In a twisted turn of events, a family man turned serial killer nicknamed “The Times Square Killer,” as well as New Jersey’s “Torso Killer,” was put behind bars for several gruesome murders, which included the dismemberment and decapitation of many of his victims.
But even after Richard Cottingham became a convicted murderer, the story didn’t end there, according to the host of Fox Nation’s “The Fuhrman Diaries” and former LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman.
Cottingham made a stunning confession during an interview with a journalist decades after he was jailed, but not every expert has bought into his bombshell claim.
“He waits 30 years, and then he talks to a female reporter after a long, long relationship over the phone and in letters,” Fuhrman said on “The Faulkner Focus” on Friday. “And then he says… there’s a lot of other ones, as many as 80 to 100. And so slowly, he actually offers up evidence where a detective working for the state, they actually connect him up totally to 11 homicides.”
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“But is there another 50, 60, 70 homicides? That’s the part that you have to kind of really scrutinize his entire life,” he continued.
Fuhrman hasn’t been convinced that Cottingham, who was a “frequent patron” of Times Square sex clubs and bars back in the 1960s and 1970s killed as many as 100 victims, despite his “confessions” to the journalist.
“It wasn’t that he was sharp, it wasn’t that he planned this, it was just happenstance,” Fuhrman said during the Fox Nation episode. “His MO was all over the place, but now he wants to play the card that everything was calculated, well I think he is probably a madman… I don’t think anything was calculated.”
“I do not believe he committed 100 homicides,” he said in the special, arguing that Cottingham made those “admissions” because he was trying to “elevate his status” as an infamous killer.
Cottingham targeted young women – both teenagers and adults – when he often scoured Times Square for his victims decades ago.
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He was accused of sexually assaulting many of them, before dismembering them, and even claimed to have hidden body parts after the slayings.
“He decapitates two of his victims, sets them on fire, leaves them in a hotel room in Manhattan,” Fuhrman recalled of two of the murders. “This is where he got the nickname the Torso Killer — and you think the story’s over, but the story isn’t over.”
Cottingham, who is now 75 years old, has been behind bars since 1980. He is serving life for committing 11 gruesome killings between 1967 and 1980, the year of his arrest.
But the convictions haven’t stopped coming.
As the Fox Nation episode explores, he was charged as recently as June with second-degree murder for the killing of 23-year-old woman Diane Cusick back in 1968.
Medical examiners claim Cusick, who was the victim in the cold case murder, was beaten until she was suffocated to death in her car outside the Nassau County’s Green Acres Mall.
He supposedly followed the New York woman to her vehicle before he beat her, raped her, and left her body.
Investigators found her body, but DNA testing was not available at the time of the case. It wasn’t until a tip that officials received allowed them to link Cottingham to the case.
“You look at what we have now, all the scientific information,” Fuhrman said. “Back then, it was really just work. It was on the phone, going out, talking to people. And when you see what we didn’t do then, it’s funny that we repeat it now with all the scientific tools we have. We still have these guys slip through the cracks.”
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