Jennifer Weiss says her life came full-circle in a massive, dreary building in Trenton, New Jersey. In May of 1978, her mother, Deedeh Goodarzi, put her up for adoption at an agency in the shadow of the New Jersey State Prison and its barbed-wire crowned fences. Decades later, she found herself at that same prison, confronting the man who had left her mother dismembered in a flaming hotel room in Times Square: Richard Cottingham, a.k.a. the Torso Killer, a man whose brutality towards his victims shocked even the most seasoned of cops.
“I wanted to find her. I didn’t want to ever have to try to find her skull,” Weiss says of her mother, whose identity she says she uncovered in 2003, when she was in her early twenties. “I was expecting to get the other half of the locket like Annie… and it was not the case.”
Weiss first met Cottingham through a sheet of glass for a window visit and was shocked to discover that she wasn’t scared of the man before her, who resembled Santa gone to seed. “I was trying to figure out pieces of my mother’s life and where her remains were,” she says. And he had the answers.
Cottingham, now 75, has spent the last four decades in relative obscurity, watching hours of police procedurals and detective shows behind bars as he slid into his seventies and his health hit a steady decline. Over the last decade or so, however, the killer — who has been convicted of eight murders — has been slowly confessing to a series of cold cases. How these confessions came about is highly contested, though: Former Chief of Detectives for the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office Robert Anzilotti would say he’s responsible for wearing Cottingham down over the years, while Weiss and her friend, serial killer expert Dr. Peter Vronsky, claim it’s her unlikely, uncomfortable relationship with Cottingham that has helped grease the gears. Cottingham, who wrote to Rolling Stone from South Woods State Prison for his first published interview in more than 10 years, credits both, seeming to play his confidantes against each other even behind bars.
Credit aside, it’s not been an easy path when it comes to getting confessions out of Cottingham. Whether it’s his failing memory, the police’s interdepartmental politics, or Cottingham’s lust for manipulation, it’s become a proverbial race against time to get his alleged crimes put to paper — according to Cottingham himself, he has roughly 70 to 90 murders to go.
Hellbound and Down 