4. The Girl On Old Hook Road
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As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actor?

an actual murder. I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, just a quick heads up before we get started. This episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault, so please take extra care when listening.

Hi, Anthony. How are you? I'm good. How are you doing? I'm pretty good. Just setting up some equipment here. I'm back on the phone with Karen Falaska. Since we last spoke, I've learned a lot of stuff that might relate to her sister Denise's case. And I'm thinking that I struck gold. So I have some stuff to tell you, actually. Okay. I did like a little research on my own.

I told her about my trip to the library, about all the articles I found on the murders of young women in Bergen County, how detectives thought the murders could be connected, and that they might be the work of one man, a serial killer named Richard Cottingham. I was expecting a big response, but Karen didn't bat an eye because she already knew about all of it. I'd known about Cottingham for a long time.

Karen told me that Bergen County detectives had been speaking to Richard Cottingham for years, hoping to get information on his unsolved murders. She said they believed that Cottingham killed Denise. I never thought Cottingham did it because what he was arrested for doesn't even resemble what happened to Denise.

Karen said she hadn't mentioned Cottingham to me because the detectives had asked her to keep it quiet.

Cottingham had told him that if anything he said was leaked to the media, he would shut down. Karen said she already had her doubts. And then she found out that Cottingham was getting special perks in prison for the information he gave them. They just kept buying this guy who's in prison for life favors to get him to say something.

Karen said that detectives never took her theories of who killed Denise seriously. They've never done anything with the information that I brought to them because in their mind, they already knew it was Richard.

Let me ask you this question. What is your confidence that Cottingham is responsible? On a scale of 1 to 10? 2. Wow, okay. So... Karen seemed so sure that Cottingham wasn't Denise's killer. But after doing my own investigation, I was starting to think he might have done it. And I was starting to wonder why Karen didn't. ♪

My name is Anthony Scalia. From Truth Media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Denise Didn't Come Home. These unsolved cases haunted the Bergen County prosecutor's office for many years. What happened here?

Two carefully decapitated female bodies were found at a Westside motel. It's a whole body, a naked body. We had a serial killer that was out there almost on a daily basis. I mentioned his name was Richard Cottingham. I said, holy smoke, I caught one hell of a guy. He said he didn't go back far enough.

Oh my God. 13 years he's out on the street. He could be responsible for hundreds of victims. Chapter 4. The Girl on Old Hook Road. I'd been talking to Karen Falaska for months, and I learned a lot about her life before her sister Denise's murder. But we hadn't talked much about what happened after. I have a really clear picture of your childhood, but between 1969 and 1996...

What were you doing? What was your life like? That's a sort of big gap right now that I can't picture. Oh, wow. That's a big question. I was trying to find myself. Yeah. After Denise was killed, Karen struggled to get through high school. And as soon as she graduated, she decided to get away for good. I just sold everything I owned and left Colorado. Came out here sort of like nomadically. I didn't know anyone.

I lived in this really beautiful mountain town, really kind of remote. And I just came out here and got lost for a while, but really lost. In those years that you're asking me about, underneath everything, I was always trying to be okay. The way everything fell apart, I didn't want to be losing my mind or, you know what I mean? Like I was working hard on being okay.

Up to that point, Karen had told me in great detail about the darkest thing that had ever happened to her. But when we got to the years after the murder of her sister, for some reason, Karen held back. I'm leaving out a lot. I definitely went through some dark times. At one point, my dad flew out here and really begged me to come home. And I had nothing here and no one. But I didn't want to go back to New Jersey.

Eventually, Karen and her cowboy had two daughters. They all lived in a little cabin together. And it didn't work out for us.

After a few years, the marriage ended. And by the 80s, Karen was raising her two daughters alone. I just worked and worked and tried to raise kids. I feel like I struggled. I wanted to be the best person I could be for the young people in my life, you know? Karen cycled through a series of jobs. She worked as a waitress. She wrote essays for college students. She was even a cashier at a gas station.

And then one day in the mid-90s, she noticed a posting for a job with the University of Colorado Police Department in Boulder. Never in a million years thought I would get that job, but I did. And I thought maybe there was a reason why I got to be there. And I didn't even realize it. The next thing that happened was Sean Bonilla got killed.

Past Santa Claus in his sleigh and a double row of candy canes, deputy coroners brought the body of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey from her upscale home. In 1996, on the day after Christmas, a little girl named JonBenet Ramsey was found strangled in the basement of her house in Boulder. Boulder police won't comment on her cause of death. They are investigating her death as a homicide. So far, no arrests have been made.

The case became a nationwide spectacle, and the media swarmed. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey, what do you want to say to the killer of your daughter? God knows who you are, and we will find you. Crowds of reporters were camping out in front of the police department where Karen worked, and where detectives were meeting on the Ramsey case. I had a front row seat to everything that was going on.

John Bonnet Ramsey's murder was very much like Denise's murder. It was scandalous, you know what I mean? It was a huge case. It was John Bonnet's case that made me look again at Denise's case. I started thinking about how much we can do now as opposed to what we could do in 1969. Can we try this new DNA testing? And that's where I sort of hooked back into the case.

From Colorado, Karen started calling the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office. She wanted to see if there had been any updates or breakthroughs. She learned that there hadn't been any progress at all. I wasn't being taken as seriously as I was taking it. It seemed like more aggressive steps needed to be taken. I flew to the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office to review the case file and ask them a line of questions that I had developed previously.

They took me in to see the case file in what they called the war room. Denise's file was literally a cardboard box. It hadn't been protected in any way from the air, from the elements. I was shocked to see that. The crime scene pictures were terrible. She was there on the ground. There were a lot of police officers walking around. There were photographers leaning over her body, taking pictures.

There were a lot of people, like a lot of cops. They smoked cigars right over her body. Not the way we know to handle a crime scene today. Karen started paging through the police reports. No work's been done on them, no transcriptions, no organization. Pages missing. Like, how are you supposed to work this case? After going through the case file, Karen was taken upstairs to a conference room. We were sitting around a table, and I was at the head of the table.

Karen must have felt like she did when she was 13, when detectives like these had interrogated her about Denise's murder. But Karen wasn't a little kid anymore. She was a professional working in law enforcement.

And she started peppering the detectives with questions. Had they thought about retesting for DNA? Had they considered exhuming Denise's body to collect more evidence? And why were no new suspects being developed? It was tense. They got mad at me and they leaned forward and raised their voices with me and told me that they weren't going to take the blame for what some investigator did X amount of years ago and that they didn't feel that they had to explain what somebody else did in another date and time.

As Karen glanced around, there weren't a lot of friendly faces. Except for one young man down at the other end of the conference table. A detective by the name of Rob Anzalotti. I was just still a young buck of a homicide detective. Like, what the hell did I know? I would have just sat there, pretty much kept my mouth shut, and listened. Anzalotti had recently been assigned to the Cold Case Squad. And watching Karen that day left an impression on him.

I gave her a lot of props and kudos for her tenacity and relentlessness to make sure that the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office stayed focused on her sister's case. I think that Karen was tormented by the death of her sister and the fact that it had never been solved. And I felt for her. I wanted justice for Denise, but for Karen as well. Anzalotti was put in charge of the cold cases of murdered women in Bergen County, and he became Karen's main point of contact at the prosecutor's office.

Karen wanted to meet with Anzalotti to share the information she'd gathered on Denise's murder. And eventually, he and his partner flew out to Colorado. She had an entire binder full of her own investigative report and whatever supporting documentations that she was able to do in her own way as a civilian. She made a pitch on who she suspected the killers were and why.

Anzalotti sat with Karen, thumbing through her binder as she told him about what she remembered from the weeks leading up to the murder. Things you heard about in episode 2. She remembered Denise fighting with her boyfriend Max in the parking lot at a 4th of July fireworks display. She said that a couple days later, Max had drugged Denise and told her that he was going to kill her. And she remembered that in the days after the funeral, Max had a nasty looking gash on his hand.

Anzalotti told Karen that when Denise's body was found in 1969, she had a bloody handprint on her leg. And there were fingerprints. At the autopsy, the coroner removed a patch of skin to preserve the handprint. Then, Anzalotti told her the bad news. I was never able to find that evidence. Where it ultimately was lost, I have no idea.

I said, what? What? That was the one piece of evidence that would have solved her case. I said, that is part of this story. I'm not saying you guys screwed up. I'm saying help me uncover what happened. Despite the tension, Anzalotti was intrigued by Karen's memories. She had a lot of detail and there was enough merit there that they needed to be run out. So we went down every road.

Anzalotti went back to New Jersey, back to his other cases. But he kept thinking about Karen's theory about Max. And eventually, he tracked him down. We ended up interviewing him in his home. He was more than welcoming. We sat in his living room, spoke for several hours. I never got the gut feeling that he was hiding anything or that he was involved. It took like a year to act on that information. And then when they acted, I have no way of knowing if they acted properly or not.

They claimed they interviewed him, they separated him from his family, but they couldn't hold him and they had nothing to hold him on. There was nothing they could do. I think I told her, like, "Listen, we ran it out and we're going to look in other directions." Karen didn't know it at the time, but Anzalotti had started working another angle. He'd been making trips to Trenton State Prison to interview known killers.

And one of them was this guy, Richard Kuklinski. I don't want to talk to nobody else. I got enough of you. Kuklinski was a notorious mafia hitman, better known on the streets as the Iceman. I was getting some confessions from him on some organized crime hits and some unsolved cases in Bergen and Hudson counties. And on one of those visits, Anzalotti learned something. The Iceman had a famous neighbor on his cell block, Richard Cottingham.

What I knew about Cottingham initially was that he was this torso killer, killing prostitutes and "easy prey," right? Streetwalkers, runaways. And Anzalotti knew that Cottingham had murdered more women than he was convicted of. The Iceman despised Cottingham. He felt like Cottingham was beneath him.

The Iceman told Anzalotti that Cottingham was running a bookmaking operation in the prison.

Monday morning after Super Bowl Sunday, I had arranged for the prison to raid Cottingham's cell and some of his runners' cells. That led to some evidence of prison violations because it led to evidence of the bookmaking operation. So that got Cottingham thrown into what they called the hole, solitary confinement. He'd been sitting in the hole for about 48 hours before I went down there. They brought him out to the interview room I was in.

He's dripping in sweat. His eyes are like bright red. He's got to be 350 pounds and he's got the long white beard. He's a fat Santa Claus looking motherfucker. And I was like, this guy's a fucking mess. I've stepped to him and explained to him that I was the reason he was in the hole. Hello, Mr. Cartigan. You fucked me. You got me in the hole. You fucked me. I'm not going to take that.

So that started the relationship, obviously on a contentious and confrontational note, but we worked our way through it.

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Anzalotti was hoping to get Cottingham to open up about other murders he'd committed in Bergen County. Maybe even confess to some of those murders. But Cottingham made it clear he wouldn't be giving any information for free.

He was big on, well, what are you going to do for me? And really, what can you do for somebody that's doing multiple life sentences in prison, right? Little stuff. They get food packages. So it started with, I'll pay for your food package so it doesn't come out of your commissary account. Yeah, that's the main thing.

Karen told me that Cottingham was the kind of guy who would say anything for a meal ticket. And in these first tapes Anzalotti recorded, Cottingham is driving the terms of the deal. Cottingham insisted that any murders he confessed to would never be made public.

Anzalotti agreed. If it was something that I said, "I'll take care of that for you," I made sure that I took care of it and I came through on my end. What I'm trying to show you is that I am willing to bend over backwards to make sure that everything's a comedy. That's the big thing. And that started to build up a level of trust between the two of us. Are we fairly comfortable with the roadmap we just laid out? Yeah.

It's probably the wackiest thing I ever heard of us doing. But you know what? This whole thing is a little wacky, so why the fuck not? This is crazy. Do you have a number in your head that you think? I would say it's well over 80. You think that many? Well over. You might just think the number I threw out 80 is a billion wide. I was out there every night. Like an animal. So what was the thrill? Was it more race? Control?

He was getting away with it. He was the game, the stalking, the... I didn't go out to kill somebody. I wasn't in a serial killer. You just told me that you killed over 80. That fits the definition pretty well.

In his mind, he was the smartest killer ever out there, constantly changing up his methodologies as a way to throw off law enforcement. Most anyone I killed was when I would be somehow connected to them and I didn't want to get caught. There was more than just not getting caught. My whole thing was not to make a pattern, which I never did. I wasn't stupid, you know, and it was like the perfect murder every time.

Anzalotti wanted Cottingham to confess to his unsolved crimes. But he started to realize that Cottingham was playing games with him, stringing him along to keep him showing up. There's a particular case that I want to try and figure out if we can either rule you in or rule you out. So if it is impossible that it's you, then I'd appreciate you just telling me that. It's not impossible. It's possible. I'm pretty confident it's possible to be you.

He loves to play with people. He's the king of the carrot and the stick. I mean, he absolutely would throw out just a little tidbit, and then when he saw I got excited over that tidbit, he'd shut it right down and be like, "Ah, I didn't say we were gonna talk about that." - Nothing's for free, my friend. And the longer you keep me talking, you're getting all these little snippets. - What do they add up to, though, buddy? Add up to nothing.

You're right. Nothing's for free. Nothing's for free for you either, though. It's a two-way street. Of course. These conversations between Cottingham and Anzalotti went on for years. And across the country, Karen was getting impatient. Karen was very frustrated by the process. If she could call every day and say, you know, why aren't you working on my case, she would.

I talked to Karen for hours at times on a Sunday night when I'm off and trying to put my kids to bed or whatever, but she would be going through something and she just really needed an ear and I would sit there and talk to her and listen to the pain that she had. It's been a lot of years of bringing things to them and waiting a year for them to make a decision or waiting six months. It's just been a lot of years of being strung along.

There was only so much Anzalotti could tell Karen, but that made her feel like he was shutting her out. Probably there is something wrong with me that I can't just let this go and I can't just accept the fact that they don't call me back. I was mad that we lost her, but I was really mad that nobody wanted to do anything about it.

She was a monster example of how no matter how many decades go by, the pain of losing a loved one in a violent way and not having answers to that violent ending impact the person that you are and how much you're consumed with this thirst for answers and a thirst for knowledge of what happened. And she was utterly consumed by it.

By 2010, Anzalotti had started bringing Cottingham out of prison to the Burton County Prosecutor's Office, where they would sometimes spend days talking.

And Cottingham would be rewarded with his favorite foods. They had been talking for six years. If Anzalotti was going to keep doing Cottingham favors, he needed something real out of him. It was a grind. I mean, to spend eight or ten hours in a room with him

was really a grind at times. Don't go back to the old Richie. The old Richie has never been gone. The old Richie is not gone. You dirty little rabbit. Fucker. What I'm going to get out of it is satisfaction of righting a wrong. I constantly hammered the theme home to him about how important it is for the survivors, the victims' families, to know what happened. The surviving people have an insatiable desire

And one of those surviving people was Karen Falasca. Anzalotti kept pushing. And finally, Cottingham started to give details on his first murder. The murder of a 29-year-old housewife named Nancy Vogel.

Today's date is Wednesday, July 7th, 2010. The time now is 7:10 p.m. This will be the statement of Richard Cottingham. Once we put the recorder in front of him, he gets noticeably nervous. His leg starts to shake. He'd pull on his ear when he's nervous. Where was it that you met her? Little Ferry. We had a couple drinks in the Holiday Inn. Did you ultimately then end up taking a ride with her? Yes. Up to Northern New Jersey. I believe it was Montfail.

And what occurred while you were up there in Montville? I ended her life. It was in a wooded area behind a cornfield. We had sex. Did it begin consensual and turn into an assault? What happened? It was like a forced consensual. She didn't have a choice. Do you recall how it is that you killed her? I believe I smothered her. Smothered her how? I held my hand over her mouth and held her nose closed.

And did you do that to the point of her death? Yes. When you don't have conclusive evidence, we're still taking the word of a convicted serial killer. I trusted him when I could verify what he had to say. During the actual confession, he gave a number of things that only the killer would know. She had just gone shopping and there were packages in the trunk. And that was something from the file. Did you check anything in the car? I looked in the trunk. Do you recall anything being inside the trunk?

And that made me very comfortable that he was truly the killer.

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Richard Cottingham had confessed to the unsolved murder of Nancy Vogel. Now Detective Rob Ancelotti was sure that Cottingham had killed a woman in Bergen County in the late 60s. And he knew that there were more. I remember it like it was yesterday. We were driving him back to prison and he was real chatty on the way back. It was almost like his guard was down. He's talking so casually, he thinks like this is not going to hurt him at all.

He's like trying to convince me like, listen, I don't remember everybody, but some of them I have an image in my head. He's like, there's this one girl and she looks just like this actress on this TV show that Roswell and I watch in prison. And he said the name of the actress, the office about an hour and a half drive. So I can't wait to just drop his fat ass back in prison and get back to the office and Google this name. And sure enough, when I pulled up the picture of her, she was a striking resemblance for Irene Blaze.

Irene Blaise was an 18-year-old girl who was strangled in Saddlebrook in 1969. Her body had been dumped about a mile from where Denise's body would be found, just three months later. I was very convinced that the same killer that killed Irene Blaise killed Denise Velasca. Anzalotti went back to Cottingham to get him to talk about Blaise. If we can, just in your own words, why don't you just tell me what you remember. Where did you first encounter this victim? They've seen her inside the Sears department store.

and she walked out and I followed her out. I said, "How about we go get a drink?" And she hesitated and then she says, "Well, I can go for one drink." We walked over to the bus station

A witness who saw Irene Blaze that night remembered her talking to a man who fit Cottingham's description near a bus stop. And that witness remembered something else. The witness said that the person had like a nervous tick where they kept pulling on their ear.

Cottingham told Anzalotti that he took Irene for a couple drinks. Then they got in his car. And then I grabbed it. She was mine at that point.

When he was done confessing to the murder of Irene Blais,

Cottingham said that something about it jogged his memory. There was another girl he picked up right around that time. Do you recall abducting a girl from Old Hook Road? I definitely took a girl from Old Hook Road. What he told me was he remembers a girl on Old Hook Road by the hospital. This is an entirely different case, correct? Yes, correct. Entirely different case. Can you describe to me what you remember? And I know you'll remember a whole lot of it at the moment.

I remember seeing a girl walking along the street, along the old road. I pulled up in front of her. She walked up and she was just looking in the car. I said, you need a ride? I think she said no at first. I said, okay, and I started to drive. And then she said, oh, okay. When you're willing to just drive off, they feel safe that you weren't going to do anything. That's when she got in the car. When I would do these things, it was almost like a different person doing it.

I would go into what I used to call the zone. It was like being drunk. You know you did something, but sometimes a whole blotch isn't there. But what you remember, you're rock solid taking this girl from Old Hook Road. I did have a girl from Old Hook Road. There's only one unsolved homicide of a girl that we last saw on Old Hook Road, and it's Denise Velasquez. That's on the next episode of Denise Didn't Come Home.

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Denise Didn't Come Home is a production of Truth Media in partnership with Sony Music Entertainment. I'm your host, Anthony Scalia. This episode was produced by Ryan Swiker and me, with help from Alexa Burke. Story editing by Mark Smerling. Kevin Shepard is our associate producer. Scott Curtis is our production manager. From Sony, our executive producers are Jonathan Hirsch and Catherine St. Louis. Fact-checking by Dania Suleiman.

Kenny Kusiak did the mix. Sound design by Kenny Kusiak and Ryan Swikert. Music by Kenny Kusiak, Epidemic Sound, and Marmoset. Our title track is Gimme Some by Weevil. If you've been enjoying the show, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 646-665-2748 and leave us a voicemail. Don't forget to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps other people find the show. And thanks for listening.