[Eleanor] Cordelia was cleaning.
Next thing you know, she's white as a ghost,
and she's telling me, frantic, "I saw an arm, I saw an arm."
I go, "A what?"
She says, "Under the bed.
I hit something under the bed. It was an arm."
Not just an arm.
It's a whole body naked.
[theme music playing]
Welcome to Very Scary People, I'm Donnie Wahlberg.
For more than a decade, starting in the late 1960s,
a vicious predator stalked young women
on both the gritty streets of Manhattan
and in the quiet bedroom communities of New Jersey.
Dubbed the Times Square Killer, his victims ranged
from suburban housewives to sex workers.
For most of his murder spree, the killer operated under the radar,
blending into his surroundings.
But as the body count multiplied,
the killer's arrogance grew, leaving detectives waiting for him
to make the one mistake that would lead to his arrest.
This is part two of "The Times Square Killer."
It was a busy morning like any other in New York City.
[siren wailing]
Around 9:00 a.m., the fire department got a call
from the Travel Inn Motor Hotel on 42nd Street
in Times Square.
[female reporter] Firemen went into a fourth floor motel room here
to find the source of smoke.
[Steve] A fireman thought he saw people lying on each bed.
He thought they were just mannequins.
Then he realized that it was two naked young females.
[Rod] He took their bodies out as best he could with some help,
prepared to take them and give them mouth-to-mouth
respiration, recovery,
and discovered they were without heads.
The killer cut off their hands and their heads
so that they couldn't be identified.
The sadistic murder of two young women in a Westside motel
early Sunday has become one of the more bizarre cases
in memory.
[Larry] The killer leaves the hotel.
He has a duffel bag, and he's stopped by
two police officers who were concerned for his safety
as he walked through Times Square.
And he just explained to the two cops
that he was staying at a nearby hotel.
Everything was good.
If only police had asked to see what was inside the duffel bag.
Perhaps the reason he wasn't questioned more vigorously
is because the killer just seemed like another regular person.
He was an average guy who had a family.
He had a wife and three children, two boys and a girl.
Had a home, had a job.
And he was very disarming to people because
he didn't look abnormal or disturbed or deviant
in any way.
Yet in New Jersey, where he'd been raised,
he'd been killing for years.
Teenage Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly
were going to the Jersey Shore and they wanted to get bathing suits.
So they were hitchhiking to the Paramus Mall.
In the '70s, what was very normal was hitchhiking.
A lot of these young kids did it.
And that was the fatal mistake they made that day.
[Steve] A man picked them up and they never could have imagined
what he planned to do.
[Mike] Then he took them to a hotel.
[Steve] He had forced them in.
[Mike] They were tied to the bed so they couldn't escape during the night.
And eventually,
he drowned them in the hotel bathtub.
[Brenna] Mary Ann's family heard on the radio
that two bodies were found in the woods.
And then there was a knock on the door.
And it was the worst news that any family could get.
[Steve] He's known as the Times Square killer.
But it really is much more the story,
I think, of a suburban double life killer.
Police had no knowledge of this guy.
He's smart enough to know that what he's doing out
in New Jersey might not come to the attention
of law enforcement in New York and vice versa.
Law enforcement has always been a tribal sort of thing,
even though they like to talk about working together,
the communication isn't always there.
[Rod] The killer left few clues, leaving investigators
with nothing to go on.
[Steve] This story terrified local residents.
If police had any suspects in mind, they didn't include
the actual perpetrator, who was a mainframe
computer operator for a major insurance company.
And he's pretty bright.
And he knows it.
He has a level of tech savvy.
He's got his hobby, his extracurricular activity,
where he's out murdering women.
Chilling, horrifying what he did to people.
We're talking about atrociously striking his female victims,
cutting them, burning them.
He was terrorizing women very close to where he lived.
Go back to being a regular family man.
It's a ridiculous dichotomy.
His wife and his three children
never suspected a thing.
He never raised any red flags.
He just was at the point where he wanted more
and more and more, and it just began to escalate.
[Eleanor] I was at the parking lot at work at the Quality Inn,
waiting for a ride home.
All of a sudden, this car pulls up.
And this guy with this stupid, smirky smile, asking me,
"Oh, can you come here? Do you work in there?"
And so now I'm like, oh my God.
So I'm not going to go near that car.
So I try walking around the back of the car to get into the hotel.
And he's now going to back the car into me,
so I couldn't get the license plate.
And I run in the door, and I get Delia that worked there.
"Delia, crazy guy out there trying to get me."
"What?"
And we look out, and he's gone.
[Larry] A housekeeper walked into room 132,
and she noticed that the room
has a bit of a foul stench in it.
She began cleaning up the room, and as she tidied up
and tried to vacuum under one of the beds,
she hit something hard and large.
[Eleanor] Delia was cleaning 132.
Next thing I know, here comes Delia.
She's white as a ghost, and she's telling me, frantic,
"I saw an arm. I saw an arm."
I go, "A what?"
She says, "Under the bed. I hit something under the bed.
It was an arm."
Not just an arm.
It's a whole body naked,
and the police are coming.
A naked 19-year-old woman with strawberry bleached blonde hair.
Fingerprints would later identify her as Valerie Ann Street,
who came north from Florida with a conviction
for prostitution in her home state.
She was handcuffed so tightly that it left
deep marks on her wrists.
There was a wound on her lower back,
which was apparently made by some sort of knife.
Police had begun retracing her steps from the day before
and realized that she had started the day in New York.
[Larry] Valerie Ann Street had been seen
by another sex worker in Manhattan
working a corner at Madison Avenue and 32nd Street.
[Steve] On the surface, her exchange with a Manhattan office worker
was no different than any of her other interactions
with her other customers.
This appears to have been a straight business transaction.
He's the John. She's the hooker.
They make a deal.
Eventually, the man brought her to New Jersey.
She showed up at the hotel and registered for the room
herself using her alias.
She's then taken hostage and tortured.
He killed her and stuffed her under the bed,
and that's where the housekeeper found her
under the bed while she was cleaning the room.
This was one of the only incidents where any sort of
a usable court evidence was found.
In this case, it was a fingerprint.
[Eleanor] So the next day, detectives called me into the office,
and they're questioning me, and they show me a picture of Valerie.
And they go, "What does she look like?"
Well, she looks a little like my blonde Tamron.
"Have you noticed anything strange around here?"
And then I told them about the incident
in the parking lot two weeks before that,
how the car pulled up, the guy had a stupid, smirky smile, and all that.
I just got this weird, like,
danger feeling, stranger danger.
And the detectives kept calling me, Ellie,
we think he's coming back.
You have to listen for everything.
I said, I'll listen for everything.
I'm on it. Yeah, I'm on it, boy.
[Larry] By 1980, the Times Square killer was committing crimes
with more frequency.
It was like he didn't have a care in the world.
He would do something in New Jersey
and then go right back to New York
looking for another victim.
But he committed his first murder over a decade earlier,
when he was just a young man.
He was 20 years old when he evidently killed his first victim.
Nancy Vogel is probably the earliest known victim
in 1967.
She was a married woman with two children.
She lived in Little Ferry, New Jersey.
And she told her family she was going out
to play bingo in the local church one night
and never came back.
[Brenna] And, you know, rather horrifyingly,
two schoolgirls found her in her car.
They thought she was a mannequin.
She was naked and bound, and she had been strangled.
[John] There were some shopping bags in the trunk.
Never quite knew why, but the keys to the car were missing.
They were nowhere to be found inside,
nor were they found outside the vehicle.
Why the keys were missing and why the car was locked
just didn't seem to make sense.
But it did point in the direction of an unlikely suspect.
On the day following the report of her being missing,
her brother showed up at Little Ferry Police and said,
"My sister is missing, but I found her car keys,"
and gave the police the keys to her car.
Investigators were thinking,
How else could Nancy Vogel's brother have her car keys
unless he had killed her and locked the car?
He soon became a suspect in his own sister's murder.
But detectives couldn't find any additional evidence
that would link him to the crime.
So he was a suspect, nowhere near enough to charge him.
[Steve] Even though police cleared him,
that didn't stop some people in his family from thinking
that he committed his own sister's murder.
By now, sex workers in New York had been warned about
the Times Square Killer.
I feel like most serial killers end up getting kind of messy towards the end.
Last winter, we told you about several especially brutal murders
of alleged prostitutes here in New York.
And so far, the murders have gone unsolved.
[Louis] When you get a case like this,
everybody wants to look for a watershed event in his life
that made him a serial sexual murderer.
But you're just not going to find it.
Poor parenting, stressful events,
and all of the rest of it never are of help.
But this is not something that's learned,
nor is it something a result of some terrible event
that happened in his childhood from
his mother, his father, and so on.
His parents, they didn't make him to become a serial killer.
That's him.
In a 2009 French documentary,
the killer reflected on how he was different than most people.
[Richard speaking]
He may have had different quirks like everybody else,
but there was really nothing in his demeanor
or his presentation that would make him stand out in any way.
He went to high school. He was on the track team.
He had friends. He may have had some difficulty with friends,
but that's not really abnormal in any significant way.
[Rod] He's a high school graduate, graduated in 1964.
His father was an executive with
Metropolitan Insurance Company,
knew the business quite well,
and encouraged his son to go in that direction
and gotten hired through his father over
at Metropolitan Life.
He started at the bottom in the mailroom.
Eventually, he worked his way up
to mainframe computer operator,
and then he found a better-paying job at Blue Cross Blue Shield.
[Larry] It seemed like a perfectly healthy father-son relationship,
but like everything else about the killer, there was a dark side.
[Rod] The father would coach him on what to do
if he got into an automobile accident
because, of course, if he had booze on his breath,
he'd get the DUI.
His father's advice was to feign injury
so that the police would back off
and they would bring the EMTs and take him to the hospital.
And by this time, the cops are losing
their opportunity to get him for DUI
because, of course, the effect of the alcohol is starting to wear off.
[Larry] There's no saying what the father's influence
might have really had on this young man,
but that alone doesn't explain why he became what he became.
I don't use words like evil, but I think that
there is something missing in him.
He preyed on all kinds of women,
but he preyed on a lot of sex workers
and people on the margins of society.
He probably thought he had it down pat.
I feel like most serial killers end up getting kind of messy towards the end,
and maybe that's overconfidence
or maybe it's wanting to be caught somehow.
[Larry] Leslie Ann O'Dell, who is an 18-year-old
who had just come to New York after a four-day bus ride
from her hometown of Olympia in the state of Washington.
[Dr. Melinda] It became somewhat of a known quantity
that if you landed at the bus station,
that there was probably a fairly good possibility
that there would be various men out there
who would provide you with all sorts of glamorous promises.
If you've been sitting on a bus for seven days,
you have to have been totally exhausted
and very difficult to make decisions about what was good.
[Steve] She found herself in the clutches of a pimp.
It was a horrible situation for a teenager to find herself in.
Leslie had no idea that the man
who would come out of nowhere and pretend to be her savior
was actually worse than anything
she could have imagined.
Leslie Ann O'Dell is working on Lexington Avenue
on the east side of Manhattan
when she meets just a random guy,
doesn't look like anything special,
but he offers her $100 in return for sexual favors.
She agrees. They go to a bar.
He keeps feeding her drinks.
She spoke to him a little bit about
the situation that she was in.
The man says to her, I'll drive you out of the city,
I'll take you to a bus terminal over in Jersey,
and you'll be on your way back to your hometown in Olympia
before your pimp even knows that you're gone.
By now, sex workers in New York
had been warned about the Times Square killer,
but the man seemed so sincere that Leslie believed him.
He looked completely normal. He can speak very well.
She needed someone to help her.
He's offering his help. He seemed like a nice guy.
She went along with him.
Now the torture begins.
He's got a gun.
[Eleanor] I heard a commotion, and I hear this girl.
"Oh, my God, no. Oh, my God, no."
Welcome back to Very Scary People.
The Times Square killer may have thought
he could get away with murder forever.
He hid behind a mask of respectability,
wearing a suit to work in New York
and raising a family in the suburbs of New Jersey.
But by 1980, his crimes are becoming more extreme,
and the Times Square killer is becoming more reckless.
[Steve] Leslie Ann O'Dell was only 18 years old.
She had just arrived in New York City
from her home in Washington State,
and met a pimp that charmed her
and put her out on the street.
She met a John in Manhattan
who took her to a bar and bought her some drinks.
She confided to him that she was in over her head,
and she wanted to get away from her pimp,
and he offered to take her back
to a bus depot in New Jersey
so she could go back to her home in Washington State.
[Larry] So this man and Leslie come across
the George Washington Bridge chatting.
He says to her, like, look,
could the two of us have sex before you head out?
So she agrees to accompany him to the Hasbrouck Heights
Quality Inn,
which has become his favorite place to do his business.
[Rod] The people who work there,
does he think they're completely blind or stupid?
He's got to realize that he's raising, you know, some alarms,
and, you know, who knows?
Don't forget, he was dressed like a businessman in a suit and tie.
I guess you could say he wasn't dressed like a killer.
Once they get inside the room,
he asks Leslie if he could give her a massage
before they have sex.
She agrees to this, and he pulls out a knife,
holds it to her throat, and immediately handcuffs her.
In the 2009 documentary,
he explained how excited he got during these
violent encounters.
[Richard speaking]
[Steve] Now the torture begins.
He's got a gun.
He's telling her that she's a whore
and deserves to be punished.
[Louis] The offender very often has a twisted sense of morality,
and so many of them will say, you know,
prostitutes and sex workers,
I want to rid the world of these sorts of things.
For the next several hours, you know,
he sliced her with a knife.
He whipped her with a leather belt.
And every time she passed out,
he would use a damp washcloth to revive her
and go right back to it.
Leslie Ann O'Dell was a fighter.
People don't expect sex workers to fight back,
but thank goodness O'Dell was willing to fight for her life.
[Larry] At one point during her ordeal, she's uncuffed,
and she immediately goes for the gun that's nearby.
And when she tries to use it,
she realizes quickly that it's a prop gun
and it's going to be of no help at all.
[Eleanor] I heard a commotion in 117.
So I run over real quick, put my ear to the door,
and I hear this girl, "Oh, my God, no. Oh, my God, no."
And something about a gun.
And then I hear, like, a struggle,
and it's coming closer to the door.
And the first thought, of course, is the murderer.
He's back. He's going to murder the girl in 117.
So I head up the hall to go to the front desk to get help.
"The girl's going to be murdered. We got to save her."
So Todd, our assistant manager, he's knocking on 117.
I don't know if this guy's going to open the door and shoot him
or what's going to happen, but it was Leslie who opened
the door a tiny bit with a chain
and stuck her little hand out like this
and was moving her eyes.
And she's saying, "Everything's okay,"
which it wasn't, which we knew.
[Mike] She was able to give a signal
to the employees that made them call the police.
[siren wails]
The police show up, and this is his last stand.
[Mike] And at that time, he realized
that he had to get out of there.
So he did take off, ran down the hallway.
This guy is running by with a suit on
and a gun and an attaché case.
So I think it's a detective, right, who would have a gun.
So I said, "Oh, did you get him?"
And he points the gun.
And with that, one of the police come in the side door
with their shotgun, and they're aiming it at this guy.
[Mike] The first responding officer caught him in a stairway.
[Eleanor] And then they had the attaché case open
with all this weird stuff in it,
black garbage bag, adhesive tape, handcuffs.
[Larry] A leather gag, two slave collars,
a switchblade, ankle cuffs, replica pistols,
and pills that he used to knock his victims out.
When I saw him arrested sitting there,
I realized it was the same guy
that tried to get me in the parking lot.
That's... I could cry.
That's when it gets overwhelming.
Police identified him as 33-year-old Richard Cottingham
from Lodi, New Jersey.
There were many cold cases that existed at that time,
and we believed it was Cottingham.
[Brenna] There was no way for the jurisdictions in New Jersey
and New York to communicate.
If there had been the Internet,
if there had been websites,
if there had been the 24-hour news network
that there is today,
police departments in New York might be able to say,
"Hey, that murder in New Jersey
looks really similar to this murder in Times Square."
[Rod] It wasn't until Cottingham was finally arrested
and they finally were putting two and two together
that they looked at these cases.
[Mike] After police take Cottingham into custody,
he tries to play all this off.
He carried his murder kit in a attaché case.
[Larry] The paraphernalia that they recovered
was just something that he kept around
because he was a fan of bondage and domination.
He said he wanted to see what it felt like to have
someone under his control.
And that line has been used a lot of times
by different people who have abused women sexually,
and they explain it away,
"We were just trying something new."
He's going to try to get himself out of this in some way.
And that's at least an explanation to the authorities
as to why they were doing this.
[Steve] But when police raided his house,
they found that the killer,
who had been so careful to cover his tracks,
had actually left a stunning record of his crimes.
He had a trophy room of souvenirs
that he'd stolen from the women he'd attacked.
That's not uncommon for killers
to keep certain items from their victims.
He's cherishing them, so to speak.
He's putting them in a safe place,
in a room in his home,
which he disallows anyone to go to.
His wife can't go in there.
His children are forbidden to go in there.
And he's got a place where he's keeping
these little trinkets to remember.
They bring back a memory of an incident
that he largely enjoyed.
It brings him gratification.
Slowly, the potato was peeling,
and we learned more and more about him and who he was.
Cottingham was raised in a fairly middle-class family
in New Jersey.
The first of four children, he had three younger sisters.
[Rod] He's raised Catholic.
He was very nervous as a child, very nervous growing up.
His mother was an innocent soul.
She didn't have a clue of what was going on.
She did offer some explanations about him
and his behavior when he was young.
She would say things like
he would constantly be chewing his nails,
constantly be waving and swishing
back and forth with his leg.
[Larry] So we know he was an anxious kid.
But aside from that, no major red flags.
No evidence that he was torturing animals,
setting fires, behavior you might expect from a serial killer.
When people saw him in the community,
they saw this professional working in New York,
working in the computer industry.
[Steve] But there were secrets that he was keeping from his wife.
He had several extramarital affairs.
And just as his wife was giving birth for the first time,
he was arrested for taking advantage of sex workers.
There were two cases, one in '73 and one in '74.
These were salacious instances.
They involved robbery.
They involved sexual assault.
There was a charge of unlawful imprisonment.
Okay, so we're talking about handcuffs.
The prosecutors need their testimony,
and these women were refusing,
refusing to cooperate to that extent.
That's on Cottingham's side.
He's frightened these women.
He's scared them to death.
He's threatened them with weapons.
And they're afraid of the police.
He's got this mindset that he's above the law.
In some ways, that's because he literally thought
that he could get away with murder.
In 1977, when his youngest child was just a year old,
Maryann Carr was taken from the parking lot
in her apartment complex.
Those who saw it later told the police
that they thought it was the husband.
[Larry] As it turned out, after Cottingham was arrested,
investigators were able to determine that
the victim's husband and he looked very much alike.
As long as Cottingham's methods were working for him,
he just kept repeating the same patterns.
He kidnapped two of his victims
from the same apartment complex,
and he continually visited the Quality Inn
in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey.
[Larry] In 1979, Cottingham's wife filed for divorce.
She said he regularly stayed out all night
and stopped having sex with her
after she had their third child.
[Rod] She got tired of being the woman
who was taking care of the house, taking care of everything.
And for whatever reason, and I think
it's his persuasiveness,
she agreed to back off.
I think she was a little more docile
than a lot of women might be with a guy like this,
letting him get away with the whole lot.
Still, she had no idea that she had married a killer.
[male reporter] Richard Cottingham is being arraigned today
on charges of murdering a 19-year-old girl
in a motel in Hasbrouck Heights.
The victim, Valerie Street, had been sexually abused
and mutilated.
Cottingham is a suspect in the killing and mutilation
of two prostitutes last December in a 42nd Street motel.
[Steve] In 1981, Richard Cottingham was charged with murder,
kidnapping and sexual assault
in connection with five different women in New Jersey.
The first of three scheduled trials.
He pleaded not guilty.
He kind of always wanted his kids
to think that there was a hint that maybe he didn't do these things,
maybe it wasn't him.
He never confessed.
[male reporter] Cottingham's blood type was found inside
the dead woman's hotel room.
And that adhesive tape, like that found on Valerie Street's mouth,
was found in Cottingham's car when he was arrested.
[Eleanor] I had to go and testify every time and...
When I had to get up and testify,
they have it facing where Cottingham's sitting.
And he kept looking at me.
So, it was horrifying, horrifying.
As evidence piled up against Cottingham,
he attempted suicide in jail.
Cottingham evidently made two or three suicide gestures,
but they were very superficial.
On one occasion, he broke his glasses
and tried cutting himself with the shards.
He also tried slicing himself with a razor
and drinking liquid antidepressants.
I think it was just simple attention
because I think if he wanted to kill himself,
he was an expert at killing,
then I think he probably could have killed himself.
He was eventually sent back to court
to hear the judge pronounce him guilty.
The sentence he declared
must be for the protection of modern society.
There were multiple trials that Richard Cottingham
went through
and ultimately,
the result of those multiple trials
resulted in numerous life sentences
for Richard Cottingham.
He probably won't get out of jail.
He's 34 years old now.
He was sent to jail for almost 200 years.
[Rod] Finally, his wife divorced him
after he was convicted for these crimes.
She moved up to New York State to get away from New Jersey,
get away from Bergen County,
and that's where she raised her kids.
[John] Even after Cottingham was convicted,
there were many cold cases that existed at that time
and continue to exist,
but law enforcement never forgets them.
When I first took over as chief,
I decided to assign the homicide detectives
to pull out a lot of the cold cases, go through them,
and find whatever viable cases
they felt they should pursue and reopen.
Many of the cold cases in New York and New Jersey
fit Cottingham's M.O.
So as the years passed and Cottingham sat behind bars,
detectives continued to go through his old files.
They were hoping to link him
to other unsolved murders in the area.
I went down there and sat down with him,
and I wasn't there specifically
to get him to confess to these murders.
I was there to see if he would come and speak to our detectives.
And he did end up calling our office,
and there was a young detective at the time back then.
His name was Rob Anzilotti.
A lot of times to get confessions,
you can't just walk into a room and ask the person,
"Hey, did you do it?" That's not gonna work.
It takes time, it takes dialogue, it takes patience,
and I felt he was the right guy for the job.
And so they spent about 17 years
going back and forth and just talking.
The serial killers, they like that cat-and-mouse thing,
and even when they are caught and they are in prison,
they enjoy the game.
You want to know something that I know,
so what are you gonna give me for it?
How are you gonna twist it out of me?
And Cottingham definitely continued that game
with Anzilotti for years.
[Mike] And Anzilotti succeeded into
developing a rapport with Cottingham,
which led to several confessions.
[Brenna] Nancy Vogel was the first confession
Cottingham gave to Detective Anzilotti.
Cottingham claimed he drove her up to a wooded area
in Montvale, New Jersey, near the New York State line.
He killed her there and put her in the backseat of her car,
because that's the car they used to get up there,
and he left the car in a residential neighborhood
back near her home
and walked back to the hotel where his car was.
You might not believe this, but there are many people out there
that confess to crimes that they have absolutely no connection with.
I had to satisfy myself that it was indeed Mr. Cottingham
that committed this crime.
I am the prosecutor, and I am the only one that
can actually authorize the warrant to charge
Cottingham with murder.
And I recall there were two things
that I was told that tied him to it.
That he took the car keys and he threw them away.
That was never in any press release.
Only the killer would have known that,
that the keys were not left in the car.
The second thing is he told us about
the Valley Fair shopping bags in the truck.
Only the killer would have known that.
And then Nancy Vogel's son told me something that I didn't expect.
He said, "I can't believe this.
All these years, I thought it was my uncle."
Cottingham had told us he threw the keys away,
so we knew that when the uncle put the keys
on the police desk,
it was just an extra set.
So, Nancy Vogel's two children received two gifts that day.
The first gift is the man who killed
their mother was brought to justice.
The second gift is it was never their uncle.
Over the next ten years, Cottingham confessed
to Anzilotti about three more murders.
The trails of which had all gone cold.
In 2021, Robert Anzilotti was about to retire.
But there was another cold case that
had been bothering detectives for years.
The murders of teenagers Lorraine Kelly and Mary Ann Pryor.
They were going down the Jersey Shore in August 1974.
They were going bathing suit shopping before that.
They had planned to hitchhike from their homes.
Five days later, their bodies were discovered
in a construction site.
I wanted that case solved and we had believed
it was Cottingham.
[Brenna] So, right before Anzilotti's retiring,
Cottingham pleads guilty to Mary Ann Pryor
and Lorraine Kelly.
According to him, he picked them up and it was raining.
They sat in the car for a while together.
First, he took them to a McDonald's to get something to eat.
Then he took them to a hotel.
He brought them into the hotel room.
He had them tied up and he spent several days
with them in the hotel.
He did bad things to them and ended up
drowning them in a bathtub.
[Mike] And he brought them up to the New York State line
and dumped their two bodies.
[Steve] The only reason that he admitted to Anzilotti
that he killed Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly
was because Anzilotti was retiring
and that was his farewell gift.
[John] I know that Rob Anzilotti didn't look at it as a gift.
He looked at it as a gift for the families.
Somewhere I knew the Pryor and Kelly families
would begin to now maybe enjoy never a normal life,
but a better life.
So, Cottingham is now in his 70s.
He's in very poor health, in a wheelchair.
He knows that he doesn't have a lot of time left.
[Brenna] There's tons of unsolved crimes
in New Jersey and New York,
and who knows how many of them are Cottingham.
Time is ticking for him to start confessing
to the rest of these.
[Eleanor] It affected me a great deal.
I tell my grandchildren, you don't walk down the street
by yourself.
I am, like, super over-cautious.
I wouldn't even let my granddaughter walk from the bus stop
down a quarter of a block.
[laughs] I didn't even want her on a bus.
You know, you get driven to school,
you get picked up from school.
[Steve] According to what Cottingham told journalist Nadia Fezzani
in a 2009 documentary,
there's still a lot of murders
that the police don't know about.
So, how many victims do you think you have?
Oh, I know exactly how many.
[chuckles]
Over 85.
Under 100.
Despite the passage of time
and Richard Cottingham's declining health,
law enforcement is still vigorously trying to connect
cold cases to the Times Square killer.
Thanks to the tenacity and grit
of the detectives on the case,
in December 2022, Cottingham finally admitted
to killing five Long Island women
between 1968 and 1973.
We can only hope that even more of his victims
will find justice.
I'm Donnie Wahlberg. Thanks for watching. Good night.