The Binge Cases: U R NEXT - Denise Didn't Come Home | 4. The Girl On Old Hook Road

Episode Date: October 6, 2024

Karen pressures Bergen County detectives to look into who she believes murdered her sister.  But they have their own suspect - a notorious serial killer. Binge all episodes of Denise Didn’t Come Home, ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Cases show page on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access.  The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Hi, Anthony. How are you? I'm good. How are you doing? I'm pretty good, just setting up some equipment here.

I'm back on the phone with Karen Falaska. Since we last spoke, I've learned a lot of stuff that might relate to her sister, Denise's case. And I'm thinking that I struck gold. So I have some stuff to tell you, actually. Okay. I did, like, a little research on my own. Found out that, you know, like, I told her about my trip to the library,

about all the articles I found on the murders of young women in Bergen County, how detectives thought the murders could be connected, and that they might be the work of one man, a serial killer named Richard Cottingham. I was expecting a big response, but Karen didn't bat an eye. because she already knew about all of it. I'd known about Cottingham for a long time.

Karen told me that Bergen County detectives had been speaking to Richard Cottingham for years, hoping to get information on his unsolved murders. She said they believed that Cottingham killed Denise. I never thought Cottingham did it because what he was arrested for doesn't even resemble what happened to Denise. He was horrible.

serious piece of work and his murders were grues of secretion and torture and dismemberment. Why would you think that he did this? Karen said she hadn't mentioned Cottingham to me because the detectives had asked her to keep it quiet. Cottingham had told him that if anything he said was leaked to the media, he would shut down. It's where I need a silence. It's not right. Karen said she already had her doubts. And then she found out that Cottingham was getting special perks in prison.

for the information he gave them. They just kept buying this guy who's in prison for life favors to get him to say something. They've always wanted to pin this on him. And I said, he's like a sitting duck. He'll say anything for a meal ticket. And I know, and I really feel in my heart, they've told me a big lie to get this case off their plate. Karen said that detectives never took her theories of who killed Denise seriously. They've never done anything with the information.

that I brought to them because in their mind, they already knew it was Richard. Let me ask you this question. What is your confidence that Cottingham is responsible? On a scale on 1 to 10? 2.

Wow. Okay. So... Karen seemed so sure that Cottingham wasn't Denise's killer. But after doing my own investigation, I was starting to think he might have done it. And I was starting to wonder

why Karen didn't. I wanted to accept that he did this. I will accept, but they have to prove it. You can't just wave your finger willy-nilly at someone and say they've committed murder. They have to prove it. My name is Anthony Scalia. From Truth Media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Denise Didn't Come Home. These unsolved cases haunted the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office for many years.

What happened here? Two carefully decapitated female bodies were found at a Westside motel. I lifted up the bed when it's a whole body, a naked body. We had a serial killer that was out there almost on a daily basis. I mentioned his name was Richard Cottingham. Oh, I think, holy smoke. I caught one hell of a guy. He said he didn't go back far enough.

Oh my God. Thirteen years he's out on the street. He could be responsible for hundreds of victims. Chapter 4. The Girl on Old Hook Road. I'd been talking to Karen Falaska for months, and I learned a lot about her life before her sister Denise's murder. But we hadn't talked much about what happened after. I have a really clear picture of your childhood, but between 1969 and 1996, what were you doing? What was your life like? That's a sort of big gap right now.

that I can't picture. I was trying to find myself. After Denise was killed, Karen struggled to get through high school. And as soon as she graduated, she decided to get away for good. I just sold everything I owned and left. Came out here sort of like nomatically. I didn't know anyone. I lived in this really beautiful mountain town, really kind of remote.

And I just came out here and got lost for a while. within those years that you're asking me about, underneath everything, I was always trying to be okay. The way everything fell apart, I didn't want to be losing my mind or, you know what I mean? Like, I was working hard on being okay. Up to that point, Karen had told me in great detail about the darkest thing that had ever happened to her. But when we got to the years after the murder of her sister, for some reason, Karen held back. I'm leaving out a lot.

At one point, my dad flew out here. I really begged me to come home. And I had nothing here and no one, but I didn't want to go back to New Jersey. It took me a while to find my feet, and I kind of got involved with a real cowboy. A real rodeo riding, Bronco-busting cowboy. I don't know if I was just looking for something

to hold on to in my life, but I married him. And I was young and I was 21. Eventually, Karen Underwood, her cowboy had two daughters. They all lived in a little cabin together. We were like worlds apart and worked out for us. After a few years, the marriage ended, and by the 80s, Karen was raising her two daughters alone. I just worked and worked and tried to raise kids. I feel like I struggled. I wanted to be the best person I could be for the young people in my life, you know?

Karen cycled through a series of jobs. She worked as a weight. She wrote essays for college students. She was even a cashier at a gas station. And then one day in the mid-90s, she noticed a posting for a job with the University of Colorado Police Department in Boulder. Never in a million years thought I would get that job, but I did. And I thought maybe there was a reason why I got to be there.

And I didn't even realize it. The next thing that happened was Sean Vanier got killed. Past Santa Claus in his sleigh and a double row of candy canes, Deputy Coroners brought the body of six-year-old John Bonnet Ramsey from her upscale home. In 1996, on the day after Christmas, a little girl named John Bonnet Ramsey was found strangled in the basement of her house in Boulder. Boulder police won't comment on her cause of death. They are investigating her death as a homicide. So far, no arrests have been made. The case became a nationwide spectacle, and the media swarmed.

Mr. Mrs. Ramsey, what do you want to say to the killer of your daughter? God knows who you are, and we will find you. Crowds of reporters were camping out in front of the police department where Karen worked, and where detectives were meeting on the Ramsey case. I had a front row seat to everything that was going on. John Vanay Ramsey's murder was very much like Denise's murder. It was a scandalous, you know what I mean? It was a huge case.

It was Jean-Bene's case that made me look again at Denise's case. I started thinking about how much we can do now, as opposed to what we could do in 1969. Can we try this new DNA testing? And that's where I sort of hooked back into the case. From Colorado, Karen started calling the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office. She wanted to see if there had been any updates or breakthroughs. She learned that there hadn't been any progress at all. It wasn't being taken as seriously as I was taking it.

It seemed like more aggressive steps needed to be taken. I flew to the Burden County Prosecutor's Office to review the case file and ask them a line of questions that I had developed. They took me in to see the case file in what they called the war room. This style was literally a cardboard box. It hadn't been protected in any way from the air, from the elements. I was shocked to see that. The crime scene pictures were terrible. She was there on the ground.

There were a lot of police officers walking around. There were photographers leaning over her body, taking pictures. There were a lot of people, like a lot of cops. They smoked cigars right over her body. Not the way we know to handle a crime scene today. Karen started paging through the police reports. No work's been done on them, no transcriptions, no organization. Page is missing.

Like, how are you supposed to work this case? After going through the case file, Karen was taken upstairs to a conference room. We were sitting around a table, and I was at the head of the table. I was there alone because they told me I couldn't bring anybody. And there were six of them. everybody looks big to me because I'm really small. But these guys were big, and they were intimidating. Karen must have felt like she did when she was 13,

when detectives like these had interrogated her about Denise's murder. But Karen wasn't a little kid anymore. She was a professional working in law enforcement, and she started peppering the detectives with questions. Had they thought about retesting for DNA? Had they considered exhuming Denise's body to close, collect more evidence, and why were no new suspects being developed? It was tense.

They got mad at me, and they leaned forward and raised their voices with me, and told me that they weren't going to take the blame for what some investigator did X amount of years ago, and that they didn't feel that they had to explain what somebody else did in another day and time. As Karen glanced around, there weren't a lot of friendly faces, except for one young man down at the other end of the conference table. a detective by the name of Rob Anzalotti. I was just still a young buck of a homicide detective.

Like, what the hell did I know? I would have just sat there, pretty much kept my mouth shut, and listened. Anzalati had recently been assigned to the cold case squad. And watching Karen that day, left an impression on him. I gave her a lot of props and kudos for her tenacity and relentlessness to make sure that the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office stayed focused on her sister's case. I think that Karen was tormented by the death of her sister

and the fact that it had never been solved. And I felt for her. I wanted justice for Denise, but for Karen as well. Anzalati was put in charge of the cold cases of murdered women in Bergen County, and he became Karen's main point of contact at the prosecutor's office. Karen wanted to meet with Anzalati to share the information she'd gathered on Denise's murder. And eventually, he and his partner flew out to Colorado. She had an entire binder full of her own investigative report and whatever supporting

documentation that she was able to do in her own way as a civilian. She made a pitch on who she suspected the killers were and why. Anzolati sat with Karen, thumbing through her binder as she told him about what she remembered from the weeks leading up to the murder. Things you heard about in episode two. She remembered Denise fighting with her boyfriend, Max in the parking lot at a Fourth of July fireworks display. She said that a couple days later, Max had drugged Denise and told her that he was going to kill her.

And she remembered that in the days after the funeral, Max had a nasty looking gash on his hand. That's when they stopped and told me I was missing in the bloody handprint. Anzalati told Karen that when Denise's body was found in 1969, she had a bloody handprint on her leg. And there were fingerprints. At the autopsy, the coroner removed a patch of skin to preserve the handprint. Then, Anzalati told her the bad news. I was never able to find that evidence. Where it ultimately was lost, I have no idea.

That was the one piece of evidence that would have solved her case. That is part of this story. I'm not saying you guys screwed up. I'm saying, help me uncover what happened. Despite the tension, Anzolati was intrigued by Karen's memories. She had a lot of detail, and there was enough merit there that they needed to be run out. So we went down every road. Anzolati went back to New Jersey, back to his other cases.

But he kept thinking about Karen's theory about Max. And eventually, he tracked him down. We ended up interviewing him in his home. He was more than welcoming. We sat in his living room, spoke for several hours. I never got the gut feeling that he was hiding anything or that he was involved. It took like a year to act on that information. And then when they acted, I have no way of knowing if they acted properly or not.

They claimed they interviewed him, they separated him from his family, but they couldn't hold them, and they had nothing to hold them on. There was nothing they could do. I think I told her, like, listen, we ran it out, and we're going to look in other directions. Karen didn't know it at the time, but Anzolati had started working another angle. He'd been making trips to Trenton State Prison to interview known killers. And one of them was this guy, Richard Kuklinski. Oh, I don't want to talk to nobody else.

Yeah, I got enough for you. Kuclinski was a notorious mafia hitman, better known on the streets as the Iceman. I was getting some confessions from him on some organized crime hits and some unsolved cases in Bergen and Hudson counties. And on one of those visits, Anzalati learned something. The Iceman had a famous neighbor on his cell block, Richard Cottingham. What I knew about Cottingham initially was that he was this torso killer, killing prostitutes and, quote-unquote, like, easy prey, right?

Streetwalkers, runaways. And Anzalati knew that Cottingham had murdered more women than he was convicted of. The Iceman despised Cottingham. He felt like Cottingham was beneath him. He felt Cottingham was a savage for hurting him. women and you know who does that type of thing that's fucking guy at him he's lucky i'm not on the street i bang his fucking head one killer's moral code was offended by the other the ice man told anzalati that coddingham was running a bookmaking operation in the prison monday morning after

super bowl sunday i had arranged for the prison to raid cottingham's cell and some of his runner's cells that led to some evidence of prison violations because it led to evidence of the bookmaking operation So that got Cottingham thrown into what they called the hole, solitary confinement. He'd been sitting in the hole for about 48 hours before I went down there. They brought him out to the interview room I was in. He's dripping in sweat. His eyes are like bright red. He's got to be 350 pounds, and he's got the long white beard.

He's a fat Santa Claus looking motherfucker. And I was like, this guy's a fucking mess. I've stepped to him and explained to him that I was the reason he was in the hole. Hello, Mr. Cartaghan. You fought me. I'll not do. So that started the relationship, obviously, on a contentious and confrontational note, but we worked our way through it.

Want more true crime? Subscribe to the binge to get all episodes of My Mother's Lies, add-free today, and get instant access to over 50 other jaw-dropping true crime stories. Plus, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series on the first of every month, every month. Search for TheBinge channel on Apple Podcasts or head to getthebinge.com to subscribe today. The Binge, feed your true crime obsession. Detective Rob Anzolotti had introduced himself to Richard Cottingham by getting him thrown in the hole.

Now Anzalati was hoping to mend the relationship. Step one. being on time for their meetings at Trenton State Prison. Hello, Mr. Cottingham. You asked for 115. No. 117. You got to complain. I know there's got to be a complaint.

Anzalati was hoping to get Cottingham to open up about other murders he'd committed in Bergen County, maybe even confessed to some of those murders. But Cottingham made it clear. He wouldn't be giving any information for free. anything to like it what I want first. Well, you'd like something if we can do it, then that's what we'll give you to tell us about something,

then we'd both have. He was big on, well, what are you going to do for me? And really, what can you do for somebody that's doing multiple life sentences in prison, right? Little stuff. They get food packages, so it started with, I'll pay for your food package, so it doesn't come out of your commissary account.

So food packages, yeah, that's the money. Karen told me that Cottingham was the kind of guy who would say anything for a meal ticket. And in these first tapes Anzalati recorded, Cottingham is driving the terms of the deal. You know what I just don't want me to fuck me. You don't want me to fuck you. Cottingham insisted that any murders he confessed to

would never be made public. Anzalati agreed. If it was something that I said, I'll take care of that for you, I made sure that I took care of it, and I came through on my end. What I'm trying to show you is that I am willing to bend over backwards

to make sure that everything's a comedy. That's the big thing. And that started to build. build up a level of trust between the two of us. Are we fairly comfortable with the road map with just like that? Yeah. It's probably the wackiest thing I ever heard of what's doing.

Like, you know what? This whole thing is a little wacky, so why the fucking aren't? This is crazy. You think that many? You might just think the number I threw out of 80s as being a lot. I was out there every night. Like an hour.

Was it more race? Was you getting away with it? To do the game, the stalking, the... I didn't go out to kill somebody. I wasn't in a serial killer. You just told me that you killed over ages. That fits the definition pretty well. In his mind, he was the smartest killer ever out there,

constantly changing up his methodologies as a way to throw off law enforcement. Most anyone I killed was when I would be somehow connected to them. And I didn't want to get caught. It was more things just not getting caught. My old thing was not to make a pattern, which I never did. I wasn't stupid, you know. It was like the perfect murder every time. Anzalati wanted Cottingham to confess to his unsolved crimes.

But he started to realize that Cottingham was playing games with him, stringing him along to keep him showing up. A particular case that I want to try and figure out if we can either rule you in or rule you out. So if it is impossible that is you, then I'd appreciate he's just telling me that. Not impossible. It's possible. I'm pretty confident it's possible to be you. He loves to play with people.

He's the king of the carrot and the stick. I mean, he absolutely would throw out just a little tidbit, and then when he saw I got excited over that tidbit, he'd shut it right down and be like, ah, I didn't say we were going to talk about that. Nothing's before you keep me talking. You're getting all these little snippets. What do they add up to, though, buddy? Add up to nothing. You're right. Nothing's for free.

Nothing's for free for you either, though. It's a two-way street. Of course. These conversations between Cottingham and Anzolati went on for years. And across the country, Karen was getting impatient. Karen was very frustrated by the process. If she could call every day and say, you know, why aren't you working on my case? She would. I talked to Karen for hours at times on a Sunday night when I'm off and trying to put my kids to bed or whatever, but she would be going through something and she just really needed an ear,

and I would sit there and talk to her and listen to the pain that she had. It's been a lot of years of bringing things to them and waiting a year for them to make a decision or waiting six months. It's just been a lot of years of being strung along. There was only so much Anzalati could tell Karen, but there was only so much Anzalati could tell Karen, but that made her feel like he was shutting her out. Probably there is something wrong with me that I can't just let this go and I can't just accept the fact that they don't call me back.

I was mad that we lost her, but I was really mad that nobody wanted to do anything about it. She was a monster example of how, no matter how many decades go by, the pain of losing a loved one in a violent way and not having answers to that violent ending impact the person that you all. and how much you're consumed with this thirst for answers and a thirst for knowledge of what happened.

And she was utterly consumed by it. By 2010, Anzalati had started bringing Cottingham out of prison to the Burton County Prosecutor's Office, where they would sometimes spend days talking, and Cottingham would be rewarded with his favorite foods. They had been talking for six years. If Anzalati was going to keep doing Cottingham favors, he needed something real out of him. Give me some one of these girls. Tell me a little something about him. It's always a little something.

It was a grind. I mean, to spend eight or ten hours in a room with him was really a grind at times. Don't go back to the old, Richie. The old Richie has never been done. The cantagoras pain in the ass. The old Richie is not done. Dirty little rabbit, fucker. We got to talk of what I'm going to get out of it.

I constantly hammered the theme home to him about how important it is for the survivors, the victims' families, to know what happened. The surviving people have an insatiable thirst for knowledge. I want to know every life's detail. And one of those surviving people was Karen Falaska. We had that one from 1960. 1969, the girl's sister, to this day, marks on us over what we knew. Anzalati kept pushing, and finally,

Hidingham started to give details on his first murder. the murder of a 29-year-old housewife named Nancy Vogel. Today's date is Wednesday, July 7, 2010. The time now is 7.10 p.m. This would be the statement of Richard Cottingham. Once we put the recorder in front of him, he gets noticeably nervous. His leg starts to shake. He'd pull on his ear when he's nervous. Where was it that you met her?

Little Firth. We had a couple drinks in the holiday inn. Did you ultimately then end up taking a ride with her? Yes, up to northern New Jersey. I believe it was Montfair. And what occurred while you were up there in Montfiel? I ended her life. It was in a wooded area behind a cornfield. We had sex.

Did it begin consensual and turn into an assault? What happened? It was like a forced consensual. She didn't have a child. Do you recall how it is that you killed her? I believe I smothered her. Smothered her, how? I held my hand over her mouth and held a noseclose.

And did you do that to the point of her death? Yes. When you don't have conclusive evidence, we're still taking the word of a convicted serial killer. I trusted him when I could verify what he had to say. During the actual confession, he gave a number of things that only the killer would know. She had just gone shopping and there were packages in the trunk. And that was something from the file. Did you check anything in the car?

Well, he looked in the trunk. Do you recall anything being inside the trunk? There was a couple packages. And that made me very comfortable that he was truly the killer. Richard Cottingham had confessed to the unsolved murder of Nancy Vogel. Now Detective Rob Ancelotti was sure that Cottingham had killed a woman in Bergen County in the late 60s. And he knew that there were more. I remember like it was yesterday.

We were driving him back to prison, and he was real chatty on the way back. It was almost like his guard was down. He's talking so casually he thinks like this is not going to hurt him at all. He's like trying to convince me like, listen, I don't remember everybody, but some of them I have an image in my head. He's like, there's this one girl, and she looks just like this actress on this TV show that Roswell, that I watch in prison. And he said the name of the actress. The office was about an hour and a half drive. So I can't wait to just drop his fat ass back in prison and get back to the office and Google this name.

And sure enough, when I pulled up the picture of her, she was a striking resemblance for Irene Blaze. Irene Blaze was an 18-year-old girl who was strangled in Saddlebrook in 1969. Her body had been dumped about a mile from where Denise's body would be found, just three months later. I was very convinced that the same killer that killed Irene Blaze killed Denise Velasca. Anzalati went back to Cottingham to get him to talk about Blaze. If we can, just in your own words, why don't you just tell me what you remember? Where did your first encounter the victim? A witness who saw Irene Blaze that night remembered her talking to a man who fit Cottinger.

Hounham's description near a bus stop. And that witness remembered something else. The witness said that the person had like a nervous tick where they kept pulling on their ear. Lack of a better word, nervous habit or anything you would do when you're standing around speaking to somebody? Okay, so you play with your ear. Yes. My right here. Cottingham told Anzalati that he took Irene for a couple drinks.

Then they got in his car. I pulled the car over. And I's identified a photograph of Irene Blaze. When he was done confessing to the murder of Highland, Irene Blaze. Cunningham said that something about it jogged his memory. There was another girl he picked up, right around that time. You recall abducting a girl from Old Hook Road. What he told me was he remembers a girl on Old Hook Road by the hospital.

This is an entirely different case. You'll remember a whole lot of it at the moment. I'm going to finish and there. Taking this girl from Old Hook Road, I did you have a girl from Old Hook. There's only one unsolved homicide of a girl that we last saw on Old Hook Road, and it's Denise Velasca. That's on the next episode of Denise Didn't Come Home. Denise Didn't Come Home is a production of truth media in partnership with Sony Music Entertainment. I'm your host, Anthony Scalia.

This episode was produced by Ryan Swiker and me with help from Alexa Burke. Story editing by Mark Smurling. 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 Donia Sulemon. Kenny Cusiac did the mix. Sound design by Kenny Cusiac and Ryan Swiker. Music by Kenny Cusiac, Epidemic Sound, and Marmoset. Our title track is Gimmy Some by Weevil. If you've been enjoying the show, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 646-66-665-2748, and leave us a voice

Don't forget to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps other people find the show. And thanks for listening.