December 30, 2021 – 2:02 p.m. Clock
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Torso killer Richard Cottingham dismembered his victims
Richard Cottingham (75) achieved notoriety as a torso killer. The serial killer killed at least eleven women between 1967 and 1980. He dismembered the corpses and set them on fire. In 1980 he was caught and convicted of murder and is serving a life sentence. Decades later, the daughter of one of his victims befriended Cottingham to find out more about him, her mother and the other women murdered.
Corpses set on fire in New York hotel rooms
Deedeh Goodarzi was found dead on December 2, 1979 in a motel room in New York’s Times Square. Cottingham had beheaded her and severed her hands. Then the torso killer set fire to her body – as did that of another woman he’d killed in the room. The heads of the women were never found.
Deedeh Goodarzi had given her daughter up for adoption
According to the portal “nj.com”, Jennifer Weiss only found out that the murdered Goodarzi was her birth mother in 2002. At that time, she was 24 years old. Her mother gave her up for adoption shortly after she was born. Weiss rummaged through old newspapers and had to read the cruel way her mother had died. She realized that only one man could answer her many questions about the crime: Cottingham.
Torso killer asked Jennifer Weiss for forgiveness for murder
But it was still many years before she sent the first letter to her mother’s murderer – that was in 2017. “I wasn’t afraid,” Weiss remembers. “Feeling invincible, I started writing to Richard.” She deliberately wrote the letter in a relaxed and friendly manner. This was the only way she saw a chance that Cottingham would even go along with her.
A month later, the killer replied with a three-page handwritten letter. In it he asked Jennifer Weiss’ forgiveness. “I just don’t know what to tell you or how to say it,” he wrote. “I am deeply sorry for causing you such pain.”
Daughter of the victim asked: “Where did you hide her head?”
She met her mother’s killer for the first time just two months later. Cottingham was sitting behind a pane of glass, at first the two held small talk. But then, according to information from “nj.com”, Weiss got down to business. “I knew what I wanted and I made that very clear,” she says. “I’ll give you my friendship for details about the crimes,” she told the gray-haired man with a full beard.
“Do you know my mother?” and “Where did you hide her head?” she asked the serial killer at the meeting at the New Jersey State Prison. She has met him more than 30 times since then.
Hug Richard Cottingham in jail in New Jersey
Her tactic worked: During further visits, during which she even hugged Cottingham, Jennifer Weiss found out more and more about her mother’s death. He buried Goodarzi’s head under a bridge, but it has not yet been found, said the serial killer. In addition, he and his victim were not strangers. Cottingham claims to have been a customer of Deedeh Goodarzi for two years before the fact, who was working as a call girl at the time.
How many people has the torso killer on his conscience?
“The extent of what he’s done is unimaginable,” Weiss told nj.com. But she not only wants to find out more about her mother, but also about other possible victims. Because Richard Cottingham could have dozens of people on his conscience. According to Sun, he was convicted of five murders in the early 1980s, but has confessed to six more murders over time. And claims to have killed between 80 and 100 people within 17 years.
“There is still a lot to be done,” says Jennifer Weiss with certainty. She wants to keep the torso killer talking until every question is answered. “I do the same for the mothers who have lost their daughters. And for these girls whose lives were taken because Richard played God.” Weiss “doesn’t want to rest until we know who they were”. (bst)
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