Richard Cottingham
In the beginning of December of 1979, Cottingham solicited a pair of prostitutes, took them to the Travel Lodge Motor Inn in New York, spent the night torturing, killing and mutilating both of them, removing their heads and hands and taking them with him, and then set the room and the bodies on fire. They were found when the staff saw smoke coming from under the door. Only one of the victims, Deedah Godzari, was identified. The identity of the other remains unknown, though she is estimated to have been in her late teens.
Serial killer Richard Francis Cottingham - Crimes Lab
On the 2nd of December, 1979, Richard set a hotel room alight in New York Times Square. When the police arrived they found two corpses. Their hands and heads were removed and they were set alight with lighter fluid. One of the victims was Deedeh Goodarzi. She was an immigrant from Kuwait working as a prostitute. The other victim was never identified.
The Stomach-Turning Story Of The Times Square Torso Ripper
In December 1979, firefighters were called to the scene of a blaze consuming a hotel near Times Square. As the firefighters moved from room to room looking for victims, one burst through a door only to find the bodies of two women
lying on a bed. Thinking that the women must have simply been knocked out by the smoke, the firefighter began carrying one of the women out of the room through the thick smoke that was obscuring his vision and prepared to give her CPR.
But when he went to check her breathing, he discovered to his horror that she had no head.
The other woman had likewise been dismembered, the firefighters soon found. Their bodies had then been soaked in lighter fluid and ignited, causing the very fire that the firefighters were trying to put out.
Once the police arrived, they
were able to identify one of the bodies as 22-year-old Deedeh Goodarzi, who was known to work in the area as a prostitute. Investigators were able to determine that the other young woman was only about 16 years old. But to this day, she has never been conclusively identified.