It was around noon on August 9th, 1974. Seventeen-year-old Mary Ann Pryor decided to go to the Garden State Plaza Mall in Paramus, New Jersey to look for a new bathing suit; she had a gift certificate for Macy’s she wanted to use. Since she didn’t want to go alone, she called up her friend, sixteen-year-old Lorraine Kelly, familiarly known as Lori.
Mary Ann told her older sister Nancy that she would probably be back in a couple of hours. Both of the Pryor girls had taken the bus to the mall countless times before, and Nancy didn’t think anything about it. A short time later, Lori’s boyfriend dropped the two girls off at the bus stop that would take them out to Paramus. Neither Mary Ann nor Lori would ever be seen alive again.
When Mary Ann hadn’t returned home by ten p.m., her family began to panic. First, they called Lori’s house and spoke to her older brother and sister; the Kellys’ parents were both deceased, and the siblings all still lived in the family residence. After learning that Lori had not come home either, the Pryors contacted the police, who told them that they would have to wait until twenty-four hours had passed before filing an official missing persons report. Frustrated, the Pryors went out to look for Mary Ann themselves.
For five days, no sign of either girl was found. Then, on August 14th, a resident of Montvale, New Jersey who was approaching her car in the parking lot of her apartment complex, spotted the remains of both Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly, lying in a wooded area behind Rolling Ridge Road. The location of the bodies lay approximately twenty miles away from where the girls had last been seen alive.
Both Lori and Mary Ann were naked and severely battered, and appeared to have been burned with cigarettes. They had both been sexually assaulted, and either strangled or suffocated to death. Horrifically, lengths of rope remained around both girls’ necks, and rope marks on the ankles indicated that the victims had been hog-tied. The killer also left glass bottles inserted into both girls’ vaginas.
As Mary Ann’s parents were too distraught to make a positive identification of the body, her older sister Nancy, then nineteen, stepped up to the task, confirming Mary Ann’s identity through a distinctive gold cross necklace she always wore. Likewise, Lorraine Kelly was identified by her older siblings; she was also found wearing a necklace, with a charm that read, “Lorraine and Ricky.”
In the days following the discovery of the bodies, investigators speculated that the girls had perhaps decided to hitchhike to the mall instead of taking the bus, and had been picked up by the person who ultimately killed them. The Pryors, as well as Mary Ann’s boyfriend Sal, vehemently disputed this assertion, claiming that Mary Ann was far too wary to hitchhike, though they conceded that perhaps Lori, who was quite socially connected through her employment by the city, would have been more amenable to catching a ride with an acquaintance. Whatever the truth of the matter, the murder of the two girls led to subsequent law enforcement crackdowns on hitchhiking in North Bergen and the surrounding areas.
Detectives had few leads and no suspects, and accusations of corruption and cover-ups eventually began to plague the investigation as it grew colder and colder. The theories surrounding the case fell into two categories: one, that the girls had been killed by someone who knew one or both of them, though no persons of interest in that line were ever identified; and two, that the girls had fallen afoul of a random serial killer lurking in the area.
This second proposition has spurred a handful of promising hypotheses put forward by various investigators and researchers into the double homicide. Retired Bergen County Chief of Detectives Alan Grieco, for example, suspected that Lori and Mary Ann were murdered by serial killer Richard Cottingham, known variously as the Torso Killer, the New York Ripper, or the Butcher of Times Square. Cottingham was ultimately convicted of six murders in the period spanning 1981 to 1986, though he claims to have killed as many as one-hundred people.
Writers Jesse Pollack and Mark Moran, on the other hand, suggested that Lori and Mary Ann might have been victims of the same killer who took the lives of Joan Kramer in South Orange, New Jersey in August of 1972, and Jeanette DePalma on the so-called “Devil’s Teeth” in Springfield in September of the same year.
Pollack and Moran point out that all four of the victims were pretty, white females between sixteen and twenty-four years old who all had long, straight dark hair, and had possibly been picked up while hitchhiking. Additionally, all four young women had been strangled or suffocated, and were left naked and face down in a wooded area. Further, they observe, all of the victims’ bodies had been left posed in the open rather than buried, and all had items taken from them, perhaps as souvenirs.
In their book, Death on the Devil’s Teeth, Pollack and Moran detail the 1975 trial of accountant Otto Neil Nilson, who was accused of killing Joan Kramer, but was subsequently acquitted. Nilson would eventually be incarcerated in a psychiatric facility in 1977 following an incident in which he marched into the East Orange Veterans Administration Hospital with a high-powered rifle and took hostages, ranting about an evil cabal that was preventing him from seeing his children. Thankfully, no one was hurt during the standoff. Nilson died in 1992, and it is unknown whether he was actually involved in the murders of Joan Kramer or Jeanette DePalma.
In spring of 2021, investigators who had all along suspected serial killer Richard Cottingham of killing Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly were vindicated; the inmate, serving multiple life sentences in New Jersey state prisons since 1980, finally confessed to the slayings, describing the crimes with details only the killer would have known. Cottingham admitted that he had adducted the girls and kept them hostage in a motel room, repeatedly raping them before drowning them in the bathtub and dumping their bodies.
Cottingham has also confessed to the 1970 murder of Lorraine McGraw, the 1968 murder of Diane Cusick in Long Island, New York, and the further killings of four additional women in Long Island during 1972–1973: Mary Beth Heinz, Laverne Moye, Sheila Heiman, and Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves.
Crime Immemorial 