Wednesday 22 June 2022 09:20 PM Notorious 'Torso Killer' serving a life sentence for murders of six women ... trends now

Notorious convicted serial murderer Richard Cottingham, who earned the moniker 'Torso Killer' because he dismembered some of his victims, has been indicted in the 1968 slaying of a Long Island dance teacher after DNA evidence allegedly linked him to the cold case.

Richard Cottingham, 75, is already serving a life sentence in New Jersey state prison for the brutal murders of six women between 1967 and 1980. 

Cottingham now faces a second-degree murder charge in the February 1968 killing of 23-year-old Long Island dance teacher Diane Cusick.

Cusick's body was found in her car outside the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream with adhesive tape around her mouth and neck. She had been raped, beaten and suffocated. 

A break in the cold case came after authorities recently retested DNA evidence preserved from the crime scene that sources told PIX11 had been recovered during the investigation.

Cottingham appeared in Nassau County Court virtually on Wednesday where he was arraigned on second-degree murder charges in Cusick's murder. He pleaded not guilty. 

Nassau prosecutor Jared Rosenblatt said during the arraignment that the DNA evidence and other evidence 'proves he's the killer.'

Cottingham, a computer programmer who had a family in New Jersey, became known as the 'Torso Killer' after brutally dismembering some of his victims - including two women who were found dead at a motel near Times Square in 1979. They were both missing their heads and hands. 

While Cottingham has claimed responsibility for up to 100 homicides, authorities in New York and New Jersey have only officially linked him to 12 so far, which now includes Cusick.

Cusick was found dead on February 17, 1968, in the back seat of her car in the parking lot of the mall. She was dressed in a black leotard, a skirt, a red blouse, and white boots. 

The divorced mother and dance teacher had told her family she was stopping at the mall after work to buy shoes, PIX11 reported. 

For decades, the case ran cold. 

In 2004, Cusick’s then-grown daughter called Nassau police and requested they use modern technology to solve the case, Newsday reported. 

A detective was assigned to the case and evidence was reexamined. The semen, though nearly four decades old, was still in good condition to be analyzed.

But it didn’t match anything in DNA databanks at the time, police told Newsday, but the sample was kept stored in the county’s forensic evidence bureau.

For years, six different jurisdictions in New York and New Jersey have been working on cold case murders they believe are linked to the serial killer. 

Retired Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office chief Robert Anzellotti coaxed Cottingham's most recent confession out of him last year.  

In April 2021, Cottingham pleaded guilty to killing 17-year-old Mary Ann Pryor and 16-year-old Lorraine Marie Kelly in a motel room in August 1974, just days after abducting them.

The two friends left their North Bergen homes on August 9, 1974, for a shopping trip 13 miles north to a Paramus mall. They had planned to take a bus there to buy bathing suits for a trip to the Jersey Shore.

Witnesses at the time told police the girls were hitchhiking and had gotten into a man's car. They were found five days after they went missing, identified by their jewelry when their nude, battered bodies were discovered facedown in the woods of North Jersey's Bergen County.

Cottingham admitted that he had kidnapped Pryor and Kelly, brought them to a motel room, tied them up and raped them. He said he drowned them in the motel room's bathtub before dumping their bodies.

The Pryor-Kelly case is among North Jersey's most infamous unsolved crimes and Cottingham is one of the region's most heinous criminals. 

Known as the 'Torso Killer' for brutally dismembering some of his victims by cutting off their limbs and heads, he's currently in a New Jersey State Prison on a life sentence for several other murders.

Cottingham has been in prison since 1981 and has confessed to three of the murders, including the killings of 13-year-old Jackie Harp, 18-year-old Irene Blase and 15-year-old Denise Falasca, whose murders took place between 1968 and 1969.

He was first arrested in 1980 for the attempted murder and rape of an 18-year-old prostitute at a Quality Inn motel in Hasbrouck Heights. 

A motel maid heard a woman screaming inside his room. Authorities found her alive, but bound with handcuffs and suffering from bite marks and knife wounds.

The surviving victim later testified at trial that Cottingham told her during the attack, '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.'

Two weeks before his arrest, police found the body of 19-year-old Valerie Ann Street at the same Quality Inn motel.

Valerie Street's body was covered in bite marks and brutally beaten in a chillingly similar manner to the murder of 26-year-old Maryann Carr, that had occurred in the same motel three years earlier in December 1977.

Police did not link Carr's murder to Cottingham until after his arrest.

The subsequent investigation linked Cottingham to the savage murders of Deedeh Goodarzi, 22, and an unidentified woman, whose bodies - missing their heads and hands - were found inside a burning hotel room near Times Square in December 1979. 

Cottingham ran free until cops caught a lucky break almost six months later on May 22, 1980, when Cottingham picked

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