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Thread: Richard Cottingham - "The Torso Killer" and "The Times Square Killer"

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    Richard Cottingham - "The Torso Killer" and "The Times Square Killer"



    A list of his victims in chronological order.

    1967: Nancy Schiava Vogel (29).
    1968: Jacalyn Harp (13).
    1969: Irene Blase (18).
    1969: Denise Falasca (18).
    1972: Mary Beth Heinz (21).
    1972: Laverne Moye (23).
    1973: Sheila Hyman (33).
    1973: Marita Emerita Rosado Nieves (18).

    1974: Lorraine Marie Kelly (16).
    1974: Mary Ann Pryor (17).
    1977: Maryann Carr (26).
    1979: Deedeh Goodarzi (22).
    1979: Unidentified female.
    1980: Jean Reyner (25).
    1980: Valerie Ann Street (19).


    Mary Beth Heinz


    Sheila Heiman


    Richard Cottingham was recently charged for the murder of Diane Cusick in 1968





    Richard Cottingham appears via video link at his arraignment, Wednesday, June 22, 2022 in Mineola, N.Y.



    Richard Francis Cottingham (born November 25, 1946) is an American serial killer and rapist who murdered a minimum of 11 young women and girls in New York and New Jersey between 1967 and 1980. He was nicknamed The Torso Killer and The Times Square Killer. In 2009, nearly 30 years after being convicted of five murders in trials in New Jersey and New York in 1981–1984, Cottingham admitted to a journalist that he had committed at least 80 to 100 "perfect murders" of women in various regions of the United States, of which, since 2009, six have been subsequently confirmed and their cases closed.

    In the most notorious of his murders, Cottingham tortured and murdered sex worker Deedeh Goodarzi, age 22, and a still unidentified teenage victim, severed their heads and hands, and set the mattresses under their bodies on fire. Cottingham fled the scene with the severed heads and hands, which were never recovered. He was eventually apprehended on May 22, 1980, in a New Jersey motel while in the act of torturing a teenage sex worker whom he had lured and driven to the location from New York City.

    Cottingham was convicted of five murders, two in New Jersey and three in New York, plus multiple charges of kidnapping and sexual assualt and other charges. Four surviving victims testified against Cottingham; he was convicted in three of the abduction-rape survivor cases and acquitted in one. In 2010, Cottingham pleaded guilty to the 1967 murder of Nancy Vogel. Subsequently, he confessed under immunity to the murders of New Jersey school girls Jackie Harp, Irene Blase, and Denise Falasca in 1968–1969 in Bergen County, New Jersey. In 2021 he confessed and pleaded guilty in the double abduction rape/murders of Lorraine Marie Kelly, 16 and Mary Ann Pryor, 17. In 2022, he was charged with the 1968 murder of Diane Cusick through DNA evidence.

    Trials

    During the early 1980s, Cottingham was convicted of five murders, in two separate New Jersey murder trials in 1981 and 1982, and in a single trial in New York City in 1984 for three murders. He pleaded innocent and, for the next thirty years, insisted he was being "framed", until admitting in 2009 that he had actually perpetrated the murders he was accused of. Cottingham was apparently 'forensically aware' and, in the 13-year period during which he is known to have committed 11 murders, in the pre-DNA era, only one fingerprint belonging to him was ever recovered, from the ratchet mechanism of handcuffs left behind on Valerie Street. A case based on his 'signature pattern' was built against him, combined with the testimony of four surviving victims, as well as pieces of his victims' jewelry and other items found in his possession after his arrest.

    In 2010 he pleaded guilty to the 1967 murder of Nancy Vogel.

    In 2021, he pleaded guilty to the 1974 kidnapping, raping and drowning of Loraine Marie Kelly and Mary Ann Pryor. He also confessed to three murders of New Jersey school girls in 1968–1969 in return for immunity from prosecution.

    In 2022, he was arraigned from his hospital bed for the 1968 murder of Diane Cusick. The link was found through DNA evidence; authorities believe it to be, thus far, the oldest criminal case to be prosecuted by DNA evidence.

    Cottingham is currently incarcerated in South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, New Jersey.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cottingham
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

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    "Torso Killer" Richard Cottingham charged in 1968 murder of Long Island mother Diane Cusick

    By CBS News

    More than five decades after Diane Cusick's lifeless body was discovered in the parking lot of a mall on New York's Long Island, authorities have linked her death to the so-called "Torso Killer," a serial killer already convicted in 11 other killings.

    The suspect, Richard Cottingham — believed to be one of America's most prolific serial killers — was arraigned Wednesday on a second-degree murder charge in connection with Cusick's 1968 killing. From a hospital bed in New Jersey, where he's already serving a life sentence for other killings, Cottingham pleaded not guilty.

    While he has claimed he was responsible for up to 100 homicides, authorities in New York and New Jersey have officially linked him to only a dozen so far, including Cusick's death. He has been imprisoned since 1980, when he was arrested after a motel maid heard a woman screaming inside his room. Authorities found her alive but bound with handcuffs and suffering from bite marks and knife wounds.

    Cottingham asked to be arraigned Wednesday by video feed from the New Jersey hospital because he was in poor health, bedridden and not ambulatory, Judge Caryn Fink said. He needed his lawyer, Jeff Groder, to repeat the judge's questions several times because he has difficulty hearing, Groder said.

    "He is a violent predator and no matter how he looks today in a hospital bed he was not always a feeble older man," Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly said in an interview with The Associated Press. "He was a young 22-year-old when he committed the murder of Ms. Cusick. He was strong, stronger than these women were, and he was violent."

    CBS New York reports Cottingham previously confessed to kidnapping and killing 17-year-old Mary Ann Pryor and 16-year-old Lorraine Marie Kelly in 1974 near a mall in Paramus, New Jersey.

    Authorities believe Cusick, 23, left her job at a children's dance school and then stopped at the Green Acres Mall in Nassau County to buy a pair of shoes when Cottingham followed her out. Detectives believe he pretended to be a security guard or police officer, accused her of stealing and then overpowered the 98-pound (44-kilogram) Cusick, Nassau County Police Detective Capt. Stephen Fitzpatrick said.

    She was "brutally beaten, murdered and raped in that car," Fitzpatrick said. The medical examiner concluded that Cusick had been beaten in the face and head and was suffocated until she died. She had defensive wounds on her hands, and police were able to collect DNA evidence at the scene. But at the time, there was no DNA testing.

    Police interviewed dozens of people, retraced her steps and never stopped hunting for her killer. But the trail went cold.

    "The police did a great job looking for any leads they could find. "They spoke to hundreds of people at the Green Acres Mall to see if anyone had seen Diane," Donnelly said. "Unfortunately, the trail went cold and the case went cold."

    Cottingham was working as a computer programmer for a health insurance company in New York at the time of Cusick's death. He was convicted of murder in both New York and New Jersey in the 1980s, though the law at the time didn't require people convicted to submit DNA samples, as it does now. His DNA was taken and entered into a national database in 2016 when he pleaded guilty to another murder in New Jersey.

    In 2021, police in Nassau County received a tip that a suspect who might be responsible for killings in the county, just east of New York City, was locked up in New Jersey. They began running DNA tests again on cold cases and came up with a match to Cottingham.

    Cottingham also led police to believe he was responsible for the death by providing some information about the case, including telling detectives he was near a drive-in theater, which was next to the mall at the time. But he stopped short of confessing directly to Cusick's death, Donnelly said.

    "He didn't lay out a full admission. What he laid out was baby steps along the way that we were able to put together with the help of the police department to fill in that story," she said.

    Prosecutors are now reviewing all open cases around the same time and running DNA to see if Cottingham may have been responsible for other killings.

    "It was only through advances in DNA technology that the NCDA and our partners at the Nassau County Police Department, could solve this 54-year-old cold case and identify a suspect in Ms. Cusick's tragic death,". "We make a promise to her surviving daughter today: we will bring her mother's killer to justice."

    Cusick's daughter, Darlene Altman, said she was overwhelmed when she saw Cottingham on the video screen in the courtroom. Altman was just 4 when her mother was killed.

    "He just had this like dead stare. I felt like he was looking right at me," Altman said. "It was creepy."

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/richard...k-long-island/
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

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    Edited:

    NYC 'torso killer’ pleads guilty to 1968 murder of Long Island woman Diane Cusick, admits to killing 4 others

    Richard Cottingham pleads guilty to Diane Cusick murder, killings of four other women in Nassau County

    By Danielle Wallace
    Fox News

    The so-called "torso killer" or "Times Square killer," who claims to have murdered up to 100 people in New York and New Jersey, pleaded guilty on Monday to the 1968 killing of Long Island single mother Diane Cusick and also admitted to the slayings of another four women in Nassau County from 1972-73.

    Richard Cottingham, 73, is already serving a life sentence in New Jersey state prison for murdering nearly a dozen women and girls in the 1960s. He allegedly often posed as a mall security guard and approached victims in parking lots, accusing them of shoplifting before launching his violent attacks.

    In a break of the five-decades-long case, Cottingham was indicted earlier this year for the killing of 23-year-old Cusick, a dance teacher and mother of a then-four-year-old daughter who had gone to the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream alone to purchase new dance shoes.

    Her parents reported her missing when she failed to return, and her father was the one to find Cusick beaten, raped and duct-taped in the back seat of her car in the mall parking lot just two days after Valentine’s Day that year.

    Appearing virtually from a New Jersey prison for the Nassau County Court hearing, Cottingham was sentenced to 25 years to life behind bars for Cusick's slaying.

    He received immunity from prosecution for the four other killings he admitted to as part of his plea deal in Cusick’s death. Those were the murders of 21-year-old Mary Beth Heinz on May 10, 1972; 23-year-old Laverne Moye on July 20, 1972; 33-year-old Sheila Heiman on July 20, 1973; and 18-year-old Marita Emerita Rosado Nieves on Dec. 27, 1973.

    "It was only through advances in DNA technology that the NCDA and our partners at the Nassau County Police Department, could solve this 54-year-old cold case and identify a suspect in Ms. Cusick’s tragic death," Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly said in June, announcing the indictment. "We make a promise to her surviving daughter today: we will bring her mother’s killer to justice."

    "I never thought I would see this day, but all these people got justice for my mom," Cusick’s daughter, Darlene Altman, said in June. "It was overwhelming to see him on video in court with a dead stare."

    Altman told News 12 she would fly from Florida to attend the court hearing on Monday.

    DNA evidence reportedly linked Cottingham to the murders of the other four women killed in Nassau County.

    https://www.foxnews.com/us/nyc-torso...lling-4-others
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

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