Infamous 'Torso Killer' pleads guilty to killing FIVE more women Leave a comment

The infamous convicted ‘Torso Killer’ admitted to killing another five women in the 1970s, including the cold case death of a Long Island dance teacher. 

Richard Cottingham, 75, confessed to the of five women on Monday, but was only charged with 25 years to life for the slaying of a dance teacher after striking a deal. 

The serial killer has been in prison since 1981 and v88toto is already serving a life sentence behind bars in after admitting to the murders of six others that died between 1967 and 1980. 

Cottingham wasn’t charged for four of the murders he admitted to on Monday in exchange for his confession on a 1968 murder case of a dance teacher Diane Cusick, 23.He previously pleaded not guilty to her murder earlier this year, but prosecutors found his DNA at the scene. 

‘There are no words to describe how purely evil you are,’ Nassau County Court Judge Caryn Fink told Cottingham, who appeared in court virtually. 

Cottingham also pleaded guilty to killing Mary Beth Heinz, 21, Sheila Heima, 33, Laverne Moye, 23, and Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves, according to The Rolling Stone.It is unclear how he killed them.

Cottingham was a computer programmer who had a family when he would commit the slayings on the side.

‘I hope there is some justice for all of you knowing that for the rest of this defendant’s life you will live and take every breath in a prison cell in New Jersey,’ prosecutor Jared Rosenblatt told the victim’s families present in the courtroom. 

‘[I] hope today will bring you the closure that you all sought for the last 50 years.’ 

The killer earned his name because he cut off the limbs of his victims and even beheaded some. He once admitted to murdering 100 women and girls, but police have only connected him to 11 cases. 

Cottingham previously pleaded not guilty to killing dance teacher Cusick, but police said semen evidence connects him to the case. 

Officials say Cottingham dressed up as a security guard to deceive Cusick the day she went to the mall to purchase shoes and never came home in 1968. 

Cusick was found in her car outside the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream with adhesive tape around her mouth and neck.Police said she had been raped, beaten and suffocated. 

‘I’m sure she tried to fight this animal off but he was so big and she was so small,’ Jim Martin, asianbookie Cusick’s brother, said on Monday.

In another recent case, Cottingham previously pleaded guilty in April 2021 to the killings of 17-year-old Mary Ann Pryor and 16-year-old Lorraine Marie Kelly. 

The two friends left their North Bergen homes on August 9, 1974, for a shopping trip 13 miles north to a Paramus mall.They had planned to take a bus there to buy bathing suits for a trip to the Jersey Shore.

Witnesses at the time told police the girls were hitchhiking and had gotten into a man’s car. They were found five days after they went missing, identified by their jewelry when their nude, battered bodies were discovered face down in the woods of North Jersey’s Bergen County.

Cottingham admitted that he had kidnapped Pryor and Kelly, brought them to a motel room, tied them up and raped them.He said he drowned them in the motel room’s bathtub before dumping their bodies. 

In 2010, Cottingham pleaded guilty to the 1967 slaying of Nancy Schiava Vogel, a 29-year-old married mother-of-two who was strangled to death inside her car.

She had been last seen three days earlier, when she left home to play bingo with friends at a local church.

The serial killer has been in prison since 1981 and has confessed to three of the murders, including the killings of 13-year-old Jackie Harp, 18-year-old Irene Blase and 15-year-old Denise Falasca, whose murders took place between 1968 and 1969.

He was first arrested in 1980 for the attempted murder and rape of an 18-year-old prostitute Leslie Ann O’Dell at a Quality Inn motel in Hasbrouck Heights.

A motel maid heard a woman screaming inside his room.Authorities found her alive but bound with handcuffs and suffering from bite marks and knife wounds. 

O’Dell later testified at trial that Cottingham told her during the attack, ‘You have to take it. The other girls did, you have to take it too.You’re a whore and you have to be punished.’

Two weeks before his arrest, police found the body of 19-year-old Valerie Ann Street at the same Quality Inn motel.

Valerie Street’s body was covered in bite marks and brutally beaten in a chillingly similar manner to the murder of 26-year-old Maryann Carr, that had occurred in the same motel three years earlier in December 1977.

Police did not link alternatif sky777 Carr’s murder to Cottingham until after his arrest.

The subsequent investigation linked Cottingham to the savage murders of Deedeh Goodarzi, 22, and an unidentified woman, whose bodies – missing their heads and hands – were found inside a burning hotel room near Times Square in December 1979. 

After his arrest, NYPD drew comparisons to the numerous unsolved sexual assault cases with similar hallmarks to the New Jersey crimes.They executed a search warrant on Cottingham’s family home where they found a secret, locked ‘trophy room’ that stashed souvenirs of his evil deeds.

Among S&M books and pornographic artwork were Maryann Carr’s apartment key and jewelry that belonged to his other victims.

Police used the evidence found in his ‘trophy room’ combined with a matching fingerprint left on handcuffs used in the murder of Valerie Street to convict him of his crimes. 

Cottingham continued to confess to murders decades later.