It was planned, rehearsed, and equipped
It was planned, rehearsed, and equipped.
The man his neighbors thought they knew had never existed.
He had been a costume, and the real person underneath had been doing things that most people can’t even imagine.
What followed were three separate murder trials between 1981 and 1984.
The cases were prosecuted in both New Jersey and New York, reflecting the crossjurisdictional nature of his crimes.
Cotttingham was convicted of five killings.
Maryanne Carr and Valerie Anne Street in New Jersey, Deda Gdarzi, the still unidentified travel in victim, and Gene Rener in New York.
He was sentenced to multiple life terms and sent to Southwood State Prison in Bridgetton, New Jersey, a facility in the southern part of the state, far from Bergen County, and the streets where he had hunted for 15 years.
Five murder convictions.
Case closed.
Justice served.
Except it wasn’t.
Not really.
Five convictions accounted for five victims out of what investigators already suspected was a much longer list.
Cotttingham had killed far more than five people.
And the families of those other victims, the ones whose cases remained open and unsolved, got nothing from his arrest.
They had no closure, no answers, not even a name to attach to the worst day of their lives.
The Everheart family was among them.
Alice’s case file was still sitting in that cabinet in Fair Lawn.
Her murder was still unsolved.
And nobody had any reason to connect the quiet teenager from Rivervale who knocked on her door in 1965 to the serial killer who was finally caught in 1980.
For 30 years after his conviction, Richard Codingham said nothing about any additional murders.
He sat in his cell at Southwood State Prison and he kept his mouth shut.
The first crack came in 2010 and it came because one detective had the patience of a saint.
Bergen County investigator Robert Anzelotti had been visiting Cotttingham in prison for years, not interrogating him, not pressuring him, visiting him.
Anelotti would show up with pizza.
They would play cards.
They would talk about sports, about the news, about whatever was on television.
The conversations were casual, low stakes, and completely free of any demand that Cottingham admit to anything.
That takes a specific kind of patience.
Imagine driving to a state prison on a regular basis to sit across from a man you know has killed multiple people and instead of confronting him about it, you eat pizza with him and pretend everything is normal.
You do that for months, then years.
You build something that can’t be rushed and can’t be forced.
You build familiarity, routine, something that Tottingham might feel like trust or respect, even though the detective’s real objective never changed.
Anelotti understood something that a lot of people in law enforcement struggle with.
You can’t bully a confession out of someone like Cottingham.
He’s not afraid of prison.
He’s already there for life.
He’s not afraid of consequences.
There are no additional consequences that matter.
The only thing that works is making him comfortable enough over a long enough period of time that talking starts to feel like less effort than staying quiet.
In 2010, after years of this slow, deliberate rapport building, Cottingham finally confessed to the 1967 murder of Nancy Vogle.
One confession after decades of silence.
That’s how long it took to get a single admission out of him.
But it proved something important.
It proved that Cottingham could be made to talk.
Under the right conditions, with the right approach, and with the right incentive, he would open up.
The incentive was straightforward.
Prosecutors agreed not to file new charges.
Codingham was already serving three life sentences.
He was never getting out.
A new murder conviction would change nothing about his situation.
So, the deal was simple.
Talk and we won’t prosecute.
Stay quiet.
And those cases stay cold forever.
Between 2014 and 2020, Cottingham confessed to three more murders.
The three teenage girls from the late 1960s, Jacqueline Harp, Irene Blae, and Denise Velasa.
Investigators kept these confessions quiet for years.
They didn’t announce them publicly because they didn’t want to spook cotting him.
The relationship was fragile.
One wrong move, one headline that made him feel exposed or cornered, and he might shut down completely.
In 2021, Cottingham pleaded guilty in court to the 1974 murders of Maryanne Prior and Lorraine Kelly, the two teenage girls from New Jersey whose case had been cold for nearly half a century.
Then came 2022 and a breakthrough that nobody expected.
Investigators in Nassau County, Long Island, got a DNA hit connecting Cottingham to the 1968 murder of Diane Cusk, the dance teacher who had been approached in the Green Acres Mall parking lot.
Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly said at the time that this might be the oldest DNA match ever used to lead to a prosecution in the United States.
Cotttingham pleaded guilty to the Cusk murder and was sentenced to 25 years to life.
As part of the plea arrangement, he also confessed to four more Long Island killings from the early 1970s.
Mary Beth Hines, Leverne Moy, Sheila Heman, and Maria Rosado Neas.
By the mid 2020s, Cottingham’s confirmed body count had grown from the original five convictions to approximately 20.
Two people played a critical role as intermediaries during this period.
Forensic historian Peter Veronsky spent years communicating with Codingham and assisted police in 11 of the confessions between 2021 and 2025.
Jennifer Weiss, the daughter of Cotttingham’s victim, D-Day Gdarzi, also built a relationship with him over time and served as a bridge between Codingham and the detectives.
Weiss passed away in 2023 before the Eberheart confession was obtained.
Veronsky, who probably knows Cotttingham’s psychology better than anyone alive, has been blunt about what he’s observed.
Cotttingham does not feel remorse.
Not in the way that word is normally understood.
Veronky has described it as cognitive remorse, meaning Codingham understands intellectually that what he did was horrific, but he doesn’t carry the emotional weight of it.
He’s not wired for it.
He can say the right words.
He can acknowledge that his actions destroyed lives, but the feeling that’s supposed to come with that acknowledgement, the guilt, the regret, the anguish simply isn’t there.
He knows what remorse means the way a person might know the definition of a word in a foreign language.
The meaning is there.
The feeling is missing.
That assessment matters because it shapes how you interpret every confession he’s ever made.
He wasn’t confessing out of guilt.
He wasn’t unburdening himself because the weight of what he’d done had finally become too heavy to carry.
He was confessing because the conditions were right.
The deal was acceptable and talking gave him something he wanted.
Whether that was attention, legacy, control over his own narrative, or simply something to break the monotony of life in a prison cell is a question that different people who have studied him would answer differently.
In the spring of 2021, while Cottingham was making headlines for his guilty plea in the Prior and Kelly case, a phone call came into the Fair Lawn Police Department.
It was from one of Alice Eberhart’s old nursing school classmates.
After 56 years, someone was still thinking about the girl who never came back to the dormatory after that Friday afternoon in September 1965.
Someone still remembered her face, her name, the empty seat in class that Monday morning.
And that person picked up the phone and called the police.
The call went to Detective Brian Ripka.
He listened and then he brought it to Chief Glenn Cowwells.
Cowwells authorized reopening the Eberhart case.
Detective Ripka and Sergeant Eric Elishawich were assigned to work it.
These were not cold case specialists brought in from some outside agency.
They were fair lawn cops.
This was their town, their department, and the Eberheart file was their department’s only unsolved homicide.
It had been sitting in that building unresolved for longer than either of them had been alive.
They went back to the beginning.
They pulled the original case file out of storage and started going through everything from scratch.
the crime scene photographs, the medical examiner’s report, the statements from nine neighbors and friends who had been questioned through the night in 1965, the records from the New York World’s Fair Dagger investigation, the notes about Ross Everheart being looked at as a potential suspect, all of it laid out on a table 60 years after it was first documented.
Reading a cold case file from the 1960s is a different experience than reading a modern case file.
The documentation is sparer.
The forensic work is more limited.
The photographs are grainy.
But the details are still there if you know what to look for.
And Ripka and Ellis were looking hard.
And as they were reviewing the file, something clicked.
Richard Cottingham was all over the news.
He was confessing to cold cases.
He was cooperating with investigators and the geography lined up perfectly.
In September 1965, Cottingham had been 18 years old, living in Rivervale, New Jersey.
Rivervale was about 7 mi from Fairlon.
He would have known the area.
He would have known Hackinack.
He would have known how to find Saddle River Road.
It was thin.
There was no physical evidence tying him to the Eberhard case.
No DNA, no fingerprints that had survived six decades, just geography, age, and a gut feeling that the timing was too clean to ignore.
Ripka and Elishawich decided to go see Cottingham themselves.
They drove to the prison.
When they sat down across from him and told him they were detectives from Fairlaw, New Jersey, something shifted in his expression.
He didn’t tense up.
He didn’t shut down.
He perked up.
Ah, fair lawn, he said.
That reaction told them everything they needed to know.
Not as evidence, not as proof, but as confirmation that they were pulling on the right thread.
A decision was made in coordination with the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office.
They would not seek new charges against Cottingham for the Eberhart murder.
He was 75 years old at the time, already serving three life sentences.
Charging him would trigger a trial and an e and a trial would give him a reason to stop talking.
What they needed was not a conviction.
It was the truth.
A confession that matched the evidence.
A name they could put in the file.
Closure for the family and for Fairlon itself.
The interrogation stretched out over 4 years.
Ripka and Ellisich visited Cottingham repeatedly at the prison.
They were joined at times by investigators from the New Jersey State Police and the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office.
They worked through Cottingham’s intermediaries, through Veronsky, through Weiss before her death in 2023.
They circled and circled the subject.
Cotttingham didn’t just open up and hand them a confession.
That’s not how it works with someone like him.
He tested them.
He would bring up a detail from his past and then watch their faces to see how they reacted.
He would talk around the edges of the Eberheart case, referring to events in Fair Lawn in 1965 without directly admitting to anything.
He would drop hints and then pull back as if checking whether the detectives were paying close enough attention to deserve the next piece.
It was a chess match.
Codingham had been playing this game with investigators for over a decade by then.
He knew how confessions worked.
He knew what prosecutors wanted.
He knew the leverage he had, which was that the information was inside his head and nowhere else.
And he could dole it out at whatever pace he chose.
The detectives had to be patient, strategic, and willing to sit in uncomfortable silence while a man who had killed 20 people decided how much he felt like sharing that day.
Some visits produced nothing useful at all.
just small talk, dead ends, and the long drive back from the prison with empty notebooks.
Other visits produced fragments that the detectives would take back to Fair Lawn and check against the original case file piece by piece, trying to build a picture of what Cottingham knew without tipping their hand about what they already had.
Over the course of the investigation, Ripken, Ripkimma, and Ellis logged more than 50 hours of recorded interviews with Codingham.
50 hours is a staggering amount of time to spend in a room with a serial killer.
That’s not a single marathon session.
That’s dozens of visits spread across years.
Each one requiring preparation, travel, and the emotional toll of sitting across from someone who did what Cottingham did.
The moment of certainty came before the formal confession did.
Ellis Witch later told reporters that there were little ways Cottingham reacted to questions that made it clear he was their guy.
Not grand declarations, just small involuntary reactions that a person can’t fake.
One exchange sealed it.
Elishuich asked Codingham about how the killer had entered the house.
Codingham corrected him.
He didn’t just agree with the detective’s version.
He told Ellis that the perpetrator did it a different way.
And then he described what actually happened.
He wasn’t guessing.
He was remembering.
And the details kept coming.
Codingham described an article of clothing that Alice was wearing that day.
A detail that had never been released to the public.
He described the interior layout of the Everheart house, the rooms, the arrangement of the space, things that only someone who had been inside would know.
He mentioned that there was no water in the swimming pool in the backyard.
A small, specific, verifiable fact, the kind of thing you’d only remember if you’d actually been there and noticed it in the moment.
He also gave investigators a rough description of where he had purchased the souvenir dagger, the curved blade from the World’s Fair that had been found at the scene in 1965.
The address he gave lined up with one of the three known sale locations that the original investigators had identified six decades earlier.
Piece by piece, the story matched the file.
Not perfectly, not without minor discrepancies in the way that 60-year-old memories always carry minor discrepancies, but closely enough, specifically enough that the detectives had no doubt.
In November 2025, the timeline accelerated.
Codingham’s health had been declining for months.
He had nearly died in October.
Bronky contacted the detectives and told them that Cotttingham wanted to talk, that his time was running short and that if they wanted the full confession, they needed to move.
The visits became daily.
The conversations grew longer and more focused.
The detectives pressed harder than they had in years.
On the night of December 22nd, 2025, Richard Cottingham gave a full verbal confession to the murder of Alice Jean Eberhart.
He described following her from the Hackinack Hospital parking lot.
He described the fake badge.
He described knocking on the door of the Dutch colonial on Saddle River Road.
He described what happened inside the house.
And he described going out the back door when he heard her father arriving.
He later provided a written confession as well, putting on paper the same account he had given verbally.
He was 79 years old.
He had been carrying this particular secret for 60 years and 3 months.
And for the detectives who had spent four years pulling it out of him, hearing the words spoken aloud was the end of a journey that had consumed a significant portion of their careers.
The next morning, December 23rd, the Eberheart family was notified.
Imagine that phone call.
Imagine picking up and hearing a detective tell you that after six decades of silence, after years of watching your family’s worst day sit untouched in a filing cabinet, they finally had a name.
They finally knew who had walked up to Alice’s door that Friday afternoon and taken her from them.
On January 6th, 2026, the Fair Lawn Police Department held a press conference.
Standing behind a podium with the department’s seal on it, investigators announced that the murder of Alice Jean Eberhart, Fairlon’s only remaining unsolved homicide, was officially closed.
Her nephew, Michael Smith, spoke publicly.
His words were simple.
We finally know who.
Three words.
60 years of waiting compressed into three words.
No new charges will be filed against Richard Codingham for the Everheart murder.
He is 79 years old, serving three life sentences at Southwood State Prison, and his health continues to decline.
There is no additional punishment the justice system can deliver.
He’s going to die in that prison regardless of whether another charge is added to his name.
The nonprosecution agreement was the only path to the truth, and every investigator involved understood that from the beginning.
The confession itself rests on Cottingham’s word, backed by the corroborating non-public details he provided.
There is no DNA evidence in the Everheart case.
There are no surviving forensic samples that could produce a match after 60 years.
The certainty comes from the specificity of what he knew.
details that only the killer could have known, cross-cheed meticulously against the original 1965 case file by detectives who had spent years studying every page of that file.
For some people, that might feel incomplete.
A confession without forensic proof, a closure without a trial, a resolution that depends on the word of a convicted serial killer.
And that’s a reasonable thing to feel.
In an era of DNA exonerations and wrongful conviction reversals, skepticism about confessions is healthy.
But consider what Cottingham provided.
He described a piece of clothing Alice was wearing that was never released to the public.
He described the layout of a house he had no documented connection to.
He knew there was no water in the backyard swimming pool on a specific afternoon 60 years ago.
He gave a rough address for where he bought a souvenir dagger that only a thousand people in the world had ever purchased.
And that address matched the investigator’s records from 1965.
These are not the kinds of details a person invents or guesses at.
These are memories.
For the Eberhart family, it was enough.
They were not looking for a new conviction.
They were not looking for a dramatic courtroom scene or a jury’s verdict.
They were looking for an answer to the question that had haunted them since that Friday evening when Ross came home and found his daughter on the living room floor.
Who did this? Why Alice? And what happened in those missing hours? Now they know.
Cotttingham’s confessions over the past 15 years have given answers to roughly 20 families.
Think about that number for a second.
20 cold case files that were reopened, investigated, and closed.
20 sets of parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren who got the phone call or the visit from a detective telling them that the name of the person who destroyed their family had finally surfaced.
In some of those cases, the parents who reported their daughters missing in the 1960s and 1970s had already died without ever learning what happened.
The answers came a generation too late, delivered to nieces, nephews, and grandchildren instead.
But if Cottingham’s own claims about his total number of victims are even partially true, and he has said the number is somewhere between 85 and 100, there are dozens more families who will never get that call.
Cases that were never connected to him.
Victims whose names were never spoken in the same sentence as his.
women and girls who vanished in the 1960s and 1970s across New York, New Jersey, and possibly beyond, whose files are still sitting in cabinets in police departments that may not even know to look in Cottingham’s direction.
Some of those cases may never be solved.
The witnesses are dead.
The evidence is degraded or destroyed.
And Cottingham himself, even if he wanted to confess to every one of them, may not remember them all.
60 years is a long time, even for the person who committed the crimes.
The Eberhart case was the earliest.
It was the one that stretched back the farthest to a September afternoon in 1965 when a teenage girl opened her front door to a stranger with a fake badge.
That badge, that small piece of theater, a hunk of metal that looked official enough to make a young woman pause and do what she was asked.
Cotttingham used the same trick on Diane Cusk three years later, posing as mall security at the Green Acres Mall on Long Island and accusing a 98-lb dance teacher of shoplifting to get control of her.
He used variations of it throughout his 15 years of killing.
A badge, a uniform, a claim of authority, an accusation that put the victim on the defensive and made them feel like they needed to cooperate.
The specific details changed from one crime to the next, but the underlying logic never did.
People trust authority.
They comply.
They open the door.
They follow instructions.
They lower their guard because they’ve been taught their entire lives that a person with a badge is someone you’re supposed to listen to.
It’s one of the deepest social instincts we have.
And Cottingham exploited it with surgical precision.
Alice Eberhart did nothing wrong when she opened her door that day.
She responded the way anyone would have responded.
A police officer needs to leave a number for your father.
Of course, you go get a pen.
That’s not carelessness.
That’s just being human.
The thing that made her vulnerable to Richard Codingham wasn’t naivity.
And it wasn’t a mistake.
It was a completely reasonable, completely normal response to what looked like legitimate authority.
That’s what makes his method so unsettling.
He didn’t break into homes.
He didn’t ambush people in alleyways.
He knocked.
He smiled.
He held up a badge.
And people let him in.
Alice Jean Eberhart was a nursing student.
She was the president of her freshman class.
She was a Sunday school teacher who loved skiing and music.
She was 18 years old.
and she had plans for who she was going to become.
For 60 years, her story story ended with a question mark.
A cold case, an empty file, a name that faded out of public memory while the man who killed her sat in a prison cell and said nothing.
It took a phone call from an old classmate who never forgot her, two detectives who refused to let it go, and 50 hours of patience across four years to finally get the answer.
The file is closed.
Now, Fairlon’s last unsolved homicide is solved, and Alice’s name has been spoken again, not as a case number, but as a person.
That’s what we do here at Cold Case Redemption.
We tell the stories of the people who waited the longest.
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