On a Friday afternoon in September 1965, a young m…
On a Friday afternoon in September 1965, a young man knocked on the door of a Dutch colonial home on Saddle River Road in Fairlon, New Jersey.
When 18-year-old Alice Eberhart opened it, he flashed a police badge and told her he needed to leave a phone number for her father.
She had no reason not to believe him.
She turned around to grab a pen and a piece of paper.
He stepped inside and locked the door behind him.
Her father found her body on the living room floor less than 3 hours later.
The case went cold for 60 years.
The man who knocked on that door went on to kill at least 19 more people across New York and New Jersey.
He earned two nicknames, the torso killer and the Times Square Killer.
And he was already serving multiple life sentences before anyone ever connected him to Alice.
It took four years of interrogation, more than 50 hours of recorded interviews, and a near-death health scare to finally make him talk.
This is the story of the youngest victim of one of America’s most prolific serial killers and the cold case detectives who refuse to let her be forgotten.
If you’re new to Cold Case Redemption, this is what we do.
We tell the stories of the victims who waited the longest for justice.
If that’s the kind of thing you want in your feed, drop a like on this video and subscribe.
It helps more than you’d think.
If you had asked anyone in Fairlon, New Jersey about the Eberhart family in the fall of 1965, they would have told you they were good people, solid.
The kind of family that went to church on Sundays and kept their yard looking sharp.
They lived in a white Dutch colonial house on Saddle River Road, a quiet residential street in Bergen County, about 20 mi northwest of Manhattan.
It was a nice neighborhood, the kind of place where people left their doors unlocked and kids rode their bikes until dark.
Ross and his wife had raised their daughter Alice there.
Her name was pronounced like Alice, spelled A L Y S.
She had auburn hair and a face that people remembered.
She had just graduated from Fairlon High School a few months earlier in June 1965.
And by all accounts, she had been the type of student who didn’t just show up, but actually got involved.
Sunday school teacher, active in her community, interested in skiing and music and taking care of people.
Fair Lawn in the mid 1960s was a textbook New Jersey suburb.
about 30,000 people, mostly young families and middle-class professionals who worked in the city and came home to treeline streets at night.
It wasn’t the kind of place where people worried about violent crime.
You might lock your car at the train station, but locking your front door in the middle of the afternoon felt like overkill.
That’s the context that matters here.
The world Alice grew up in felt safe because for most of the people in it, it actually was.
Her father, Ross, worked during the day.
Her family attended church.
They were involved in the fabric of the town, in the way that people were in smalltown New Jersey in that era.
Everyone knew someone who knew you.
And your reputation was the thing you carried with you everywhere.
What drew Alice toward nursing was something more than just a career interest.
She was the kind of person who oriented herself around other people’s needs.
the Sunday school teaching, the community work, the way she naturally took charge in group settings, it all pointed in the same direction.
She wanted to help people and nursing was the most direct path she could find.
In the fall of 1965, Alice enrolled at the Hackinac Hospital School of Nursing about 10 minutes from her family’s house.
It was a well- reggarded program, the kind of place that took its students seriously and expected them to take the work seriously in return.
Alice was a freshman, brand new to the program, and within weeks, her classmates had already elected her president of the freshman class.
That tells you something about who she was.
She didn’t blend into the background.
She stepped forward and people followed her.
She was barely a month into nursing school and she was already leading it.
Alice was 18 years old and she had her entire life mapped out in front of her.
Nursing school, then a career in healthcare, then whatever came after that.
She was the kind of person who made plans and followed through on them.
She had direction.
She had people around her who loved her and she had a future that by any reasonable measure looked promising.
On Friday, September 24th, 1965, Alice left her nursing dormatory at around 2:30 in the afternoon.
She was heading home to Saddle River Road.
The family was planning to travel to Oswego in upstate New York for her aunt’s funeral that weekend, and she needed to pack and get ready before they left.
It was supposed to be a quick stop at the house before a family trip.
That was all.
She never made it to OSGO.
This story sat buried for 60 years.
If you want to make sure you don’t miss the ones we tell next, hit subscribe.
Every case on this channel went cold before someone cracked it open again.
What happened inside the Eberhart house that Friday afternoon stayed a mystery for six decades.
It was only after the killer himself described it from a prison interview room in 2025 that the full picture finally came into focus.
We now know that the man who killed Alice first spotted her in the parking lot of the Hackinack Hospital School of Nursing.
He was 18 years old himself.
He saw her get into her car and he decided to follow her.
He trailed her from the hospital, stopping briefly at a diner along the route and then continued behind her all the way to Saddle River Road.
He watched her pull into the driveway of the Dutch Colonial.
He waited and then he walked up to the front door and knocked.
When Alice opened it, the young man was holding a police badge, a fake one.
He told her he needed to speak to her father.
He asked if he could leave a phone number.
It was a simple, reasonable request from someone who appeared to be law enforcement.
Alice had no reason to be suspicious.
This was 1965.
In a neighborhood like Fair Lawn, a police officer at the door wasn’t alarming.
It was ordinary.
You answered, you helped.
You went on with your day.
She turned to get a pen and a piece of paper.
And in that moment, he stepped through the door and locked it behind him.
What followed was violent and brief.
Alice fought back hard.
Detectives who later reviewed the case said she was very aggressive in defending herself and that she had essentially disrupted whatever the attacker had planned.
She didn’t go quietly.
She resisted with everything she had.
The attack moved through multiple rooms of the house.
The cause of death was blunt force trauma to her skull.
A large kitchen knife, one that belonged to the Eberhart family, was found at the scene.
She had suffered dozens of stab and cut wounds, though the medical examiner could not determine whether those were inflicted before or after she died from the head injury.
Bergen County prosecutor Guy W.
Khesi stated that Alice was found partially clothed, but that there was no evidence of a sexual assault.
A second weapon was also found at the scene.
It was a curved souvenir dagger, a small decorative knife that the Eberhart family did not recognize.
It did not belong to anyone in the house.
The killer was still inside when Alice’s father arrived home.
Ross Eberhard pulled into the driveway shortly before 6 that evening.
As he came through the front door, the man who had murdered his daughter, slipped out through the back.
Ross found Alice on the living room floor.
A large kitchen knife, one from his own home, was still in her body.
The house showed signs of a violent struggle through multiple rooms.
He had left for work that morning with a living daughter and come home to a crime scene.
And the person who had done it had walked out the back of his house just moments before he walked in the front.
If Ross had arrived 5 minutes earlier, he might have caught the killer in the act.
If he had arrived 5 minutes later, everything would have looked exactly the same.
The timing haunted the investigation for decades.
The Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office took over the investigation immediately.
Prosecutor Guy W.
Callie put his top people on it and Fairlon Police Detective Robert Vanhton, who would later become the department’s chief, was assigned as the lead investigator.
They worked through the night.
Nine friends and neighbors were brought to police headquarters for questioning.
Alice’s room was searched.
The house was processed for evidence.
Detectives canvased the neighborhood, knocking on doors up and down Saddle River Road, asking if anyone had seen a stranger, a car that didn’t belong, anything out of the ordinary that Friday afternoon.
In a small, tight-knit town like Fair Lawn in 1965, a murder like this was unthinkable.
This wasn’t New York City.
This wasn’t some rough neighborhood where violence was a known risk.
This was a quiet residential street in a suburb where people left their windows open in September because the weather was nice and they had nothing to fear.
A young woman had been killed inside her own home in the middle of a weekday afternoon and nobody could explain how or why.
People were rattled.
Parents suddenly started locking doors they had never thought to lock before.
The local papers covered the story extensively.
Alice’s classmates at the nursing school were devastated.
She had been with them just hours earlier, sitting in the same classroom, walking across the same parking lot.
And now she was gone.
The police wanted answers as badly as the community did.
And for a while, it looked like that strange little dagger might give them one.
The curved souvenir knife was unlike anything investigators had seen before.
It was decorative, about 4 in.
long and it clearly wasn’t a common household item.
The Eberheart family had never seen it.
Nobody who visited the house regularly had ever seen it.
It had been brought there by the killer.
Investigators traced it back to the Jordanian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair of 1964 and 1965.
The massive exhibition held in Flushing Meadows, Queens.
The World’s Fair had been a spectacle, drawing millions of visitors from around the world, and dozens of countries had operated their own pavilions.
The Jordanian Pavilion had sold these small souvenir daggers to fairgoers.
Only about 1,000 of them were ever manufactured.
They had been sold at just three locations.
the World’s Fair itself, a store called The House of Jordan near 38th Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan, and a shop called The Acropolis near 44th Street and 8th Avenue.
Police purchased an identical dagger for comparison.
They tracked sales records.
They tried to narrow down who might have bought one, but a thousand daggers sold across three locations to anonymous fairgoers in one of the busiest cities on Earth was a needle in a hay stack.
Even before you accounted for the fact that some buyers might have given them as gifts or resold them.
They never found the matching curved metal scabbard, they never identified the buyer.
The dagger was a tantalizing clue that ultimately led nowhere.
Think about the frustration of that.
You have a murder weapon that was only produced a thousand times, sold at only three locations, and you still can’t trace it back to the person who bought it.
In a modern investigation, that dagger would have been a gold mine.
Sales records would be digitized.
Credit card transactions would be traceable.
Security cameras at the point of sale would have captured the buyer’s face.
In 1965, none of that existed.
A cash purchase at a crowded World’s Fair pavilion left no trail at all.
And that was the fundamental problem with the Eberhard case.
In 1965, the tools that would later crack open cold cases across America simply did not exist.
There was no DNA testing.
There were no surveillance cameras on residential streets.
There were no cell phone records to trace, no internet search histories to subpoena, no forensic databases to cross reference.
The forensic science that would eventually become the backbone of cold case investigations, things like genetic genealogy and kotus database matching, was still decades away from being invented.
The killer had left behind two weapons, signs of a violent struggle across multiple rooms, and almost nothing else that investigators could use to identify him.
Worse still, the man who had committed this murder was just 18 years old.
He lived in Rivervale, New Jersey, a small town roughly 7 mi from Fair Lawn.
He had no criminal record.
He was not on any law enforcement radar anywhere in the state.
As Sergeant Eric Ellis would put it six decades later, he was on no one’s radar back then.
Over the years, Alice’s father, Ross, was looked at as a potential suspect.
That’s standard in homicide investigations when a family member discovers the body.
And it must have been agonizing for a man who had already lost his daughter.
He was never charged.
No one was ever charged.
The case went cold.
The file was placed in a cabinet at the Fairlon Police Department.
And there it sat year after year, decade after decade, while the man who killed Alice Everheart went home to Rivervale and continued living his life as though nothing had happened.
His name was Richard Francis Cotttingham.
He was born on November 25th, 1946 in the Bronx, New York.
And his family moved to Rivervale, New Jersey when he was young.
It’s a small burrow in Bergen County, the kind of place that feels like it’s in the country even though Manhattan is less than an hour away.
Quiet streets, big trees, neighbors who knew each other’s names.
When Cotttingham was 4 years old, he was hit by a car.
The accident was serious enough to cause what researchers later believed was frontal lobe brain damage.
Forensic historian Peter Vonsky, who would spend years interviewing Cotttingham in prison decades later, has pointed to that childhood injury as a possible contributing factor in what Cottingham became.
The frontal lobe controls impulse regulation, empathy, and decision-m.
Damage to it at that age can rewire how a person processes the world around them.
Whether the accident explains anything or not, the fact remains that by September 1965, Richard Cotttingham was 18 years old, living a few miles from Fair Lawn, and he had just committed a murder, his first known murder.
He was the same age as the girl he killed, and nobody knew.
After the Eberheart murder, Cottingham’s life on the surface looked unremarkable.
He finished high school.
He got a job as a mainframe computer operator at BlueC Cross Blue Shield of Greater New York.
Commuting from New Jersey into Manhattan every weekday.
In the 1960s, mainframe computing was a stable, respectable, slightly boring career.
You showed up, you ran your programs, you went home.
It was the kind of job that nobody asks follow-up questions about at a dinner party.
He married, he had three children.
The family settled in Loi, New Jersey, another small Bergen County town about 15 minutes from where he had grown up in Rivervale.
He lived in a house on a residential street.
His neighbors saw a family man.
His co-workers saw a reliable employee.
The commuters who sat near him on the bus or the train into the city saw a face they recognized from the routine of their daily ride.
to the people around him.
Richard Cottingham was an ordinary suburban commuter, a husband, a father, a guy who went to work and came home and mowed his lawn on weekends.
Nobody looked at him and saw anything unusual because there was nothing unusual to see.
He was careful about that, meticulous even.
That was entirely by design.
Cotttingham was living a double life and the gap between what people saw and what he was actually doing was enormous.
During the day, he processed insurance claims on a mainframe.
After hours and sometimes during his lunch breaks or his commute, he was hunting.
He knew the streets of Manhattan.
He knew the highways that connected Bergen County to New York City and Long Island.
He knew how to move between jurisdictions without drawing attention.
The fake police badge he had used to get into the Eberhart house in 1965 was not a one-time improvisation.
It was a tool he had tested and found effective, and it would become a recurring part of his method in the years that followed.
The badge gave him something that a stranger at your door normally doesn’t have.
It gave him instant authority.
It gave him a reason to ask questions, make demands, and expect compliance.
And it worked over and over again because people are conditioned from childhood to cooperate with law enforcement.
This decision, the one to keep living as an ordinary family man while continuing to kill in the shadows, is the thing that kept him invisible for 15 years.
He didn’t fit the profile that investigators were looking for.
He wasn’t a drifter.
He wasn’t a loner.
He wasn’t unemployed or transient or living on the margins.
He was a commuter with a mortgage and a family.
He looked like everyone else.
And that was exactly the point.
If you’ve been watching this far, you already know this case goes deeper than one murder.
We cover cases like this every week on Cold Case Redemption.
Hit subscribe so the next one shows up in your feed.
After killing Alice Eberhart in September 1965, Richard Cotttingham did not stop.
He kept killing.
And one of the things that made him so difficult to catch was that he almost never did it the same way twice.
In October 1967, 2 years after Eberheart, 29-year-old Nancy Skava Vogle was found strangled.
For decades, Vogle was considered Cottingham’s earliest known victim.
Nobody had connected him to the Eberhard case yet, and they would not for another 58 years.
Then in 1968, Cottingham used a familiar trick.
Diane Cusk was a 23-year-old dance teacher, barely 5t tall and weighing about 98 lb.
She was walking to her car in the parking lot of the Green Acres Mall on Long Island when a man approached her.
He claimed to be mall security and accused her of shoplifting.
the same basic ruse, a fake badge, a false claim of authority, a person in an apparent position of power telling you to comply.
Cusk was killed.
Her case sat unsolved for over 50 years until a DNA match finally connected it to Cottingham in 2022.
In the late 1960s, three teenage girls in the Bergen County area were strangled.
13-year-old Jacqueline Harp in 1968, 18-year-old Irene Blae in 1969, 15-year-old Denise Velasa, also in 1969.
Three young women, three separate murders, and none of them connected to each other or to any named suspect at the time.
Through the 1970s, the killings continued, and they continued to change.
Cotttingham moved constantly between New York and New Jersey, operating across a patchwork of jurisdictions that never talked to each other.
He would kill in Bergen County, then in Manhattan, then on Long Island, then back in New Jersey.
Each crime landed on a different detective’s desk in a different department with a different filing system and a different set of priorities.
In an era before computers linked police databases, a murder in Bergen County and a murder in Manhattan might as well have happened on different planets.
There was no centralized system.
There was no shared database.
A detective in Fair Lawn had no way of knowing that a detective in Nassau County was investigating a case with a similar MO because nobody was comparing notes across state lines.
Each jurisdiction worked its own cases in isolation, and the connections that seem obvious in hindsight were completely invisible in real time.
Cottingham knew this.
Maybe not consciously, maybe not as a calculated strategy, but on some level, he understood that moving between jurisdictions was a form of protection.
Every time he crossed a county line, he reset the clock.
One of the details that Peter Bronky has worked hard to correct is the popular myth about who Cottingham’s victims were.
The press, particularly after his later convictions, tended to paint him as a killer who targeted sex workers in the Times Square area.
Bronky has said that only about a third of Cottingham’s confirmed victims were sex workers.
The rest, roughly 70% were women and girls like Alice Everheart, teenage students, working women, housewives, women who were approached through manipulation, not through the street.
In 1974, Cottingham committed a crime in New Jersey that would not be solved for nearly 5 decades.
Two teenage girls, 17-year-old Maryanne Prior and 16-year-old Lorraine Kelly, were murdered.
Their case sat cold until Cotttingham himself pleaded guilty in 2021.
Then came 1979 and the crimes that earned him his most notorious nickname.
At a travel-in hotel near Time Square in Manhattan, firefighters responded to a blaze in one of the rooms.
When they put out the fire, they found two women dead.
Their bodies had been set ablaze.
Their heads and hands had been removed.
The removal of the hands and heads was deliberate, designed to prevent identification through dental records or fingerprints.
The brutality and the calculation behind it shocked even hardened NYPD investigators who had seen plenty of violence in late 1970s Manhattan.
One of the victims was eventually identified as D-Day Gdarzi.
The other woman has never been identified.
To this day, more than four decades later, nobody knows who she was.
She remains a Jane Doe.
And her family, if they’re still alive, may not even know she’s dead.
That’s where the name came from.
The torso killer, the tabloids loved it.
The case became one of the most covered crime stories in New York in the late 1970s.
The press also called him the Times Square Killer because several of his known crimes in New York took place in or around the Times Square District, which in the late 1970s was a very different place than the one tourists visit today.
It was a grimy stretch of adult bookstores, peep shows, and cheap residential hotels where rooms could be rented by the hour and nobody asked questions about who you were or who you brought with you.
Cotttingham’s methods included strangulation, stabbing, drowning, and bludgeoning.
Some victims were tortured before they died.
He moved bodies across jurisdictions.
He changed his approach from one killing to the next.
And because of all of that, because there was no consistent signature and no centralized system connecting cases across counties and states, law enforcement treated each murder as an isolated event.
He later claimed to have committed between 85 and 100 murders during his active years.
If that number is accurate, and authorities have not verified it, it would mean he was killing roughly once every 7 weeks.
That would make him one of the most prolific serial killers in American history.
What investigators have been able to confirm is that he is officially linked to approximately 20 killings spanning from 1965 to 1980.
Cotttingham’s run ended on the night of May 22nd, 1980.
He was at a quality in motel in Hasbro Heights, New Jersey, a town in Bergen County, not far from where he had committed his first murder 15 years earlier.
That night, motel staff heard screaming coming from one of the rooms.
They called the police.
When officers arrived, they found an 18-year-old woman named Lesie An Odell, who had been tortured and restrained.
Inside the room, police recovered a switchblade, slave collars, a leather gag, replica pistols, and prescription drugs.
Cotttingham was arrested on the spot.
The double life was over.
The commuter, the father, the computer operator from Loi, who nobody suspected of anything, was suddenly sitting in a Bergen County jail cell.
His wife had to be told.
His children had to be told.
His co-workers at Blue Cross Blue Shield had to process the fact that the quiet guy who ran the mainframe was being charged with murder.
When police searched his home and his belongings, the picture got worse.
Cottingham had kept trophies from some of his crimes.
He had accumulated tools and devices that made it clear his violence was not impulsive.
