The sister of a teenager who disappeared in the 1970s has spoken about her extraordinary lifelong search for answers, culminating in her writing a letter to a notorious American serial killer this year.
Maryann Collette was just nine years old when her sister, Patricia Newsom16-year-old disappeared from her boarding school in the Monticello area of New York.
Patricia’s whereabouts had remained a mystery until last year, when Maryann’s DNA was used to identify her as the victim of an unsolved murder case from August 1975.
An unknown suspect had suffocated, gagged and wrapped the teenager in a tarp before dumping her body in New Haven, Connecticut, but the case had been considered a “Jane Doe” mystery that baffled detectives for decades.
Fast forward to 2024, her younger sister Maryann, now 59, lives a peaceful life in Blountville, northeast Tennessee, where she has chickens that could be heard clucking in the background of her call with DailyMail.com, belying the dark story she was about to reveal.
Maryann Collette was just nine years old when her sister, Patricia Newsom (pictured), 16, disappeared from their boarding school in the Monticello area of New York.
Maryann, now 59, lives a peaceful life in Blountville, north-east Tennessee, where she has chickens that could be heard clucking in the background as she spoke to DailyMail.com, belying the dark story she was about to reveal.
Maryann explained to DailyMail.com why she wrote to the man she believes is responsible for her sister’s death – the notorious ‘Times Square killer’ Richard Cottingham (pictured).
Maryann described her painstaking search for answers about what happened to her beloved sister, while explaining why she wrote to the man she believes responsible, the notorious “Times Square Killer” Richard Cottingham.
“Writing to a serial killer is not something I saw coming,” Maryann told Dailymail.com. “But I had been looking for my sister for 47 years. If I confessed to anything, it would mean that chapter of my life was over.”
“You have to take the emotions out of the situation,” she added. “I’m a very direct person. He’s alive. I wanted to know if he killed my sister. Do you remember anything about my sister?”
“Since he’s older now and I don’t know how much he’ll remember, I basically explained to him a little bit about who my sister was, why I was writing to him, and why I thought he might have been responsible.”
Patricia’s body was found on August 16, 1975 in a drainage ditch in New Haven, Connecticut. At the time, detectives only knew that she had died of asphyxiation and the case would remain unsolved for decades.
Maryann said she believes Cottingham, also known as the “Torso Killer,” is the killer because of the similarities between how Patricia was found and several of the killer’s other victims.
“There are some similarities with some of his other crimes – the way they left the bodies, the way they killed them and the things he didn’t do to them,” he told DailyMail.com.
“I’ve been able to rule out a lot of other serial killers. But I can’t rule him out.”
Maryann Collette was just nine years old when her sister, Patricia Newsom, 16, disappeared from their boarding school in the Monticello area of New York. (Pictured: Maryann, left, with her sister Patricia, center, and her late brother Peter, right)
Patricia’s body was found on August 16, 1975 in a drainage ditch in New Haven, Connecticut. At the time, detectives only knew that she had died of asphyxiation and the case would remain unsolved for decades.
Patricia’s identification came in April of last year after Maryann shared her DNA from genealogy company Ancestry with a publicly available database called GEDmatch, which compares data samples from different testing companies.
Cottingham, 77, claims to have murdered about 100 women in Florida, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Baltimore in the second half of the 20th century.
Although he was known for mutilating the corpses of some victims, which was not the case with Patricia, many of his murders also involved leaving the bodies intact.
“I found an old interview with him,” Maryann said. “He talked about throwing young girls down a well after killing them and he was worried about them rotting away.”
He drew parallels between Cottingham’s self-proclaimed concern and the fact that Patricia’s body was left in a place where it would be easily discovered.
Patricia’s identification came in April of last year after Maryann shared her DNA from genealogy company Ancestry with a publicly available database called GEDmatch, which compares data samples from different testing companies.
Asked what that moment was like, Maryann said: “Amazing. It’s still amazing. Forty-seven years, that’s a really long time.”
Patricia has now been buried next to her mother and grandparents in the family cemetery in Pennsylvania.
“A detective from our local police department came to my house and asked if I could talk to him. He put me in touch with the captains and they said, ‘We found your sister.’ What do you say to that?”
“There’s a part of me that’s been missing my whole life and now I have that missing part.”
Maryann noted that she was wearing a pendant with Patricia’s ashes. “She is always with me,” she said.
Patricia has now been buried next to her mother and grandparents in the family cemetery in Pennsylvania.
Maryann said she doesn’t know if Cottingham has received her letter or if he will respond.
However, East Haven Police Capt. Murgo, who was the one who notified Maryann about Patricia’s identification, said he has been trying to arrange a meeting with Cottingham to discuss the case.
“Mr. Cottingham was active from the mid- to late-1960s up until the time he was arrested in New York City in 1980, so it definitely fits the time period in which Patricia was murdered,” he said. NBC News.