The Torso Killer Confessions

Storyline

For almost 20 years, Bergen County (NJ) Chief of Detectives Robert Anzilotti elicited murder confessions from a vicious but relatively unknown serial killer - Richard Cottingham, nicknamed the Torso Killer. He was serving five life sentences for targeting prostitutes in 1980 in New York City, dismembering and setting them on fire. Anzilotti suspected Cottingham might also be responsible for unsolved murders of young women in the late '60s and mid-'70s, across the Hudson River from Manhattan; they were not prostitutes but mainly schoolgirls who had been abducted and attacked. Anzilotti made it his mission to tie Cottingham to these murders and to get him to confess. It became an intense, decades-long series of conversations, a psychological duel between a relentless detective and a killer who thought he held all the cards. When Anzilotti retired in 2021, Cottingham had confessed to six of the cold-case homicides, but Anzilotti knew there were more - and he couldn't let it go. THE TORSO KILLER CONFESSIONS reveals that Cottingham's killing spree had started earlier than anyone realized. Anzilotti got it all on tape - uncomfortable, shocking and raw confessions from a killer who used victims as bargaining chips. These conversations have never been seen or heard publicly until now. THE TORSO KILLER CONFESSIONS is the story of how Anzilotti did it.