Local retired Chief Prosecutor Robert Anzilotti worked with Pascack Valley graduate and convicted serial killer Robert Cottingham, dubbed “The Torso Killer.” Anzilotti got six confessions from Cottingham and brought peace to many victims’ families.

The Forensics, Sociology, and Psychology classes at PV had the opportunity to hear Anzilotti speak about the work he did as Bergen County Chief Prosecutor, specifically regarding Cottingham and the “Torso Killer” case.

Before Anzilotti became a police officer, he started as a paramedic. After graduating from Essex County Community College with a degree in paramedicine, he started his work in Newark and Paterson during the “height of the crack epidemic.” According to Anzilotti, this allowed him to gain experience with trauma.

“I got interested in law enforcement. I didn’t come from a background in law enforcement. There are no cops in my family,” Anzilotti said. “But working alongside the cops in the EMS role is what got me interested in becoming a cop.”

After graduating from the police academy, Anzilotti began his law enforcement work as an officer for the Woodcliff Lake Police Department; four years later, he was promoted to the role of detective.

“I was used to that faster pace of the inner city of Paterson and Newark, and it was a little slow for me being on patrol,” Anzilotti said. “I wanted to get involved in more specialized work.”

Anzilotti was then brought into the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, where he worked for twenty-five years; for the last five years, he worked as Chief Prosecutor.

“It was just an amazing experience there, not because I became the chief, but because the county allowed me to have such a massive breadth of experience with investigations,” Anzilotti said.

Upon starting at the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, Anzilotti began in the Organized Crime Department where he worked undercover as a “plain clothes cop” to expose and catch criminals involved in illegal gambling, loan sharking, extortion, murder-for-hire and gun cases, and prostitution. According to Anzilotti, he also worked against “the complex financial crime schemes that became a norm for modern organized crimes.”

When Anzilotti worked at the Prosecutor’s Office, he worked in different departments—ultimately working on the homicide squad before his promotion to chief. There, he was assigned a series of cold cases, or unsolved cases.

“Our responsibility at the prosecutor’s office, besides the specific crimes, was oversight of all these local police departments,” Anzilotti said. “It was a big undertaking and an awful lot of work.”

As chief, he was in charge of 72 towns and police departments; his job left him little time to focus on anything other than the demanding tasks in front of him that took priority over the cold case work.

“I never lost sight of those cold cases, and I always wanted to keep working,” Anzilotti said. “So through those years, despite all these other responsibilities I had, I always kept working on these 12 unsolved cases.”

Anzilotti started making headway on some of the cases, but as he rose in the ranks and was promoted to chief, there were more responsibilities for him to take on and less time to devote to the cold cases he was so passionate about.

“A lot of times, I did it on my own time. I would take these cases home, take the files home, and work on them,” Anzilotti said. “Sometimes, when my kids were young, after putting them to bed, I would read these files and take notes. When I got some momentum in the cases, I would bring them back to the squad, and we would then take each of them on as a particular case.”

As Anzilotti dug deeper into each case, he began to eliminate suspects, but he kept hitting walls with leads that he described as “dead-end after dead-end.” There was, however, one suspect he could not eliminate from some of the cases: Richard Cottingham.

Richard Cottingham has a connection to the Valley area, graduating from PV in 1964 and returning to neighboring towns later for dumping grounds and abduction sites.

Cottingham was arrested in 1980 for kidnapping, attempted murder, and aggravated assault and has been imprisoned since; he is now facing multiple life sentences for crimes he has recently been connected to.

When Anzilotti began to suspect Cottingham, Cottingham was notorious for refusing to talk to law enforcement. Anzilotti knew he needed a unique tactic to start up a conversation.

“I think he thought he was untouchable,” Anzilotti said.

While working on a separate cold case, Anzilotti had already built a relationship with Richard Kuklinski. Also known as “The Iceman,” Kuklinski was a convicted “hitman” with mob connections. Anzilotti used his conversations with Kuklinski to have an “in” and to start up conversations with Cottingham.

Fortunately for Anzilotti, Kuklinski exposed an illegal gambling system within the prison, allowing Anzilloti to call for a raid of Cottingham’s cell and a mandatory interrogation, during which Anzilotti made his first impression on Cottingham and started a conversation. This conversation was the first of many, creating a relationship between the two that lasted many years, even before obtaining the first confession.

“I knew I was going to have to play the long game,” Anzilotti said. “I needed to spend a lot of time and many fruitless trips, only talking about his trials and crimes that were known cases and were publically [known].” 

As he explained to PV students, throughout his career and even after his retirement, Anzilotti got Cottingham to confess to six murders committed in Bergen and Hudson County.

Ultimately, according to Anzilotti and CBS, it is suspected that Cottingham murdered up to 100 women.

Anzilotti retired in May of 2021. In the past two years, he started businesses, mainly concerning security, investigative, and public safety consulting. Additionally, he had the opportunity to record several documentaries on his work with cold cases. To find out more about the Cottingham case, there is a documentary on A&E called Torso Killer Confessions.

Anzilotti credits his years as a paramedic and police officer to his love of helping others. 

“I started a scholarship for a high school senior that wants to pursue a life of service, whether you want to be an educator, a police officer, firefighter, military, nurse, occupational therapist— you know, whatever it is to serve others,” Anzilotti said. “I feel it is important to give back.”