Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (2 page)

Richard Francis Cottingham, age thirty-four, I learned, was the recently separated father of three children and lived in suburban New Jersey. Neighbors typically described him as aloof and private but a doting father who always took his children out trick-or-treating on Halloween. The son of an insurance industry executive, a high school athlete but nonetheless a lonely boy, Richard had been steadily employed for the last sixteen years as a computer operator at Empire State Blue Cross–Blue Shield insurance company on Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan. He was a valued and dependable employee. Choosing the 3:00–11:00
P
.
M
. shift, he would do his killing in the morning, after work at night, or on the weekends.

The heads and hands from the victims in the Times Square hotel were never found despite an extensive search by police of the river area nearby. One victim was identified through hospital X rays as Kuwaiti-born Deedah Godzari, a twenty-three-year-old prostitute from New Jersey and mother of a four-month baby. The other victim, estimated to be in her late teens, remains unidentified to this day.

Six months later, Cottingham killed and mutilated another New York prostitute, twenty-five-year-old Jean Mary Ann Reyner. She was found in the historic but declined Seville Hotel on 29th Street near Madison Avenue. This time he severed the victim’s breasts and set them down side by side on the headboard of the bed before setting fire to the room.

Cottingham actually preferred to do his thing closer to home in New Jersey. He would either pick up his victims on the streets of Manhattan or meet them in bars. Either way, he would buy them drinks or dinner and slip a date rape–type drug into their glass. He then would maneuver or lure the semiconscious victims to his car and drive them across the river to New Jersey to cheap motels that lined the complex of highways there. He carried them in through motel back doors and then molested and tortured them in his room for extended periods of time. The lucky ones would later awake from the effects of the drug finding themselves raped and sodomized and covered with horrific wounds, dumped naked by a roadside or on the floor of a motel room with little memory of what had transpired. They were alive because Cottingham was a particular type of serial killer—an
anger-excitation
or
sadistic-lust
offender. Cottingham did not derive his pleasure from killing, but from torturing the victim. He couldn’t care less whether the victim lived or died once he was finished with his torture—and if the victim did die during the attack before Cottingham was satisfied, he would continue abusing the corpse until satisfied. Once done, he would abandon the victim like “trash,” and whether she was dead or alive was inconsequential to him. Some victims were lucky to survive, but others were not.

The body of nineteen-year-old Valerie Ann Street was found in a Hasbrouck Heights Quality Inn in New Jersey by housekeeping staff. A cleaning woman was attempting to vacuum the floor under the bed but something was jammed under it. Lifting up the mattress, she found a hideously disfigured corpse stuffed underneath the bed. The victim’s hands were tightly handcuffed behind her back; she was covered in bite marks and was beaten across the shins. Valerie Street had died of asphyxiation and traces of adhesive tape were found on her mouth. Cottingham had carefully taken it away with him after killing the girl. He must have lost the key to the handcuffs, as he left them behind still restraining the victim—a fatal mistake, as police would lift his fingerprint from the inner ratchet of the cuffs.

One of the victims was not a prostitute. Twenty-six-year-old radiologist Mary Ann Carr had been found dumped by a chain-link fence near the parking lot of the same New Jersey motel two years previously. She had been cut about the chest and legs, beaten with a blunt instrument, and covered in bites and bruises. Her wrists showed marks from handcuffs and her mouth had traces of adhesive tape. She had been strangled and suffocated by the adhesive tape.

Cottingham was arrested on May 22, 1980, about six months after my encounter with him. He had picked up eighteen-year-old Leslie Ann O’Dell, who was soliciting on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 25th Street. She had arrived in New York on a bus from Washington State four days earlier and was quickly turned to street prostitution by bus station pimps. Cottingham bought her drinks and talked to her about his job and house in the suburbs until about 3:00
A
.
M
. He then offered to take her to a bus terminal in New Jersey so that she could escape the pimps in New York. Leslie appreciatively accepted. After crossing the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey, he bought her a steak at an all-night diner. He was charming, generous, sympathetic, and helpful. At some point she agreed to have sex with him for $100. It was around dawn when they checked into the very same Hasbrouck Heights Quality Inn where he had left his last mutilated victim stuffed under the bed eighteen days earlier. Nobody recognized Cottingham.

After getting a room, Cottingham drove to the back of the motel and they went in through a rear entrance. Leaving the girl in the room alone, Cottingham returned to his car, telling her he wanted to move it to the front. He came back carrying a paper bag with whiskey and an attaché case. It was now nearly 5:00
A
.
M
.

Cottingham offered to give the tired girl a massage and she gratefully rolled over onto her stomach. Straddling her back, he drew a knife from the attaché case and put it to her throat as he snapped a pair of handcuffs on her wrists. While Leslie attempted to persuade Cottingham that all that was unnecessary, he began torturing her, nearly biting off one of her nipples. She later testified that he said, “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.”

The charges that would be listed in Cottingham’s New Jersey indictment give us some idea of how the next four hours passed for O’Dell:

Kidnapping, attempted murder, aggravated assault, aggravated assault with deadly weapon, aggravated sexual assault while armed (rape), aggravated sexual assault while armed (sodomy), aggravated sexual assault while armed (fellatio), possession of a weapon; possession of controlled dangerous substances, Secobarbital and Amobarbital, or Tuinal, and possession of controlled dangerous substance, Diazepam or Valium.

Between bouts of rape, sodomy, forced oral sex, biting, beating, cutting with the knife, and whipping with a leather belt, Cottingham would pause to gently wipe down the face of his victim with a cool, damp washcloth. Then he would begin anew. O’Dell’s muffled cries of pain became so loud that the motel staff, already spooked by the murder eighteen days earlier, called the police and then rushed to the room demanding that Cottingham open the door. Cottingham gathered up his torture implements and dashed out of the room but was apprehended by arriving police officers in the hallway.

That was the end of Cottingham. For his crimes in New Jersey, he received several terms ranging from sixty to ninety-five years, a term of twenty-five years to life, and another term to run consecutively of a minimum of thirty years. And then he was extradited to New York to stand trial for the “torso” homicides there. We won’t be seeing Richard again.

Cottingham denied committing any of the murders to the bitter end, despite the fact that some of the victims’ property was found in his home and his fingerprint was found on the handcuffs restraining one of the victims. The only thing Cottingham admitted was, “I have a problem with women.”

My brief run-in with Cottingham was a hell of a story and I told it for a long time, long after had I met, but did not know it, yet another serial killer—one for the record books, the Ukrainian cannibal Andrei Chikatilo, who killed and mutilated an extraordinary fifty-three victims in the Soviet Union.

In 1990 I was making television documentaries, and in October of that year I found myself in Moscow making a film about the changes taking place there under Gorbachev. One day we came upon an extraordinary sight. A tent city with about five hundred people had been spontaneously erected on the front lawn of a hotel immediately behind the Red Square beneath the domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral. The residents seemed to have come in from all parts of the country and were mostly aged pensioners protesting Stalinist abuses of the past. They had bizarre placards attached to their tents and shelters. Some pasted to their foreheads little slips of paper with protests with strange things written in broken archaic English, such as “Lenin is bonehead.” Others held up placards with elaborately laid-out documents, letters, and photographs documenting their complaints. I waded into the crowd with my crew and started speaking with some of the people, seeking out possible interviews to film. It seemed that almost everybody there was somehow traumatized and mentally ill, and considering what had happened to them during the Stalin era, it was understandable.

At some point I spotted a small stand decorated with the white, blue, and red of the old Imperial Russian tricolor flag. In 1990 it was still a rare thing to see those colors in the USSR. It belonged to a gaunt man with graying hair and big glasses. His other features I cannot recall, other than his being closely shaved and dressed relatively well (for the USSR) in a mid-length jacket, clean shirt, and neatly knotted tie. He looked to be maybe in his late forties or early fifties and stood out with his neat dress and younger age when compared to the many raggedy-scruffy bearded Russian pensioners occupying the tent city around him. There was something refined about him—perhaps delicate or prissy. Next to him was a typical battered leather briefcase like those that almost every Soviet bureaucrat and office worker carried.

He introduced himself, but later I forgot his name and where he said he came from. At first he spoke quietly, calmly, and in a highly educated manner. The few phrases he attempted in English were well pronounced and grammatical. He reminded me of a librarian. He explained that he held several university degrees and was “not like” the rest of the rabble around him. As his story began to pour out, he gradually was overcome with emotion; his eyes welled up with tears and his glasses actually fogged up. But his story was so absurd that I would never forget it: He was here in Moscow, he told me, to see Gorbachev to complain that somebody was building an illegal garage and toilet beneath the windows of his son’s apartment.
It was a conspiracy
, he wailed.

I had just interviewed an old woman a few rows away who had told me she was dying of cancer and fifty years earlier had been arrested and put in the gulag while her children were sent to a state institution. She had not seen them since and was desperate to find them before she died, but the authorities were not helping. This neatly dressed man’s prissy complaints about some garage seemed to me petty and stupid in comparison—and worse: boring television. Searching for somebody else to interview, I drifted away from him as fast as I politely could, not even listening to the last few things he had to say, and quickly forgot all about him. That is how I missed filming an interview with Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo—the Red Ripper
—
“Citizen X”—three weeks before his capture—one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history.

While Cottingham I remembered, I forgot everything about Chikatilo other than the neatness of his dress and the banality of his complaint. I do not remember his eyes, other than the tears in them and the fogged veil of the lenses in his glasses; nothing of his face other than it was clean shaven. He remains but a softly spoken shadowy politeness in my memory—but in my nightmares, he stills comes to me as a monstrous geek with eyeless sockets spewing tears.

Within days of my brief conversation with him in Moscow, he would return to his home in Rostov in the Ukraine to kill his fifty-first known victim. Riding on a local train, he convinced a sixteen-year-old mentally handicapped boy to accompany him to his “cottage” with the promise that there were girls there. The two got off the train and Chikatilo walked the boy into a dense wood, where he suddenly forced him to the ground and ripped off his trousers. He tied the boy with a rope that he carried with him in his briefcase just for that kind of occasion and then rolled him over and removed the rest of his clothes. (Was it the same briefcase I saw that day in the tent city?) He molested him and then bit off the tip of the boy’s tongue and stabbed him repeatedly in the head and stomach. Afterward he cut off the boy’s genitals and threw them into the bushes. After dragging the body into some thick undergrowth he recovered the rope and wiped the blood off himself and his knife with the boy’s clothes. He straightened out his own clothing (and was it the same shirt and tie I saw him in?) and then calmly returned to the nearby railway station and took the train home.

Ten days later at a different railway station, Chikatilo killed another sixteen-year-old boy, mutilating him in a similar fashion, his fifty-second victim. A week later, behind the same station where he killed the mentally handicapped youth, he murdered his fifty-third and final victim, a twenty-two-year-old woman. He cut off the tip of her tongue and both her nipples after mutilating her genitals. After he emerged from the bush with blood smeared on his face, he was washing up at a platform water tap when a police officer, on the lookout for a killer, briefly questioned Chikatilo and recorded his identification. He was allowed to continue on his way—the police officer later stated that he had no way of determining that the smear on Chikatilo’s face was actually blood. Gorbachev’s new rules strictly regulated police conduct toward citizens—everything was to be done by the book now. The police officer let Chikatilo go, but for the next few days he was put under surveillance. When the body of the female victim was eventually discovered near the station where he was questioned, Chikatilo was immediately picked up.

The following year I watched the Chikatilo trial on Russian television and saw photographs of him. Chikatilo had killed women, girls, boys, and youths indiscriminately, almost always luring them either to a killing shack he kept in a seedy part of town or to isolated fields or woods. He used his refined and educated persona to seduce his victims into trusting him. Often preying on the destitute, the mentally handicapped, the lost, and the young, he offered food, sex, shelter, or directions to entice his victims to accompany him to their deaths. Once he had his victims isolated, he would brutally attack and mutilate them using a “killing kit” of various knives and sharp instruments he carried with him in his briefcase.