FAIR LAWN, N.J. (1010 WINS) -- Police in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, announced Tuesday that they had solved the 60-year-old cold case murder of Alys Eberhardt, with a jailhouse confession from the notorious serial killer Richard Cottingham.
Eberhardt was an 18-year-old nursing student at Hackensack Hospital who was killed on Sept. 24, 1965. She had left school and made it home that day but was stabbed and bludgeoned to death by Cottingham, police said.
The case—the only unsolved homicide in Fair Lawn for decades—was reopened in 2021.
Cottingham, 79, who is known as the “Torso Killer” and “Times Square Killer,” went on a killing spree in the 1960s and ‘70s. He has remained incarcerated with the New Jersey Department of Corrections since July 1981 and is serving three life sentences at South Woods State Prison. He is also being held on three out-of-state murder detainers.
After Cottingham “made admissions” in 2021 to his involvement in several murders in the Bergen County area in the ‘60s and ‘70s, “the possibility surfaced that Eberhardt’s murder could have been one of his earliest crimes,” police said in a press release.
Cottingham was interviewed multiple times over the next four years and finally confessed in December 2025, providing a written admission as well, police said.
“In these admissions, he provided corroborating details about the circumstances leading up to the crime, the house, and details about the murder which were not publicly known,” police said.
“After several years of talking to him, recently he gave a full confession, telling us how he encountered her and how ultimately he committed the crime,” said Fair Lawn Police Sgt. Eric Eleshewich.
“I can't speak what's in his mind,” Eleshewich said. “But I can tell you that his health is declining. He's up there in age now. So perhaps that did motivate him in some way.”
Eleshewich said that after all these decades, “Alys is able to finally be at rest, and her family can get some closure,”
The nephew Eberhardt never knew, Michael Smith, provided a statement on behalf of her family, “Our family has waited since 1965 for the truth. To receive this news during the holidays—and to be able to tell my mother, Alys’s sister, that we finally have answers—was a moment I never thought would come. As Alys’s nephew, I am deeply moved that our family can finally honor her memory with the truth.”
“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,” the statement continued. “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. Richard Cottingham is the personification of evil, yet I am grateful that even he has finally chosen to answer the questions that have haunted our family for decades. We will never know why, but at least we finally know who.”