It took a detective in the US state of New Jersey almost his entire career to win a game of cat and mouse with serial killer Richard Cottingham.
WARNING: Readers might find some of the details in this story distressing.
The then-64-year-old Cottingham was known as the Torso Killer for a spate of horrifying murders in the late 1970s in New York City.
By day, he seemed an average father of three, living in suburban New Jersey and commuting to Manhattan, where he had a good job as a computer programmer.
But when night fell on New York, Cottingham's mask of respectability slipped.
He stalked Times Square, where he would hire women selling sex before taking them to motel rooms and killing them.
He was finally caught in 1980 and sentenced to life in prison for the deaths of five young women.
But Detective Robert Anzilotti always had a gut feeling there was more to the story.
On his desk, he had a pile of cold cases involving the murders of women and young girls from New Jersey and New York in the late 60s and early 70s.
No-one but Anzilotti had ever thought to link the Torso Killer to the unsolved killings.
The victims and the circumstances of their deaths were entirely different to Cottingham's known crimes.
And yet Anzilotti just knew the man responsible was sitting in New Jersey State Prison, serving time for the deaths of five people but denying answers for the loved ones of several more.
In 2004, he began to visit Cottingham in jail.
He'd play cards with him, occasionally order a pizza — any little treat that might break up the monotony of prison life and get Cottingham to open up about his past.
"He's very intelligent. He can be affable," Anzilotti told local media last year.
"He's very talkative about nonsense. He's happy to talk to you just to occupy his time."
Finally, after six years, Cottingham spontaneously decided to reveal one of his secrets to the detective.
"I'm going to give you one,'" the killer said to the police officer.
The young suburban mother
In October 1967, 29-year-old Nancy Vogel told her family she was heading down to the local church for a game of bingo with friends.
The married mother of two would be found three days later, bound and strangled to death in her own car.
Her murder remained unsolved for 43 years until Cottingham confessed.
Prosecutors cannot be sure, but assume that Vogel may have been an acquaintance of Cotttingham's, given they were both raising young families in Little Ferry, New Jersey.
Despite his notoriety, Cottingham seemed fearful of further media attention.
He told Anzilotti he would only confess to the murders he got away with if he could do so quietly.
"We would always tell the victims' families. But we would never do press conferences or press releases," Anzilotti said.
"We had a larger goal, which is to get every homicide out of him."
Despite arranging a secret, night-time court appearance so he could plead guilty away from the glare of the spotlight, local reporters still found out what was going on.
Cottingham vowed to never speak to Anzilotti again, and to take his secrets to the grave.
But after a year of silence, Cottingham grew restless in his prison cell and asked Anzilotti to come see him.
Their psychological game was back on.
The teenagers trying to get home
Over the next few years, Cottingham would slowly reveal to Anzilotti that he was responsible for the deaths of three more people.
First, in 2014, he casually mentioned that he had strangled to death an 18-year-old woman in the spring of 1969.
Her name was Irene Blase, and she had vanished one evening while waiting for a bus to take her back to her mother's house.
Anzilotti wanted to keep Cottingham talking, but the only way he could do that was if he struck an unusual bargain with the victim's family.
He called the Blases and broke the bittersweet news: He had found Irene's killer, who was already behind bars for the rest of his life.
But he needed them to make one sacrifice.
In a bid to shake loose more of Cottingham's secrets, Anzilotti asked if he could quietly close Irene's case without charge.
Irene's loved ones agreed, hopeful they could give other victims' families the answers they deserved.
A clearer picture was emerging of Cottingham's murky early years in suburban New Jersey.
Several months after he killed Irene, he confessed to murdering Denise Falasca, a 15-year-old he lured into his car with the promise of a lift home.
Police had always suspected one perpetrator was behind the killing of the two teens.
But then Cottingham shocked everyone by revealing another victim.
In 1968, Jackie Harp, just 13 years old, was walking home from band practice when a man in a car offered her a lift.
She refused and ran off.
Witnesses saw the man give chase, force the child into his car and drive off. She would later be found strangled to death in a wooded ravine.
Anzilotti couldn't give Jackie, Irene and Denise's families justice, but he could assure them Cottingham would never walk the streets of New Jersey again.
Jackie's childhood best friend Cyndie Neil, who had called the prosecutor's office every year for 50 years asking for an update, struggled with the resolution to the case.
“At first I didn’t want to believe it, and then I thought, 'Now I have someone to blame for everything,'" she said.
"That was a lot of crap to carry for 50-something years," she told the New Jersey Herald last year.
But as Anzilotti approached retirement, he had one loose end that Cottingham stubbornly refused to allow him to tie up.
'Once I give you that case, I'll never see you again'
By March last year, Anzilotti was ready to move on with his life.
He had been a police officer for nearly three decades, half of which he had spent locked in a psychological game with a serial killer.
He went to Cottingham and broke the news.
Cottingham, who had spent half of his life in a high-security penitentiary with only the detective's occasional visits to break up the monotony, urged him to reconsider.
For the 17 years they had been talking, Cottingham had dangled the possibility of one more revelation.
New Jersey had long been haunted by the grisly deaths of two teens — Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Marie Kelly — who had vanished in 1974 while trying to hitchhike to a local shopping mall.
Their bodies were found in the woods five days later.
Curiously, they had drowned. But there were no bodies of water nearby.
With just days to go before Anzilotti handed in his badge, Cottingham finally gave in.
"I was with them for a couple of days and got to know them," Cottingham said of the teens, according to an official police transcript of his confession.
The deaths of Mary Ann and Lorraine represented a dramatic escalation in Cottingham's violence against women.
He admitted luring them into his car after they gave up waiting for a bus to take them to the mall where they planned to buy new swimming costumes.
Days of horror in a New Jersey motel room ended when he drowned both girls in the bathtub.
Anzilotti told the New York Times he believed Cottingham had several reasons to keep this particular crime to himself.
Despite the terror he unleashed on American women and girls for decades, somehow, this particular crime caused him something akin to shame.
"He's embarrassed by this case," Anzilotti said.
The ageing killer might have also feared losing his only visitor's sporadic visits.
"He said, 'I know once I give you that case, I'll never see you again,'" Anzilotti said.
"He enjoys our relationship. He enjoys our time together."
In April last year, Cottingham went to court and admitted to the murders of Mary Ann and Lorraine.
Two life sentences, to be served concurrently, were added to his 200 years of prison time.
Five days later, Anzilotti finally walked away.
He has no illusions about his connection with the killer.
"I was like a game to him," he told local media after the plea deal was struck.
'I have problems with women'
By the time Cottingham was arrested in 1980, his crimes had developed into frenzied, ghoulish violence.
His murders, which by then involved torture and dismemberment, earned him the nickname the Torso Killer and the New York Ripper.
He was finally caught when a maid in Manhattan heard the screams of an 18-year-old woman in a motel room and called police.
"I have problems with women," was all Cottingham said to the arresting officers by way of explanation.
Since his association with Anzilotti ended, Cottingham has confessed to an additional five cold cases.
Among them Is the murder of Diane Cusick, a 23-year-old dancer who vanished from a shopping mall parking lot in 1968 after buying new dance shoes.
Cottingham has told authorities he killed between 85 to 100 women throughout his life — a claim police believe is inflated.
He has only been officially linked to murders where DNA evidence puts him at the crime scene, or when he has provided details that only the killer would know.
But he is still believed to likely be one of the most prolific serial killers in US history.
Now an old man with a bushy white beard, Cottingham appeared in court via video link, sometimes from a hospital bed.
Earlier this month, he made what may be his last court appearance.
In the end, it was a woman who sat in judgement of Cottingham's final confessions.
Judge Caryn Fink said to the 76-year-old that if he wanted to seek forgiveness from his victims' families, now was the time.
"No," Cottingham responded.
"There are no words to describe how purely evil you are," she shot back.
"You stand before the court now, over 50 years after you have committed your crimes, sick and infirm.
"But make no mistake, Mr Cottingham. No-one has any sympathy for you. There is no sentence that I can impose that will truly be enough."
