Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators (23 page)

Uncuffing her wrists, he put the cuffs around her ankles and ordered her to kneel at his feet, fellate him and call him master.

She did so, but also felt under the bed and grabbed his pistol, knowing that she had to kill or be killed. The terrified teenager aimed at him and pulled the trigger, only then realising that the weapon was a replica. Backing away, she pleaded with him not to hurt her again.

Cottingham threw himself at her in a rage and she began screaming. Staff intervened, and after trying to explain it away as a lover’s quarrel, the sadist fled. But the police had been called and they managed to intercept him in the corridor, the bag containing his torture kit held tightly in his sweating palm.

He now swore that he’d been having a consensual session with the young prostitute, but the trembling girl’s cut and badly 191

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bitten body told a very different story. She explained that he’d been trying to kill her – and her injuries were so severe that Cottingham was originally charged with attempted murder as well as with sodomy and rape.

Examining the contents of his bag, police discovered a knife with a three inch blade, a leather gag, two studded slave collars and three sets of handcuffs. It could have been a consensual sadomasochistic kit but for the addition of the toy pistol which he used to terrorise his victims and the several bottles of strong drugs he kept to subdue them with.

Failed suicide

In jail awaiting trial, Cottingham knew that the odds weren’t in his favour so he smashed his glasses and cut his left wrist. He was rushed to the nearest hospital for emergency care.

His only hope now lay with his mother who refused to believe that he was guilty, despite the fact that he’d been caught outside the room where prostitute Leslie Ann O’Dell had been tortured. By now his fingerprint had been found on the handcuffs binding Valorie Street’s wrists together so he was also facing charges for her murder. It was equally clear to the authorities that he was most likely the Torso Ripper who had tortured and decapitated the two victims near Times Square. Cottingham’s signature torture marks had also been found on Jean Reyner’s body, and a man answering to his description had been seen talking to Maryann Carr shortly before she was abducted, put into bondage and killed.

Determined to clear her only son’s name, Richard Cottingham’s mother spent her life savings getting him the best defence possible. In her efforts to defend him she would even have to sell her retirement home.

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Richard Cottingham

Happy families

Meanwhile, the press described Cottingham as a devoted family man, something they invariably do with any married man who hasn’t taken an axe to his offspring. In reality, he’d mocked his wife so relentlessly that she was divorcing him for cruelty.

And he hardly saw his children when they lived together as he was asleep when they had breakfast and he had left for his 4 p.m.–11 p.m. shift by the time they returned from school.

Many of his weekends were also child-free, being spent with various mistresses or with prostitutes.

But newspapers find that those closest to the defendant clam up so they are forced to speak to those who only casually knew the family. Neighbours said that Richard took his children trick or treating at Halloween, and this was enough for journalists to describe him as the father of the year.

Later, when the press became aware of his collection of sadomasochistic novels, they hinted that these were to blame

– but in reality many more killers have the Bible or the Koran at their bedsides. And religious beliefs have been at the core of numerous torture murders throughout the centuries.

One man, Donald Fearn, began fantasising about hurting women after reading how a sect called the Penitentes had religious ceremonies which included torture. Fearn waited until 1942 when his wife was in hospital giving birth to their first child, then he abducted a 17-year-old nurse and drove her to a hut in a remote part of the desert. For the next six hours he tortured her with wire which he’d heated, also mutilating her with pliers and raping her multiple times before eventually killing her.

The trials

Now it was Richard Francis Cottingham’s turn to go on trial for torture and rape. He firstly appeared at Bergen County 193

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Court a year after his prolonged abuse of Leslie Ann O’Dell.

He was tried for her attempted murder, for the murder of Valorie Street and for the torture of Karen Schilt, Susan Geiger and Pamela Weisenfeld. The jury heard from the traumatised women about the agonies which he’d inflicted on them.

Surprisingly, he insisted on taking the stand. (Lawyers usually advise their clients not to testify if they believe that they are guilty.) Unfortunately for him, his arrogance and his hatred of women shone through. Shown photos of one of his bite-marks, he dismissed it as ‘only a scratch’.

He said that Leslie had agreed to his fantasy, that he’d told her it would involve ‘tying her up, possibly spanking her with my hand’. He smiled coldly as he was cross-examined, only his body language betraying his nervousness, his legs tapping endlessly as he refused to make eye contact with his questioners.

He admitted that he’d been fascinated with sadomasochism from an early age and that he frequented massage parlours where such practices were on offer. He also admitted that his wife had been partway through divorcing him on the grounds of mental cruelty – but she’d put the divorce on hold after his arrest and was standing by him. (The police considered her to be a good woman who didn’t want to kick a dog when it was down.)

The defence wanted to produce an expert who would explain to the jury that sadomasochism wasn’t unusual but the judge disallowed this, saying that if the practice was widespread then the jury would already be familiar with it.

The forensic evidence against Cottingham was damning. He denied knowing any of the four women but their fingerprints had been found in his car and fibres from his car rug had been found on their bodies. They’d identified him in court, their flesh still bearing scars from his assaults.

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Richard Cottingham

He paled as he was found guilty of Valorie Street’s murder, three kidnappings and several assaults (but not guilty of Pamela Weisenfeld’s kidnapping) and sentenced to 197 years in jail.

Richard Cottingham’s father was dead by the time of his trial but his mother and one of his two sisters attended the first trial throughout and refused to believe the guilty verdict. They had concluded that Richard had angered the Mafia by making loans to his colleagues and that the underworld had framed him for the prostitutes’ torture and deaths.

Cottingham’s subsequent trial was held up after he collapsed with a bleeding ulcer and had to be hospitalised. He again tried to take his own life and would later make a third suicide bid. But he finally faced the charge of murdering the medical technician Maryann Carr. In some respects her murder bore his signature – she’d been bound and strangled. However, she’d had no alcohol or drugs in her system, unlike his later victims. Moreover, the only mark of torture on her body was a small bruise on her breast.

She was also a respectable married woman – Cottingham’s future murder victims were prostitutes. But she worked as a medical technician and the prosecution speculated that Cottingham might have mistaken her for a nurse, a profession he wrongly believed to be universally promiscuous and deserving of punishment. In October 1982 he was found guilty of Carr’s murder and given 25 years to life, to run concurrently with his other sentences.

On 30 March 1983 – under tight security as he’d made an escape bid, fleeing from the gents toilets in the court to the street outside before being recaptured – he was taken from Trenton’s maximum security prison and transferred to Manhattan to answer the charges of murdering Deedeh Goodarzi, Miss X

and Jean Reyner.

The court heard that Deedeh’s jewellery had been found in Cottingham’s safe, as had jewellery and other souvenirs from 195

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several of the torture victims. His handwriting matched that of the man who had signed the hotel registers, though he’d used a false name. Equally damning, the bodies had all been tortured in similar ways to that of his murder victim Valorie Street. His guilt was virtually a foregone conclusion and on 28

August 1984 he received an additional 75 years to life for the three hotel-based homicides.

An ostensibly contrite Cottingham shakily told the judge that he would never again break society’s laws if he was released, but given the appalling savagery of his five murders, he’s likely to die in prison.

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PART THREE

THE WILDERNESS YEARS: AUSTRALIAN

SADISTS

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHRISTOPHER

BERNARD WILDER

Australia-born Wilder started his raping spree
close to home, and may also have murdered two
young women there when he was 20. Emigrating to
America, he abducted and sadistically murdered at
least eight young women and teenage girls, returning
to Australia briefly and committing further sexual
crimes. At one time he was on the FBI’s Most
Wanted list. Today, the authorities believe that the
total body count may be as high as 17.

A nomadic childhood

Christopher was born on 13 March 1945 in Sydney, Australia, the first son of a comparatively wealthy family. He almost died at birth and was given the last rites. Two years later, he apparently fell into the family swimming pool and was found unconscious, and a year after that he had convulsions and briefly lapsed into a coma whilst in the back of his parents’ car.

Some criminologists would later imply that this suggested brain damage, but in truth small children are prone to convulsions when they get seriously overheated or ill.

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Christopher Wilder

The Wilders went on to have three more boys and the family moved constantly between Australia and America as Christopher’s father worked for the American navy. They lived in Alabama, Albuquerque and New Mexico and this obviously involved the children having numerous changes of friends and school.

Christopher’s father was the family disciplinarian so he was much closer to his mother. As he grew, he felt increasingly ambivalent about becoming a man.

Sexual abuse

Christopher would later tell a friend that he had numerous sexual experiences from the age of nine. As a child doesn’t normally become overtly sexual at this age, it’s clear that these experiences must have been abusive. The frequently uprooted boy with the slight speech impediment would have been an easy target for a seductive paedophile. His abuser would have told him that ‘sex is good and healthy’, a message that was in sharp contrast to the ‘sex is dirty’ message that his family’s religion peddled, and he found it impossible to reconcile the two. By age 11 he had begun to peep at young girls and by age 12 he had begun to bite his nails until they bled. Other children noted that he was a lonely and nervous youth who kept very much to himself.

At home, he wasn’t told any of the facts of life and was outwardly so repressed that he’d blush if other boys made sexual references. But in his dreams he was all powerful – and as he moved into his teens his sexual fantasies became equally omnipotent and he masturbated to images of turning girls into slaves.

By 15 he was frequently afflicted by a nervous stomach and later admitted to a therapist that he felt depressed and anxious throughout his teenage years.

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At 16 he graduated from high school and became a carpenter, undertaking an apprenticeship that would last for the next five years. He was good at his job, was fit and attractive, yet his formative experiences had left him with no self-esteem, and his dreams were filled with hate.

Teenage rape

At 17, the victim became the victimiser for the first known time when he and his friends gang-raped a girl on an Australian beach. Wilder went first and was clearly the ringleader – though he told the police that she’d had sex with him consensually and that only the other boys had forced her to comply. Rather than imprisonment, he was ordered to undergo psychoanalysis.

Bizarrely, part of his treatment for this sexual dysfunction was electroshock therapy which is more routinely used to treat depression. They thought that this would create an aversion, that Wilder would never sexually coerce a female again. But it was just one more form of pain meted out to a boy who was already hurting, so it’s unsurprising that he turned it into one of his sexual fantasies and would eventually torture his female victims with electric shocks.

By age 18 his nervous digestive problems had worsened and by 22 he sometimes found it difficult to breathe – again, this seems to have been as a result of stress.

Two unsolved murders

In 1965, when Christopher was 20, a man fitting his description was seen accompanying two young women to a beach near Sydney. Afterwards both girls were found raped and strangled.

Police would later state that they believed him responsible for these gruesome deaths.

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Christopher Wilder

A failed rst marriage

Christopher kept doing his carpentry work and in his spare time he liked to surf so spent endless hours on the beach.