CRIME HUNTER: Times Square Killer linked to 1968 murder

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During the day, Richard Cottingham would toil as a computer programmer in Manhattan, across the Hudson River from his suburban New Jersey home.

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In the sleaze pits and hot-sheet hotels that infested the pre-Disney Times Square, he would embrace his sick obsessions.

Severing the two key components of his troubled life.

Most of his targets were drug-addicted sex workers whose bodies began turning up in the 1970s.

Cottingham — who appeared to have an unquenchable bloodlust — was back in the news this week, tied to a long unsolved Long Island murder.

Cops say DNA led to the murder charges against the notorious serial killer.

On Feb. 16, 1968, Nassau County dance teacher and mother of one Diane Cusick was discovered by her father, strangled to death inside a parked car.

“That evening, she told her parents that she was going to purchase a pair of shoes at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream,” said Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly. “She never returned home.”

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One of Cottingham’s ruses was to pose as a cop or store security to ensnare his victims. It’s believed he accused Cusick of shoplifting, leading her to doom.

“That is what we believe happened on that night,” Nassau County Homicide Capt. Stephen Fitzpatrick told the New York Daily News.

In a video-link, hospital bed-bound Cottingham pleaded not guilty to sexually assaulting and murdering Cusick.

“I never thought I’d see this day,” Cusick’s daughter Darlene Altman told The News outside court. “It was very overwhelming. He just had like this dead stare. I thought he was looking right at me. It was creepy.”

At the time of her mom’s murder, Altman was just four years old.

Cottingham, now 75, was one of those unheralded monsters in the serial killer canon until a new documentary rekindled public interest in the case.

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He is currently serving a life sentence in a New Jersey prison and is in poor health.

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Born in The Bronx in 1946, Cottingham’s father was a big roller for insurance giant Metropolitan Life. Dear old dad greased the wheels for his son’s entry as a computer programmer.

But there was always something different about Richard. Oh, he married in 1970 and had children, yet there were those itches that would not go away.

When he was just 21-years-old, the Times Square Killer made his debut. Not in the seedy city’s rotten core but in suburban Ridgefield Park, N.J.

Her name was Nancy Schiava Vogel. She was a 29-year-old married mother of two.

Vogel had planned to play bingo with pals at the local church and was never seen alive again. Her nude body was discovered three days later on Oct. 31, 1967. She had been strangled to death.

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Her murder also remained unsolved until Cottingham copped to it in 2010.

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In between the 1967 slaying of Vogel and his 1980 arrest, there were many, many more murders.

In 2014, he confided to Det. Robert Anzilotti that he had murdered three New Jersey teenagers in 1968 and 1969. The slayings had long been cold.

Jacalyn (Jackie) Harp, 13, Irene Blase, 18, and Denise Falasca, 15, had all been strangled. In 2021, Cottingham also admitted he was the killer of Lorraine Marie Kelly, 16, and Mary Ann Pryor, 17, in August 1974. Both teens had drowned.

But by 1977, Cottingham was looking for more perverse violent sex as he cruised The Deuce by night.

On Dec. 12, 1979, the scuzzy Travel Inn just off Times Square called firefighters. Inside one of the rooms, officials were met by a grisly sight: Sex worker Deedeh Goodarzi and another unidentified woman were discovered with their heads and hands removed.

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Both had been doused with lighter fluid and set ablaze. The missing body parts were never found.

Six months later the body of Valerie Ann Street, 19, was discovered in a room at a Quality Inn across the river in New Jersey. Her hands were handcuffed behind her back, she was bruised, beaten and her breast had been bitten. She had been asphyxiated.

The slaying was linked to the earlier murder of Maryann Carr, discovered dead in the same hotel’s parking lot.

And on May 15, 1980, Jean Reyner was discovered strangled with her throat slit in a room at the Big Apple’s Seville Hotel.

Her breasts had been severed and posed on the headboard. Then, Cottingham set the bed ablaze.

On May 22, 1980, he arranged to have sex for $100 with teen prostitute Leslie Ann O’Dell. Their tryst would be at the Quality Inn in New Jersey.

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It would again be a house of horrors. Again, he bit off one of O’Dell’s nipples.

She would later testify that he told her: “You have to take it. The other girls did, you have to take it too. You’re a whore and you have to be punished.”

Hotel staff heard the teen’s anguished cries and called the cops.

And that was that.

Except for the fact he has claimed he killed dozens more. And over the years, it’s been proven.

He wasn’t lying.

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