NEW YORK — A convicted serial murderer known as the “Times Square Killer” whose savage string of sexually charged murders stretched from New Jersey to Manhattan for nearly 15 years confessed Monday to the half-century-old homicides of five women on Long Island.
Richard Cottingham, 76, who is also known as the “Torso Killer,” is already serving time in New Jersey State Prison in Trenton for 11 homicides committed between 1967 and 1980.
Dressed in a medical gown, he appeared via video in Supreme Court in Nassau County from a prison hospital ward and pleaded guilty to the 1968 murder of dance teacher Diane Cusick. He also admitted to killing four other women in 1972 and 1973.
“You did this to her!” Cusick’s brother Jim Martin yelled at Cottingham’s image on the TV screen during the hearing. “He turned our lives upside down.”
“My dad carried her body not knowing if she was alive or dead,” Martin added. “Can you imagine?”
Offered a chance to speak to victims’ families during the hearing, Cottingham flatly refused, saying only, “No.”
Cusick, 23, disappeared outside the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream after going there to buy dance shoes.
Cottingham was linked through DNA to Cusick’s murder and charged in June 2022. Nassau authorities say he sexually assaulted her and strangled her in a parked car on Feb. 16, 1968.
Cusick’s father found her body in the back seat of her car. Her mouth was covered with an adhesive band and her hands were tied together, authorities said.
Investigators previously said Cottingham pretended to be a police officer or mall security officer and accused Cusick of shoplifting before he strangled her.
DNA evidence collected at the scene was retested in 2021, 53 years after the crime, and matched to Cottingham, authorities said.
Cusick’s daughter Darlene Altman shook and cried at the hearing. “The day Mr. Cottingham murdered my mother, the lives of all those who loved her forever changed,” she said.
“I will never know what my life would or could have been had this tragedy not occurred.”
Additionally, Cottingham admitted Monday to the strangulation of 21-year-old Mary Beth Heinz, whose body was thrown from the Peninsula Blvd. Bridge in Rockville Centre and found floating face-down in a muddy creek on May 10, 1972.
He also admitted to strangling Laverne Moye, whose body was tossed from the same bridge on July 20, 1972. A boy found the body in the creek.
Moye was from the St. Alban’s section of Queens and had two kids.
“There’s been some dark days behind us, but today the sun shines brightly because justice has been served,” her son John Moye said Monday, holding a photo of his mom.
Cottingham also confessed to killing Sheila Heiman, 33, a mother of three who was found stabbed and bludgeoned to death on the bathroom floor of her North Woodmere home in July 1973.
Her husband discovered her body after returning from a trip to the store. Authorities said her throat was cut, and she had stab wounds on her head and a broken jaw.
Heiman’s daughter Randi Childs said the suspicion that fell on her father after her mother’s murder wore on the family.
“My brothers and I learned early in life that the world can be a dark and dangerous place and there are people who can inflict harm on us, even in the perceived safety of our own homes,” she said.
Cottingham also admitted to strangling Marita Emerita Rosado Nieves, 18, two days after Christmas in 1973. Her body was found covered in plastic bags and wrapped in a gray blanket near a bus stop on Ocean Parkway by Jones Beach.
He was sentenced Monday to 25 years to life in prison for the Cusick murder.
“There are no words to describe how evil you are,” Judge Karen Sink said from the bench.
Under the plea agreement, he won’t be prosecuted for the other four killings because he is already in prison for life for the prior murders.
“Serial killer Richard Cottingham has caused irreparable harm to so many people,” Nassau DA Anne Donnelly said. “He overpowered, assaulted, and brutally murdered the (victims) to satisfy his craven desires.”
In 2021, he pleaded guilty to the killings of two New Jersey teens in August 1974. He was already serving a life sentence in New Jersey.
Toward the end of his rampage, Cottingham killed and dismembered three prostitutes in Times Square and then set them on fire, earning the nicknames “Torso Killer” and “Times Square Killer.”
Before that, his first victim was a New Jersey woman murdered in October 1967. He also killed five teenage girls in Jersey including a 13-year-old walking home from band practice in July 1968.
Jennifer Weiss, the daughter of one of Cottingham’s victims in the Times Square dismemberments, Deedeh Goodarzi, actually befriended the aging murderer and tried to convince him to assist law enforcement, Rolling Stone reported.
Cottingham, a married father of three from Lodi, New Jersey, worked as a computer technician while carrying out his crimes. The subject of the Netflix documentary “Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer,” released in December 2021, he has claimed without substantiation to have killed more than 100 victims.
In August, Cottingham claimed he murdered two Rockland County women, but cops there said they only have evidence to believe him in one of those killings, LoHud reported.
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