There is a book that has been called by many
the most comprehensive work on serial killers. It is called “The method and madness of
monsters” and was written in 2003/2004 by a man called Peter Vronsky. In the introduction he explains one of the
reasons why he started writing the book, telling the reader that one Sunday morning in 1979
he checked into a New York city hotel. He was momentarily irked by the fact someone
had held the elevator on the top floor. When that person finally came down he passed
Vronsky. He had a bag in his hand. Years later Vronsky would discover that two
heads and body parts were in that bag. The mutilated torsos of the women those heads
belonged to were on fire in a room on the top floor. Vronsky later smelled burning, but he didn’t
know it was the smell of roasting flesh. That’s our introduction to a man who could
be the USA’s most prolific serial killer. We say could, and we’ll explain later why. First let’s start the story at the beginning. Before Cottingham got the title, The New York
Ripper, or the Butcher of Times Square, or the Torso Killer (how do you kill a torso?),
he was a young man from a middle class family living in New Jersey. His father was a Vice Chairman at an insurance
company and his mother was a homemaker. By all accounts the family was a loving one,
except for the fact the dad enjoyed binge-drinking his weekends away at the local bars. It’s said the family was large, and Cottingham
as a boy was always surrounded by lots of young people. Most of those people, however, were girls
and women since his own family and relatives we are told were mostly of the fairer sex. Cottingham has said he grew up doted on because
of this and always received lots of attention. We know all this because many years after
Vronsky’s book was written he would go on to interview Cottingham. In an interview in 2018 with a Bangkok-based
podcast called “This Strange Life” Vronsky talked about those interviews and partly about
Cottingham’s childhood. By all accounts, he did indeed come from a
normal, loving family. He did not fall into the category of what’s
called the McDonald Triad. This is related to three things common in
the childhood of serial killers. Those are cruelty to animals, setting fires
and constant bedwetting. If you are watching this and are now thinking,
“Oh my God, that’s me,” don’t worry, as Vronsky is quick to say that this is common
for many kids, but it just seems the triad is a feature in many serial killers’ early
lives. Cottingham loved animals, with Vronsky saying,
“He had homing pigeons as a boy. He loved animals and still does.” He explained that he couldn’t even kill
one when one needed to be put down. “He couldn’t have possibly killed one
of those homing pigeons,” said Vronsky. But he didn’t mind killing humans later
in life. In his book Vronsky writes that Cottingham
would drug, torture, and mutilate women, and whether they were dead or alive at the end
of this he didn’t much care. It’s said at times he made sure some women
were dead, but that’s only because he had known them and so wanted to get rid of their
hands and head so they could not be identified and a trail lead back to him. What Cottingham would do is pick up women
selling their bodies on the streets, and we must remember that back in the 1970s around
New York those women were plentiful, young girls were travelling from all over the U.S.
to work the streets of a city which we might say were not paved with gold. If the women went with Cottingham he might
drug them and torture them, and sometimes they might survive. But an awful lot, perhaps as many as 80 women,
did not. Some sources say as many as 100. According to Vronsky, many of these women
might have died during the mutilation and beating, and that it was not always Cottingham’s
intention to kill them. “They died on him” said Vronsky. The women were often tied up, and then Cottingham
would start his process with his hands, teeth and a bag of tools. We cannot go into details, but those details
are nothing short of horrific. “I have a problem with women,” Cottingham
once said, and that might be the understatement of the century. It’s said that many of the women that did
survive this ordeal didn’t report it, mostly because they were already doing illegal things. Some did, some didn’t, but Cottingham was
never under suspicion. He was for the most part invisible, an American
psycho, a man with three kids who loved him and a very normal family life. One hour he might be standing over his small
child as she blew out her birthday cake candles, and the next hour he might be dismembering
one of his victims. According to the experts, Cottingham was what
is referred to as a sadistic killer, a person who derives excitement from the process of
causing extreme pain, a person who gets off on the woman’s expression during her ordeal. The type of killer often doesn’t care about
the coup de gras, the death blow, the process where other killers get all their pleasure. Murder is often just a way to prevent capture
by police. Asked what Cottingham, now an old man in bad
shape, is like now, Vronsky says he is very shy. He had given just one interview before he
spoke with Vronsky, with the reason likely being he didn’t want exposure as it would
hurt his three children. They no longer visit him, not after he admitted
what he’d done. “What’s he like? Evil?” asks the interviewee in Bangkok. “He is a great guy,” replies Vronsky,
surprising his interlocutor. But this is how it often works, because serial
killers might need to be charming to lure people into their web. “I could see why all those women trusted
him,” says Vronsky. He adds that Cottingham is amiable, intelligent,
well read, talkative, and yet, he adds, you know you are sitting next to someone tremendously
evil, someone who is open, but at the same time deceptive. Vronsky says the psychologists 30 years ago
said the same thing about Cottingham. The only reason he talked to Vronsky is a
lurid story in itself. One of those women that Cottingham had decapitated
in 1979 and then set on fire had had a child. Forensics new this because she had a scar
where the cesarean had been performed. The child was adopted, and years later that
child found out who her mother was. She subsequently read Vronsky’s book and
went to visit Cottingham in prison, after which she asked Vronsky to help her talk to
him to retrieve any information pertaining to her mother. As we speak, said Vronsky a few months ago
when he did the interview, police are trying to find the head. Cottingham had at least been helpful there. He is close to death now, and it seems he
wants some kind of redemption. The problem is his memory has faded, and Cottingham
has said he has never remembered the torture and killing part but only his meticulous clean
up. He said during the time he was getting rid
of evidence he was in what he called “the zone.” He was rather good at evading detection by
police, and he’d been doing it for a long time. Cottingham was only ever convicted of killing
five women. Vronsky says that some serial killers have
lied about the number of people they killed, but he believes Cottingham might be telling
the truth about the 80 number. Ongoing investigations have indeed found that
he definitely did kill more people, but as for the 80 count, it just won’t be possible
to prove if that’s true. He was just 21 when he committed his first
murder in 1968, but the next murder he was charged with didn’t happen until 1979. That’s a big gap, and Cottingham has said
he was prowling the streets, finding and hurting women, all that time. Many women as we said, he didn’t kill, but
he says a lot of bodies of women found by police throughout the 70s were on him. He was bringing up children at the time of
the murders, and those kids we are told loved him dearly. He did have two mistresses in New York, but
apparently he was also very kindhearted with them. In fact, it’s said they thought he was very
shy and often unable to manifest his more normal sexual desire on them. He held down a good job and was liked by those
who knew him. So, how did he get caught, this invisible
monster? According to Vronsky he had gotten sloppy. Police had been discovering dead young women
at hotels, each of them having been strangled and tortured. In 1980 Cottingham did this to one girl, and
then just stuffed her under the bed in the hotel. She was later found by a maid, covered in
bite marks, badly beaten, throat slit with a knife. A maniac was on the loose. Then Cottingham just a short time later picked
up another woman, and he took her to the same hotel. The staff didn’t think anything of it; for
some reason they didn’t remember Cottingham and the fact he had gone there just 18 days
before with a girl that ended up being killed. He took this girl to a room and told her he
would like to give her a massage, and then he proceeded to hold her down, handcuff her,
and torture her. She screamed, and she later said in court
he had told her, “You have to take it. The other girls did, you have to take it too.” But those screams had been heard, and because
staff at the hotel were already shaken by what had happened before, they immediately
called the police. Cottingham was caught red-handed, the girl
still on the bed, alive. At Cottingham’s side were replica pistols,
slave collars, a knife, and lots of prescription drugs. Police wasted no time in searching Cottingham’s
house and there they found trophies he’d collected from other women he had murdered. The game was up, it was an easy case to solve
from there. As we said, he was only convicted of five
murders in the end, but that number certainly isn’t the number of his actual victims. Vronsky said during his visits with him, which
are still ongoing, or at least were not long ago, he appears looking like Santa Claus with
his portly figure and white beard. He uses a wheelchair, and now at the edge
of his own life, Vronsky says he is in a “confessional state.” Not because he feels bad about what he did,
according to Vronsky, but because he’s hedging his bets on an afterlife. According to Vronsky, Cottingham says there
is more to what he did that has not come out. “He hints that no one knows exactly what
he did,” said Vronsky in the interview, “and people will be shocked when they find
out.” Needless to say, Cottingham won’t ever be
getting out of prison. So, there you have the story of a loving family
man who had a double identity, a man who evaded arrest in part because he didn’t fit the
profile of what most of us would think is a maniac who is capable of doing the most
despicable things to another human being. Maybe there were signs, but if that’s true,
no one talked about them. In time most of us realize that the real monsters
in life come with human faces, sometimes all too normal, the boy next door, the doting
dad, the guy with the briefcase and business suit who spends his weekends watching his
young kids play sports. Cottingham is perhaps the perfect example
of a Jekyll and Hyde character. There are many in the serial killing world. All we can ask you is what do you think about
this story? Tell us in the comments. Also, be sure to check out our other show
The Acid Bath English Serial Killer - John George Haigh. Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t
forget to like, share and subscribe. See you next time.
