BRIGHT LIGHTS, BILLBOARDS & MURDER
THE SHOCKING TRUTH BEHIND NEW YORK CITY’S TIMES SQUARE KILLINGS
Times Square is famed for being a modern mecca for tourists with shops, dazzling lights and neon billboards. But in the 1970s, the five-block district was one of New York City’s most dangerous hotspots for violence, murder and sex crimes.
It was also the hunting ground of notorious murderer Richard Cottingham. Dubbed the ‘Torso Killer’, Cottingham’s crimes have been exposed in a new documentary titled, Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer.
Throughout the episodes, documentarians investigate the lives Cottingham took and the devastated family members left behind.
The story begins in 1979, after police were called to a room at the Travel Inn Motor Hotel in Times Square, where a fire had broken out. Inside, detectives found the charred bodies of two Jane Does lying on twin beds. They tried to attempt CPR, but quickly realised the victims were long dead. The women had been decapitated and their hands were removed.
Without the help of DNA testing, which wouldn’t exist for another seven years, the New York Police Department struggled to identify the murder victims.
“It was pretty much the hotel room from hell,” former detective Malcolm Reiman told the documentary.
“Spatter, gore, puddles, fingerprints, there was nothing. How can you behead two women, chop off the hands off two women, and not have gore from one end to the other?”
The only pieces of evidence found in the hotel room were the women’s clothes, discovered neatly folded in the bathtub. Without identification, police turned to the public for help by dressing department store mannequins in the victims’ outfits, which led to a breakthrough. One of the women was identified as Deedeh Goodarzi, a 22-year-old sex worker who was born in Iran.
Deedeh had been formally identified by her caesareansection scar after a friend recognised her clothing.
The documentary interviewed Deedeh’s daughter, Jennifer Weiss, who was adopted as a baby and learnt of her mother’s fate years later.
“I wanted to find my biological mother … When I turned 26, I found the orphanage I came from,” Jennifer explained.
“I was expecting a Lifetime movie, where I would get to meet, possibly, the woman who gave birth to me. But they gave me these terrible newspaper articles about how she was killed.
“There was a gorgeous picture of my mother. So half of me is so excited to see my mother’s face. And then feeling angry, because her life was taken in such a horrific manner. It’s just inconceivable.”
Sadly, the woman found next to Deedeh would never be identified and is still classified as a Jane Doe.
But the deranged murderer didn’t stop there. The police department’s worst fear that a serial killer was on the loose was confirmed when the body of 25-year-old Jean Reyner was found six months later in the Seville Hotel in New York.
In similar circumstances, Jean’s throat had been slit, her breasts cut off and the room was set on fire.
That same month, a maid at the Quality Inn in New Jersey discovered the handcuffed body of sex worker Valerie
Ann Street under a hotel room bed. Her body bore the markings of a pattern – the killer certainly had a ‘modus operandi’. She had been strangled to death, and cuts and scratches were discovered around her breasts.
It reminded detectives of a murder that had taken place at the same motel in 1977, when X-ray technician Maryann Carr, 28, was found dead in the parking lot. This discovery marked the end of the killer’s reign of terror.
On May 22, 1980, motel workers at the Quality Inn called the police after hearing the muffled screams from a woman in one of the rooms.
Inside, police discovered Richard Cottingham, a married father of three, with a terrified sex worker.
Leslie Ann O’dell had been tortured and assaulted for hours by Cottingham, only just escaping the same fate as his other victims.
The Times Square killer was finally identified. The 34-year-old computer technician from New Jersey was arrested and a search warrant was issued for his home and computer.
Inside police uncovered handcuffs, pornographic material, slave collars, a blade and a leather gag. A small, locked box contained items stolen from his victims. Cottingham’s gruesome double life had finally
‘MY MOTHER’S LIFE WAS TAKEN IN SUCH A HORRIFIC MANNER … IT’S JUST INCONCEIVABLE’
unravelled. Detectives soon started linking him to more unsolved cases.
Cottingham was put on trial for the murder of five women. In August 1984, he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars. The ‘Torso Killer’ only faced justice for the deaths of five women, but it’s suspected he is guilty of over 80 murders.
Jennifer, the daughter of Cottingham’s first victim, Deedeh, has made it her mission to uncover the truth about his crimes. She is working with detectives to help solve cold cases and has even met with Cottingham to try to get a confession from him.
“All of the women who Richard killed left this world in a horrific way. It always weighs heavily on me, like a dark cloud,” Jennifer said.
Decades later, Cottingham confessed to being behind several unsolved murders. He admitted to strangling his youngest victim 13-yearold Jacalyn Harp in 1968 and 15-year-old Denise Falasca in 1969. Last year, he also confessed to the unsolved 1974 double abduction, rape and murders of Lorraine Marie Kelly and Mary Ann Pryor.
Jennifer is determined to seek resolution for his other victims. “They deserve justice,” she says.