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For more than six decades, the murder of 18-year-old nursing student Alys Eberhardt remained unsolved. On September 24, 1965, Eberhardt was found dead inside her family's home in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, after being stabbed and beaten. Despite an extensive investigation involving local, state and federal authorities, the person responsible was never identified.

Then, more than 50 years later, investigators found themselves looking in an unexpected direction.

The case was reopened in 2021, when Fair Lawn detectives began reviewing the original files and examining whether convicted serial killer Richard Cottingham could have been responsible. Cottingham, known as the "Torso Killer" and "Times Square Ripper," had already been connected to multiple murders across New York and New Jersey and was serving several life sentences.

Over the next four years, investigators repeatedly interviewed Cottingham, building a relationship with people close to him while quietly pursuing the possibility that Eberhardt had been one of his earliest victims. As his health deteriorated, Cottingham eventually asked to speak with detectives again.

In December, he reportedly gave investigators a full verbal confession to Eberhardt's murder and later provided a written statement. According to police, his admissions included details about the crime, the family's home and circumstances that had never been released publicly. Those details gave investigators additional confidence that the confession was genuine.

Authorities decided not to pursue another criminal prosecution, citing the family's desire for answers and closure rather than another lengthy legal process. Cottingham remains in prison for other murders and has confessed to several additional killings in recent years.

For Eberhardt's family, the admission brought something they had been waiting for since 1965: a definitive answer about who killed Alys. Her nephew said the family finally knew what had happened and could honor her memory with the truth.

Cottingham has now confessed to numerous murders spanning nearly a decade, but investigators continue to examine which unsolved cases might be connected to him. Whether his latest confession finally closes one chapter or opens the door to more unanswered questions remains to be seen.

Ottis Toole became one of the most notorious figures in American true crime history, but separating fact from fiction in his story is unusually difficult. Toole and fellow convicted killer Henry Lee Lucas claimed responsibility for more than 100 murders, yet many of those confessions were later shown to be false or unsupported by evidence.

Toole's early life was marked by severe instability and abuse. He left school at a young age and accumulated a lengthy criminal history before eventually meeting Lucas in Jacksonville, Florida, in the 1970s. The two men later became associated with a series of violent crimes across several states.

Both men were notorious for confessing to unsolved murders. Lucas in particular became known as the “Confession Killer,” claiming responsibility for crimes investigators eventually determined he could not have committed. Toole similarly supplied investigators with sweeping accounts of murders, including claims involving a supposed cult that authorities were unable to substantiate.

Ultimately, Toole was convicted of six murders. Among them were the deaths of George Sonnenberg and Ada Johnson, as well as four additional victims in the Jacksonville area. He received multiple life sentences and spent the remainder of his life in prison.

One of the most infamous cases connected to Toole was the 1981 disappearance of six-year-old Adam Walsh. Adam disappeared from a Florida shopping mall, and his remains were discovered weeks later. Toole repeatedly confessed to killing the boy, then later withdrew his confession. Physical evidence that might have helped establish what happened was lost, and Toole was never charged with Adam's murder. Authorities eventually attributed the crime to him and closed the case.

Toole also made extraordinary claims about other killings and even cannibalism, but there is no reliable evidence supporting many of these statements. His history illustrates one of the biggest problems surrounding confession-heavy investigations: an admission is not necessarily proof, particularly when a suspect has a demonstrated history of claiming responsibility for crimes they could not have committed.

Toole died in prison in 1996 at the age of 49. His name remains linked to some of America's most disturbing unsolved and solved cases, but the true number of people he killed may never be known.