Torso Killer: Serial killer Richard Cottingham, 74, pleaded guilty Tuesday, April 27, 2021, to the 1974 murders of Mary Ann Pryor, top right, and Lorraine Kelly, bottom right.
NEWARK, N.J.
Richard Cottingham, 74, pleaded guilty Tuesday to murdering Mary Ann Pryor, 17, and Lorraine Marie Kelly, 16, both of North Bergen.
He told authorities he forced Kelly into the motel room by force and threatened to hurt her if Pryor didn’t follow.
Cottingham, who grew up in River Vale, has been in prison since the 1980s, when he was convicted of the first five murders to which he was linked.
Dressed in khaki prison scrubs and seated in a wheelchair, Cottingham appeared virtually Tuesday in Bergen County Superior Court, where he pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder.
Bergen County Prosecutor Mark Musella said in a statement that Cottingham “admitted to kidnapping and raping Pryor and Kelly, and to their willful, deliberate, and premeditated murders between Aug.
Torso Killer: Serial killer Richard Cottingham, center, is pictured Tuesday, April 27, 2021, during a virtual court hearing in Bergen County, N.J.
“After failing to return home that night, the girls were reported missing to the North Bergen Police Department,” Musella said in a news release.
Pryor’s sister, Nancy Pryor, watched the virtual hearing of her sister’s killer.
We’ll take the bus.’ And to me, it was perfectly normal.
Nancy Pryor began to worry when she came home from her own night out and her sister, who had an earlier curfew, wasn’t home.
Kelly, who lived with her siblings, had lost her mother to cancer two months before the murders, the Record said.
Torso Killer: Pictured in a November 2020 Street View image is the Montvale, N.J., neighborhood where the bodies of Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly were found after their 1974 abduction and double murder.
When the Pryors called North Bergen police officials that night, they were told to wait 24 hours to file a missing persons report.
“A lot of the girls back then looked exactly the same.
Investigators in the Pryor-Kelly homicides long suspected Cottingham, a Bronx native whose family had moved to New Jersey when he was a child.
Cottingham once claimed he has killed between 85 and 100 women, but authorities are skeptical of that number.
Torso Killer: Richard Cottingham, known as the “Torso Killer,” is pictured in a booking photo following his May 1980 arrest in Bergen County, N.J.
O’Dell was one of the few victims who survived.
According to NJ.com and the Record, she ended up at a shopping mall in Montvale, where she encountered Cottingham.
Jacalyn Harp, 13, of Midland Park, was walking home from band practice July 17, 1968, when Cottingham tried to talk her into getting into his car, NJ.com reported.
Torso Killer: From left are Jacalyn Harp, 13, of Midland Park, N.J., and Denise Falasca, 15, of Closter.
Nearly a year later, on April 7, 1969, Irene Blase, 18, of Bogota, was shopping in Hackensack when Cottingham asked her to go have a drink with him, according to the news site.
Another of the killer’s younger victims, Denise Falasca, was walking along a road in Emerson that July when Cottingham stopped and offered her a ride.
Cottingham’s killing spree, which up to that point had produced a victim about once a year, saw an apparent lull until the double murder of Pryor and Kelly in the summer of 1974.
Her body was found discarded along a chain-link fence behind the same Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights where the killer would later be arrested in 1980.
2, 1979, to a room on the fourth floor of the Travel Inn on West 42nd Street, blocks from Times Square in one direction and the Hudson River in the other.
Torso Killer: The Travel Inn on West 42nd Street in New York City is pictured in a June 2019 Street View image.
It took two months, and photos of the victims’ clothing broadcast on the television news, before authorities were able to identify one of the women as Deedah Godzari, a 22-year-old Kuwait immigrant who had been working in the city as a sex worker.
Hotel workers described the man who’d rented the room four days before the fire as a sandy-haired man in his 30s who registered as “Carl Wilson” of New Jersey, the Daily News reported.
Torso Killer: Deedah Godzari, 22, was one of two women found decapitated and missing their hands Dec.
Following the double murder of Godzari and Jane Doe, Cottingham’s remaining crimes came one after another in a flurry of unspeakable violence.
A housekeeping employee vacuuming a room May 5, 1980, discovered the body of Valerie Street, 19, stuffed under the bed.
At trial, some of Cottingham’s surviving victims testified about having drinks with him and getting very sleepy, the Daily News reported.