Denise Didn't Come Home | 7. Evil Nice Guy
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Did you know that after World War II, the US government quietly brought former Nazi scientists to America in a covert operation to advance military technology? Or that in the 1950s, the US Army conducted a secret experiment by releasing bacteria over San Francisco to test how a biological attack might spread without alerting the public?

These might sound like conspiracy theories, but they're not. They're well-documented government operations that have been hidden away in classified files for decades. I'm Luke LaManna, a Marine Corps recon vet, and I've always had a thing for digging into the unknown. It's what led me to start my new podcast, Redacted Declassified Mysteries. In it, I explore hidden truths and reveal some eye-opening events, like covert experiments and secret operations that those in power tried to keep buried.

Follow redacted, declassified mysteries with me, Luke LaManna, on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen ad-free, join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. The Bench. 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.

I want to say something to you. I just believe that certain people are moved into my path at certain times. And I just believe that you're the person to do this. And that's why your heart is being stirred. When Karen passed away, she left me with a hole in my heart and a mountain of tape to go through. I didn't know what this project was without her. So I started to listen back from the beginning. But this really needs to be done. And you're yawning, you're full of energy, and you're ready to look at this thing with fresh eyes and...

Now, it was my turn to keep this story alive. Listening to the tape, Karen had found some measure of peace writing to Richard Cottingham, but she died without knowing all the details of what happened to Denise. I actually couldn't really nail him down on specific details that he should have had. People think, well, oh, you don't want to know all the details because it'll just upset you.

She really wanted to know why. How had Cottingham become the man who killed her sister? I knew that I would need to get answers to Karen's questions, and those could only come from Cottingham.

I listened back to one of the last things she said to me. Is there anything that you would impart to me? Any sort of wisdom? Don't be afraid. When you get that feeling inside of you to go after something, don't be afraid. Cottingham was known to reject interviews. It took a while. But then there I was, sitting in my parents' basement, waiting for his call. You will not be charged for this call. He's right. What call is from? Dick Hammond.

Hello? Hello? Hi, Richard? Yes. Hi, this is Anthony. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Can you hear me? Yes, yes, I can hear you. Oh, that's better. Yeah. My name is Anthony Scalio.

From Truth Media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Denise Didn't Come Home. When I'm done talking to Richard, I want to be done with Denise's case. We're talking about a guy who is the master of deception. He's a bad guy, but he is the one that has answers, believable or not. The person that stalked me that day, to me, was like the devil himself. Do you think that you saw Richard the night that Denise died? Do you think that person in the car was Richard?

I know it was, now. I absolutely know it was. Hello, Anthony. How are you? This is to you and your girlfriend. You know the one I'm gonna steal from you. Good morning. Most people see me as a monster. I can understand that. I don't blame them at all. When they look at what I've done and everything, it has to come out to a monster. It has to come out to a scary, dangerous, ghoul type of person.

By the time I finally got on the phone with Richard Cottingham, he was a 73-year-old who had spent more than half his life in prison. He had been convicted of five murders and had confessed to four more, but he claimed to have killed around 80. It's true I did some really, really terrible things in my life. I don't believe it sometimes. You know, sometimes I don't believe I did these things.

I knew two things about him from talking to Bergen County detectives. That he was charming and manipulative, and that he loved food. So on that first call, that's what we talked about. What do you miss the most, food-wise? Pizza. I love pizza. I could eat pizza all day long. Hot dogs. I love hot dogs, too. Yesterday, we made fresh homemade tomato sauce. Cute. I make it, too. I use ketchup and water. It's not just like watery ketchup.

I knew that I wouldn't be able to get into the big stuff right away. So on that first call, I kept it to small talk. You know who my biggest singer right now is? Kelly Clarkson. I love her music. Get out of here, really? I listen to them all day long. I got 65 of her songs. Wow. Karen called Cottingham an evil nice guy. I was starting to see why. You know, you said that you really did feel bad when it came to Karen. I felt horrible. I felt ashamed.

I liked her. I liked her immediately. She was very sincere. She wasn't easy on me. She told me off right away. She had a lot of hurt in her still, which really troubled me because I didn't realize after all these years it would still be there. What brought me peace and happiness was making Karen feel good, seeing that I could help her. She deserved better. She deserved a better

a little more life where she could enjoy her family and, you know, it just seems like the good ones go early and the bums like me, I'll probably be around until I'm 98. See, I'm going to go look at my bologna. You have 30 seconds remaining. And you can eat your lasagna and stuffed meatballs and it'll be awesome. Thank you. You don't have to worry. I'm doing this because I want to. I'm doing this for Karen. I'll talk to you as long as it's necessary to take care of this project.

Great, I'll write you. As soon as the phone cut out, I remember I went upstairs and my parents were like, oh my God, what was he like? I was like, he was normal. You could easily forget who you're talking to. But then I remembered what Karen told me about Cottingham. This man had been damaged to this point where there was no good in them. There was an evil that exists within this man, even to this day.

Late afternoon, 1977. Miriam Lewin is running for her life. I turn my head and I see a dark red Ford Falcon and a long gun barrel hanging out from one of the windows. He says, "I am the man responsible for your life and your death." Four decades later, Miriam is among the few to survive. I still ask myself, why did I survive? I'd say it was to bring justice.

Season three of The Burden Avenger will be available everywhere you get your podcasts on October 23rd. Fifty years ago, a young woman named Karen Silkwood got into her car alone. She was reportedly on her way to deliver sensitive documents to a New York Times reporter. She never made it.

And those documents she'd agreed to carry were never found. Do you think somebody killed her? There's no question in my mind that someone killed her that night. I think they were trying to stop her in order to get the documents. A new investigation into the life and death of America's first nuclear whistleblower. Listen to Radioactive, the Karen Silkwood Mystery, from ABC Audio. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

This call is from an inmate at a New Jersey state prison. To accept this call, press 5 now. Hello? Hey, Rich. How are you?

Oh, it's been a whirlwind the last week and a half. You know, it's prison shit, you know. After a few calls with Richard Cottingham, we started to get into a rhythm. We'd get on the phone, he'd complain about the prisoner's health. They got mad at me because I wouldn't go to the hospital. I'd ask a question or two. And then the 15 minutes would be up, and he'd have to call me back. But on those calls, I started to dig into one of Karen's unanswered questions.

What had turned Cottingham into a monster? Have you ever tried to seriously take the time and think about why you did these things? I've thought about it thousands of times. There's no answer. There's just no answer. I had a perfect family life. I had two great parents, went to the best schools in the area, never went to bed hungry. Just a normal life. Cottingham grew up in the nice part of Bergen County with three sisters.

His father worked for an insurance company. His mother was a housewife. I had no proclivity toward any of the known actions of serial killers when they were young. I never started fires. I never killed animals. In fact, I raised pony pigeons. Every once in a while, a bird would come back and it'd have a broken wing or something, and you'd have to kill it. I couldn't kill it.

But there was one thing that happened to Cottingham when he was a kid that he thinks might explain who he became. I hit my head and I went to the hospital and the whole bit.

You know, when a kid gets the head injury or something, it's possible that some area of your brain gets scrambled up or something like that. Cottingham says he started acting out at his elementary school, talking in class, cheating on tests, and stealing. I'd always take the chance, and more times than not, I got caught. Back then, when you went to Catholic school, the nuns beat the shit out of you.

Did you ever get hit by the nuns? Oh, I got hit all the time. Because I wasn't smart enough to get away with it. As he moved to high school, Cottingham says he got better at breaking the rules and getting away with it. And he was starting to enjoy it. It's that gambling instinct. If you did something bad like that, you were supposed to get caught. So when I didn't, it showed me that you can probably do anything you want and get away with it.

Cottingham told the cops that his first murder happened back in 1967, when he was 20 years old. The victim was a young housewife named Nancy Vogel. Was Nancy Vogel your first homicide? I think I understand now that your first was in high school, right? But he did end up telling me a little about it.

She was also a young housewife from Bergen County, and at the time, he was only 16 or 17 years old. It was unintentional. Maybe 99, 98% unintentional. You know, maybe in the back of my mind, something was going to happen or something like that, but it wasn't intentional. Did you realize then that you were capable of this? Or were you kind of surprised that you had done something like that?

I was euphoric that I got away with it. You feel powerful. You feel like you know something that nobody else in the world knows. And that's a powerful thought. After high school, Cottingham went on to kill other young women in Bergen County, like Nancy Vogel, Irene Blaze, and Denise Falasca. I didn't get off killing anybody.

By the 70s, Cottingham was married with three kids, living in my hometown of Lodi. He had a steady job working the night shift as a computer operator at Blue Cross Blue Shield in New York City. I did all the work and...

I'd have five or six or seven hours every night to go to the bars or pick up girls, stalking people and doing what I wanted to do. I went to Times Square at 3:00 in the morning. You couldn't imagine what Times Square was. The excitement was like electricity in the air. You could walk down the street and almost guarantee you see somebody getting stabbed. You know, the pimps would be shooting each other.

You'd always see the whores fighting with each other and it was a wild place. Everything a man, just out for some fun, could want was right in that area. I loved women. I could never get enough of them. I was always mysterious. I would sit at the end of the bar and I would just look disinterested. And before I know it, they'd be running after me. I wasn't a bad looking guy back in those days. I dressed well.

Sometimes, Cottingham says he would pick up a nurse or a waitress who had just gotten off her shift. But most of the time, he would pick up a prostitute and bring her to a seedy motel.

The bodies Cottingham left behind told a different story. He would sexually assault these women.

He would torture them for hours, sometimes for days. He cut them with knives, bit them, and beat them. The autopsies in these cases are clear. It was almost like playing God. It's a powerful situation. It's a powerful feeling. The day after I'd done something, it was out of my mind already. I never looked over my shoulder. I never watched the night's sleep. You know, I didn't think about it no more. I didn't have to think about it no more.

Come home, sleep two hours, play with the kids for two hours, take my wife to the store for an hour, and then go right back and do it over again. Night after night, week after week, year after year. If you had not been arrested, you'd think you would have continued to do these violent crimes. Definitely. You have 60 seconds remaining. Does Friday around the same time work for you? Is that okay? Yeah, unless they give me parole before that, you know?

I might just knock on your door one night and say, hey, guess who? This call is from an inmate at a New Jersey state prison. To accept this call, press 5 now. Hello. Hello. How's it going? Good, good. I wanted to jump into some questions about Denise because...

I'd been talking to Richard Cottingham every week for a few months, hoping to gain his trust. And now that I felt that I had it, there was one more murder I wanted him to tell me about. Can you just talk me through that initial moment when you saw Denise and what followed afterwards? I was driving on Old Look Road at night. It was desolate, so to speak. There's no houses, there's nothing but woods. In that time frame...

It was almost impossible to drive two or three miles and not see a hitchhiker. Everybody hitchhiked, and usually it was mostly girls. I don't think Denise was actually sticking her finger out. I'd seen her on the other side of the street going the opposite way, and she was just walking alongside of the road. And I pulled over, and she just came right up, opened the door, and said, "You're going to Westwood."

She was very pretty, she was sexy. I said, "Yeah," and she just hopped in. I think I asked her if she wanted to go for a drink or something, and she giggled or something like that. She had a very young-sounding voice. She was just too young. But when you pick them up and they're already in your car, it's too late. She wanted to go to a pizza shop in Westwood. And that was only about maybe a five-minute drive at the Tops. So I had to make a decision right away whether I was gonna kidnap her or whatever.

or let her go and just let her go on her way. Obviously, I decided to do it. She told me she was supposed to meet her friends at the pizza shop, but as we approached the pizza shop, you could see there was nobody there. You know, I told her something to the effect, "Well, why don't we go in and have a slice of pizza and wait for your friends?" And her friends didn't show up. I said to her, you know, "Can I take you someplace else or whatever?" I went and got the car.

Cottingham told me that he drove Denise to the parking lot behind his old Catholic elementary school. It was the place where he first started breaking the rules. It was a beautiful place to be alone and, you know, not be bothered.

Cottingham sexually assaulted Denise.

He told me that when it was all over, he questioned her, trying to get a feel for whether he could let her go. Are you going to get in trouble if you come home really late? What are you going to say when you go home? I think she asked me if I had any sisters, what high school did I go to, and of course I didn't tell her the truth. I knew immediately what she was getting at. I could sense that she was trying to find out a little bit about me.

I got the sense that she would not be afraid to go home and tell her parents exactly what happened. It's not gonna end if I just let her go home. She was a lot smarter than I gave her credit for in the beginning. If she was a little more stupid, I think she might be alive right now.

You realize now, in retrospect, the hypocrisy is something like that. She was just a sitting duck. You're the bear.

I mean, that's the way I see it. There's no way to justify something like that. When I met her, she was the sitting duck. She was helpless. She didn't do anything wrong or anything like that. If I were to let her go, then it turns around and now she becomes the danger and I'm the one that's the sitting duck. But you put yourself in that danger. Oh, of course. I'm not blaming her at all.

Cottingham says that once he made up his mind, the only question left was where it would happen. Cottingham had killed another girl in that area, just a few months before. Cottingham.

It was just really a perfect place for something like that. She knew something was going on. She was acting different. She was, of course, a lot more worried. I pulled off to the side of the road. I remember shaking her, grabbing her around the head, you know, around the neck to calm her down. She was bent over, almost laying on her back. And I was basically on top of her with my hands around her. And I strangled her.

It's amazing how heavy a 95 or 100-pound girl can be when they're dead. And you're on the side of a road and the wind is going by. You're rushed, you know, you can't take your time. In a way, it's an exciting type of time because that's where the danger is. Karen told me she wanted to know all the details. That not knowing what happened was the worst part. But by the time Cottingham was finished, I was glad she would never have to hear them all.

Do you have any idea what Denise's last words may have been? Yes. Well, I'm not going to tell you. Are you lying to me? No. That's quite an important thing. Is there any way you could just tell me? Because it is a big deal to me. It's a hard thing to talk about. I get very emotional when I talk about it. I will tell you. I just got to be in the right mood. For weeks, I pushed Cottingham to give me Denise's last words.

It started to feel like he was stringing me along to keep me calling. But then, finally, he said he would tell me on our next call. What made you not want to talk about it until today? I wasn't going to talk about it at all. I didn't have no intention the entire time to really speak of it. Okay. So, what were they? During the actual ending of her life...

Well, now you know.

Do you think people will ever know the extent of all that you've done? No. Simple answer, no. There's only one person in the world that knows.

In a lot of ways, Cottingham is still the kid he was in high school, holding secrets in his head and taking pleasure from the fact that no one else knows. He could help more people like Karen, but he chooses not to. There's really not that many crimes where people are still involved.

Still even living, say. I can assure you that there are a lot of people who are still looking. Oh, I'm sure there are. Karen got enough from Cottingham to bring her some peace. But there was one more question she asked him that he didn't give a clear answer to. Do you think that you may have seen Karen that night? We talked about that extensively. If you've seen a blue car, she said, and the way the guy looked at her.

You know, some people have imaginations and they start to imagine things.

Karen might have said something over and over and over until she got convinced of it. On the next and final episode of Denise Didn't Come Home, I finally get my hands on Denise's case file and learn things Karen always wanted to know. And I learned some things Karen didn't want me to know. You can actually sometimes convince yourself that you did something or you saw something that you didn't.

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That's all episodes, all at once. Unlock your listening now by clicking subscribe at the top of the Binge Cases show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. Denise Didn't Come Home is a production of Truth Media in partnership with Sony Music Entertainment. I'm your host, Anthony Scalia. The show is produced by Ryan Swiker and me. 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 Swiker. Music by Kenny Kusiak, Epidemic Sound, and Marmoset. Special thanks to Peter Vronsky and Jennifer Weiss. Our title track is Gimme Some by Weevil.

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