November 25, 1946 - Richard Cottingham
Cottingham operated for roughly fifteen years before his arrest, and the span of his confirmed crimes across two states suggests an ability to avoid detection that outlasted most investigations of the era. The mutilation of some victims — and the removal of identifying features — reflected deliberate effort to obstruct identification, a pattern that complicated law enforcement efforts for years. His later claims of up to eighty unconfirmed killings, made under non-prosecution agreements, have never been fully resolved, leaving the true scope of his activity uncertain.
From Wikipedia
Richard Francis Cottingham (born November 25, 1946) is an American serial killer who committed ten murders in New York State between 1972 and 1980, plus a further ten murders in New Jersey between 1965 and 1980. He was nicknamed by media as the Torso Killer and the Times Square Ripper, since some of the murders he was convicted of included acts of mutilation and dismemberment.
Cottingham's confirmed killings resulted in nine convictions and a further eleven confessions under non-prosecution agreements, leading to him serving multiple life sentences in New Jersey prisons. In 2009, decades after his first murder convictions, Cottingham claimed that he had committed at least eighty "perfect murders" of women in various regions of the United States.
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