On a Saturday night in October 1967, Nancy Vogle kissed her two kids good night, told her husband she was heading to bingo at St.
Margaret’s Church in Little Ferry, New Jersey, and walked out the front door. 3 days later, two young girls spotted something through their upstairs window on a quiet street in Ridgefield Park.
What they thought was a store mannequin lying in the back of a parked car turned out to be NY’s body.
She’d been beaten, bound, and strangled. Bergen County investigators spent months chasing leads. They found her shopping bag still in the car.
They found the rope used to kill her. They found evidence suggesting she knew her attacker, but they never found the attacker himself.
The case went cold. It stayed cold through the 70s, the 80s, the ‘9s, and into the 2000s.
NY’s mother, Carmela, died without ever learning who murdered her daughter. And the whole time, the killer had been right there, not hiding in another state.
Not some drifter passing through town. He’d been living on the same streets of Little Ferry, walking past the same houses, commuting to the same train station.
He was 21 years old when he killed Nancy Vogle, and nobody ever looked at him twice.
His name was Richard Cotttingham. And by the time the world found out what he was, they’d know him by a different name entirely, the torso killer.
This is the story of a murder that went unanswered for 43 years. A detective who refused to let it stay that way and a family that waited a lifetime for a single word: guilty.
This channel covers the cold cases that everyone thought would stay buried and the people who refused to let them go.
If that’s the kind of story you want to hear, stick around. This one is worth your time.
Before Nancy Vogle was a case file, before she was a name in a cold case database, before she became a footnote in the biography of a serial killer, she was a person.
And that matters more than anything else in this story. It matters because for 43 years, the system reduced her to a question mark.
And restoring who she actually was is the least this story owes her. Nancy Maurice Skiava was born in 1937 and grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey.
Her family was Italian-American, working class, rooted in the kind of post-war suburban landscape where families knew their neighbors by name.
Kids walked to school along treeline streets and Friday nights meant something. The neighborhoods of Bergen County in the 50s and 60s were tight.
People stayed. People looked after each other. And Nancy was woven into that world completely.
Her family called her Bubby. It was one of those childhood nicknames that sticks forever.
The kind that tells you something about how a person was loved before the world got complicated.
She graduated from Cliffside Park High School in 1955 and took a job at McGra Hill.
The publishing company commuting into New York City the way millions of Jersey residents did then and still do now.
Every morning the trains from Bergen County poured workers into Manhattan and every evening they brought them back.
Nancy was part of that rhythm, young working, building a life. Around 1958 she married Henry P.
Vogle. They started their family quickly the way young couples did in the late 50s.
And had two children together, a son named William, who everyone called Bill, and a daughter named Karen.
For the first years of their marriage, they lived at 74 Grant Street in Fairview, New Jersey, before moving to a house at 63 Bertoala Avenue in Little Ferry around 1964.
Little Ferry was a tiny burrow, barely a square mile, tucked between the Hackinack River and Route 46 and the sprawling suburban grid of Bergen County.
It had been farmland not that long ago, and some of the older residents still remembered when the Meadowland stretched unbroken to the horizon.
By the mid60s, though, it was filling in. Small houses on small lots, families with kids, cars parked along narrow streets.
It was the kind of town where you could walk from one end to the other in 15 minutes and run into three people you knew along the way.
People left their doors unlocked. Kids played in the street until the street lights came on.
Neighbors borrowed tools and returned them the next morning. That’s not nostalgia. That’s just what Little Fairy was in 1967.
NY’s mother, Carmemella Skiava, also lived in Little Ferry. Her brother, Frank, lived in nearby Ridgefield Park, just across the river.
This was a close family in a close community. Sunday dinners, holidays together, the kind of connective tissue that defined life in Italian-American Bergen County in the 60s.
On Saturday nights, Nancy played bingo at St. Margaret of Cortona Roman Catholic Church in Little Ferry.
It was her routine, her break. A few hours out of the house, away from the kids, doing something simple and social in a place where she felt comfortable.
It was normal. It was safe. It was the kind of thing you don’t think twice about.
That’s who Nancy Vogle was. A 29-year-old mother of two who worked, raised her kids, stayed close to her family, and played bingo on Saturday nights in a church a few blocks from her house.
Not a case number, not a victim profile, not a cold file gathering dust in a prosecutor’s office.
A woman with a life that mattered in a town where people were supposed to look out for each other.
Except, as it turned out, they couldn’t look out for what they couldn’t see. If you think cases like NY’s deserve to be remembered for the people at their center, not just the crimes that ended their lives, consider hitting that like button.
It helps more people find these stories and it makes a real difference. Saturday, October 28th, 1967.
That Saturday evening, Nancy told Henry she was heading to bingo at St. Margaret’s. It was the same thing she’d done plenty of times before.
Same church, same game, same Saturday night routine. There was no reason for anyone to worry.
She never arrived at the church. Somewhere between leaving the house on Berilada Avenue and where she was supposed to be, Nancy changed course.
She drove to the Valley Fair department store in Little Ferry. Maybe she needed to pick something up on the way.
Maybe she wanted to browse for a few minutes before the game started. The reason doesn’t survive in any record.
Nobody knows why she stopped there instead of going straight to St. Margaret’s. What does survive is the evidence found later.
Shopping bags and receipts from Valley Fair placed in her car, establishing her final known movements on the last night she was seen alive.
It was in that parking lot, according to what would eventually be confessed decades later, that a 21-year-old man from her own neighborhood encountered her.
His name was Richard Cotttingham. He also lived in Little Ferry. He walked the same streets, shopped at the same stores, passed the same houses.
And on this particular Saturday evening in October, he crossed paths with Nancy Vogle in a parking lot a short drive from both their homes.
What happened between that encounter and the discovery of NY’s body 2 days later would not be fully described for more than 40 years.
The details that eventually emerged came from Codingham’s own confession given to investigators in a prison interview room.
And they are the account of a killer, not a neutral witness. According to that confession, he drove Nancy in her own car to a remote area near Montail, a cornfield on the outskirts of Bergen County where he strangled her.
Then he drove her car across the Hackinack River to Ridgefield Park and parked it on a residential street.
Then he walked away. At home, Nancy didn’t return that night. On Sunday morning, Henry Vogle reported his wife missing to the Little Ferry police.
Officers began making calls and canvasing the area, but there was nothing to go on.
No witnesses had come forward. No disturbance had been reported anywhere. No one had seen anything unusual at Valley Fair or on any of the streets between Little Ferry and the surrounding towns.
Nancy had simply left the house and not come back. Then came Monday, October 30th.
On Brinkerhoff Street at Homestead Place in Ridgefield Park, just across the Hackinack River from Little Ferry, two young girls were looking out their upstairs window at the street below.
A car was parked along the curb that hadn’t been there before. It was a Rambler.
And through the car’s window, the girls could see something in the back seat that looked from a distance like a waxy mannequin.
Something pale and still draped partly with a dark covering. They went down to investigate.
It wasn’t a mannequin. Nancy Vogel’s body was in the back of her own car.
She had been beaten. There was a black eye on the right side of her face, bruising on the back of her head.
Her hands had been bound in front of her with a thin cord. She had been strangled with a rope or tie.
And then there were the details that would haunt investigators for years and that revealed something deeply unsettling about whoever had done this.
NY’s clothes had been removed and folded neatly beneath her body on the back seat.
Not thrown, not torn off and discarded. Folded. An army blanket that had been on the floor of the car had been draped partially over her body.
Her shopping bags from Valley Fair were still in the vehicle, undisturbed. The car had been driven from Little Ferry across the river into a residential neighborhood in Ridgefield Park and parked calmly on a quiet street as if it belonged there.
Whoever had done this was not panicked. They had not dumped the car in a ditch or abandoned it on a highway shoulder.
They had taken the time to position it neatly, deliberately, in a place where it might sit undiscovered for days.
Then they walked away. And for 43 years, that is exactly where the trail ended.
The case landed on the desk of Bergen County prosecutor Guy Kalesi. He was one of the most experienced prosecutors in New Jersey at the time, and the evidence told him something immediately.
Nancy Vogle knew her killer. Kalissi said as much publicly. The folded clothing, the way the body had been arranged, the signs that Nancy had been in the car willingly, at least initially, before the violence began, everything pointed towards someone she had interacted with voluntarily, someone she recognized, or at the very least, someone she had no reason to fear.
This was not a stranger ambush in a dark parking lot. This was someone from NY’s world.
That assessment turned out to be exactly right. Nancy and Richard Cottingham lived in the same small burrow of Little Ferry.
They likely recognized each other the way everyone in a town that small recognizes everyone else.
Investigators in 2010 would later confirm that they believed Cottingham and Vogle knew each other, though the precise nature and depth of that familiarity was never fully established.
But in 1967, being right about the general profile of the killer was essentially useless without the tools to narrow it down to a specific person.
Think about what investigators did not have. No DNA testing. The forensic science of extracting and matching genetic material from crime scenes would not exist in any usable form for another 20 years.
No surveillance cameras at Valley Fair or along Brinkerhoff Street or at any point along NY’s route that night.
No cell phone records because cell phones would not be invented for another 16 years.
No digital trail of any kind. No credit card transaction history beyond the physical receipts found in the car.
No automatic license plate readers. No social media. No email. Nothing that a modern investigation would take for granted in its first hour.
What they had was shoe leather and instinct. Detectives went door to door. They interviewed NY’s friends, her family, the regulars at the bingo hall, the employees at Valley Fair.
They checked alibis. They looked at known offenders in the area. They ran down every lead and every tip that came in.
They did everything the technology and methodology of 1967 allowed them to do, and none of it pointed to a quiet, recently arrived 21-year-old named Richard Codingham, who happened to live in the same small town.
He had no criminal record, no complaints lodged against him by neighbors or co-workers, no history of violence that was known to anyone.
He was, by every observable measure, unremarkable. And in a murder investigation that hinged on identifying a familiar face in a victim’s social orbit, being unremarkable was the most effective camouflage imaginable.
The investigation wound down, not with a press conference or a formal announcement, but with the slow, grinding reality of a case that had run out of places to go.
Leads dried up. Witnesses had nothing more to offer. The forensic evidence pointed to a known attacker, but could not name him.
There was no dramatic moment where a senior detective declared the case cold. It just happened.
The calls slowed. The interviews stopped producing new information. Other cases demanded attention because Bergen County didn’t stop producing crime while detectives worked the Vogle file.
Eventually, the folder was placed in the unsolved records at the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office in Hackinack, filed alongside the other cases that had outlasted the effort to solve them.
And there it sat. The years passed and they passed cruy. NY’s children, William and Karen, grew up without their mother.
They were toddlers when she died. They would have had only fragments of memory at best, impressions more than images, the echo of a voice they couldn’t quite place.
They started school, made friends, celebrated birthdays, learned to ride bikes, had their hearts broken for the first time, and they did all of it carrying the knowledge that their mother had been taken from them.
And nobody could explain why or by whom. Every milestone that should have had a mother present didn’t.
Every question about her went unanswered or was answered only with the kind of vague reassurance that adults offer children when the truth is too heavy to hand over.
Her husband Henry carried the weight of it differently. He knew what the investigators had found.
He knew the condition his wife’s body was in. He knew what the prosecutor believed.
And he lived the rest of his life knowing that the man who had done that to Nancy was still out there somewhere unnamed and unpunished.
And NY’s mother, Carmela Skiava, kept living in Little Ferry, kept getting older, kept wondering who had killed her daughter and why.
A mother who has buried a child and doesn’t know who is responsible carries a specific kind of grief.
It doesn’t settle. It doesn’t fade into the background the way normal loss eventually does.
It sits in the chest sharp and persistent because the wound was never closed. Carmemella asked.
She waited. She hoped. The answer never came. Meanwhile, 4 miles from the courthouse where NY’s file gathered dust.
The man who had strangled her was building what looked like a perfectly ordinary life.
And behind that ordinary life, he was becoming something that no one in Little Ferry could have imagined.
Richard Francis Cotttingham was born on November 25th, 1946 in the M Haven section of the Bronx, New York City.
His father was an executive at Metropolitan Life Insurance, a white collar professional who provided the family with a comfortable, stable upbringing.
When Cottingham was still a toddler, the family moved out of the Bronx to Dumont, New Jersey, and then a few years later to Rivervale, settling into the quiet, treelined Bergen County suburbs that were filling up with young families in the post-war boom.
Codingham graduated from Pascac Valley High School in Hillsdale, New Jersey in 1964. He ran cross country and track.
Yearbook photos show an unremarkable teenager with an unremarkable expression. Classmates who were later asked to remember him struggled to recall anything specific.
He wasn’t the class clown or the bully or the loner everyone whispered about. He was the kid who blended into the background.
The one you might nod to in the hallway without ever learning his name. After graduation, he worked briefly at Metropolitan Life, following his father’s footsteps into the insurance world.
Then in October 1966, he took a job as a computer operator on the night shift at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Greater New York in Manhattan.
He was 19 years old, commuting from New Jersey, e into Midtown, working overnight in a largely empty office building while the city operated on a different frequency outside the windows.
That night shift was important. It would define the architecture of Cottingham’s double life for the next 14 years.
During the day, he lived in Bergen County. At night, he traveled into Manhattan and occupied a different world entirely.
Time Square in the late 1960s and 1970s was not the sanitized tourist destination it would later become.
It was a warren of peep shows, adult theaters, cheap bars, and transient motel. The people who moved through that ecosystem after midnight were often vulnerable, often invisible, and often the last people anyone would notice if they disappeared.
By 1967, Cottingham was living in Little Ferry, the same small burrow where Nancy Vogle lived with her husband and children at 63 Bertilada Avenue, walking the same streets, shopping at the same stores, passing the same houses.
Nancy Vogel’s murder that October was his earliest confirmed killing. He was 20 years old, turning 21 the following month.
And according to his later confessions, it may not have been his first act of violence, only the first one that ended in death.
After killing Nancy, nothing in Cottingham’s outward life changed. Not that year, and not for a long time afterward.
In 1970, he married a woman named Janet. They had three children together and moved to Loi, New Jersey, another small Bergen County town a few miles from Little Ferry.
He commuted to his night job in Manhattan. He walked his kids to the park.
His neighbors in Loi thought he was polite, quiet, a little reserved maybe, but perfectly normal, a typical suburban family man.
The night shift gave him cover. While his wife and children slept in Loi, Cottingham was in Manhattan.
And the Manhattan he inhabited after midnight was not the Manhattan of publishing houses and office towers.
It was the Manhattan of Flophouse motel on West 42nd Street, of the bars and clubs and dark corridors around Time Square, of the women who worked the streets or passed through the cheap hotels and who could vanish without setting off any alarms.
Through the 1970s, Cotttingham’s violence escalated. Women were abducted from bars, from motel rooms, from the streets around Midtown.
They were assaulted, restrained, tortured, and killed. And because his victims were often transient, because the crime spanned multiple jurisdictions in New York and New Jersey, and because the forensic tools to connect separate cases through DNA or other physical evidence did not yet exist, the investigation stayed fragmented.
Different precincts, different counties, different states, each working their own cases without realizing they were all hunting the same man.
Then came December 2nd, 1979. Firefighters responding to a fire alarm at the Travelin motor lodge near Time Square in Manhattan, forced open the door to a smoke-filled room on one of the upper floors and found two women’s bodies on the bed.
Both had been set on fire. Both had been decapitated. Both had their hands severed at the wrists.
One victim was eventually identified as 22-year-old D-Day Gdarsi. The other woman has never been identified.
More than 45 years later, she remains a Jane Doe. Nobody ever came forward to claim her.
Nobody reported her missing. She existed and then she didn’t. And the only people who know her name are either dead or won’t talk.
The New York City tabloids gave the killer a name. The torso killer. Detectives also called him the Times Square Killer.
The public was horrified. The police across two states were trying to connect a widening circle of missing and murdered women to a single predator they could not see.
The killings continued. Maryanne Carr, a 26-year-old X-ray technician, was abducted from the Ledgewood Terrace apartment complex in Little Ferry in December 1977.
And found murdered. Little Ferry, the same town where Nancy Vogel had been killed 10 years earlier.
Cotttingham had lived in that same apartment complex he was killing in his own backyard and still nobody made the connection.
The end came on May 22nd, 1980. Cottingham checked into a quality in motel in Hasbro Heights, New Jersey with an 18-year-old woman named Leslie Anne Odell.
A motel worker heard screaming coming from the room and called the police. When officers forced entry, they found Odell alive, handcuffed, and brutalized.
Cotttingham was caught trying to flee the building carrying a bag containing handcuffs, adhesive tape, a leather slapjack, and assorted pills.
A subsequent search of his home in Loi revealed a locked room that his wife and children had never been allowed to enter.
Inside were trophies, items that belonged to women who had never come home, belongings that victims had been carrying when they vanished.
The room was a catalog of violence that stretched back years. The convictions came rapidly.
In June 1981, a New Jersey jury found Cotttingham guilty on 15 of 20 counts, including the first-degree murder of 19-year-old Valerie Anne Street.
He was sentenced to 173 to 197 years in prison. In 1982, he was convicted of the secondderee murder of Maryanne Carr.
In 1984, New York State convicted him for the murders of D-Day Gdarzi, the unidentified Jane Doe from the Travel Inn, and another victim named Jean Rainer.
Cotttingham would eventually claim to have murdered between 85 and 100 women. That number has never been confirmed and the real total may never be known.
And through all of it, through every arrest, every trial, every screaming tabloid headline about the torso killer, nobody ever connected Richard Cottingham to a 29-year-old mother from Little Ferry who disappeared on her way to bingo in October 1967.
Not the prosecutors who convicted him, not the detectives who investigated him, not the journalists who covered the trials.
Nancy Vogle’s murder stayed exactly where it had been since the early 1970s, in a cabinet, in a building in Hackinack, in a file that no one had any reason to open.
We cover cases like this every single week here on Cold Case Redemption. Cold cases that went unsolved for years, sometimes decades, until someone finally refused to stop looking.
If that sounds like the kind of deep dive you want to see more of, go ahead and subscribe.
And if you’re already subscribed, hit the bell so you don’t miss the next one.
By the mid 1990s, Richard Codingham had been locked inside the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton for more than a decade.
He was serving multiple life sentences stacked on top of each other with no possibility of parole.
He was in his late 40s. He was never getting out. Everybody knew that, including him.
In 1996, Bergen County detectives decided to take another run at the cold cases they believed Cottingham could solve.
The old files from the 60s and 70s were still there, still unsolved, still weighing on the families of the victims.
And Cottingham sitting in a cell in Trenton with nothing ahead of him but decades of the same walls might be persuaded to talk.
The lead on this effort was then Chief of Detectives Alan Grio who arranged a series of interviews with Cotttingham inside the prison.
And to the surprise of nearly everyone involved, Cotttingham talked. He told Grio that he had killed Nancy Vogle in Little Ferry in 1967.
He said it plainly. He admitted it. After 29 years of silence, the words were out.
He also confessed to the 1974 murders of Maryanne Prior, age 17, and Lorraine Kelly, age 16.
Two teenage girls from North Bergen, who had been hitchhiking to a shopping mall in Pamis on a summer afternoon and were never seen alive again.
Their case was one of the most agonizing unsolved murders in Bergen County history. And Cotttingham was sitting in a room in Trenton telling detectives he was the one who killed them.
This was the break. After nearly three decades, the families of these victims were on the verge of getting answers.
A deal was negotiated. The structure was unusual, designed to accommodate the unique circumstances. It would be a secret, no plea confession.
Cotttingham would formally admit to the killings on the record, but there would be no public trial, no press conference, no media coverage.
The confession would be documented. The cases would be officially resolved and the families would be notified.
All behind closed doors. The Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office signed off. The New Jersey Attorney General reviewed the arrangement and approved it.
Everything was in place. 29 years of silence were about to end. Then Governor Christine Todd Whitman vetoed the entire arrangement.
The specific reasons for the veto have never been fully detailed in the public record.
What is known is that the governor’s office killed the deal at the last minute and with it the confession.
The file went back in the drawer. Cotttingham returned to his cell. The interviews stopped and the families of Nancy Vogel, Maryanne Prior, and Lorraine Kelly were left exactly where they had been before, in the dark, waiting, wondering.
Now, here’s the part of the story that is genuinely difficult to sit with. NY’s mother, Carmela Skiava, was still alive in 1996.
She was elderly, but she was living. She had spent nearly 30 years not knowing who had killed her daughter.
30 years of birthdays, holidays, quiet evenings. All of them shadowed by a question that nobody could answer.
If that deal had gone through, even in secret, Carmela would have died knowing. She would have had the name.
She would have had the closure. Or at least as close to closure as a mother can get when her child has been murdered.
Instead, the truth had been spoken aloud inside a prison interview room in Trenton, New Jersey, and then sealed back up as if it had never happened.
Carmemella Skiava passed away without ever learning that her daughter’s killer had been their neighbor, that he had lived on the same streets, that he had confessed, and the system had chosen not to tell her.
14 more years would pass before anyone heard that confession again. February 2004, 2 days after the Super Bowl, a Bergen County detective named Robert Anzelotti walked into the New Jersey state prison in Trenton to meet Richard Codingham for the first time.
Anelotti had been assigned to review Bergen County’s cold case files from the 1960s and 1970s.
It was the kind of assignment that could mean different things depending on who received it.
For some detectives, it might have been a bureaucratic exercise, a boxchecking review of old cases with no realistic prospect of resolution.
For Anelotti, it was a mission. And the centerpiece of that mission was the collection of unsolved murders that he believed led back to one man.
He knew the history. He knew Codingham had confessed to Grio in 1996. He knew the deal had been killed by the governor’s veto.
And he knew that Cottingham, furious at the collapse of the arrangement, had told investigators afterward that he was done, that he would never cooperate with Bergen County again, that the door was closed permanently.
Anelotti went anyway. His approach was nothing like a standard interrogation. He didn’t walk in with crime scene photos spread across the table.
He didn’t lay out evidence and demand explanations. He didn’t press for details or issue threats or use any of the standard pressure techniques that work on suspects who still have something to lose.
Cotttingham had nothing to lose. He was already serving multiple life sentences that would keep him inside those walls until he died.
The usual leverage points, the fear of conviction, the possibility of a deal, the threat of additional time were all meaningless.
You can’t scare a man with more prison when he’s already staring at infinity. So Anelotti tried something different.
He sat down and talked. Not about Nancy Vogle, not about murder, not about anything in particular at first.
He showed up, introduced himself, and had a conversation about life, about sports, about nothing important.
And then he left. And then he came back and did it again and again.
Over the next six years, Anelotti visited Cottingham at the state prison on a regular basis.
He played cards with him. He ordered pizza and had it delivered to the interview room, turning what could have been a cold institutional encounter into something that at least resembled a normal human interaction.
On certain occasions, he arranged to have Cottingham transported from Trenton to Bergen County for overnight interview sessions in a setting that was more comfortable and more private than the standard prison visiting area.
This was not kindness for its own sake. It was not Stockholm syndrome in reverse.
It was not a detective who forgot what the man sitting across from him had done.
It was calculated strategy executed with extraordinary patience over a time frame that most investigations would never tolerate.
Anelotti understood something critical about Cottingham’s psychology. This was a man who had spent decades living a double life with absolute success.
For 14 years from 1966 to 1980, he had maintained the perfect facade. Suburban husband, commuter, father, neighbor.
Behind that facade, he had been killing women and nobody suspected a thing. The secrecy was part of who he was.
It was central to his identity. But now the secrecy served no purpose. He was caught, convicted, known.
The world already knew he was the torso killer. The question was not whether he had killed, but how many.
And Anelotti believed correctly that part of Cottingham wanted to talk. Part of him wanted someone to understand the full scope of what he had done.
After decades of hiding, there was an impulse, maybe vanity, maybe something else, to be known completely, but only on his terms, only if the process felt like his choice, not something being extracted under duress.
So Anelotti made a commitment not in any formal written agreement but in practice in the way he handled every session, every conversation, every scrap of information that Cotttingham provided.
There would be no press conferences, no press releases. When Cottingham confessed to a killing, the victim’s family would be told.
The case would be formally resolved, but the announcement would be handled quietly without the media spectacle that a serial killer’s confession would normally generate.
Anelotti later described his reasoning plainly. They would always tell the victim’s families, but they would never stage a public event around it.
They had a larger goal, which was to get every homicide out of it. Every name, every case, every detail, and turning each confession into a headline would shut Cottingham down permanently.
It was a gamble that required the detective to subordinate his own potential career recognition to the long-term objective.
Solving a 40-year-old serial murder case is the kind of achievement that makes careers. Doing it quietly without public credit because the publicity would cost you the next confession and the one after that requires a different kind of discipline.
Roughly 100 interviews took place across those six years. Hours upon hours of conversation in prison visiting rooms and Bergen County interview suites, cards and pizza and sports talk and gradually, inevitably, the edges of something darker beginning to surface in what Cottingham was willing to discuss.
The progress was not linear. There were sessions where Cottingham hinted at things and then pulled back.
Sessions where he tested Anelotti, dropping partial details to see if they wound up in a newspaper the next week.
When they didn’t, the trust deepened a little more. There were also sessions that went nowhere where Cottingham talked about anything except the cases Anelotti needed him to address.
Those sessions mattered, too. They reinforced the relationship. They reminded Cottingham that Anzelotti was not going away.
And there was another dimension to the strategy that rarely gets discussed. Anelotti wasn’t just building rapport.
He was also building a psychological dependency. Cotttingham was an aging man in a maximum security prison.
His wife had divorced him. His children wanted nothing to do with him. The fan mail and media requests that sometimes come to famous killers had largely dried up.
Anelotti’s regular visits were in a very real sense the most meaningful human contact in Cottingham’s life.
That gave Anzelotti leverage that no interrogation room technique could replicate. Walking away, even temporarily, had consequences that Cottingham could feel.
The first case Cotttingham was willing to formally resolve, the one he would agree to stand in a courtroom and answer for, was the one that started everything.
Nancy Vogle, his earliest confirmed victim. The 29-year-old mother from his own neighborhood who vanished on a Saturday night in October 1967.
There may have been a reason he chose that one first. The Vogle case was the farthest in the past, the oldest, the one with the least remaining physical evidence and the fewest living witnesses.
Pleading guilty to a 1967 murder carried less public weight than confessing to the more notorious cases that had made the torso killer a household name.
It was in a sense the safest confession to give, a way of testing the process without fully committing to it.
6 years after walking into that prison for the first time, Anelotti had what he came for.
Cottingham agreed to plead guilty. The question now was how to make it happen without breaking the promise that had made it possible.
Late August 2010, Bergen County Superior Court, Hackinack, New Jersey. Judge Donald R. Vanetsia presiding.
The hearing had been deliberately scheduled for the end of the day. A quiet slot on the docket.
No advanced notice to reporters, no press advisory issued by the prosecutor’s office, no cameras set up in the hallway.
This was the promise Anelotti had made, delivered in the most literal way possible. If you wanted to know about this hearing, you had to be in that courtroom, and hardly anyone was.
Richard Codingham was 63 years old when he was brought into the courtroom in shackles.
He had been in prison for 30 years. He had been convicted of multiple murders across two states.
His name had appeared on the front pages of New York tabloids alongside words like butcher and torso and monster.
And now he was standing in a half empty courtroom in Hackinack, New Jersey to answer for the very first life he had taken.
Sitting in the gallery were three people who had waited longer than anyone for this moment.
NY’s brother, Frank Skiava, a man who had spent four decades knowing his sister was murdered and not knowing who did it, who had watched his own mother, Carmela, grow old and die carrying that same unanswered question.
And NY’s two children, William and Karen. They were in their 40s now. They had been toddlers the night their mother walked out the door of 63 Berilada Avenue to go play bingo and never came back.
They had grown up without her. They had gone to school, graduated, found jobs, built relationships, started families of their own, and they had done all of it, carrying the weight of her absence and the compounding weight of not knowing why.
43 years of living with a wound that couldn’t close because the cause had never been named.
And now the cause was standing in front of them in shackles. About to say the word they had waited their entire adult lives to hear.
Cottingham pleaded guilty to the murder of Nancy Skava Vogel. He was sentenced to life in prison to run concurrently with the multiple life terms he was already serving.
In practical terms, the sentence changed nothing about his confinement. He was never getting out before this plea.
He was never getting out after. The number of years in front of him was irrelevant because all of them would be spent in the same cell.
But the math was never the point. The point was the word guilty spoken in a courtroom with a judge on the bench and a record being made and NY’s family in the room to hear it.
The point was a formal legal acknowledgement that Nancy Vogle had been murdered by this specific man and that the state of New Jersey recognized it.
After 43 years of silence of a file sitting in a cabinet in this very building of a family carrying an open wound that nothing could close, there was finally an answer on the record.
Cotttingham apologized to the family. Whether that apology carried genuine remorse or was simply the expected gesture from a man who understood what was required in that moment is something only he knows.
The record reflects the words. The family received them. What they did with them was their own.
Bergen County prosecutor John Molinelli confirmed the plea to reporters after the news leaked despite the precautions.
He described the outcome as the culmination of years of patient investigation of detectives traveling to the prison and building a case from a confession rather than from physical evidence.
He stated that the office was satisfied that Cottingham was the person responsible for Nancy Vogel’s murder.
Then came the moment that revealed exactly who Richard Codingham still was underneath whatever performance he had given in the courtroom.
As Anelotti escorted him out through the hallway, shackled and shuffling, Cottingham leaned toward the detective and told him in blunt terms that he would never do this again.
Never cooperate, never confess to another killing, never give up another name. Anelotti noted the threat.
He did not believe it. The plea brought Codingham’s confirmed murder count to six. It would not stay there for long.
Despite what Cottingham said walking out of that courtroom, Anelotti kept showing up, kept visiting the prison, kept playing cards, kept ordering pizza, kept sitting across from a man responsible for some of the most horrific murders in New Jersey and New York history, talking about football scores and weather and whatever else it took to keep the door open.
And Cottingham kept talking and eventually kept confessing. Between 2010 and December 2026, Richard Codingham confessed to 15 additional murders committed between 1967 and 1975.
The slow, methodical extraction that Anelotti had designed his entire approach around was working exactly as intended.
In January 2020, Bergen County authorities publicly attributed three more cold cases to Cottingham. The victims were Jackie Harp, Irene Blazy, and Denise Velasa.
All young women strangled in Bergen County in the late 1960s in the same period as Nancy Vogel’s murder.
These cases were exceptionally closed, a legal term, meaning that Cotttingham confessed and authorities were satisfied of his guilt, but no formal prosecution was pursued.
The families were notified privately. The files were marked resolved. No press conference. In April 2021, Cottingham stood in a courtroom once more and pleaded guilty to the 1974 murders of Maryanne Prior, age 17, and Lorraine Kelly, age 16.
Two teenage girls from North Bergen who had been hitchhiking to a shopping mall in Pamis on a summer day and were never seen alive again.
This was the same case Cotttingham had confessed to in 1996. The confession that had been killed by the governor’s veto.
25 years after that vetoed deal, the families of those two girls finally heard the guilty plea that should have come in the ’90s.
In December 2022, Cotttingham crossed state lines in the legal sense, pleading guilty in Nassau County, New York to the 1968 murder of Diane Cusk and four other Long Island women.
The Cusk case was a landmark and not just for the Cottingham investigation. It had been cracked by a DNA match.
Reportedly the oldest DNAdriven prosecution in the United States at the time. For the first time, forensic science, not just a confession, had independently and definitively linked Cottingham to a victim.
And in December 2025, Cotttingham confessed to the 1965 murder of Alice Eberhart, an 18-year-old nursing student from Fairlon, New Jersey.
Fairlon police publicly announced the closure of the case in January 2026. That confession carried a significant implication.
It meant Cottingham’s killing had started even before Nancy Vogle’s murder. The young man from Rivervale may have begun taking lives when he was barely out of high school.
Nancy was not his first victim. She was his first confirmed victim, which is a different and more disturbing distinction.
Anelotti was not the only person who helped extract these confessions. Forensic historian Peter Vonsky, the author who founded the torso serial killer project, developed his own independent relationship with Cottingham through years of correspondence and prison visits.
Jennifer Weiss, the daughter of travel-in victim Dday Gdarzi, also built a rapport with the man who had murdered her mother.
The dynamics between these various figures were complicated and at times contentious. Cotttingham appeared to enjoy the attention and to enjoy playing his confidants against one another, revealing different details to different people, keeping everyone slightly off balance.
But whatever interpersonal drama surrounded the process, the outcome was consistent. Names came out, files were closed, families were told.
Cotttingham has claimed a lifetime total of between 85 and 100 victims. Investigators have confirmed or formally attributed roughly 20.
The gap between those numbers exists in a space that may never be fully resolved.
Some of those claimed victims may be fabrications, exaggerations from a man who has spent decades cultivating a mythology around his own violence.
Others may be real women whose cases will never have enough corroborating evidence to close, even with a confession.
And some may be cases that are still right now sitting in file cabinets and prosecutor’s offices across New Jersey and New York waiting for the same patient work that opened the Vogle case.
For Nancy Vogel’s family, the number that mattered was never the total. It was one.
One name on a guilty plea, one case resolved. One night in October 1967, finally explained.
And that is where this story finds its center. Not in the body count, not in the headlines, not in the horror of what Richard Cottingham did across two states in two decades.
In the simple, specific, irreducible fact that a woman named Nancy Vogle was murdered. And 43 years later, her children sat in a courtroom and heard the man who did it say the word guilty.
For 43 years, the story of Nancy Vogle’s life was collapsed into a single event, a case number, a cold file, a question nobody could answer.
And when the answer finally came in 2010, it arrived as a subplot in a much larger and louder story about a serial killer and his decades of unchecked violence.
There is a gravity in this kind of case that pulls everything toward the perpetrator.
The horror of what he did, the scale of it, the gruesome details. These things consume attention, the way fire consumes oxygen.
And the victim, the person at the center of it all, the person without whom none of this would exist, risks disappearing into the background.
So, let this ending belong to Nancy. She was 29 years old, a mother to William and Karen, a wife to Henry, a daughter to Carmela, a sister to Frank.
Her family called her Bubby, and they meant it with love. She graduated from Cliffside Park High School in 1955 and worked at McGra Hill in New York City before starting her family.
She lived at 63 Bertoala Avenue in Little Ferry, New Jersey, in a small house in a small town in the kind of tight-knit community where everybody recognized everybody.
And Saturday nights meant bingo at St. Margaret of Cortona Church. For four decades after her death, her murder was a question mark, a file in a cabinet, a weight her children carried every single day of their lives, an ache her mother took to the grave.
The answer, when it finally came, did not bring her back. It did not undo the decades William and Karen spent growing up without their mother.
It did not give Carmela the peace she waited 30 years to receive and never did.
It did not erase the years of silence or make whole what had been broken on a Saturday night in 1967.
But it gave Nancy her name back. Not as an unsolved case, not as a line item in the torso killer’s body count, not as a footnote in someone else’s story.
As Nancy Vogle, a woman who lived, who was loved, who mattered to the people around her, and who deserved to be remembered for who she was, not only for how her story ended.
Her case is one of more than 15 cold murders now attributed to Richard Cotttingham.
He remains in New Jersey State Prison serving multiple consecutive life sentences. He will die there.
The detectives, the researchers, and the family members who spent years, sometimes decades, extracting the truth from a man who wanted to keep it buried accomplished something that goes beyond any single conviction.
They proved that no case is truly cold as long as someone refuses to let it go.
That a name written in a file 43 years ago still has the power to matter if the right person decides to pick that file up and start reading.
Nancy Vogle waited 43 years for justice. Her family waited 43 years for the truth.
And on a quiet afternoon in a courtroom in Hackinack, they finally heard it. If you believe these stories deserve to be told, and if you believe the forgotten victims of cold cases deserve to have their names spoken out loud, subscribe to Cold Case Redemption.
There are more cases like NY’s out there. Cases that went cold for years, sometimes decades, until someone refused to stop looking.
Will be here telling every single one of
