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DNA testing led to new murder charges against “Times Square Killer” Richard Cottingham, who is already in jail for violent deaths in New York and New Jersey.
The authorities now allege that the serial killer who today has 75 years sexually assaulted and strangled in 1968 to Diane Cusick, an innocent mother from Long Island (NY) whose case had been open for more than half a century.
COLD CASE: Infamous “Times Square Killer,” already serving life for an old murder spree, faces new charges for 1968 sex assault, death of a Long Island dance teacher
Serial killer Richard Cottingham, 100, was linked to young mom’s suffocation, sex assault.https://t.co/RBqd9ZYMzn
— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) June 22,
“That night (Cusick) told his parents that he was going to buy a pair of shoes at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream,” District Attorney Anne Donnelly recalled. “She never came home.”
The new DNA evidence was recovered from defensive wounds on the victim’s hand during her apparently unsuccessful fight for survival. Cottingham apparently identified himself as a police officer or mall security officer and accused Cusick of shoplifting before killing her.
Her distraught father found the body lying in the back seat from her car when she went to the mall after her daughter did not return.
Darlene Altman, Cusick’s daughter, and other family members attended the Nassau County court hearing on Wednesday 22 in June, where Cottingham pleaded “not guilty” via a video link above the brutal strangulation of the dance teacher inside a parked car on 16 from February of 1968.
“That night he told his parents that he was going to buy a pair of shoes at the mall… He never came home”
Anne Donnelly, District Attorney Nassau
Altman was only 4 years old when the mother was killed her. He attended Wednesday’s court hearing with his uncle Jim and his son Mike, reported Daily News. “I never thought I’d see this day,” she said with a trembling voice after seeing her mother’s alleged killer in court. “It was very overwhelming. He just had this dead look. I thought he was looking directly at me. It was creepy.”
Last year Cottingham admitted to the rape and murder of two New Jersey teenagers in August 1974. And now he is a possible suspect in five other homicides on Long Island, said authorities, who are investigating additional cases there.
Father of three children in New Jersey, he was already serving a life sentence for the previous murders. “Now (he’s) a known serial killer, but then he was an unknown computer programmer in Times Square,” said Nassau District Attorney Jared Rosenblatt, chief of the homicide bureau.
Cottingham, a Bronx native, is also known as “The Torso Killer” after executing and dismembering three prostitutes in Times Square at the end of his murder spree of 13 years.
Has been in Trenton State Prison (NJ) with a life sentence since 1981, convicted of two murders in New Jersey and three in New York. In the past he himself has claimed that he was responsible for up to 100 murders in both states and in 2020 confessed to three more homicides, dating back to the end of the decade of 1960.