The moment Leslie Ann O'Dell realized she was going to die, she decided she may as well take her chances against the sadistic monster who had bound, beaten, raped and tortured her in a cheap motel room off a Jersey highway for what felt like a hellish eternity.
The 18-year-old was battered, bloody and raw from the unspeakable acts he had forced her to do with the barrel of his gun pointed at her temple and the sharp edge of his knife digging into her jugular.
But O'Dell somehow found the strength to spring off the bed the moment the man removed the handcuffs he'd slapped on her hours earlier — back when he seemed like just a nice, quiet guy who only wanted to party with a pretty prostitute before going back to his humdrum suburban life.
O'Dell grabbed the pistol he'd left on the floor and pointed it at his face.
"Don't move or I'll kill you!" she shrieked, a sense of euphoria sweeping over her now that she had turned the tables on her tormenter.
The moment was fleeting. The man simply smiled, pulled out his long knife and moved towards her.
O'Dell didn't have time to be frightened. She pulled the trigger, then again and again — and then realized she really was going to die after all.
The gun was only a toy.
With nothing more she could do, the young woman screamed as loudly as she could as the man swarmed her and covered her mouth and nose with his large hands.
She was being suffocated to death, and the last thing O'Dell saw before everything went black was his vacant eyes and twisted snarl.
On that balmy May morning in 1980, O'Dell never realized she would be the latest victim of one of the most savage serial killers in the annals of modern crime, a depraved sex fiend with a taste for torture whose reign of terror three decades ago was back in the news this week when officials added two more heinous slayings to his ever-growing body count.
The killer's rampage had actually begun six months before he took O'Dell to a room at the quiet Quality Inn on Route 17 in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., and turned it into a sexual torture chamber.
On the morning of Dec. 2, 1979, James Rogers was one of several FDNY firefighters responding to a blaze at the Travel Inn, a sketchy Hell's Kitchen hotel on W. 42nd St. near 10th Ave.
Rogers made his way through thick smoke on the fourth floor and entered room 417, where the fire originated. There were two two badly burned bodies on twin beds, both of them women. He grabbed one and carried her out to the hallway, hoping she was still alive.
"I was preparing to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation," Rogers told the Daily News, "when I suddenly noticed there was no head."
The other victim was in the same condition. Both were also missing their hands.
"I'm used to seeing charred bodies," Rogers said, "but this was the worst experience I've ever had in 12 years of firefighting."
An apparent arson case had become a horrific double homicide, and NYPD detectives only knew that four days before the fire, a tall, sandy-haired man in his 30s had checked into the room under a phony name.
The women had been strangled, and their heads and hands had been severed with surgical precision before the bodies were doused with lighter fluid and set ablaze. The killer left nothing behind that could identify him — or his victims. He'd taken the body parts with him.
It took two months before detectives ID'd one of the women. She was Deedeh Goodarzi, 22, a high-priced hooker. The other victim, who was around 16 and likely a streetwalker as well, was never identified.
Cops who canvassed the seedy Times Square area, hoping to find leads amid the sex-charged squalor of 42nd St., had no luck getting any info from tight-lipped denizens of The Deuce.
Then on May 15 the killer struck again, this time in a room at the Seville Hotel on E. 29th St. and Madison Ave. And it was firefighters who again made a grisly discovery.
Jean Reyner, 25, a known prostitute, had her throat slashed before being set on fire. She also had bite marks on her body. The killer left the head and hands this time — but severed her breasts and placed them on the bed's headboard as a gruesome calling card.
The lunatic the papers dubbed the "Times Square Ripper" had again left nothing behind that could trace him to the murders.
New York cops were stumped — and also clueless that a madman with a similar M.O. was terrorizing prostitutes directly across the Hudson River in New Jersey.
Ten days before Reyner's charred and mutilated body was found at the Seville, the body of a sex worker named Valerie Ann Street was found by a maid stuffed under a bed at the Quality Inn on Route 17 in Hasbrouck Heights. She'd been strangled and had several deep bite marks on her body. She was also wearing handcuffs.
Like the New York slayings, the room had been meticulously cleaned — except this time the killer left a partial fingerprint on the 'cuffs.
A week later, a prostitute covered in bite marks was found badly beaten and left for dead in a parking lot in Teaneck, N.J. She survived the attack and told police she had been drugged by a john, an average looking guy in his 30s, but couldn't remember much else.
Neither the NYPD or Jersey cops made the connection between their respective cases — until May 22, when police were called to the same Quality Inn where Street was killed earlier that month.
A maid heard screams coming from one of the rooms. It was Leslie Ann O'Dell, the 18-year-old prostitute who'd been tortured and assaulted for hours.
A security guard interrupted the man's attempt to suffocate her, and cops arrived just in time to apprehend the attacker as he ran away.
He was Richard Cottingham, 33, and he seemed too ridiculously normal to be a serial killer. A married father of three young children, he lived in the peaceful New Jersey suburb of Lodi and worked as a computer technician for Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Manhattan for more than a decade.
But it soon became apparent that Cottingham was the prostitute-hating psycho responsible for the recent murders. Prosecutors called him a "Jekyll and Hyde killer," and the evidence against him was overwhelming, including a fingerprint match on the handcuffs on the dead hooker at the Quality Inn — and a private, locked "trophy room" in his tidy home, where he had stashed souvenirs of his crimes, mostly jewelry and clothing belonging to his victims.
Over four trials in the early 1980s, three in Jersey and one in New York, Cottingham was convicted of five murders. That included the 1977 slaying of a married 27-year-old nurse whose body was found in the parking lot of the same Quality Inn where he'd committed other atrocities. His prison sentences added up to nearly 300 years, with New Jersey getting the pleasure of hosting him at the state prison in Trenton.
Several women who survived his attacks — including O'Dell, a runaway from the Seattle area who had only been hooking a scant four days when she had the bad luck to run into a maniac — told of being drugged and then brought to hotel rooms where Cottingham, now forever known as "the Torso Killer," did his evil deeds.
His motive was pure sexual stimulation, torture his only turn-on.
''The whole idea of bondage had aroused and fascinated me since I was very young,'' he said on the stand at one of the trials.
Now 74, Cottingham, who claims responsibility for dozens of murders, has confessed to a handful of unsolved cases over the years.
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In 2010, he copped to his first slaying, a 29-year-old mother of two, closing a case that had been cold since 1967.
Then this week, after the prodding of veteran Bergen County Detective Robert Anzilotti, Cottingham decided to come clean about the brutal 1974 double murder of teen girls he kidnapped, raped for days and drowned in a motel bathtub before dumping their bodies in a wooded area near Montvale, N.J.
The Torso Killer's official death toll, including the slaying of a 13-year-old girl in 1968, now stands at 11, with who knows how many more to come.
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Mystery / Thriller100 murder cases that are either solved or not solved
