ROBERT ANZILOTTI CONFESSIONS ~ EXCERPTS FROM THE FORTHCOMING NEW BOOK BY PETER VRONSKY
AMERICAN WEREWOLF: THE TRUE STORY OF THE TORSO SERIAL KILLER CONFESSIONS

In the show A&E two-night "event" series broadcast in March 9/10 2023, The Torso Killer Confessions, that retired BCPO Chief of Detectives Robert Anzilotti executive-produced after he retired, with Canadian producer Jacqueline Bynon of Cineflix, Anzilotti looked into the camera and told an outright fairy tale about how the three secret confessions were made public by me in a public meeting on December 30, 2019, in Midland Park.

Without diminishing the righteous work done by retired Chief Robert Anzilotti in closing murders committed by Richard Cottingham, or the public praise and congratulations I gave him when the show aired in March 2023, and in my two previous books, American Serial Killers (2020) and Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (Second Edition 2020 [2004]) Anzilotti, has not shared credit for the good work he has done in the last three of Cottingham's confessions, with the help of Jennifer Weiss, and has even chosen to state mistruths in the TV show recently aired on A&E, which he executive-produced.

Anzilotti fabricated an untrue story about how surprised and taken aback he was by my "all of a sudden" revelations, and how they became a "roadblock" to his carefully laid confidential strategy of successfully extracting future confessions from Cottingham.

That is total unadulterated bullshit; it had the exact opposite effect and would re-start Cottingham's confessions that had stalled since 2017, starting with Cottingham's confession to the 1974 unsolved double murder of Lorraine Kelly and Mary Ann Pryor.

In his TV series, Anzilotti said:

"I always knew that it was a gamble keeping these cases to myself and closed to the community. And sure enough, one day all of a sudden, it all blew up.  In an odd twist of events, Richard Cottingham was befriended by an author and he began cooperating with this author in his writing a book about his life. Richard had told him that he had confessed to these cases to me.

He announced it in public to an audience of people at the public library, and that quickly made the newspaper, a serial killer confessing to three more murders after more than 50 years.

Of course, once it was public, we obviously confirmed that these cases had been cleared. There were a lot of people that criticized the fact that we kept it quiet, and all that criticism was squarely at my feet. I understand where they're coming from. I can see why. You know, the communities wanted to know about it.

But I was looking at this more globally. The blow to me with the whole thing was for all these years, that he used the potential publicity as a roadblock for me to get confessions out of him. Here he is now, letting it out to everybody. I was pretty pissed off, and I was like, this is all on you, man. You're the one cooperating on this book. And your boy is who let this out? It was a bit of a betrayal." 

Everything Anzilotti said above, on camera, was a complete fabrication and entirely untrue in every way.

Anzilotti and BCPO had approved the revelations I made more than six months earlier, the text and content of which I had submitted to him in writing! 

And once that Midland Park meeting was scheduled in early December for the 30th, I kept in close touch with Chief Anzilotti day-to-day about it in the weeks leading up to it, as we had many details and issues to work out about it together, along with Cottingham too, who also knew that the public meeting was coming. Robert Anzilotti knew that Richard Cottingham was not my source on the secret confessions, other than Cottingham's hint to me in February 2018 that he had a "confidential informant contract" with BCPO. Other than that Cottingham remained tight-lipped.

Rob and I even had a face to face meeting in his office in Paramus about it on December 14, 2019, on the day I arrived in New Jersey, two weeks before the scheduled meeting.   

ROBERT ANZILOTTI AGREES TO MY MAKING THE SECRET CONFESSIONS PUBLIC SIX MONTHS EARLIER - MAY 29, 2019.
In the spring of 2019, my publisher informed me that my first book, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters, originally published in 2004, was going to be reissued in a second edition, and commissioned me to write a new chapter at the end of it, updating the world of serial homicide since the first edition came out 18-years ago. This gave me an opportunity to update not only what occurred in the field of serial murder over sixteen years between 2004 and 2020, describe new historic case closures, but as well the twists and turns that were taking place in what Jennifer and I were doing with Cottingham, since I first introduced Jennifer to my readers in 2018 in the concluding pages of Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present.

At first the second edition was scheduled to be released in the autumn of 2019, but then re-scheduled for February 2020.  As soon as the publisher contacted me about the second edition, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to put on the public record the three secret case closures. I was not going to do it without Rob Anzilotti's and BCPO's permission and cooperation, or without their approval of the exact text that was going to appear in the book.  I was confident in my powers of persuasion that they would go along, and knew that eventually they had nearly ten months advance notice to prepare for the public revelations.

On May 23, 2019 I sent the following text to Anzilotti:

It turned out it took hardly any persuasion at all. Six days later Anzilotti readily agreed and approved the text that would appear in my book revealing the three secret case closures.  They did not come "all of a sudden" when I made the revelation in a small public meeting on December 30, 2019 seven months after he had approved them and the text.  It was all agreed upon and set.

Prior to the book coming out in February 2020, in December 2019, I was going make the same announcement in a small public meeting in a church in Midland Park, New Jersey.

By then my website New Jersey Girl Murders was up and running, and I was invited by a member of the church John A. Bandstra to join them in December 2019 and present to them in a public community meeting what I might know about Jackie's murder. Since all this was going to be disclosed in my book in February, I thought this might be a good moment and opportunity to release the information that was going to be published in it.  I agreed to speak at the meeting and Bandstra scheduled it for December 30, 2019.

On a minor note of complaint to the A&E show, the public meeting did not take place at the Midland Park Public Library as Anzilotti and the A&E show asserted. They couldn't even get that right even though Anzilotti had weeks before planned at being at that meeting and speaking with me at it. 

The meeting was held at the Midland Park Faith Reformed Church on Prospect Street, not the library. 

THE COMMUNITY MEETING IN MIDLAND PARK DEC 30 2019
I arrived in December 2019, for another extended stay in New Jersey during the break from my lecture schedule at Toronto Metropolitan University (Ryerson)where I teach the history of espionage, terrorism and international relations.

On my way to Princeton I stopped of at the BCPO field office in Paramus and met with Anzilotti to tell him about the community meeting scheduled for December 30 and that I was going to make the three case closures public, but I assured him I was not going to reveal anything more than what he and BCPO had approved in August to appear in my book scheduled to be released in two months.

Anzilotti was irritated when I told him that this was going to be made public at a scheduled community meeting in Midland Park. "You never said there was going to be a public meeting."

I shrugged my shoulders, “Rob, it’s coming out in my book in February anyway. You can't get any more public than that.”

“A book is one thing, but you said nothing about any community meeting. Now I will have to show up and answer people’s questions,” Anzilotti whined at me.

I reviewed with Anzilotti in minute detail what I was planning to say, that it would not deviate from the content and context of the last summer's approved text which was going to appear in the book.  We stayed in touch day-to-day over the Christmas week as the meeting date approached.
 
Both Anzilotti and Richard Cottingham were concerned that somehow the announcement would breach the agreement that the two of them had between themselves not to talk about the three case closures, and more Anzilotti to Cottingham, as Anzilotti was at first intending to come to the meeting. Cottingham had wanted me to read a letter from him to the people of Midland Park, but was worried that Anzilotti would see that as a breach of their agreement.  I consulted Anzilotti on putting Cottingham's letter of atonement on the record.  Anzilotti asked me not to read Cottingham's letter at the public meeting. 

Right up to hours before it was to begin on December 30, 2019, a chair was set up for Anzilotti to sit with me and face the community. But at last minute, an hour before the meeting started, Anzilotti called me to say he was not coming, but gave me his blessings and assured me that if anybody from the press appeared, I could refer them to the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office and they were prepared to officially confirm the three victims’ names, causes of death and that Richard Cottingham had been identified as their murderer in exceptional closures.

On December 30, 2019, in co-ordination with and support of Chief Anzilotti and the Bergen Country Prosecutor’s office, with Jennifer in attendance, hosted by John Bandstra, I made it public in a small community meeting in a church basement that Cottingham had confessed to three murders in Bergen County from 1968-1969, and that BCPO had kept it secret from the public for good reasons: in the hope to extract further confessions, but that since 2017 when Anzilotti extracted the last confession of the three, none were forthcoming, and now Jennifer and I were going to assist BCPO in extracting further confessions.

THE MEDIA FRENZY JANUARY 2020
Although no press attended the meeting (other than a crew from a TV company Jennifer and I were working with) the news media picked up on the story  after the New Year holidays and began a frenzied reporting on the three cold case closures in early January 2020. The story went national, and then international.



New Jersey Herald: After "'Torso Killer' confession, NJ loved ones explain how 1960s' murders changed their lives."

To this day, more than a year after the 2023 A&E documentary The Torso Killer Confessions first aired, I cannot understand why Anzilotti said what he did, and wonder what else did he speak mistruths about?

The sad part is that Chief Anzilotti did some brilliant police work, and handled Cottingham for sixteen years with a sniper's patience and cunning, as doggedly and as patiently as Cottingham handled him.  After the story broke in January 2020, I had described to the press how the two of them had a kind of antagonistic, bickering, love/hate  "old married couple" relationship.

Anzilotti while a good policeman, never outgrew his backwater New Jersey roots and maybe he was saddled with a psychopathological need to make himself the center of everything (which in a way he actually was) but to the exclusion of everybody else around him, without crediting his team and collaborators.  I later chided him publically for not even crediting his BCPO partner Jimmy McMorrow who was there for all this in the press interviews after the revelations, and noticed that at least in The Torso Killer Confessions, Rob on a few occasions mentioned his partner Jimmy after that. Yes, Jimmy was there.

And later in 2021, Rob would betray Jennifer for everything she did to help him close "the Whale" - the Kelly and Pryor murders - weeks before his retirement, another bullshit story that Rob would spin in The Torso Killer Confessions.  Had Anzilotti acknowledged Jennifer Weiss's assistance and small contribution in talking Cottingham into confessing and pleading to Kelly & Pryor as a "retirement gift" to Anzilotti, I think he would have come out looking better and more of an inventive and 'out of the box' thinking a detective, than the preening huffed-up peacock boasting "look at me I am a genius who did this all by my lonesome brilliant self." In The Torso Killer Confessions, Rob comes off as a big time ambitious investigator with a small time credit-hogging petty backwoods mentality. 

The tragedy is that Rob really was an 'out of the box' cop who broke a lot of rules and went ways other cops would never dare, and in the end produced Cottingham case closures: seven between 2009-2022, and certainly Jennifer (and I) had nothing to do with the first four confessions he extracted from Cottingham 2020-2017.  I used to argue with Jennifer, that Rob did just fine without us before we showed up and had a much longer relationship than we did with Cottingham. 

But that was before I learned that Anzilotti had taken due credit from the former BCPO Chief of Detectives Alan Grieco and Assistant Attorney General Charles Buckley on the work they did on Nancy Vogel in 1996.  Who knows how the three secret confessions were closed now; Anzilotti has lost his credibility in my eyes after I saw The Torso Killer Confessions. And Jennifer died in May 2023 bitterly sad and broken hearted by Anzilotti's cruel refusal to acknowledge in a small way the assistance she had rendered in 2022 in closing the case of Kelly & Pryor, and my book sets the record straight on that.  Without Jennifer Weiss, there would have been no confession or plea from Richard Cottingham to the Kelly & Pryor murders in April 2021, and Anzilotti would have retired with the murders remaining unsolved.      

ANZILOTTI AND I AFTER THE REVELATIONS
In January 2020 after the media frenzy in New Jersey died down, Anzilotti and I met to review the ramifications of the public revelations on Cottingham's confessional mood and to the public's reaction to BCPO withholding from the public the three previous confessions. Both were positive. Anzilotti was ecstatic and our working relationship actually was at its best and moving into a new uncharted ground.  My making the announcement had actually broken the stagnant deadlock on further confessions that took hold after the last confessions in 2017.

The public understood. Contrary to Anzilotti's claim in the The Torso Killer Confessions, that "There were a lot of people that criticized the fact that we kept it quiet, and all that criticism was squarely at my feet," nobody criticized Rob Anzilotti, as I had defended his strategy in the public meeting, and in press interviews afterwards.  Nor did it become a "roadblock" to further confessions; it actually cleared the roadblock for further confessions because Cottingham had been begging Anzilotti to bring him up for more interviews since June 2017! The only roadblock had been how busy Anzilotti was as Chief. My move, cleared the roadblock, as in the wake of the media attention, Rob made new confessions his priority.

Despite Anzilotti previous reluctance before the public meeting and fear of "answering" questions from the community, now he was actually happy.  Firstly, prior to the revelation of the three case closures, Anzilotti's name had not come up in the press connected to Cottingham. When he led Cottingham in 2010 to confess and plea to Nancy Vogel, he had been barely mentioned in the press at all, and never in connection with a serial killer like Cottingham.  Thanks to my making the three confessions public, and crediting Anzilotti, suddenly he was for the first time broadly mentioned and connected to Richard Cottingham and duly credited for extracting the confessions, including Nancy Prior back in 2010.  And he deserved it.

Moreover my quote in the media as describing the relationship between Cottingham and Anzilotti as that of an "old married couple"  with a lot of love-hate bickering, became a hook in many later articles, including one in the New York Times written by a local journalist and friend of Anzilotti's, aggrandizing him as a serial killer whisperer and paving the way to his new reputation and later the A&E TV show. 

Before I praised Anzilotti in my other books, and to the press in January 2020 in the wake of the revelations that Cottingham had confessed to three cold cases from the 1960s, Anzilotti's name had rarely appeared in the press, and never connected to serial killer Richard Cottingham.  A search of newspapers.com will confirm that.  Anzilotti's name occasionally comes up connected to a few mediocre case closures and arrests in Bergen County, announcement of promotions at BCPO, but never in the context of a serial killer like Richard Cottingham. I had created a Frankenstein's monster with an ego so big it ate Hackensack.

With my passage praising Rob and Jimmy in the second edition of Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters  released in the winter of 2020, and in interviews with the media in January 2020, I suddenly created the huffed up preening blowhard who would now go on to betray Jennifer Weiss over the small but critical make-or-break assistance she would render him on the capping of his illustrious career - the closure of the Kelly & Pryor Murders in April 2021. It was one of the most important accomplishments for Jennifer in her troubled and chaotic life, and she went to her grave in May 2023 broken-hearted over how Anzilotti refused to mention her and thank her for what she did.  Again, the case of Kelly & Pryor would have never been closed without Jennifer.  Anzilotti in April 2021, would have not been able to pull it off without her, and would have retired without closing the case.  He owed Jennifer Weiss a "thanks for the assist" - the only thing that Jennifer wanted. A thank-you. "I exist." 

As for me, I never personally wanted "credit" from Anzilotti and BCPO.  The unprecedented open access that Anzilotti gave me to the case files was my reward and thanks for the assistance I had rendered him on my part.  I had a book deal with a major publisher and a TV deal and all the power to inevitably credit myself when the time came. 

ANZILOTTI AND I DEVISE A 'COTTINGHAM CONFESSION PLAN' JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2020
I was scheduled to return to Canada by the second week in January to begin winter semester teaching at my university and in my final weeks there Anzilotti and I now began to sketch out a plan for February 2020 when I would be available to return during winter-break at the university. Anzilotti wanted to land 'the Whale' of New Jersey cold cases, the 1974 unsolved murder of Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly, two teenage girls abducted on the way to a shopping mall, held captive, tortured and raped for two days, murdered and 'dumped' behind a housing complex parking lot.

The Kelly & Pryor murders were the most controversial unsolved cold case in New Jersey history and Anzilotti who already unknown to me had one-eye on leaving BCPO for private practice, had his other eye on closing this case before he 'retired' at BCPO. It would be a crowning achievement on a distinguished career that he could take to the bank.  Anzilotti as well wanted to be on TV.  He already had a run at trying to host a true crime TV show under development but it did not go into production. A TV show all about him and how he closed the Cottingham murders, something he could not do while still serving as a Chief, would be a great calling card for his TV ambitions and the private corporate investigative and police services business he was setting up Anzilotti Group Inc, and closing Kelly & Pryor would knock it out of the park.

"Everybody knew" for years now - including Jennifer and I - that Cottingham had murdered Loraine Kelly and Mary Ann Pryor. Cottingham and Anzilotti had a bond of trust, in which Cottingham was free to talk about his murders to Anzilotti knowing that he would not be charged until Cottingham agreed to make a formal confession.  The "ritual" was the reading of Cottingham's Miranda Rights, ("you have the right to be silent, you have the right to an attorney, anything you say can be used against you later...etc") Unless those rights were read in the interview, Cottingham knew his confessions were unusable in a court against him. When Cottingham and Anzilotti would conclude a deal negotiation for a confession that would end with a plea, and the time would come to make a formal confession, only then Miranda Rights would be read to Cottingham, he would acknowledge them, and the confession formally made, recorded and recognized.  That was how Anzilotti and Cottingham played the game. And as far as talking to me and Jennifer, we weren't cops; who were were going to go and tell? Rob?  So Cottingham talked a lot about his murders, especially the ones lined up on the negotiation table for forthcoming confession, and that included Kelly & Pryor which Cottingham knew Anzilotti wanted the most.

Solving cases is easy. Closing them is the hard part. The only hump in the road on Kelly & Pryor was that Rob unlike the previous three confessions, which were "exceptional closures" with no prosecution or sentencing, wanted Cottingham to go before a judge and plead guilty and take an additional sentence on Kelly & Pryor murders, something that Cottingham had not done since the Nancy Vogel case closure in 2010.

Anzilotti was complaining to me that since being appointed Chief in 2016, he did not have the time anymore to spend hours "listening to Richie's bullshit." Indeed, Cottingham rarely talked about murder or about his victims unless he was talking about something else, as in the 'pastrami murder' case I described previously.  He rarely responded to a direct questions, and the confessions come conversationally and 'by the way'  digressions.

I had the time and patience to pan out the gold nuggets of remembrances and flashes of murders Cottingham would blurt out and digress to. But Anzilotti did not.  Moreover, writing the kind of book I was, I was interested in Cottingham's extra-curricular activities, character, psychology, background and his life and times.  Anzilotti's interests were of a limited scope: solving a murder.

Cottingham previously told me, that when Anzilotti used to bring him up to BCPO field office in Paramus for interviews, they had to pick him up in Trenton State Prison early in the morning by the prison schedule for transport to Paramus -- a ninety-minute ride in a cop car with flashers going, cutting through the traffic, but on arrival at the field office, Rob would keep Cottingham locked up in an interview room all day eating pizza and burgers and reading newspapers and magazines until after 5:00 pm, when everybody in the office would go home, and Anzilotti would then bring Cottingham up to his office where he and "his crew" would play cards, drink and carouse and party with Cottingham through interviews, that would later result in formal confessions. After 5:00 pm, out of sight of the rest of the BCPO staff, because Anzilotti did not trust anybody working at BCPO to witness the "party interviews" except for "his crew" -- his loyal "ol' boys" including Lt. Jimmy McMorrow (Rob's former partner), Lt. Kelly Krenn, and Sgt. Kevin Dempsey.

I proposed to Anzilotti that he bring Cottingham up as usual in the morning and I would sit with him over pizza and listen to "his bullshit" and "warm him up" for the evening session when everybody goes home and Anzilotti can then at the end of the day take Cottingham off my hands to his office and get to business that he needed to do without needing to warm him up listening through his "bullshit."  Whatever I got from Cottingham during the day, if it did not contain murder case information in other jurisdictions, would still be of use to me in writing my book and understanding Cottingham in his past and psychology and his non-serial killer persona, etc. Plus I could videotape my interviews with Cottingham for an eventual TV series, something that was complicated and very time limited to do in Trenton State Prison where a TV crew on an approved "media visit" would only be given an hour with an inmate.

It was a win-win proposal for me, with a possible bonus: that Anzilotti might eventually invite me to come in the Cottingham confession sessions in his office! I was not law enforcement, but I was already working with "his boys" often enough - Kevin Dempsey and Kelli Krenn. Anzilotti was as Chief, and would often task them to assist me with calling down case boxes from the warehouse or sending messages to and from Cottingham and doing field boots-on-the-ground surveys and shooting photos for me while I was in Toronto doing historical geographic analysis on Cottingham suspected crime scenes, like the elusive abandoned agricultural well in Montvale, where Cottingham revealed he dropped three dead girls into. Often on my visits to work with the case files at BCPO I would see Krenn or Dempsey without seeing Rob at all that day.

Anzilotti thought it was a great idea and readily agreed and he and I set the schedule to do this in mid-February 2020 during semester winter break when I would return to New Jersey.

But it would never happen.  Instead the COVID Pandemic came calling and everything went off the rails and changed forever.

It did not happen the way Anzilotti told it.

NANCY VOGEL MURDER (1967) "YOU DIDN'T GO BACK FAR ENOUGH."
Nor is the story true which Anzilotti tells of how he through brilliant detective work, "discovered" and "deduced" that a victim Cottingham was describing to him was Nancy Vogel, murdered in 1967.

The truth was that Cottingham had already confessed to the murder of Nancy Vogel back in 1996 to BCPO Chief of Detective Alan Grieco long before Anzilotti showed up. When Cottingham confessed to Grieco, Anzilotti was a twenty-six year-old probationary detective wet behind the years, recently hired at BCPO (in 1996 with Grieco's mentorship) from a small town police force, where Anzilotti was a uniformed cop writing traffic tickets, investigating noise complaints and writing up missing cat reports.

Alan Grieco was a former Olympic (1964) bicycle sprint and road racing champion before an injury cut short his sporting career, and he came to work for BCPO in 1970 as an investigator - the year Anzilotti was born shitting in his diapers.  Grieco was one of the original investigating officers along with his partner the late Ed Denning when Cottingham was first arrested.  Grieco was the detective in the Maryann Carr murder in 1977 murder in 1980, and after Cottingham's arrest in May 1980 the two murders were quickly connected to him and Grieco and Denning were assigned with other BCPO homicide officers to the case.  It was Alan Grieco who went to New York to conduct interviews with Cottingham's mistresses and all his fellow-employees at Blue Cross Insurance, copies of which he had generously shared with me when I went first to see him with Jennifer in 2018 to interview him.

Grieco had a long standing adversarial relationship with Cottingham going back to Cottingham's arrest and prosecution in 1980, but at the same time Cottingham had a grudging respect for and trust in Grieco. In 1996 Grieco was Chief of Detectives at BCPO when he was surprised by a letter from Cottingham inviting Grieco to come down and visit him in Trenton State Prison about sixteen years after Cottingham had been convicted in the two New Jersey murders at trial in 1981 and 1982. 

Grieco long suspected that Cottingham committed more murders in Bergen County than the two he was convicted for in the 1980s which spanned only a short period of 1977 to 1980.   He accepted the invitation and went to see Cottingham, who said to Grieco, "You did good detective work, but you got one thing wrong. You didn't go back far enough." (Virginia Rohan and Stephanie Dazio, "Homicides haunt loved one, police: Decades later, teen's slayings remain unsolved" The Record, Hackensack, New Jersey, August 8, 2016 Page A6; Peter Vronsky interviews with Alan Grieco.)

Not only had Cottingham gone on to confess to the murder of Nancy Vogel to Grieco, but he also alluded to Grieco in 1996 that he murdered Kelly and Pryor in 1974. He told Grieco "I remember picking up a couple of girls, by one of the malls, on one of the highways. I disposed of them out of the area." Greico did a lot of preliminary work on that case too linking it to Cottingham twenty-three years before Anzilotti again, claimed that on his 'lonesome' self claims he brilliantly, closed the Kelly & Pryor murders on the eve of his retirement in April 2021, without Grieco's assistance or that of Jennifer Weiss's. [see Part x for the Kelly & Pryor case closures.)

Cottingham told Grieco that he wanted to confess to Vogel because he felt badly about having killed a mother of two children and wanted to get it off his chest but he wanted a deal: minimum publicity in court because unlike other serial killers, Cottingham hates publicity. Cottingham is "embarrassed" by what he did (as opposed to ashamed or remorseful.) Moreover, he kept silent since the 1980s because he did not want to bring attention to his family, his adult two sons and a daughter, and cause harm to their successful professional careers, nor bring attention to his ex-wife Janet.  As part of the terms of his confession and plea, Cottingham also wanted something for himself: extra food rations in prison. 

Working with Charles Buckley, the New Jersey Deputy-Attorney General, assigned at that time to BCPO as an interim prosecutor, who had a lot of political clout to see through an unusual unprecedented deal with Cottingham like the one being proposed, Alan Grieco got the case details out of Cottingham to ensure that indeed he had committed the murder, including that Cottingham took the car keys away from the car that Vogel was found in and threw them away, information that police held back from the press in 1967.

The unprecedented deal was presented to and approved by all the parties concerned with endorsing it: the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office (BCPO), the Department of Corrections (DOC), and the New Jersey Attorney General (NJAG), but at last minute, when it landed on the desk of Governor Christine Todd Whitman, who was being criticized in the press recently for being "too soft on crime", she became concerned about the political optics of a deal with a serial killer if it became public.  She cancelled the deal.  The Vogel cold case murder would now remain unresolved for another twelve years before it would be closed in 2010

In The Torso Killer Confessions Anzilotti looked into the camera and spun a story how he cleverly untangled the Nancy Vogel murder mystery and connected it to Cottingham victim without crediting the retired BCPO detective Alan Grieco, who actually solved the case in 1996. Moreover, Grieco had been Anzilotti's 'godfather' when Grieco was Chief of Detectives at BCPO; he mentored and hired Anzilotti as a detective in 1996 from the uniformed police service as a beat cop in the small sleepy dead-end municipality of Woodcliff Lake. For Anzilotti not to credit his old mentor for the work he did on developing the Nancy Vogel murder investigation, was act of disloyalty. 

In the version he told, Robert Anzilotti was not only aggrandizing himself and the new private investigation and law enforcement management consulting agency that he established after retiring, the Anzilotti Group but he was at the same time obscuring his former mentor Alan Grieco of the same opportunity to bring attention to his own private investigation agency which he is still operating.

Cottingham's confession to the Vogel murder had been delivered to Anzilotti on a silver platter like room service by Grieco and Buckley.  Not just the investigative work, but the deal structure too, that had been negotiated, done and made in 1996, along with the case work completed by them. In a manner of speaking, if BCPO was a college and Anzilotti was a student submitting the Vogel case as an essay, he would have been failed for plagiarism: a "F".

Taking all the credit for himself and sharing none, will be a pathological flaw that Anzilotti will reveal himself having, especially when it will come to Jennifer Weiss and the critical assistance she rendered to him in the last weeks of April 2021 as Rob was retiring and desperate to close the Kelly & Pryor case: "the whale" of New Jersey cold cases. His betrayal would leave Jennifer broken-hearted, and she would take that broken heart to the grave. (Figuratively speaking: she had been cremated.)

Photo and caption from the Jersey Herald News March 26, 2021 "Robert Anzilotti estimates that closed more than a dozen cold cases by himself."