CHAPTER 1 - Serial Killers: A Brief Introduction to the Species
The author's close encounter with a serial killer, New York City, December 2, 1979.
In December 1979 when I was twenty-three years-old visiting New York City, I briefly encountered at random serial killer Richard Cottingham, the "Times Square Torso Ripper." He was was fleeing the scene of a double murder at a hotel into which I was trying to check-in that morning. He had tortured and murdered two women in his room during the night, sawed-off their heads and hands, and after laying out their torsos on the blood-soaked twin beds, he set fire to the room, fleeing with the severed heads and hands in a soft faux-leather vinyl valise bag. I was downstairs in the lobby impatiently waiting for the elevator to arrive. He must have been holding the doors waiting to ensure the fire he had set had taken hold. Except I didn't know any of that yet...
When the elevator finally began to come down, I was already well-annoyed with whoever the "jerk-off" was who had held up that elevator making me wait all that time. I intended to give him a 'you jerk-off...' or 'what's the fuck is the hold up' look into his face. In Sons of Cain I describe what happened next when the elevator doors finally opened...
Richard F. Cottingham, "The Times Square Torso Ripper", a thirty-three year-old computer operator employed at an insurance company in New York, living in Lodi, New Jersey with his wife and three children, was arrested in May 1980 and eventually convicted for a series of rape-torture killings: two in New Jersey and three in New York City. In 2010 he confessed to a sixth murder he had committed in 1967 in New Jersey. Cottingham recently stated he committed some 80 murders between 1966 and 1980 in multiple states and is suspected in several prominent unsolved murders of young women in New Jersey and New York and other nearby states in the 1960s-1970s.
Cottingham is currently serving a life sentence plus 254 years in the Trenton State Prison in New Jersey.
Located on W. 42nd Street near Tenth Avenue, the Travel Inn was near the notorious "Deuce" strip of 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, a neon-lit ground-zero for drug dealing, prostitution, pornography and other illicit activities in the 1970s and 1980s.
The headless victims with their hands severed were discovered by FDNY responding to a fire alarm at the hotel.
A month after the murders, police managed to identify one of the victims as 22-year-old Deedeh Goodarzi, an upscale escort living from Trenton, New Jersey. Her shoes left at the crime scene were sold exclusively in a New Jersey store while her torso had a Caesarean birth scar. Goodarzi had given birth to a girl she had given up for adoption sixteen months before her murder. When police reviewed the medical records of women reported missing in New Jersey after December 2, they located a series of x-rays of Goodarzi's back after she had an accident. The x-rays of her spine matched those of the torso victim.
Despite an intensive search, police were never able to
recover the severed heads and hands while Cottingham steadfastly refused to
cooperate after his arrest and would not reveal what he did with them.
The second victim, estimated by the NY Medical Examiner to be a teenage girl, remains
unidentified to this day.
