An inteview with historian, true crime author & filmmaker Peter Vronsky

Peter Vronsky is a Canadian historian, true crime author, and filmmaker specializing in serial killers and criminal history. He has extensively interviewed serial killer Richard Cottingham, also known as the "Torso Killer," and has worked on uncovering Cottingham’s previously unknown crimes, contributing to cold-case investigations and appearing in related documentaries like Netflix’s Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer.

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https://www.petervronsky.org/

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Welcome to Unforbidden Truth. I'm Andrew. Today I'll be speaking
with Peter Vronsky. Peter Vronsky is a Canadian author, investigative historian,
and filmmaker specializing in criminal justice, history and espionage. He
holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and is
widely recognized for his best selling true crime works, including
serial Killers, The Method and Madness of Monsters two thousand

(00:40):
and four, Female serial Killers, How and Why Women Become
Monsters two thousand and seven, and Sons of Cain, A
History of serial Killers from the Stone Age to Present
twenty eighteen, which was named a New York Times Editor's Choice.
His most recent book, American serial Killers The Epidemic Years
nineteen fifty to two thousand, explores the rise of serial
murder in the United States during the second half of

(01:03):
the twentieth century. In addition to publishing his books, Peter
has directed several feature films, including Bad Company nineteen eighty
and Mondo Moscow nineteen ninety two, and has produced new
media and video art pieces featured internationally. His professional career
also spans decades in television and documentary filmmaking, where he
worked as a producer with major networks such as CNN, CBC, CTV,

(01:27):
and RII. His work has taken him across North America
and internationally, covering topics ranged from political conflict to subculture
and crime. Peter has lectured at Toronto Metropolitan University, where
he taught courses on international relations, terrorism, espionage, the American
Civil War, and the Third Right. He also serves as
a consultant of various law enforcement agencies, including the NPD

(01:51):
and New York State Police, providing expertise in cold case
homicide investigations. Here's my interview with Peter Vronsky.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Sure, I'm Peter Vronsky. I'm a forensic historian, and I'm
working with serial killer Richard Coylingham is an incarcerated serial
killer incarcerated since nineteen eighty.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
So can you give me some background when it comes
to your career in some of your accomplishments.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Well, I mean, I've had many lives. I started off
as a journalist. I was doing a lot of documentary films,
a lot of travel. I ended up maybe witnessing a
little bit too much history, and so in my fifties
I took a decade off and I got a history degree.

(02:51):
My field is espionage in international relations, and of course
what does that have to do with serial killers. Well,
the spies are actually serial perpetrators. I'm talking about, not
intelligence officers, uh you know, ranking operatives. I'm talking about

(03:14):
spies who betray their own country. Often they have a
very similar type of pathology. They often will cover their
tracks in a similar ways. So so definitely there, you know,
there was some useful stuff for me to be dealing

(03:34):
with with this particular serial killer. And you know, I
had some in my past as a journalist. I had
some random encounters with serial killers as I was traveling,
and that certainly made me think about, you know, where
they came from and uh, what was their origin. And

(03:55):
of course when I first ran into obviously that serial
killer Richard Cottingham, the one that I am working with,
and primarily because I had that random encounter with him
in seventy nine, that gave me an extra key, I
guess to accessing him, and so we kind of bonded

(04:18):
on on that in a way. And and of course
his victim's daughter as well introduced me to him and
actually brought me in, so I was you know, I'm
a professional historian, but I was writing trade books about
the history of serial homicide. I started writing before I

(04:40):
got my degree in history, in fact, and so almost
like a sideline, you know, it's not what I teach,
Like I said, espionage military history is my field. But
I guess I have two lives, a night job in
a day and a day job. I don't know which

(05:01):
is which, maybe three jobs, because of course I'm writ
you know, writing books about true crime, books about the
serial homicide. Of written now four books starting from serial Killers,
The Method and Madness of Monsters to my last book,
American serial Killers, and my favorite Sons of Caine and

(05:23):
Female serial Killers. So I have quite a you know, well,
not compared to Katherine Ramslan, for example, who's got like
thirty six books. How the hell did you ever do that? Right?

Speaker 1 (05:35):
I think it's more like sixty something, honestly.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
Right, But still it's nice and it's all focused on history,
and you know, a way my vision was shaped of
serial killers in a way that when I encountered the
first one in nineteen seventy nine, of course the word
serial killer was not being used at that time and

(06:00):
and and so for me, you know, stripped of everything
that we learned about the serial killers in the subsequent decade,
and the work that the mind hunters were doing, and
how that term was defined and all the classifications that
came with it. I started without any of that. For me,

(06:23):
they were like Alfred Hitchcock movie monsters. I mean, we
had serial killers, we just never called them that, and
and and you know, I mean we had the Boston
Strangler and a Gean and there's nothing new about them.
We instant call them serial killers, and we didn't have
those concepts of how to classify them. And there was

(06:44):
no systemic profiling. Uh, you know, people were profiling, but
it was you know, like Brussels, famous Doctor Brussels. It
was you know, profiler by profiler essentially. So so I
kind of bridged that in my experience, and that's how

(07:06):
I ended up. Around two thousand, I wrote my first book.
It took me a while because I'm not a writer.
I never thought I was a filmmaker essentially, and you
become a filmmaker because you can't spell right. So now
with you know, auto correct and word perfect and all

(07:28):
that software corrected my spelling. So I began to write
a little more than I used to write when you know,
when I was a filmmaker, so I never thought i'd
write books, But there you go, I have, and I am.
And I never wanted to meet any serial killers either.
When I was writing, I saw a lot of videos

(07:54):
of interviews with serial killers, and all the questions that
people asked them were essentially the same questions I would
have asked. So there wasn't anything that I wanted to,
you know, go find a serial killer and ask him,
and and all the answers that I saw were very

(08:15):
unsatisfactory as well, so that those books I wrote without
going in and seeing any serial killers, and and and
so the only incarcerated serial killer I've been interviewing is
this one guy, uh cotting Hand and and you know,
he's a whale. He's a whale. I don't know where

(08:39):
this is gonna go. I keep delaying my book year
by year, month by month, and and my my new
deadline is January. I really wanted to meet the July deadline.
I've been on this now six years. I speak with

(08:59):
him every day, almost every day. He calls me. Certainly
before COVID, I used to go in and see him
in Trenton State Prison when he was incarcerated there and
in the process and myself and the Lake Jennifer Weis,
we ended up being involved in nine code case closures.

(09:23):
He confessed to a multiple of cases. Since twenty ten,
he began confessing. He was originally convicted back in between
nineteen eighty one and nineteen eighty four. There was a
series of trials, two in New Jersey and then one
in New York. And he was convicted for five murders

(09:47):
back then, and then he dropped out the map. He vanished,
he stopped talking. He always denied having committed those murders,
claimed that he was framed, just wouldn't talk to anybody.
And and interestingly enough, and you look at Cottingham. Cottingham

(10:10):
and Ted Bundy are eighteen hours apart in age. And
yet you know, when you say, you know, name me,
any average person on the street, name me a serial killer,
it's going to be you know, Jack the Ripper, and
Ted Bundy, and you know the Boston strangler probably and

(10:30):
John Wayne Gacy. Just anybody would name those individuals, and
nobody talks about Cottingham. And yet Cottingham I suspect murdered
more people than perhaps any serial killer that we know
of right now, probably more than Samuel Little and um,

(10:52):
he really didn't start confessing until twenty ten to the
other murders. So he went in for five. He confessed
to a six to one in twenty ten, and then
he started blurting out confessions and three more were closed
before I arrived at the scene. And then from twenty

(11:15):
seventeen onwards with Jennifer, he confessed to nine more. And
so when I first met him, he was in for
six murders. He's now in for eighteen and nine of them.
I had a direct Uh, Jennifer had a direct role

(11:35):
in getting closed.

Speaker 1 (11:39):
So speaking of Jennifer, tell me how you met her,
what she was like, and what part she played in
your work with Richard Cottenham.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
Jennifer is the daughter of the Day of Godarzi, the
biological daughter. That's one of the two women that were
murdered by Cottingham in the infamous Torso murders in New York.
He killed these two women who were sex workers in

(12:08):
this motel room on forty second Street. He tortured them.
After he killed them, he cut their heads off and
their hands, bagged them, set the torsos on fire, and
walked away and buried the heads. They were never found

(12:29):
and still have not been found. Didaa was identified because
Cottingham left her shoes behind, something that's unusual for him,
because usually he would take all the evidence away, including
the women's clothing, but here he got sloppy. He left
the shoes behind. And the shoes were only sold in

(12:51):
very few Bamberger stores. So they traced the shoes to
a store in New Jersey. And she also had a
Cesarean scar and and so here you have a head
with no you know, no a torso with no head,
no hands, but a Cesarean scar en shoes from New Jersey.

(13:13):
And so cop started looking like, who's missing? Maybe you
know that as a child, And and of course that's
how they identified the day of go Darzi. And she
was a Iranian national. Although the kind of the canonical
history newspapers reported her as being a Kuwaiti, she wasn't.

(13:37):
She was born in Kuwait to to certainly an Iranian father.
Uh he was working there and and you know he
brought her back to Iran. She was being brought up
to you Iran. He came to the United to the
United States in the early sixties. He was kind of
an opponent to the shop. So all this is pre

(13:57):
Islamic Revolution Iran. And eventually, when she was fourteen, he
went back to Iran and he brought her, brought her back.
We don't know what happened to the mother. They divorced
and the mother didn't keep custody, so they made some deal.
The mother, I think was from the Netherlands, and so
we never really found her. So Jennifer was adopted, and

(14:22):
I always wondered. I knew that there was a child
and an infant that was born about eighteen months before
Dina was murdered, and I always wondered what happened to
the infant, and did she know what happened to her mother?
And did she disappear kind of in the maw of
you know, the adoption system and foster you know, wasn't

(14:44):
going to be some kind of nightmare story. And sure enough,
one day, twenty seventeen in the springtime, she calls me
up and introduced herself. And you know, the woman I
was always wondering about for ten years more, maybe more so.
I wrote the book around two thousand and two, two
thousand and four, and so she introduced herself to me,

(15:10):
and of course I knew of her, and we started
talking about Nadia Fitzani, who went to see Richard Cottingham
in two thousand and nine, and she was a Canadian
journalist and she was the first one to actually get
Cottingham talking. And she too resembled the Daya. She was

(15:34):
Tunisian and so she had this olive skin color tone
to her. She was dark in that way, and Cottingham
likes Despite the game what you read about Conningham's predilection
for blondes, Cottingham actually likes brunettes and dark haired women.
And right away, for some reason, he saw Nadia almost

(15:57):
as a kind of a reincarnation of Dia good Ns,
who he had a long relationship with. He knew her, yeah,
both a professional as as you know, he was her client,
but they also had a friendship in those years. So

(16:19):
you know, it's Jennifer now actually didas daughter and she
wants to find the heads. Where are the heads? And
of course we want to find the other head because
the other girl was never identified, a teenage girl and
with a rare blood type, and so we wanted to
find the several heads. He told us where he buried them,

(16:41):
you know, more or less remarkably, NYPD got involved very easily.
There was a kind of very diligent detective there, William
Bill Simon on the cold case squad. He's retired since
in frustration, but Bill right away got involved in the

(17:05):
case for the sake of identifying the other girl, because
they didn't need the heads. Cottingham was already convicted for
those murders, so it wasn't like we brought them evidence
for something new. They didn't need it. But NYPD, this
was of course in the old days, in the pre
COVID days and different political era, and NYPD was very

(17:26):
committed to trying to find that girl and hopefully identify her,
and they still are, but it's not the kind of
priority they were able to make it in twenty eighteen
twenty nineteen. There was a different world back then, and
so we conducted the first search and we've been doing

(17:48):
searchers annually trying to still find those heads, and I
think we're getting closer. Partly is the issue with Cottingham's memory.
You know, he does have a geriatric memory. He has
bad days and good days. He's not in very good
health and there's a lot of murders on his hands,

(18:11):
and and and it's a very slow process. Solving the
cases is easy getting them closed this heart. And and
so I know that Cottingham I know of about i'd
say roughly thirty six murders that he committed. And out

(18:34):
of the eighty five to one hundred he claims and
claims plausibly. And so thirty six I'm pretty clear about
about maybe eleven of them are under active investigation with
different jurisdictions. Some I'm assisting in, some rather not deal

(18:56):
with the civilian or with somebody from outside law enforcement,
and and so different jurisdictions will deal with it in
different ways. But cold cases are very hard. People are
very reluctant to engage in them. And and that's one

(19:17):
of the reasons that certainly Bill Simon resigned from the
NYPD two years ago. It just wasn't, you know, the
cold case squad wasn't getting the kind of support they
used to have in the in the old days. You know,
it's a new squad. It was only formed by the

(19:39):
guy kind of inspired. It was a detective Wendo Strafford,
who was now retired as well. But it was only
formed I think nineteen ninety six or nineteen ninety four.
I believe nineteen ninety six, So it was something new,
and there's about if you look at the killing years
between nineteen sixty and nineteen eighty, there's about eleven thousand

(20:06):
unsolved homicides in New York. That's a lot of murderers
walking around. That's a lot of cold cases. And so
the nineties were the worst. And so you know, when
you talk about cold cases, often what they really want
is a cold case that is maybe ten years ago,

(20:27):
twelve years ago. Nobody wants to investigate thirty years and
forty years, which is what Cottingham's murders are ranging on.
I believe his first murder was nineteen sixty three Kennedy
was still alive, which, again, if you can compare them
to Ted Bundy, Cottingham is incredibly precocious. You know, Cottingham

(20:51):
is doing what Ted Bundy was gonna do, but he
was doing it when Ted Bundy was still only choplifting
at his best. So I kind of described Cottingham that
Cottingham was Ted Bundy before Ted Bundy was Ted Bundy.
He did the shopping mall thing, posing as a private

(21:12):
detective as a as a shoplifting detective. Right, That's how
he lured women into cars the way Ted Bundy failed
to do. He attempted to do. You know that famous
he tries to lure a woman into his polkswagon, pretending
that that he's a detective investment that something's wrong with
her car. I think was that somebody attempted to steal

(21:35):
her tires or something. Was Bundy's routine. Cottingham did the
same thing, targeted women off in shopping malls. He would
abduct them in their own car. So he definitely had
a pattern that that became recognizable. And today, of course,
as I tracked as many suspected cases, it's much more

(21:56):
obvious to me than than was there anybody back then.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
So out of hundreds of potential serial killers that you
could have contacted to work with, why did you choose
Cottenham out of all of them?

Speaker 2 (22:09):
Well, he chows me. Jennifer chose me. Like I said,
I didn't want to meet any serial killers. I had
no intention, and Jennifer reached out to me. And of
course I had that connection with Cottingham in the sense
that he was the one I ran into by accident.
That who was fleeing the Torso murders. I mean, I

(22:31):
believe that Cottingham hit me getting off the elevator with
a bag with Jennifer's mom's head in it. That's how
close I got to the case. I was twenty three
years old, and I was stranded in New York and
the Sunday morning, December second, nineteen seventy nine, as Cottingham
is fleeing the hotel, having set the room upstairs on fire,

(22:54):
the torsos. I'm trying to check into that hotel. So
we collided in the elevator doors, and he annoyed me.
He annoyed me because he held up the elevator. I'm there,
you know, hitting the elevator button, and the elevators is
up there on the fourth floor, Like, what the hell?
But jerk coff is holding up the elevator. How long

(23:15):
does it take you to get on an elevator? You know,
I want to take a look at this place, see
if I want to stay there, and and and so
probably was maybe sixty seconds, seventy seconds, but it seemed
like forever. Now I'm young, I'm impatient. I'm from Toronto,
so New York is a is a you know, I'm

(23:37):
there on a trip, on an exotic trip, but I'm stranded.
I'm on the mission there for a film company, and
and so I want to enjoy myself while I have
the time. I don't want to be standing pushing an
elevator button. And so I'm annoyed. This guy annoys me.
And so when he comes down, I gave him a
hard look, right, and and so when I went up

(23:59):
to his I smelt the fire. And I probably was
there maybe two minutes, three minutes, and and and then
there was the alarm started, and and and housekeeping was
forcing everybody out of the hotel. Off the floor. I
smelt stuff, but I didn't see any planes. And it's
only at the end I saw some smoke just curling

(24:20):
along the ceiling of the hallway, right, and so I
knew it was a fire now. And and you know,
there were all those nightmare stories about high risetel hotel fires,
so I knew what to do, you know, don't get
on the elevator, go down the stairs. I went down
the stairs and and out the door, and the fire
department was just arriving as I was leaving, and so

(24:43):
so I said I'm not staying here, and I'll go
somewhere else. And and and I don't remember where I stayed,
but I didn't know what happened, and and and so
I got to my destination, a film laboratory the next morning,
and I'm in the lobby, and their newspapers in the lobby.
I'm there to pick up motion picture film that was processed,

(25:04):
right to bring him back to Toronto. And so in the newspapers,
I see the story that the hotel I was at
there was a fire, and there was two prostitutes burnt,
their portsals burnt. They already identified them as as sex workers, right,
two prostitutes from the Times Square area, which they weren't.
But that's why the newspapers reported it burned, set on fire.

(25:27):
Oh my god, that's when I was in But again,
not having that word serial killer. You know, when you
when you think serial killer, you think the guy next door,
the nose neighbor, the quirky guy at work, the stranger
on the elevator. Right, none of those concepts existed. They

(25:50):
were all monsters back then. And and so the guy
on the elevator, I never thought about him until I
saw his picture. Maybe eighteen months or two years later
when he went on trial after he was arrested. So
that was also a kind of a surrealistic experiment you experience.

(26:11):
It was like, you know, like layers of an onion
getting peeled as I kept discovering what the hell I
was in. So I didn't know for the first twenty
four hours that I was at a crime scene until
the next morning.

Speaker 1 (26:29):
That's crazy, Yeah, it is crazy.

Speaker 2 (26:32):
It is crazy. And because I then encountered the second
serial killer in nineteen ninety, also a notorious serial killer
in Russia, and it turns him down for a TV interview.
He wanted to be interviewed about something else. So I
write about both these guys in my book Method and

(26:52):
Madness of Monsters. I described meeting these two people. But
it made me wonder, like you know what's wrong with me?
And you know, right, like like, okay, you can get
struck by lightning once you meet a serial color. I
just happened to find out who my serial color was

(27:12):
at random. Okay, but now it's two. Now it's two
and and the math now starts looking kinky, all right,
like does this meat?

Speaker 3 (27:22):
But you know I met at random, bumped into or
ran into at random when I was a kid, Robert Kennedy.
In nineteen sixty seven in Montreal, I met Peter O'Toole
on an elevator. I ran into Sammy Davis Junior in

(27:45):
a cigar shop.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
In London, England. I uh bumped into Andy Warhol in
the bar doorway.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
I I.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
Elton John. I ran into the street coming out of
a hair transplant clinic in Toronto, in Yorkville. I mean,
you know all these celebrities that I wasn't seeking out right.
You know, I've driven celebrities as a film worker, when
I worked as a as a as a teamster, and

(28:19):
as an assistant director. You know, I worked with them.
But these were people I ran into at random. So
why not a couple of serial killers among them? I
mean I met more movie stars than I did serial killers.
Maybe there's a third one or fourth one. I don't know.
Maybe we're all meeting encountering serial killers. We just don't

(28:40):
know it. Luckily, I just happened to find out which
ones were mine. And the same with the guy in Russia, Chikatillo.
I didn't know I was talking to a serial killer.
Even after he was arrested. Because I was in Russia
when he was arrested and put on trial, and you know,

(29:01):
it was on live television in Russia his trial. I
didn't recognize the guy, but I had a long conversation
with him. Unlike Conningham on the elevator, I had a
fifteen second encounter with Chickatillo, the Red Ripper. I talked
to him for maybe four or five minutes before I
told him to get lost, right And you know, I

(29:23):
was kicking myself after when I realized that's the guy
who my cameraman and I kind of brushed off. We
didn't want to go. We don't have time for your
stupid story. You wanted to be interviewed. I kuld have
had Chickatillo at three minutes, four minutes of video with Chickatillo.
You know, unfortunately he wasn't He didn't want to talk
about serial killing. He had something else you wanted to

(29:46):
talk about. And it was a really shit ass, crazy story,
which is why I told him to get lost. And
then I'm writing my book maybe seven years later, and
I I got to write about this guy because because
Chikatillo in a certain period in the late nineteen nineties,

(30:07):
he was he had the most victims, he had the
most confirmed victims. He went in for fifty three murders. Okay,
So I said, I got to write about this guy, obviously,
because I was writing about all these different serial killers
in my first book. And so as I'm researching his story,
I read that he's in Moscow at the same time

(30:31):
I am suspected and murdering somebody in Moscow. And the
purpose of his visit to Moscow was why he wanted
to me to interview him. He was claiming that he
was there to protest about a toilet being built outside
his apartment windows in Rostov on the Don, where he

(30:53):
lived in the Ukraine, and and that Gorbatov he wanted
to meet with Gorbatrop about the toilets. And when he
wanted me to do the television interview with him about that,
I told him, get lost, you know, go away, get
await for me, you freak. Yeah. And so now I'm

(31:16):
beating and you know, in the sources, struggle by god,
you know, I remember the guy and I didn't remember
his face. Same with Cotting had if you know, if
I had moaned that I had run into a serial killer,
and then I went to the cops and stuff. Right, Oh,
the other guy on the elevator, I couldn't give you
a description, couldn't tell you what color eyes he had,

(31:37):
but he had a mustache or anything. So all I
remembered about Chickatillo was, you know how his tie. He
had a tie, right, And and as he was talking,
his tie kept bobbing up and down, right, That the
memory I have of him. And you had these big
horn rim Peter cellars kind of glasses, all right, and

(31:58):
and and and as he got excited, they started fogging up.
He was like tearing up and heating up, and his
glasses were fogging up. And he looked like some kind
of geek, right, And that's all I could remember. And
and and you know how he was dressed, not his face,
you know nothing. And like I said, when I saw

(32:20):
him on television the next year, when he was on trial,
and of course he was you know, his head was shaved.
He was acting now crazy. I don't know if you
ever saw any of that Chickatillo. Yeah, but he looked
pretty crazy. He's now, you know, he's with the demons.
And and so I didn't recognize him as the guy

(32:40):
I was interviewing him, and you know, he was in
a tent city we were shooting these protests. This was
of course an era when people for the first time
were allowed to protest without the Russian cops that's coming
in and arresting everybody. And and so there were all
these mostly old people protesting Gulag crimes and Stalin as

(33:02):
there are crimes. And he was in the middle of
this tense city with his own little tent, and and
we were interviewing people, and there were horrible stories, and
then he started telling me the stupid story about it
about the toilet, all right, So so you know, not
filming this and videotape was scarce. You know, if you

(33:24):
ran out of videotape in Russia in those years, go
try to find you know, raw videotape, fresh videotape. You
had to fly it in from Germany. So it wasn't
an easy thing of those days. Now, you know, it's
a different story, but back then everything was scarce. So
so my cameraman and I had a code where we

(33:44):
would pretend to film not to offend people, all right,
And and the cold Word there was a commercial at
that time by Kodak and and and and they throw
like pictures and they go, you know, they're selling that
the Kodak on TV, and the slogan is it's a
Kodak moment, and and and so my cameraman and I

(34:06):
had this code word that, oh, this is gonna be
a Kodak moment. Meant pretend you're filming, but don't waste
any videotape on this month, right and and and certainly
right away I called Kodak moment on on on his
stupid story.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
That's funny, Yeah, yeah it is.

Speaker 2 (34:26):
Yeah, it's funny. It's it's it's frustrating too. And I
went back because before doing interviews, we just panned everybody.
We went up and down all the aisles, and we
shot all these sequences. And when we get to him,
because he had a low tent, I kind of miss him.
We just got the top of this tent, all right,

(34:48):
you know, and and and and so I had no
fucking video of him. It's, you know, one of those
lost lost moments, right right.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
Yeah, that'd be frustrating later on when you when you
learn who who actually was.

Speaker 2 (35:01):
Yeah, but there you go. I'm the guy who turned
down Andre Chickatillo for an interview.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
That's crazy.

Speaker 2 (35:10):
It's crazy, it's crazy. You know. Those two random encounters.
By then, of course the word serial killer existed, but
they made me think. And I had a moment in
my life where I was kind of in hiatus between
television projects, and I had written so much like scripts
and proposals, and I thought, yeah, I'll take a shot

(35:33):
at a book. And and I was reading a lot
of Harold Chuckter's books, and I read Colin Wilson's A
Criminal History of Mankind. And so those two books, I said,

(35:53):
somebody should combine Harold Checkter with Colin Wilson and and
and write a history of Syria killers, not just one
case the way Harold Checkter he would do, you know,
only one case, but the entire book, but a whole
collection of different kind of serial killers that met different
kind of categories. And and so that's how I ended

(36:16):
up writing Mether than Madness of Monster. There was no
book like it out there, and and and and and
so I covered in Method and Madness, I covered essentially
the modern era, like from Jack the Ripper onwards. And
and then I returned in Sons of Caine to write

(36:39):
it back to the prehistoric times. Sons of Cain. Of course,
the title is a history of serial killers from the
Stone Age to the present and and and so I
started looking at serial killers as werewolves and as vampires.
And you know what, what we thought were monsters were

(37:00):
actually what I describe as secular, not at all supernatural,
ordinary serial killers. But we imbued them with these supernatural powers.
So I think all our vampire stories and our werewolf
stories really go back to actual serial killers. And of course,

(37:26):
as a species, you know, animals in the wild are
all serial killers. They have to be. If they weren't,
you know, they would not get very far. And so
we're humans. Yeah, we described the kind of the four
e f's and Sons of Cain necessary for any species

(37:52):
to evolve and survive. And you know, f of course,
the first step is flee, second one is fight, third
one is feet, and the fourth one obviously is the fuck.
All right, if any one of those four apps don't
kick in and and you're living in the jungle, that's it.

(38:16):
Your species will will vanish. And we all were in
the jungle until about fourteen thousand years ago, and and
then you know, for a million years, we were all
out there serial killing, cannibalizing each other. You know, there
was no marriage, there was no courting. It was all rape.

(38:39):
Obviously you males we were would have had many females
and and so it was about you know, it was
about killing even and fucking right and running away when
you can't do any of the last three things. And
and of course comes civilization. We're taught that, you know,

(39:02):
that's wrong. And now fourteen thousand years later, some of
us still have those instincts. Those for f instincts. They're
they're not inhibited. So you know, when people ask me
what makes a serial killer? I actually argue that we're
all born as serial killers and we're unmade. It's the

(39:26):
rare few that remain with those instincts, untamed and uninhibited,
that end up engaging in the serial murder. I mean,
what was sadism. Sadanism is the aggressive impulse crossed with
the reproductive impulse. So I was fighting fuck and and

(39:49):
somewhere something's wrong, you know, maybe it's a head injury,
maybe it's psychopathy, maybe it's trauma. We have all these
different theories, but we really don't know. But but those
four primary impulses, the wires get crossed and and and
so you have this this small, tiny sliver minority of

(40:12):
people who who are serial predators and have those instincts.
So it's almost going back to the nineteenth century, you know,
the Lombroso school of criminology, where where they talked about
criminals as being primitive beings. The only thing was was

(40:35):
that Lombroso thought that you can recognize a criminal just
by the shape of their head and their face, all right.
So so he kind of got the primitive ativist aspect
of murder. But it's not as visible as we think
it is. You know Ted Bunby, who had that primitive

(40:59):
ativistic soul, if you want to call it. But he looked,
you know, as the totally civilized middle class, you know,
post bar He's our postmodern serial killer. He's the one
that's like us, creepy Ed Dean and and and and

(41:19):
and that freak, the Boston Strangler, the Solvo, all those guys,
they weren't like us Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy wanted you know,
he was a yuppie, upperly mobile. You know, he was
law school, right. He was like like you know, like
like the majority of the middle classes, among whom he prayed,

(41:44):
and and and and and so the ativistic thing, and
we should rethink Lombrosa. Now I think it's it's it's
you know, you can't physically recognize them, but the theory
that this kind of a primitive instinctual thing that's gonna awry,
that that has not been harnessed by maybe lack of

(42:08):
good parenting or bad luck or a combination. It's never
one thing. That's always a combination of cocktail of things.
And let's not write off old fashioned biblical evil, right,
I'm not ready yet to take that off the table.
You know, we don't know enough about the world to

(42:28):
say that there is nothing, you know, there's no such
thing as just supernatural, self sustaining evil. Forget psychopathy, forget psychiatrists.
Let's go back to the priests. Right, Maybe they got
it wrong. The guy's just goddamn evil. And the story.

Speaker 1 (42:51):
So, when when you do go visit Cottenham, what's an
average visit like for you?

Speaker 2 (42:57):
The average visit I don't I have I'm due for
a visit, but I haven't visited him since COVID, and
and so the process would be you get you get
four visits a week, two window visits, which are very
awkward because you're talking on the phone and it's not private.

(43:20):
And then you can have on the weekends, you can
have contact visits where you sit in a family room
on two chairs facing each other and and and you know,
it's called a contact visit because the visitor can hug,
they can touch the inmate. It's you know, it's for
wives and girlfriends and family and so forth, but friends

(43:43):
as well, So they're called contact visits. And there's no
glass and there's no phone, so you have a certain
sense of privacy. And and you're sitting in a room
with about maybe forty other visitors. It all happens at
the same hour. You line up, they bring you in,

(44:04):
so there's there's like a all this chatter around you.
People are spaced out on their chairs facing their their inmate,
and that's how we would we would converse. So I
would get about ninety minutes with him, depending on you know,
how impatient the guards work. And you can't take notes,

(44:24):
you cannot bring a recorder, you can't bring in a
pencil or piece of paper, nothing, so I would have
to work by memory. And so it got actually better
after COVID, when he started regularly calling me, and I
could record the phone calls and we could have video
visits as well, although they're difficult for him because he's

(44:47):
in bad health. So so my business actually become more
intense and more active. Once I don't see him physically
any more. We're on the phone, and so I probably
have around four hundred hours of conversation with him. I mean,

(45:07):
he's been phoning me daily since twenty twenty, so probably
more than four hours, sorry, four hundred hours. Probably more
than that. So he calls me at least, you know,
three hundred and twenty days out of the year. Some
days he's in hospital, some days he's being interviewed by cop,

(45:27):
so I don't get a call from him. But otherwise
he calls me every day.

Speaker 1 (45:34):
All that audio is that what you're using?

Speaker 2 (45:36):
Oh? You know that We talk about all sorts of shit, right,
because I talked to him so long. If you ask
him a direct question, he doesn't answer it. He his
murders come out in kind of nostalgic conversations that he
and I bonded over for our love for Old New York.

(46:01):
I'm nine years younger than him, and so I started
coming to New York in nineteen seventy three as a kid.
And of course, so he I see myself personally seven
years of the New York he experienced before he was arrested,

(46:23):
and he loved New York. He was very self conscious
that he was, you know, working in New York daily
and how special New York was as much as I was.
And so we talked about, you know, the music scene
and the singles bars, and the sex clubs and the
Deuce and pornography and prostitution in New York, and you know,

(46:47):
the nineteen seventies were a wild, anarchistic time. I don't
know if you saw the TV show of The Deuce,
but it kind of caught that. And certainly if you
saw tax Driver, then that is authentic New York of
the nineteen seventies. And and I fed on it. I

(47:07):
made move I made films in there. I did a
project about the Guardian Angels, who were vigilantes traveling on
the subways, the punk rock scene in New York. So
so I was doing a lot of independent films in
New York. My dream was to live down there, and
so I was coming into New York all the time,
and it was conceivable that Cottingham and I might have

(47:31):
been in the same clubs at the same time and
and and just didn't meet, but you know, and he
would then when we started talking about things like, hey,
rich where was the best where where? You know? We'd
argue like, where was the best pastrami in nineteen seventy eight? Where?
You know? And he tell me about his favorite pastrami place,

(47:51):
And then he remembered how he killed somebody and left
their body behind the pastrami place he was going to.
That's how his confessions started coming out. And so he
dropped them at random, and I pretend I didn't hear them.
But then I'd work my ass to to you know,
identify the case and get back to him and start

(48:12):
now milking him on those specific cases. And that's partly
how we close those nine cases. So was it? So?

Speaker 1 (48:22):
Was it a total of nine cases that have been closed?
There have there have There have been other cases that
he's been linked to that have been closed.

Speaker 2 (48:28):
No, No, there nine that I was involved in. But
again he was convicted for He was convicted five first
two thousand and ten, he confessed to one, so that's six.
Then three were closed before I arrived. So that's nine

(48:51):
and and and then the nine that we did, there's
your eighteen. So so I came in for the last nine, which.

Speaker 1 (49:02):
Okay, okay, three three in.

Speaker 2 (49:05):
Bergen County, New Jersey, including a double murder, five in
Nassau County, Long Island, and one in Rockland County up
in the towards the Hudson Valley. One case there. So
that's how the mine came together.

Speaker 1 (49:27):
But do you know how many total murders he's responsible for.

Speaker 2 (49:33):
He says eighty five to one hundred, and I believe
him at the rate. Let's say, if we take the
first murder that we confirmed, which is Marianne de la
Sala in January nineteen sixty seven, that's that's that's that's confirmed,

(49:56):
that's closed case. And he's a in May nineteen eighty.
So if you take January sixty seven to May nineteen
eighty and you split it into one hundred, you get
one murder every six weeks. That's entirely doable. Especially in

(50:18):
the days before profiling, before DNA, before cell phones, before
digital databases, before the words serial killer existed, easy nobody
knew there was a serial killer out there. He killed
those hundred women nobody connected any of the cases except

(50:38):
for a new journalists in New Jersey. You know, he
killed a lot of some teenage girls, one after another
the county over a period of about maybe twenty months,
almost three years. And some journalists begin asking questions, all
these teenage girls, schoolgirls getting murdered, could this be the

(51:02):
same person, And of course the police no, no, no, no,
no no. You know, one was strangled, but the other
one was suffocated, so it can't be the same guy.
I mean, that's how cop stopped in those days. And
he varied his method deliberately strangled some, he browned, some
he smothered. Others he beat to death. Some he would

(51:27):
move around, he would cluster them in different places. His
youngest confirmed victim is thirteen. His oldest confirmed victim is
I think thirty one, So there was a huge ave range.
He killed African. It was an African American victim, so
he crossed racial lines. He only thirty percent of his

(51:52):
victims were sex workers too. The other um, you know,
seventy percent essentially a little bit under or schoolgirls or
employed women or housewives, mothers. So it wasn't like he was, ah,
you know, targeting prostitutes in in in particular, and and

(52:17):
and he you know, he was an equal opportunity murderer,
no question about about that. So one hundred, he says,
he says, between eighty five and one hundred. And like
I said, I have about thirty six that est m

(52:37):
hum uggle to get him to, you know, have his
Miranda rights read to him, because the moment any cop
tries to read him his Miranda rights, he shuts the
fuck up right, and nobody can force him into an interview.
I mean the police that arrived from across the US,

(52:57):
and and and arrived in his prison to talk to him,
and he told him to go home. I'm not talking
to you, oh and and and low. Any cop who
tries to read him his Miranda rights, well, they do
you do you? You know, do you understand your Miranda rights?

(53:18):
And he goes, no, I don't understand them at all.
And the cop can't do anything. The guys, you know
you won't, you won't acknowledge his Miranda rights. And so
whatever confession the cop gets out of him is useless.
He's got he don't knows that, he's very it's you know,
he's a he's a jail House lawyer. Right, So so

(53:40):
I one cop not that long ago tried Well that's okay,
but you know what I mean about you know you
you know you understand your miranda rights and no I
don't know what that means. What it's a miranda. Right. Oh,
so so he's he's he's he's cracky, he's crafty. And

(54:02):
Robert Ainsloddis the chief, worked them from two thousand and
four until he retired in twenty twenty one. Extracted how
many confessions extracted? Extracted four confessions without me and then
another three with me. Right. He worked Cottingham from two

(54:29):
thousand and four until twenty twenty one, So that's nearly
twenty years his entire career. You know, he started off
as a sergeant when he went to first see Cottingham
and Trenton. And when he retired in twenty twenty one,
he was the chief of the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office Detectives,

(54:53):
the investigation squad. And you know, Rob, like I said,
closed uh count because four four and and and and
for seven cases you closed in that period very very

(55:15):
slowly because cotting hand he likes to talk and and
and you know we entertain each other too, because you know,
serial killers get bored very easily. If you can't entertain them,
it's hard to keep their attention. So so you know,

(55:36):
we shoot the ship like two old men. Essentially, we
we grumble and we complain about the world, and I
make jokes about, you know, how lucky he is to
be inside, not to be outside, how it sucks lining
up at the bank, and how much a pizza costs
these days. You know, he's still he was he you know,

(55:59):
he's come to the world through television, and so that's
all he does is just watch TV all day, all night, right,
So so he knows the world out there. He sees commercials,
but he's still shocked and how much a hamburger costs,
or a beer or or a quart of milk and shit,
you know, and and what it's like on the street

(56:21):
and the dating scene, and you know, and sometimes we
you know, he has these fantasies of what it would
have been like for him to be a serial killer
with DNA and with cell phones out there, and you know,
whether he would have been able to get away with
things the way he was able to get away with it.

(56:42):
I mean, he got away. He was caught by accident.
There was nobody looking for him, there was no task force,
nobody knew there was a serial killer. He he he
got caught torturing a woman in a motel room, and
a hotel security brought the police to the door. That's
how he was arrested. And you know Cottingham. The mistake

(57:07):
Cottingham was was that he brought this woman back to
the same motel which he murdered another woman nineteen days earlier.
They left her stuffed under the bed, and now he
comes back to the same motel with another victim. And
so the hotel room's staff I spooked from the murder,
and when they hear the woman screaming, they right away

(57:31):
they react. They might not have you know, previously, and
so they call in security, and security calls in the
police and Cottingham is literally caught red handed with this victim.
They rescue the victim. She'll testify a trial. And because
right away the cops go, wh isn't that interesting We
found another girl here nineteen days ago, stuffed under the bed.

(57:56):
What if it's this guy? And three years earlier he
left a woman in the parking lot of that same hotel.
So once they started pulling on those strings, and and oh, yeah,
he's doing stuff in the hotel rooms. Wasn't there some
murders in New York? Right? And and and so all
those those five cases, five murders came in, two murders

(58:17):
in New Jersey, three in New York City. And that's
what he was put away for. And like I said,
a couple of trials in New Jersey for you know too.
They tried the two murders in New Jersey separately, and
then New York tried him for all three murders, the

(58:37):
torso murders. And then there was another woman who he
murdered in the Seville Hotel on Magison Avenue, set her
torso on fire too, and instead of cutting off her head,
he cut off her breasts and left her breasts posed
on the bed, and and and and and and and

(58:59):
he veried that too, Like those mutilation murders were just
something he was doing for New York City. In New Jersey, right,
the murders were so different that at first nobody thought
it was the same guy.

Speaker 1 (59:13):
So what so what what inevitably linked him? Did he
just confess or did they have evidence?

Speaker 2 (59:18):
Like?

Speaker 1 (59:18):
What what was it that connected him to the five
cases after he got caught torturing that woman.

Speaker 2 (59:23):
Those five cases. It was circumstantial, entirely circumstantial. Dennis Kalo,
who was the prosecutor in New Jersey, did a very
unique prosecution for that time. He talked about signature evidence.
Klo I got to say, you know, he was so

(59:44):
far ahead of the ball in saying that there's a
difference between m O and signature. And even though the
five murders are all apparently seemed different in the m O,
the signature is the same.

Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
And and.

Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
They had only one fingerprint from him, and and the
chain of custody was if that went to trial today,
they probably would have thrown out that fingerprint. The chain
of custody was had been briefed. But but they wanted
to put them away. They really did, they, you know,
and and and so the argument with that one fingerprint,

(01:00:25):
that's it, that's all they had. The argument was was
that the you know, his signature was obvious, and the
jury was scared enough. Plus they had three surviving witnesses,
four witnesses testifying too, describing what he did to them.

(01:00:46):
Because a lot of his women survived he killed, he
probably abducted maybe a thousand women over that period, but
very few of them reported it. Most women didn't. They
just didn't want to, you know, deal with it, you know,
And and rape in those days was was, you know,

(01:01:07):
classified in very different ways. So so I found all
these cases from his descriptions. Later I traced them back
to newspaper reports that were never you know, even the
victims they can't identify anymore. When I went to NYPD
about a number of cases in New York, they went

(01:01:29):
to look for the case files, but they were gone.
These weren't even homicides, these were rapes, so they didn't
even know the name of the victim anymore, and it
wasn't reported in the newspaper. So so a lot of
women didn't report his crimes, and a lot of them
walked away alive. So four of them, like I said,

(01:01:49):
testified against them and described what he did to them,
and so far, and that was his thing about he said.
He once said to me and said, you know, killing
someone doesn't make you god. Knowing whether they live or
die does that. And so he played god. And in

(01:02:13):
order to have those god powers, he had to leave
some of them to live. Otherwise He's not God, and
so he left all the most of the women he
abducted were left alive. He only killed probably ten percent
of his victims, and it was for all sorts of reason.

(01:02:36):
I mean, one girl he killed because she lied to him.
She told him that she was a vegetarian, but then
several hours later she orders a cheeseburger. Killed her, right,
can't trust her. One woman made her joke. He was
going to let her go. He wanted to let her go.

(01:02:57):
He liked her, and he said to her, he says,
I guess you're gonna call the cops now if I
let you go. And she was, you know, a tough woman,
and she she wisecracked. She said, no, I'm gonna have
a shower first, then I'm gonna call the cops. That's

(01:03:21):
how she ended up dead. He said, if she hadn't
said that to him, he would have let her go.

Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
So basically, so he killed these women to cover up
the rapes, right, essentially, it was.

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
One of the things. I mean, he he had a
kind of a random, instinctual whimsic. Whether I'm in the
mood filtering system as to who he killed, who he
let live, If there's something about the girl he liked

(01:03:59):
and and and he felt it was safe that she
wouldn't be able to identify him or find him. He
would let them go. He wasn't out there killing. The
killing part was a chore for him. For him, it
was the abduction, the control over the women. That's that's
what he was looking for. The killing was like almost

(01:04:22):
an afterthought, something he you know, he had to do.
So he doesn't describe the killing is giving him any
kind of particular pleasure or or wasn't why why he
was out there. He wasn't out there to kill them.
He was out there to abduct them, you know, as
he would put a fuck with him and keep them

(01:04:44):
under control. He also said he liked meeting new people.
This was a way to get to meet new women
and get to know them by you know, he said
to me. It was a straight face. He said to me.
You know, when you hold someone prisoner, they tell you
the most amazing things. You get to really know them
when when when you hold them prisoner?

Speaker 1 (01:05:03):
Right, Okay, so you're currently writing a book called American Werewolf,
The Life and Crimes of Richard Cottenham, the last serial
killer on the Left. Can you tell me what that
book's all about and what people can expect to read.

Speaker 2 (01:05:20):
Question, it's about my meetings with him, it's about him.
I'm not sure that the last serial killer on the Left.
My publisher really hates that title. I don't think it's
gonna go And and they're not crazy about American Werewolf either,
for crying out loud because of that movie. Right, And
I'm sorry, it's not the Godfather American Werewolf, right. I

(01:05:40):
think Cottingham really is the I mean, he's not an
American werewolf in London, he's from the American Werewolf in America.
For crying out loud. I keep arguing with my publisher
that we're going to redefine the word American werewolf. And
he is lookanthropic. That's why I call him a werewolf
because I believe that cotting and his behavior is related

(01:06:01):
to a head injury. It's not a behavior disorder or
something you know, like a traumatic thing. It's a physically
physiological brain injury. Because he essentially the core of him

(01:06:22):
is not evil unless that's the face of evil. Right.
But but I would describe him as a very nice
guy with a cork. He likes to cut off women's
heads and and set their torsils on fire. But other
than that, he's like you and me. You know, there's
nothing twitchy about him. There's no flights of fantasy. You know,

(01:06:46):
I watched those those interviews with the I'm just trying
to remember his name now, that the Long Island serial
killer from New York.

Speaker 1 (01:06:57):
Oh Rex Heureman.

Speaker 2 (01:07:02):
Sorry was the name.

Speaker 1 (01:07:03):
I don't know how to say his last name.

Speaker 2 (01:07:05):
Oh no, that's the recent guy. But there was one
in the nineteen nineties. Damn. He had a body that
fell out of this pickup truck. That's how the cops
caught him. Right, he was he was He was a
landscape worker.

Speaker 1 (01:07:21):
It wasn't yeah, Joe Rika, Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:07:25):
You look at those interviews with Joe Ripkin. He has
a lot of TV interviews, and the guy looks like
he's thought of it, none of his head, you know,
there's nothing like that about Collingham is completely whether what
you would describe as as as normal, you know, like
your he's like your uncle, and and and so there's

(01:07:48):
nothing twitchy about him. There are no weird flights of fantasy, nothing,
and and and and his values seemed to be like
my values, Like what he thinks is wrong. You know,
I agree on yeah. You know, he loves animals, he
loves kids, right and not in a predatory way, and

(01:08:12):
and and and so he doesn't. He has a very
stable family history. You know, he grew up with with
three younger sisters who adored him and stayed loyal to
him and couldn't believe that that, you know, their older
brother was charged with this. They honestly believed he was framed.

(01:08:33):
And and so he lived in this middle class family.
And you know, not that the middle class necessarily excludes
you from this kind of stuff, but but there was
nothing typical about him that you could compare to other
serial killers. You know, you think of Ted Bundy a
little bit, and and you know, Ted Bundy didn't really

(01:08:56):
have also any kind of like, you know, the kind
of trauma that say, Charlie Manson had as a child
or or or Henry Lee Lucas that kind of childhood, right,
Bundy had this also, this kind of middle class childhood.

(01:09:19):
But he had that little thing about his thinking that
his mother was his sister or or the other way around,
or so you know, I forgot what it was, but
but you know, there was that kind of little weird thing.
And and but but Coningham, you know, grows up in
you know, unquote normal family in the suburbs, and and

(01:09:41):
and but I did determine he had a very severe
head injury when he was four years old that I
confirmed and found the record on was severe enough that
it was reported in the newspapers. And I think that's
the key. I think that's that's that's the key. And
I wish I could get his head into a brain

(01:10:02):
scan to see if there's any scarring on his frontal lobe,
you know, because because we now know from the NFL
football players the head trauma, how that changed their behavior. Boxers, right,
you get a lot of blows to the front of
your head, it does can impact your personality. So so

(01:10:23):
it could be that's the only explanation.

Speaker 1 (01:10:26):
I have, right right, you know, So before we conclude
this interview, is there anything that you'd like to talk
about or plug before we get out of here.

Speaker 2 (01:10:38):
No, I'm I'm no, No, I'm talked out.

Speaker 1 (01:10:42):
Okay, Well, I appreciate your time today. I've been I've
been wanting to talk to you for a couple of
years now, and I'm glad that we were able to
get it done.

Speaker 2 (01:10:49):
Glad we did it any time.

Speaker 1 (01:10:51):
That was my interview with Peter Vronsky. If you liked
the episodes and would like to listen to them ad free,
head on over to patreon dot com slash I've Forbidden Truth.
You just opened a new tier on Patreon which gives
you access to add free episodes, merchandise from Unforbidden Truth
once a month, and digital downloads which includes legal documents
from infamous cases all the way down to non violent

(01:11:12):
drug charges. Thank you for listening, See you on the
next one.