NEW JERSEY COLD CASES 1960 - 1980
CASE TIMELINES
GEO-FORENSIC MURDER MAP
JOINT NEW YORK STATE - NYPD
1960 - 1980 COLD CASE DATA PORTAL
The New Jersey Girl Murders Project welcomes any submission of information or corrections of fact on any of these listed cases or on
any cases between 1960 and 1980 overlooked here.
All sources of information will be treated confidentially.
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About New Jersey Cold Cases 1960-1980
This is a listing of case summaries and an online map of 58 unsolved cold case sexual murders or suspicious disappearances of female victims in New Jersey between 1960 and 1980.
There are two ways of viewing the cases on this website. A
Case Timeline offers a narrative description of the
cases (primarily based) on contemporary media
reports. The
Geo-Forensic Murder Map features a Google Map with an
overlay of where victims were murdered or found and the associated secondary locations
("geo-forensic markers") such as where
the victims were last seen, resided, their
destination if known, etc. The
map include cases of New Jersey females who were found murdered in New
York, or victims murdered in New York by perpetrators residing in New Jersey.
The body/murder location points are color coded chronologically:
Green=1960-1969;
Red= 1970-1974;
Orange=1975-1980
Black= Case Closed
The password protected Suspect Map Overlay includes geo-forensic data on suspects and is restricted to members of law enforcement and approved investigative researchers. It is password protected by security protocols hosted by russianbooks.org on US-based servers.
INTRODUCTION: The unsolved New Jersey Girl Murders 1960-1980.
The 58 cases primarily occurred in Bergen, Monmouth, Middlesex, Essex, Passaic and Ocean Counties and remain unsolved to this day. Cold cases in Bergen County until 2016 were listed on the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office (BCPO) website. [Archived BCPO Unsolved Cases webpage circa 2016 ] Other New Jersey counties sometimes list some of their unsolved cases on their own websites like Burlington, Middlesex, Somerset, Monmouth, Camden, Cumberland, and Cape May Counties and New Jersey State Police Unidentified bodies website.
The M.O. (modus operandi - method of operation) of the perpetrator or perpetrators varies across the range of these cases from victims being attacked in their home or place of work in the daytime to being abducted on the street at night or ambushed and killed while walking in the vicinity of their home, school or local business. Some of the bodies were concealed or thrown into bodies of water, while others were abandoned by a roadside unconcealed. Some of the victims were mutilated or decapitated and dismembered. Causes of death ranged from manual and ligature strangulation, stabbing, battery to asphyxiation and forcible drowning. In four cases victims were killed together as a pair, including a mother and her daughter. While not all the victims were subjected to forcible penetrative rape, some form of identifiable sexual assault was a key feature of most of the homicides listed here, with the exception of victims found in a state of decomposition too advanced to ascertain a cause of death, or victims who had disappeared in suspicious circumstances suggestive of foul play.
It is entirely plausible that some of these homicides were committed by a single serial perpetrator, or that groupings of the homicides were committed by several serial perpetrators working independently of each other. Several solved serial homicides are included in the case histories and on the geo-forensic map as reference points for scale and scope and are identified as closed cases on a separate layer.
Between 1960 and 1980 at least eight serial killers or
suspected serial killers were identified in New Jersey:
Raymond
Alves,
Richard Biegenwald,
Richard
Cottingham,
William Doss,
Joseph Kallinger,
Richard Kuklinski,
Robert Reldan,
and Robert Zarinsky.
Some of their known murders are similar to some of the cold cases
from the time periods these perpetrators were
killing or occurred in the geographic proximity of their known
murders. However, because sexual homicide is a pathological offense,
different individual perpetrators can often commit murders with very similar
characteristics common to the psychopathology of sexual offenders, both
serial and single.
The New Jersey Girl Murders Project welcomes any submission of information or corrections of fact through Contact Us on any of these listed cases or on cases between 1960 and 1980 overlooked here. Information will be treated confidentially.