The scene was Times Square 1977, and there was a butcher on the loose. The city's prostitutes were being slaughtered, and even the pimps were frightened. In December of 1979, a seedy hotel on 42nd Street was burning down. A firefighter pulled an unconscious, naked woman out of a burning room into the hall. Thinking to resuscitate her, he leaned down to attempt mouth-to-mouth and discovered she was missing her head. Her hands had also been cut off. A second body was found later in the same room in the same condition. One victim was identified as Deedah Goodarzi, a Long Island prostitute; the identity of the other was never discovered. A year earlier, another prostitute, "Bouncey," had been discovered on a street in Queens. She was dismembered elsewhere and laid out with her legs on one block, her body on another. Her head wasn't found. Months later in May 1979, an older streetwalker was found in a hotel room sliced, burned, and with her breasts carefully removed. A week or two earlier, Shelly Dudley was murdered in a motel in New Jersey, just over the George Washington Bridge. Two weeks later, the killer brought another whore back to the same New Jersey motel where Shelly Dudley was found. At nine a.m. police responded to a call at the motel - a woman was screaming in one of the units. AN officer went to check out the report, gun in hand, and met Cottingham coming out with a drawn pistol. The gun was unusable and Cottingham was arrested without incident. The prostitute they found in the room had only been on the street for about a week. He seemed nice to the disillusioned young girl, and she went with him. But when they got to the room, he'd handcuffed her, slashed her with a knife, bit and ripped her body and licked her blood, whipped her, and continuously raped and sodomized her. It was ultimately discovered that he was responsible for the torture and rape of another three women, one of which was a pregnant housewife. Richard Cottingham was the most unlikely suspect the police could possibly have dreamt up. He was a nearsighted, thirty-three-year-old father of three children. He lived in Lodi, New Jersey, a normal middle-class neighborhood. Cottingham worked as a computer operator for Blue Cross/Blue Shield for thirteen years. What eventually convicted Cottingham was not only his still-living victim, but also the contents of the briefcase he carried. Far from the essential items a computer operator uses on a daily basis, it contained three sets of handcuffs, a bondage gag, slave collars, and other similar items. The search of his house turned up amny items belonging to his various victims. Cottingham was in the process of a devorce and apparently hadn't had sex with his wife for years prior. Police believe this may have contributed to the violence of his crimes. Court records revealed that he'd been arrested in the past for soliciting prostitution, but the cases had all been dismissed. After his capture, he made several suicide attempts, once in open court, but this ploy ultimately failed. Richard Cottingham was sentenced to hundreds of years in jail for dozens of crimes, only one of which was multiple murder.