Anzilotti had begun to believe, he said in a recent interview, that Mr. Twenty years later, he was reinvestigating several cold cases involving girls and young women who had been abducted, sexually abused and killed. Cottingham entered prison in 1981, Robert Anzilotti was not yet a teenager. Cottingham began to open up to the detective about past unsolved crimes. Did the old man kill those girls?Īfter years in prison, Mr.

Anzilotti met with the inmate, seeking the truth. In the 1970s, he had preyed on prostitutes in Times Square - 30 miles but a world away from Montvale - not just killing them, but torturing and dismembering them.īut something - a hunch, past investigative speculation, the proximity of the crimes - drew Mr. That man, Richard Cottingham, had been convicted of crimes that seemed to bear little resemblance to the murders of the girls. His search for a killer led him to a man already locked away, in New Jersey State Prison, 75 miles from his office. But he carried those cold cases with him - literally, his thick files in cardboard boxes that he moved from office to office - chipping away at the false leads, seeking similarities in the victims and in the crime scenes. With an uncomplicated enthusiasm for his work, Detective Anzilotti rose through the ranks, eventually becoming the chief of detectives with a busy office to lead. There were at least five unsolved killings of girls, each an open wound for families seeking resolution. In 2000, as a young detective in the Bergen County prosecutor’s office, Robert Anzilotti was tasked with looking into the murders, along with a few other similar cold cases from the 1960s and 1970s. Over time, though, one investigator was slowly developing a theory.

Cold case files a killer slips away