RICHARD COTTINGHAM
The Torso Serial Killer Project

~Sophie Olanick, 14
June 2, 1963, Hillsborough-Manville NJ
Ambushed while walking by a roadside near her home and forcibly drowned in a creek, similar in many ways to Cottingham's confirmed murders of Jackie Harp (13) and Denise Falasca (15) in 1968 and 1969, his abduction and forcible drowning murders of Lorraine Kelly (16) and Mary Ann Pryor (17) in 1974, and Cottingham’s still unresolved confession in the murder of Lisa Thomas (15) in 1974 in Rockland County, NY, shopping near her home in Nanuet. Cottingham admitted to committing his first murder when he was still a junior in high school in 1962-1963 which puts Sophie Olanick's murder within the range of his earliest first murders.

~Gail Ann Kalinowski, 14
September 8 1971, Manville, NJ
Vanished near her home on a short shopping trip by foot to a nearby store, similar to other victims in some of the Cottingham confirmed murders. Kalinowski was found in a body of water and was at first believed to have drowned by accident but upon further medical examiner and police investigation at the time, indicating sexual assault, the case was reclassified as a homicide, with cause of death perhaps forcible drowning. Cottingham recently (2014) described in a leaked police interview video, the drowning of some of his victims as a way to get away with a "perfect murder." See police video at www.richardcottingham.org

~Sandra Kucks (née Carroll), 37
September 14, 1976 Rocky Hill, Montgomery NJ.
Disappeared while shopping at a mall near her home and found ligature strangled and sexually assaulted nearby in her own car, similar to confirmed Cottingham victims Nancy Vogel (29) in 1967 and Diane Cusick (23) in 1968, found in their cars while shopping at malls, and an active recently reopened case in Suffolk County, NY that Cottingham has admitted to NBC-New Sarah Wallace that he has knowledge about, Marilyn Simons (40) in 1966, also found in her car after vanishing on a shopping trip in the vicinity of her home.

For decades, generations of authorities in New Jersey and New York who have had Cottingham in their custody since May 22, 1980, and who is confirmed committing 19 murders between 1967 and 1980, have neglected to diligently investigate his claims of having committed nearly one-hundred murders from 1963 to 1980. He is currently serving multiple life sentences in South Woods NJ State Prison, confined in the prison hospital ward in the palliative program.

First arrested and convicted in the 1980s in five serial murders in New York and New Jersey in 1977-1980, Cottingham began confessing in 2010 to four more murders from 1967-1969, and recently in 2021-2024 he has further confessed to ten more murders since my late investigative partner Jennifer Weiss and I began in 2019 facilitating Cottingham's predisposition to cooperate with police and district attorneys and prosecutors in New Jersey and New York.

These three reopened cases in Somerset County are among those that I and some of the victim families have been actively lobbying New Jersey authorities to investigate for over six years, right up until my presentation on Richard Cottingham as a suspect in over 100 possible cases in NJ and NY 1963-1980 to some 250 homicide investigators gathered at the Advanced Homicide Conference in Asbury Park in June 2025 organized by the New Jersey State Police and the NJ Homicide Investigators Association (NJHIA).

For more information on the Cottingham suspected murders visit www.nynjpd.org and www.richardcottingham.org

NBC-News New York Channel 4 ~ Sarah Wallace reporting.
July 7, 2025, Suffolk County, NY  
[ Play Video ]
The Suffolk County district attorney is responding to an I-Team investigation with new clues from an infamous serial killer about an unsolved murder in 1966. Investigative reporter Sarah Wallace spoke to DA Ray Tierney and the killer once nick-named “The Torso Killer.” NBC New York’s Sarah Wallace reports.

NBC-News New York Channel 4 ~ Sarah Wallace reporting.
June 25, 2025, Suffolk County, NY  
[ Play Video ]
An I-Team exclusive gives an update regarding one of the tri-state’s most prolific admitted serial killers and an unsolved murder on Long Island from 1966. Richard Cottingham, known as the “Torso Killer,” is already convicted of multiple crimes in New York and New Jersey. But now he says he may have new information that could give a victim’s family closure. NBC New York’s Sarah Wallace reports.