Alys Eberhardt, an 18-year-old New Jersey nursing student, left classes early on a September Friday to get ready to travel to New York for her aunt’s funeral.
She never made it.
According to a new deathbed confession from convicted serial killer Richard Cottingham, he spotted Eberhardt in the parking lot at a Hackensack hospital and followed her home in his car, said Dr. Peter Vronsky, a forensic historian who assisted law enforcement with the case. When she arrived, he knocked on her door, showed her a fake police badge, and told her he needed to leave his phone number for her father.
It was 2:30 p.m. He followed her inside and attacked.
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The brutal home invasion left detectives hunting down leads for more than 60 years. Her father found her inside their home — with a knife sticking out of her neck and signs of struggle across multiple rooms. She had been bludgeoned to death, according to authorities, and had dozens of shallow cuts in addition to the neck wound that Vronsky said was not part of the fatal wound.
According to a contemporary report from The Associated Press, the redheaded Eberhardt was a Sunday school teacher and a freshman class leader at the Hackensack Hospital School of Nursing.
Earlier this week, police in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, announced the confession and said Eberhardt’s family had been notified. It was the department’s only unsolved homicide going back decades, according to Police Chief Joseph Dawicki.
“Alys (pronounced Alice) was a vibrant young nursing student who was taken from our community, and we never got to see the great things she could accomplish,” he said in a statement.
Marianne, a former neighbor who asked Fox News Digital not to publish her last name, was a little girl when the murder happened.
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“Everyone felt so safe,” she said, describing Fair Lawn before the murder. “It was the kind of childhood where the kids were out all day until it got dark, and we didn’t have phones — we didn’t have contact with our parents…So this incident really rattled our parents.”
Afterward, things changed.
“It was a very creepy feeling around the neighborhood,” she said. “Every time we would walk past their house, we would run by the house.”
Previously dubbed the “Torso Killer” and “Times Square Killer,” Cottingham’s earlier crimes followed a different pattern — making Eberhardt’s murder a major departure from his perceived modus operandi, according to Vronsky, who along with the daughter of another Cottingham victim, Jennifer Weiss, built a rapport with the imprisoned killer and convinced him to assist police. Weiss died in 2023.
“He killed completely at random,” Vronsky told Fox News Digital. “He didn’t have a preferred victim…He killed on impulse. He didn’t stalk them, target them, other than he might follow a victim for several hours.”
Of the 20 victims Vronsky says Cottingham has confirmed ties to, only about a third were sex workers.
“The other 70% were exactly like Alys Eberhardt,” he told Fox News Digital. “There were teenage schoolgirls, there were housewives, there was gainfully employed women. They were what we might say civilians.”
Some were dismembered. Some weren’t. Some were strangled. At least two were drowned. Others, like Eberhardt, were bludgeoned. Many were sexually assaulted, but not all of them.
Cottingham, in what Vronsky said was an attempt to plant misleading clues, inflicted 62 cuts on Eberhardt’s body after she was already dead. His plan was to leave 52 marks, a reference to a deck of cards, with a rare dagger that he left at the scene, Vronsky said.
“But then he lost count,” Vronsky said.
The dagger was from the Jordanian Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair — only 1,000 were made and sold at just three locations in New York, Vronsky said. Although the store is no longer open, Cottingham told investigators a rough address, which police said lined up with one of those locations.
Cottingham often toyed with investigators, he said. In many cases, he took his victims across county lines, which back in the 1960s and 1970s, without computers and close cooperation between police and sheriff’s departments, helped conceal his murderous patterns.
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“That’s the kind of game playing and riddle playing Cottingham did,” Vronsky said.
And for years, he led a double life, raising a family and working a steady job at a health insurance company.
With an absence of DNA evidence, Vronsky credited two Fair Lawn police investigators for their hard-nosed, old-fashioned work on the case — Sgt. Eric Eleshewich and Det. Brian Rypkema. They reopened the case in 2021 and interviewed Cottingham repeatedly, building their own rapport.
Eleshewich deferred comment to Bergen County prosecutors, who declined an interview request from Fox News Digital.
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Cottingham was 18 at the time of Eberhardt’s murder on Sept. 24, 1965. According to Vronsky, who was privy to the confession, Cottingham saw Eberhardt in the parking lot, followed her to a diner where she stopped, then to her home, where he used the fake police badge ruse.
This already makes Cottingham one of the youngest serial killers on record, and Vronsky said he may have started earlier.
“We suspect that he began when he was a high school junior when he was 16 years old,” Vronsky said. If Cottingham’s claims of 85-100 total victims are accurate, “that’s one murder every seven weeks” during his active period.
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Cottingham was first arrested by deputies in 1980 after a motel worker called 911 to report a woman screaming in a room and, according to Vronsky, another murder had taken place there just three weeks earlier. Staff were on the lookout.
Finally, the confession of a 79-year-old convicted serial killer in declining health provided harrowing details and a resolution for Eberhardt’s family. Her father, who was never charged, had been scrutinized as a potential suspect.
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Cottingham told Vronsky he was still inside the house when Eberhardt’s father returned home.
“As the father was coming in through the front door, Cottingham went out the back door,” Vronsky said.
It would be decades before the family found out what happened.
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Cottingham has fallen into poor health and isn’t expected to last much longer, Vronsky said.
The serial killer, originally sentenced for five murders, has now been officially connected to 20 and claimed responsibility for dozens more, he added.
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Vronsky said that while Cottingham began admitting to additional crimes in 2009, the killer feels no actual remorse, but rather, something he called “cognitive remorse.”
“He confessed to me that he doesn’t feel remorse,” Vronsky said. “He’s not wired up for it. But he knows what it is. He knows intellectually that he committed horrific acts.”
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Vronsky said he believes Cottingham may have CTE or similar brain injury due to a childhood fall, records of which he confirmed.
The confession came after intensive daily visits in November and December, as investigators raced against time. Cottingham nearly died in October, and at 79, investigators knew they were running out of time to solve dozens of other suspected cases.
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Cottingham confessed on the night of Dec. 22, with investigators hoping to give the family some resolution for Christmas.
The Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office has declined to pursue additional charges, according to Fair Lawn police.
“On behalf of the Eberhardt family, we want to thank the entire Fair Lawn Police Department for their work and the persistence required to secure a confession after all this time,” Eberhardt’s nephew, Michael Smith, said in a statement. “Your efforts have brought a long-overdue sense of peace to our family and prove that victims like Alys are never forgotten, no matter how much time passes.”
Vronsky called upon other jurisdictions to interview Cottingham about unsolved cases before he dies, saying there are more than two dozen cold case murders he could have committed in New Jersey and New York.
