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“Dogged investigation and relentless interviews” by BCPO Chief of Detectives Robert Anzilotti and Detective Capt. James McMurrow over the course of nearly 15 years got the confessions from Richard Cottingham, said author Peter Vronsky, who’s writing a book about a slew of cold-case New Jersey female killings.
Bergen County Prosecutor Mark Musella confirmed that Cottingham, 73, of Lodi, confessed to killing:
• Jacalyn (Jackie) Harp, 13, of Midland Park, who was walking home from school band practice on July 17, 1968 when she was strangled with the leather strap of her flag sling;
• Irene Blase, 18, of Bogota, who went missing from Hackensack on April 7, 1969 “and was found face-down in four feet of water in Saddle River, strangled with a wire, cord or perhaps the chain of a crucifix she was wearing,” Vronsky said;
• Denise Falasca, 15, of Closter, who went missing from Westwood on July 14, 1969 “and was found the next morning in Saddle Brook by the side of a road next to a cemetery, strangled with a cord or the chain of her crucifix,” the author said.
Vronsky assembled nearly two dozen loved ones, friends and others in Midland Park earlier this week to deliver the update on the 1968 Jackie Harp killing.
All three Bergen schoolgirl cases were “exceptionally closed,” he said, quoting Anzilotti.
When, or whether, the confessions will result in prosecution wasn’t immediately clear.
Although Cottingham technically is scheduled to come up for parole in less than five years, he is expected to complete his life sentence at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton.
The three killings were “remarkably different from the 1977-1980 hotel/motel room murders of Cottingham’s later adult female victims, most of whom were working as sex workers,” Vronsky said.
As a result, Cottingham “was never seriously considered as a suspect until the 2000s,” he said.
Over the course of 13 years, beginning in 1967, Cottingham killed six women in New Jersey and New York.
Authorities tied him to the killings after police were called to a Hasbrouck Heights motel, where a maid had heard a woman screaming. They found an 18-year-old victim who’d been bitten and stabbed bound with handcuffs.
The method in the three Bergen schoolgirl killings seemed different from the more gruesome adult murders, some noted – the latter which earned him the nickname “The Torso Killer.”
Vronsky responded: “You have to remember that serial killers who kill over a long time without being apprehended often evolve in their MO. His victims in 1977 - 1980 in New Jersey were not decapitated or mutilated in the way his three known victims in New York were.
“Cottingham states that he would deliberately ‘switch things up’ with his victims in order that police did not start focusing on a single possible perpetrator.
“Only two of his nine now-known victims were decapitated (and decapitated postmortem). One died of a stab wound previous to her decapitation while the other victim’s mode of death prior to her decapitation could not be determined,” Vronsky said.
The third in New York had her breasts severed, he said, adding that “only the victims in New York were set on fire.”
Of his five victims in New Jersey, “only one was a sex worker, and she was brought over from New York to New Jersey where she was murdered,” Vronsky said.
“All his victims in New York were sex workers,” he added. “The remaining victims in New Jersey were three schoolgirls, a X-ray technician, and a homemaker and mother of two children....The youngest was 13. [T]he oldest was 29. He was very versatile and had been killing since at least 1967 until his apprehension in May 1980 (And claims his 1967 murder is far from his first.).”
Cottingham was serving time for five murders, following convictions in New Jersey and New York, when Bergen prosecutor’s detectives in 2010 tied him to the killing of 29-year-old Ridgefield Park mom Nancy Schiava Vogel, bringing the total to six.
The schoolgirl murder confessions bring the total to nine. Whether that number is expected to increase investigators wouldn’t say.
ALSO SEE: New Jersey Girl Murders Project (FACEBOOK)
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