Lengthy and very interesting article..
Jan 30 2020
By
Rodrigo Torrejon
Copy photo of Jennifer Weiss, left, and Richard Cottingham, known as the Torso Killer. Weiss's biological mother, Deedeh Goodarzi was one of Cottingham's victims. (Photo courtesy Jennifer Weiss)Photo courtesy Jennifer Weiss
The ‘Torso Killer’ dismembered her mother. So why did this woman become his friend?
''As she walked into the New Jersey State Prison in 2017, Jennifer Weiss had two questions for the notorious serial murderer known as the “Torso Killer.”
“Did you know my mother?” And “where did you hide her head?”
She had no inkling at the time that the day she met eye-to-eye with the man who killed and dismembered her mother decades ago would lead her on a bizarre journey with Richard Cottingham.
Through reinforced glass dividers in cold and sterile visitation rooms, Weiss has sought answers from the hulking, bearded 73-year-old Cottingham, who has boasted he killed as many as 85 to 100 people.
Cottingham is currently serving a life sentence with no hope of parole after admitting to six killings in New York and New Jersey. Earlier this month, Bergen County authorities announced
Cottingham had been linked to three previously unsolved cold cases involving teen girls killed decades ago, renewing interest in his more than decade of violence that ended with his arrest in 1980.
The actual death toll may never be fully known or verified. But one thing is clear.
Cottingham’s notoriety as the “Torso Killer” evolved from the night Deedeh Goodarzi was found dead in a Times Square motel room on Dec. 2, 1979. Goodarzi had been beheaded, her hands were cut off and she was set on fire along with another unidentified woman.
Goodarzi was Weiss’s birth mother - something she wouldn’t learn until 2002 when Weiss decided to try to find the woman who put her up for adoption.''
It took Weiss a decade to muster the courage to write a letter to her mother’s killer.
Weiss saw the letter as an entry into Cottingham’s life and a way to find out where he had hidden her mother’s head, a gruesome trophy that was still lost decades later.
The unanswered questions that still lingered, and her recovery from breast cancer provided the courage.
“I felt fearless,” said Weiss. “I felt invincible. I started to write Richard and ask him to put me on his guest list. I made it light-hearted and funny and made it really comfortable for him to say ‘Yes.’ That he would accept my friendship in return for information about my mom.”
''Weiss penned that first letter in March 2017. It had emoji stickers plastered all over it, she said. She knew that the only way to get answers from Cottingham would be to approach him with kindness.
A month later, Cottingham responded with a three-page letter scrawled on legal paper. More than 37 years after Cottingham had killed Goodarzi, he sent her daughter a message of apology.''
