
by a series of violent attacks in the airport area.

Speaker 5 (07:16):
There were actually a number of incidents of sexual assaults
that had taken place within that time period, in which
victims were either found on the side of the roadway
or reported to be in motel rooms semi conscious.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
The attacks were perpetrated on prostitutes that had been picked
up in New York City, where New Jersey resident Richard
Cottingham worked as a computer operator.

Speaker 6 (07:55):
He was strange. I mean most of the stuff we
talked about other than the job at the time, well,
stuff that he did after work, supposedly, you know, he
talked about F and M clubs you'd go to. He
talked about.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
Prostitute Cottingham made no secret of his enjoyment of New
York's dark entertainments.

Speaker 3 (08:17):
New York City at that time was a very different
place than it is now. The Times Square area was
a virtual cesspool, four and oh houses up and down
the block, street walkers for blocks around.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
Photojournalist Alan Tannenbaum captured the prostitution industry at the time
whilst working for the Soho News.

Speaker 8 (08:50):
It was rampant. It was all over the place, but
especially concentrated in the few blocks around here.

Speaker 9 (09:00):
It was quite funky, very CD.

Speaker 8 (09:02):
I can give you an example right around the corners.

Speaker 6 (09:07):
Right here, those together stri together.

Speaker 7 (09:10):
Everybody loves the stripper, Come on, all right.

Speaker 9 (09:14):
The girls would work on these corners by the subway entrances,
in doorways close to the peep shows, and solicit asking
men going out on a date, and or the men
would approach them.

Speaker 8 (09:29):
It was pretty obvious who was a working girl.

Speaker 10 (09:32):
Eighth Avenue was one of the more CD parts of
this strip. In fact, it used to be called the
Minnesota Strip.

Speaker 8 (09:44):
That's because the girls would come to New York City
from the Midwest, get off at the Port Authority, and
they would immediately get hustled by pimps who would put
them into prostitution. I think a lot of them were away,
it is in a bit naive and probably not arriving
with a lot of money, so that they would get

(10:06):
trapped into this kind of situation.

Speaker 1 (10:11):
Now, these young women were being plucked from the city
streets and brutally assaulted.

Speaker 11 (10:18):
Prostitutes are very very common victims. Why the hardest thing
in getting a victim is the abduction. How do you
get a woman to go with you, you have.

Speaker 6 (10:28):
To talk to her.

Speaker 11 (10:29):
And even if you could talk well in your somewhat
articulate and charming and engaging, not all women are going
to go with the stranger. The problem with the abduction
is eliminated by targeting prostitutes. That's part of their job
description to go with strangers, take their clothes off and
have sex.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
The victims were being drugged, beaten, and dumped in an
area just across the river in New Jersey, not far
from where the body of X ray technician Mary Anne
Carr had been found.

Speaker 5 (11:02):
There's a lot of motels in the area, and they're
not high class motels. There places that he used for
hour traffic, much of it from New York City.

Speaker 1 (11:16):
One of the patrons of those motels was computer operator
Richard Cuttingham.

Speaker 6 (11:26):
He used to talk about how he would be able
to lure a prostitute out of Manhattan, showing them he
always had two pockets full of cash and tons of cash,
thousands of dollars. He would show a prostitute the cash,
he would take them to New Jersey.

Speaker 1 (11:40):
But cutting him, it seemed, didn't like the idea of
paying for his pleasure.

Speaker 6 (11:45):
Did he talk about not letting anybody get the best
of him. One time we had a long discussion about
this hotel that he went to and how he could
slip out of the place, you know, when she was
asleep and take her. He said. He took her clothes
and her money and left her in the room. You know,
when you're at work and you're talking. Some of it

(12:05):
you believe, some of it you don't take. You take
it goes in one ear at the other. You take
them a grain of saw.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
Meanwhile, the attacks on the New York working girls continued. Dumped, discarded,
and left for dead.

Speaker 5 (12:20):
One of the girls was left in this motel on
the corner here, called the Airport Motel.

Speaker 3 (12:30):
She had been picked up. She was brought to a
bar in New York City called Flanagan's, and that's the
last thing she could recall.

Speaker 1 (12:42):
Near a major hospital, Flanagan's bar was a popular haunt
for Richard Cottingham.

Speaker 3 (12:51):
An analysis of her blood and urine indicated that she
was drugged.

Speaker 1 (12:59):
The young victor him had been subjected to a horrifically
violent ordeal.

Speaker 5 (13:05):
When she was found, she was unconscious in the room,
and she was in pretty bad shape.

Speaker 3 (13:13):
He soodomized her. He beat her very very severely, bit
her breasts very severely.

Speaker 11 (13:24):
Prostitutes are sexual service providers, and that offends many serial
sexual murderers. As ironic as it sounds, many serial sexual
murderers view themselves as highly moralistic, and they want to
degrade prostitutes or are behaving in what they considered to

(13:44):
be an unpermissible sexual conduct. They're very very mixed up sexually,
and so you would think that they would understand prostitutes
and relate to them and understand, but they don't. They
have very very twisted sense of sexuality.

Speaker 1 (14:04):
In December nineteen seventy nine, someone would strike out against
prostitutes in a way that would send shockwaves through the city.

Speaker 2 (14:16):
It was a very big story, even for Manhattan.

Speaker 6 (14:19):
It was very big.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
I clearly remember it because if only because of how
gruesome it was.

Speaker 1 (14:26):
Emergency services had been alerted to a fire in a
room at the travel In Motor Lodge near Times Square.
There they found twenty three year old d D. Gudazi
and another unidentified young woman.

Speaker 5 (14:40):
They were two alleged prostitutes that were discovered in beds
in a motel room, and the bodies had been desecrated.

Speaker 1 (14:51):
Each woman's head and hands had been cut off before
the beds were ignited.

Speaker 3 (14:57):
Beheaded, burnt, chopped up, and nobody knew who was responsible.
It was a mystery.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
The dreadful nature of the crime led to the mystery
perpetrator being dubbed the Times Square Ripper, and news soon
hit the Manhattan computer room where Dominic Volpe and Richard
Cottingham worked.

Speaker 6 (15:19):
This guy, his name is Rob. He came in. He said,
what sick son of a bitch. We do something like this,
take the heads and the hands off the grand burn
them inh so look the climbing and he shook his
head like this is well, Rob could have been you
could have been me, I thought. I thought it was
a joke.

Speaker 1 (15:45):
The depraved crime appeared to have no connection to the
murder two and a half years earlier of X ray
technician Mary Anne Carr, her body found in the parking
lot of a New Jersey motel.

Speaker 5 (15:59):
It did nuts to have any connection to our case.
It happened in New York City that the body is
being desecrated the way they were in. New York City
had a tremendous amount of homicides every day, so there
was no direct connection made at that time.

Speaker 11 (16:16):
This is an important point because we found in our
research that about seventy percent of serial sexual murderers will
experiment at a crime scene and do something very very
different with one victim that they had not done with
the others, such as cut their eyes out, cut their
vagina out, and so on. Now, when an investigator without

(16:37):
extensive experience in this field looks at it, one victim
looks so very different, they're led to believe, at least
from their own experience, that it has to be someone
else that's incorrect.

Speaker 1 (16:50):
However, detectives were about to be called to a scene
with a similarity that couldn't be ignored. At the same
location that Mary Anne Carr had been found two and
a half years earlier, a chilling discovery had been made.

Speaker 5 (17:09):
A chambermaid was cleaning the room and thought she detected
what was a foul odor coming from the bed area.
Lifting the mattress from the frame, she was startled to

(17:29):
see the naked, handcuffed body of a female deceased female
lying there. It was extremely frightening and disturbing to the chambermaid,
to say the least.

Speaker 3 (17:48):
Of that woman, who we sometime later learned was Valerie
and Street, who had been a prostitute in New York City.
On her lower back, there was an abrasion which had
been made by a sharp object. We thought at the
time it was a knife.

Speaker 11 (18:07):
That was torture marks. It's eroticized the power and control
that the offender has over the victim, to make the
victim realize that he, the offender, is in control of
life and death, and so very often the offender will
prolong her agony to kill her in a very very
slow and deliberate way, so that she's aware that he's

(18:31):
going to kill her.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
A monster was on the loose, and it was clear
he wasn't afraid to return to the scene of his crimes.

Speaker 5 (18:42):
That was the second case of a woman's body being
found on the premises of this particular motel.

Speaker 4 (18:51):
I think that the fact that he'd us the same
hotel is narcissism, and that brings us to the concept
of narcissistic immunity. Some narcissists absolutely believe they are invisible,
they're untouchable, they're so superior to everybody else that there's
no chance that they're ever going to get caught.

Speaker 1 (19:11):
As if to prove the killer right identifying a suspect
was proving impossible.

Speaker 3 (19:17):
We had no idea who the perpetrator of the murder
of Valerie in Street was.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
In just a matter of days, the Times Square ripper
would strike again across the river in New York. During
May nineteen eighty, two and a half years after the
murder of X ray technician Mary Anne Carr, a New

(19:45):
Jersey motel had become the scene of a second brutal
killing with the discovery of prostitute Valerie Anne Street. Meanwhile,
in the computer room of a large New York insurance firm,
Dominic Volt, he would listen in disbelief to fellow operator
and family man Richard Cottingham, as he openly discussed his

(20:07):
desires for the city's dark entertainments.

Speaker 6 (20:15):
He was very upfront about it. He bragged about prostitutes,
s and m gambling, all those vices that he had.
He bragged about.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
Cottingham claimed to be a regular visitor to Sato masochistic clubs.

Speaker 6 (20:32):
He would describe things that went on there. He talked
about a woman that was walking around with a guy
on a leash. He was on his knees. He would
walk into the bathroom cunning it would follow them and
watch this. The girl made him lock the urinals with
his tongue. He liked the slave thing, you know, hair
cloths and treating people, you know that had no way

(20:53):
of helping themselves.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
It seems from an early age Richard had liked being
in control. Back in Pascack Valley, New Jersey, Richard Newman
was on the same high school track team.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
I met Richard on the athletic field. Richard stood apart
in the sense that he wasn't always at practice, as
I remember. He wasn't a joiner, he didn't have a nickname.
He wasn't part of our little clique. He had a
kind of wise guy attitude about him, dismissive of teachers

(21:36):
and of school in general. I don't think he was
crazy about authority.

Speaker 4 (21:42):
He would stand out from groups. It's common for narcissists
who believe they're better than others, and obviously they're at
heart insecure, but he just has disdain for what of
the people are doing and doesn't really want to be
invested in it. He thinks he's superior to everybody else.

Speaker 2 (22:02):
He was kind of a big guy, several inches taller
than me. I'm sure broad shoulders. I don't remember him
menacing students in general. I do remember that the two
or three friends of his, that he seemed to lord
it over them a bit like he was the leader
of the pack, so to speak. He was certainly attracted

(22:24):
to women, but my recollection is that he did not
have a girlfriend. When he spoke about women, it was
kind of in a negative way.

Speaker 6 (22:37):
Being in the.

Speaker 2 (22:37):
Locker room reminds you of the expression locker room talk.
I certainly remember him talking among his friends and perhaps
in gym class if I remember about what girls were
attractive to him, And the only ankling you would have
of the way his mind works is that he would
talk about the girls in class, or I guess the

(23:02):
girls out on the street too, who were perhaps were
better endowed, you know, larger breasted.

Speaker 1 (23:12):
That just seemed to be.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
Sort of a key attraction for him.

Speaker 4 (23:21):
It's one thing to have an interest in large breasted
women because you think they're attractive. It's another to have
an obsession with the breasts, not the women, the breasts,
and that then becomes what we call it paraphilia, or
an abnormal sexual interest that is needed for arousal.

Speaker 1 (23:43):
Now in his mid thirties, Richard Cottingham would brag to
his coworkers about his use of prostitutes, but it seems
Cottingham didn't enjoy all aspects of the vice trade.

Speaker 6 (23:56):
I heard one conversation about you had a venereal? Did
he contracted through a prostitute? And at that point he
was Luckily he sounded angry when he mentioned the hookers.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
Less than two weeks after the discovery of the second
body of the New Jersey hotel, the Times Square ripper
struck again in New York. In a burning hotel bedroom,
the body of another young working girl was found. Both

(24:36):
breasts had been sliced off and taken away.

Speaker 11 (24:41):
In almost all serial sexual murder cases, they will go
above and beyond killing the individual and engage in post
mortem activity that to them is sexually gratifying. This type
of ritualistic behavior grows out of the offender's fantasy life,
and very often, as a series of murders occurs, the

(25:04):
individual's behavior becomes much more elaborate. As the offender gains
much more comfort and killing. Their ritualistic behavior is apt
to become more personalized and more embellished.

Speaker 1 (25:18):
With a depraved killer on the loose. Police in New
York and New Jersey were in a state of frustration.
But then one week later, the killer would make an
uncharacteristic mistake and reveal himself for the first time. Yet
again the motel in New Jersey would be the focus.

Speaker 5 (25:40):
There was a great deal of excitement when we got
the call from the Hazrakit's police department, which said that
they had just apprehended a suspect attempting the flee from
the motel. The motel front desk was alerted to a
disturbance in one of the rooms. They decided to send

(26:03):
one of their representatives to make sure that the occupants
were okay. It took several minutes for someone to be
coaxed to the door. Verbally, she said, yes, everything is okay,
but with her eyes gave the impression that everything was
not okay.

Speaker 1 (26:24):
The motel staff immediately called the police and an officer
was dispatched.

Speaker 5 (26:30):
And when he responded, he responded to that area of
the motel, towards the farthest corner where there was an entrance.
A man was observed running out of the building in
a suspicious manner, carrying a bag in his hand and at.

Speaker 7 (26:52):
The time of his arrest, he had the handcuffs tape.
It was to either place over the mouths of the women,
or mind her hands and feet, or what have you.
So all of these items were incriminating and he had
no real explanation for it.

Speaker 1 (27:08):
The fleeing man was identified as Richard Francis Cottingham of Lodye,
New Jersey.

Speaker 3 (27:18):
He had a wife and children. It's a computer operator
in New York City.

Speaker 7 (27:23):
He was in his mid thirties. He was kind of stocky.
He was at least average looking, except again, as I say,
he was kind of stocky, well built, you might say.

Speaker 3 (27:34):
His wife, she described him to my recollection as a
devoted husband. She said that he was very attentive to
his children.

Speaker 1 (27:44):
Despite being virtually caught in the act, Richard Cottingham professed
his innocence.

Speaker 7 (27:50):
He just flat out denied it, and I know I
found it very difficult to accept. They sort of caught
him red handed. That's one might say.

Speaker 5 (28:02):
He was somewhat smug in his attitude and his answers,
although at one point he indicated the only thing I'll
say is that I have a problem with women.

Speaker 1 (28:21):
Investigators immediately moved to search Cottingham's New Jersey home.

Speaker 5 (28:27):
We prepared a search warrant to look for any evidence
that might be associated with a female abduction, rape murder.
This is the street that Richard Cunningham lived on.

Speaker 1 (28:43):
Cottingham resided with his wife and children in a two
family home in a pleasant suburban setting.

Speaker 5 (28:49):
There's a middle class neighborhood. I would describe it as
a working class people. Nothing would stand out of the ordinary.
He seemed to be a normal dad, husband. It's what
we didn't know was hidden underneath. He truly was a monster.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
Inside the family home, detectives would discover evidence of a
man who reveled in sadistic murder.

Speaker 3 (29:17):
In the lower basement of his home. He had a
large room which was locked, which his wife first children
did not have access to.

Speaker 7 (29:25):
Now this guy married with three children, but he has
in this room. I suppose one could refer him as
souvenirs or memorabilia or whatever you want to call it,
items that he took from these women after he tortured
them and murdered them.

Speaker 4 (29:43):
People that we call organized seria killers often take trophies.
They will take something from victims like an earring or
shoe or piece of clothing a purse. Now, Like big
game hunters, the trophy room helps them to relive those
moments where they felt most in control. The trapper room

(30:03):
is a nice metaphor for this compartmentalized life. This is
a place where they go to just completely fully indulge
in their narcissistic fantasies of what they've done to other people.

Speaker 1 (30:15):
Now, the successful computer operator husband and father was identified
as the Times Square ripper and murderer of the women
at the New Jersey Motel. His capture stunned those that
had known him.

Speaker 6 (30:30):
It was like he was unbelievable. No one talked about
anything else. He hit, eon, got arrested, and blah blah blah,
And it was articles in the newspaper being copied every day,
and he talked about crazy things where we never thought
he would do crazy things. You know, I got children
on my way. I'm just thinking about it now thirty
five years later, So I mean, it was a complete.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
Shock amongst his co workers. Gottingham had never made any
secret of hiss of prostitution, sayto masochism and gambling.

Speaker 6 (31:05):
He was a gambler. He was not afraid to take
chances on anything. He usually won. I would say ninety
five percent at a time. He was a winner. He
always said that he can get at him anything. There
was nothing to take him over another. He would always win.
He used that gambling thing in his head for everything
that he did. He was a winner.

Speaker 1 (31:34):
Now, Richard Cuttingham was about to gamble on being able
to outwit his accusers and beat the legal system.

Speaker 5 (31:41):
During his trial, he seemed to be a very conscious
participant along with his attorney, taking notes, paying very close
attention to the testimony of the victims and of the
witnesses against him.

Speaker 7 (31:59):
You could sense that he was calculating all the time.
I came the conclusion that he was devious at best.
After several weeks and court. Everybody, of course, the jury,
the judge, court offices, everybody sort of had the same impression.

Speaker 3 (32:18):
Mister Cattingham was a very intelligent man. He was not
as intelligent as he thought he was. He thought he
was more intelligent than everybody else. That was part of
his personality.

Speaker 1 (32:31):
Cottingham denied all the crimes and claimed that on the
one occasion that he had been caught at the motel
with prostitute Leslian O'Dell, the activities had been consenting. What's more,
despite the advice of his lawyers, Cottingham insisted he wanted
to personally take the stand.

Speaker 7 (32:51):
That was explained to him, You're going to be cross
examined and there are a lot of holes in your
story that probably will be exposed, but he wanted to testify.

Speaker 11 (33:07):
A guy like Cottingham enjoys being smarter than other people,
particularly the law enforcement. He thinks he's the smartest person.

Speaker 6 (33:14):
In the room.

Speaker 11 (33:15):
No matter where he is, he wants to show everyone
his brilliance and how smart he is.

Speaker 3 (33:22):
I started my cross examination by getting him to admit
the things that he could not deny, as any good
prosecutor would do. He could not deny that he was
arrested with multiple pairs of handcuffs. Handcuffs were used in
the murders of Valerieanne Street and Marianne Carr. They were
used in the assault on Leslian O'Dell. He could not

(33:47):
deny that he had mouth suppressants. He could not deny
that he had a knife, and a knife was used
against Valerie Ane Street to torture her on the lower back.
Could not deny that. He could not deny that he
had the barbiturate pills in his satchel. Barbiturates were used
on one of the victims that he had sexually assaulted

(34:09):
and thrown on the roadside. He could not deny that
he bit Leslian O'Dell's breasts. He could not deny because
it was in the photographs part of the assault on
Valerie An Street.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
Understand, Cottingham was forced to admit that he had a
fascination with bondage, But as the pressure intensified, no one
could have predicted the extent to which he would go
to avoid imprisonment. After taking the stand in his own

(34:44):
defense for multiple assaults and murders, New York computer operator
Richard Cottingham was faced with intense cross examination under increasing pressure.
The defendant had revealed a fascination with bondage since his childhood.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
Everything that we were able to piece together, he had
a typical upbringing, middle class, lower middle class family, very close.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
To his mother. Cottingham had been born in New York's
Bronx neighborhood before moving with his family to the leafy
Pascack Valley in New Jersey.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
His home was about two miles from where I lived,
was a great area to grow up in there was
plenty of parks and open space.

Speaker 6 (35:32):
Yeah, this is it here.

Speaker 2 (35:35):
This is where he lived, a modest home, set back
from the road. I didn't go in the house, but
I remember that this is where he lived. I know
his mother was devoted to him.

Speaker 11 (35:50):
These individuals are in very dark and perverse sexually sadistic
fantasies from very very early on. The fantasy driven crimes
like serial sexual murder begins ten fifteen, twenty years earlier
in the offender's.

Speaker 1 (36:06):
Mind, Cottingham would claim that his deviant desires had grown
out of the use of pornography.

Speaker 4 (36:15):
It's a common trajectory with sadistic sexual serial murders is
to begin with ordinary pornography, even just erotic literature, even
just catalogs that show women in underwear. Some people stop
at various stages because they don't really like the rest.
They they're fine with the tame stuff. Others want more,

(36:39):
and if that is what appeals to them and excites
them and arouses them, they will continue to get more
and more extreme with it. Not all serial killers are
sadistic sexual murderers. Those who are tend to become very
extreme with what they do to their victims.

Speaker 1 (37:01):
A portrait developed of a monster with a devious method
of operation.

Speaker 7 (37:06):
He would go out on the street, meet these girls,
say to them, I want to take you out, not
just to have sex in the car or some such thing,
but I'd like to take you to a restaurant. I
just won a lot of money, uh, in a card
game or gambling. And he would show them a lot
of money with a hundred dollar bill around it. Of course,

(37:27):
I guess these girls were impressed. They would go to
dinner with him. At some point he would drug them,
and then he was able to lead them out of
the place into his car and take them to a
motel and sexually assault them, plus cut them and try
to torture them. That's the kind of person he is.

Speaker 1 (37:46):
As the evidence mounted, Cottingham faced the prospect of spending
the rest of his life in prison. Still by hook
or by crook, the killer was determined to avoid incarceration.

Speaker 5 (37:58):
I had briefly left the courtroom and gone downstairs to
my office, and as I came back into the courtroom,
I immediately saw the matron in a frenzy running from
the area of the holding cell, and without her saying

(38:20):
a word, I knew that he escaped.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
During a break in proceedings, Cottingham had decided to make
an audacious bid for freedom.

Speaker 3 (38:34):
Took a jacket and threw it against the sheriff's officer's face.
He followed the sheriff's officer and went about one of
the back stairways.

Speaker 5 (38:43):
I could see him running from the courthouse across the street.

Speaker 3 (38:48):
We chased him across the street.

Speaker 5 (38:51):
Another sheriff's officer had spotted him as well, and we
both tackled him on the street and put them in
handcuffs and restrained them and brought them back to the courthouse.

Speaker 1 (39:07):
Richard Cuttingham would not elude authorities again. He was found
guilty and condemned to spend the rest of his life
in prison. But was this serial sadist, mad bad or
born to kill?

Speaker 2 (39:24):
What makes them think they're going to get away with it?
That's what I dwell on more than anything else. What
makes them think they can continue to do it and
have this smug attitude and exercise this awful power over people.
There's lots of things inside our mentality, inside our personality
that tell us not to do it. If only that

(39:47):
that's a fellow human being and that they have loved
ones at home.

Speaker 4 (39:51):
Those who are psychopathic absolutely have no remorse for what
they're doing. They don't really care about people being in
pain unless they're and they care because they want them
to be in pain. So the psychopath and the sadas,
they're not one of the same. But if you get
the two in combination, you have a very very dangerous person.

Speaker 3 (40:12):
Some people might have trophies for their exploits in baseball
or basketball or golf, or awards that they get for
community service. These were his trophies.

Speaker 6 (40:25):
These were his.

Speaker 3 (40:26):
Conquests, These were his criminal activities which he had gotten
away with, and these were his trophies of how intelligent
he was, how charming he was, and how smarter than
everyone else he was.

Speaker 11 (40:43):
Cottingham is pretty much a very classic serial sexual murderer.
The best way to understand serial sexual murder is to
view it as a deviant sexual arousal pattern where sex
and aggression become fused and the aggressive act of self
is eroticized, whether it's choking or cutting or stabbing in

(41:08):
regular sexual intercourse. In normal conditions, there is some level
of pain inflicted and received, and there's some level of biting,
and these sorts of things. In serial sexual murder, those
particular behaviors are exaggerated enormously and really take a life
of their own.

Speaker 5 (41:30):
I think there is something in their genetic makeup. I
think it is a twisted mind that associates sex with harm, hurt, injury,
and death.

Speaker 4 (41:45):
I think someone who's a psychopath already starts at a
disadvantage as he then gets exposed to things that lure
him into wanting power over other people and in particular
being sadistic type of person, the idea of being born
to kill comes pretty close to him.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
In twenty ten, the incarcerated Cottingham admitted to the murder
by strangling of twenty nine year old mother of two,
Nancy Vogel in nineteen sixty seven, when he was just
twenty years old, and Cottingham is suspected of several other
possible slayings. One thing is for certain for those that

(42:32):
met him and be lucky enough to survive, Richard Cottingham, torturer, murderer, mutilator,
will never be forgotten.

Speaker 7 (42:42):
He was far different than people that I've met, and
I've met some people from all kinds of bad backgrounds
or bad situations. But I think is intrinsically evil.

Speaker 6 (42:56):
You know, you fool around. How goes you fool around
with nurses? You fool around with this, You fool around.
That's fine. A lot of people do that. Nobody kills people,
Nobody decapitates people, Nobody rips people's hands off. I think
it's a six son of a bitch.