[image error]On the morning of December 2, 1979, when I was 23-years-old, I briefly and completely at random, encountered a serial killer in the lobby elevator doors of a seedy hotel that I was attempting to check into on W 42nd Street in New York.

He had raped, tortured, mutilated, murdered and beheaded two prostitutes in his room upstairs, set their torsos on fire and fled with their heads, which remain missing to this day.  One of the victims would be later identified as 22-year old Deedeh Goodarzi, while the other still remains a “Jane Doe” today.

[image error]

We briefly stared at each other in the elevator doors in the lobby.  I had given him a close and hard “you jerkoff” look because I was annoyed that he had held up the elevator I had been impatiently waiting for. I would remember his strange “haircut” (he was apparently wearing a wig as a disguise), his lightly chubby face glowing with a sheen of perspiration and blank eyes that seemed to stare through me, as if he was stoned or in some kind of daze.

As he got off the elevator past me, actually walking through me as if I was not there, he bumped me on the shins with a soft bag that felt as if it contained bowling balls.

As the fire set off alarms and was evacuated, I never ended up staying at the hotel and only learned what had caused the fire the next morning when I read about it in the newspapers.  Even then, I did not immediately associate the “jerkoff” with the “bowling balls” on the elevator with the killer.  It was only some six months later, when he had been arrested and charged and his picture appeared in the newspapers that I recognized Richard Cottingham, the “Times Square Torso Ripper” as he became known.

[image error]

Richard Cottingham, who upon his arrest told police, “I have problems with women”, had been raised in a stable, upper-middle-class strict Catholic family in New Jersey.   Mom was a housewife while dad was an insurance company executive in Manhattan.   “Richie” had been a high school athlete, and when arrested was still living in New Jersey.  He was married and a father of three children and was gainfully and lucratively employed for over a decade as a computer console operator at the offices of Blue Cross Insurance in mid-Manhattan.  He also had two mistresses, nurses, who did not know about each other.    Working a shift from 4 P.M. to midnight, Cottingham would commit his savagely sadistic murders in Manhattan and New Jersey between dates with his mistresses, his hours at Blue Cross and his commute home to his wife and kids in Lodi, New Jersey.

Cottingham was eventually convicted for five mutilation rape torture murders of women and recently (in 2010) he suddenly pleaded guilty to a sixth earlier murder in 1967.  He is suspected in an additional thirty to fifty unsolved murders in New York and New Jersey between 1967 and 1980.

Cottingham would be the first of two serial killers that I would encounter, completely at random between 1979.  In both cases I did not know at the time I was encountering a serial killer.

As a historian I became curious about where these monsters I had encountered sprang from and it inspired a life-long interest in their nature and origin, which culminated with my first book on their history published in 2004:  Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters.

Recently, I published a more extensive account of my encounter and the Richard Cottingham case in Times Square Torso Ripper: Sex and Murder on The Deuce.