Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters Read Free

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    That was the end of Cottingham. For his crimes in New Jersey, he received several terms ranging from sixty to ninety-five years, a term of twenty-five years to life, and another term to run consecutively of a minimum of thirty years. And then he was extradited to New York to stand trial for the “torso” homicides there. We won’t be seeing Richard again.
    Cottingham denied committing any of the murders to the bitter end, despite the fact that some of the victims’ property was found in his home and his fingerprint was found on the handcuffs restraining one of the victims. The only thing Cottingham admitted was, “I have a problem with women.”
    My brief run-in with Cottingham was a hell of a story and I told it for a long time, long after had I met, but did not know it, yet another serial killer—one for the record books, the Ukrainian cannibal Andrei Chikatilo, who killed and mutilated an extraordinary fifty-three victims in the Soviet Union.
     
    In 1990 I was making television documentaries, and in October of that year I found myself in Moscow making a film about the changes taking place there under Gorbachev. One day we came upon an extraordinary sight. A tent city with about five hundred people had been spontaneously erected on the front lawn of a hotel immediately behind the Red Square beneath the domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral. The residents seemed to have come in from all parts of the country and were mostly aged pensioners protesting Stalinist abuses of the past. They had bizarre placards attached to their tents and shelters. Some pasted to their foreheads little slips of paper with protests with strange things written in broken archaic English, such as “Lenin is bonehead.” Others held up placards with elaborately laid-out documents, letters, and photographs documenting their complaints. I waded into the crowd with my crew and started speaking with some of the people, seeking out possible interviews to film. It seemed that almost everybody there was somehow traumatized and mentally ill, and considering what had happened to them during the Stalin era, it was understandable.
    At some point I spotted a small stand decorated with the white, blue, and red of the old Imperial Russian tricolor flag. In 1990 it was still a rare thing to see those colors in the USSR. It belonged to a gaunt man with graying hair and big glasses. His other features I cannot recall, other than his being closely shaved and dressed relatively well (for the USSR) in a mid-length jacket, clean shirt, and neatly knotted tie. He looked to be maybe in his late forties or early fifties and stood out with his neat dress and younger age when compared to the many raggedy-scruffy bearded Russian pensioners occupying the tent city around him. There was something refined about him—perhaps delicate or prissy. Next to him was a typical battered leather briefcase like those that almost every Soviet bureaucrat and office worker carried.
    He introduced himself, but later I forgot his name and where he said he came from. At first he spoke quietly, calmly, and in a highly educated manner. The few phrases he attempted in English were well pronounced and grammatical. He reminded me of a librarian. He explained that he held several university degrees and was “not like” the rest of the rabble around him. As his story began to pour out, he gradually was overcome with emotion; his eyes welled up with tears and his glasses actually fogged up. But his story was so absurd that I would never forget it: He was here in Moscow, he told me, to see Gorbachev to complain that somebody was building an illegal garage and toilet beneath the windows of his son’s apartment. It was a conspiracy , he wailed.
    I had just interviewed an old woman a few rows away who had told me she was dying of cancer and fifty years earlier had been arrested and put in the gulag while her children were sent to a state institution. She had not seen them since and was desperate