A 79-year-old serial killer serving life for murdering nearly a half-dozen women and girls in New Jersey and New York since the 1960s has confessed to killing another woman in the Garden State almost 60 years ago, authorities announced Tuesday.
Richard Cottingham, currently serving a life sentence in New Jersey state prison for his past convictions, confessed to killing 18-year-old Alys Eberhardt, a Fair Lawn woman who was found stabbed and bludgeoned to death in her family home on Sept. 24, 1965. Investigators say it may have been among his earliest crimes.
The case was reopened in 2021.
The Eberhardt family says the confession brings long-awaited answers and a sense of peace, nearly six decades after the crime.
Though he has been behind bars for decades, prosecutors say they continue to work to bring closure to families. Several years ago, they brought closure to the family of Diane Cusick, a 23-year-old mother who called her parents one night in 1968 to say she was going shoe shopping and never came back home.
He also confessed to four other slayings. As part of a plea deal, Cottingham received immunity for those. He won’t be charged in the Eberhardt case as part of that previous agreement with prosecutors.
One of New Jersey’s most notorious serial killers, Cottingham was nicknamed “The Torso Killer” because he was known for dismembering his victims, according to NorthJersey.com. He has admitted to killing at least a dozen women since the 1960s.
Though only convicted of some, he has claimed responsibility for up to 100 murders over the decades.
In the early 1980s, Cottingham was convicted of killing five women — three in New York and two in Bergen County. He has since confessed to other killings and been jailed since 1981.
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