The notorious serial murderer known as the “Torso Killer” on Monday admitted to five more slayings on Long Island — adding to a bloody tally that already has him serving a life sentence.
Richard Cottingham, 76, who earned the chilling nickname because of the way he dismembered some of his victims, pleaded guilty from prison in New Jersey, where he was convicted of killing six other women between 1967 and 1980.
The aging killer wore a green smock as he copped to the slaying via video link at the South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, NJ, sitting next to his lawyer, Jeffrey Groder.
“I hope there is some justice for all of you knowing that for the rest of this defendant’s life you will live and take every breath in a prison cell in New Jersey,” prosecutor Jared Rosenblatt said, weeping as he spoke.
“[I] hope today will bring you the closure that you all sought for the last 50 years,” Rosenblatt told the families of the victims who were gathered in court.
Cottingham, a former computer programmer and once-married dad of three, admitted to the 1968 rape and murder of dance teacher Diane Cusick, as well as the slayings of four other women in Nassau County in 1972 and 1973.
Cusick, 23, was found murdered after failing to return home from a trip to the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream to buy shoes — with Cottingham linked to her through DNA testing.
“I’m sure she tried to fight this animal off but he was so big and she was so small,” Cusick’s brother, Jim Martin, said at the Mineola courthouse Monday.
“He punched her face, put tape over her mouth and nose and then raped her,” Martin said, turning his attention to the killer on the screen. “I just wish that my brother Bobby and I had found you in the streets and we would have torn you apart.”
The serial killer was indicted in Cusick’s death in June.
Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly said at the time that she believed it was the oldest DNA hit to lead to a prosecution in the US.
The other murders that Cottingham has been tied to include the killings of two women whose mutilated bodies — missing their heads and hands — were found at a motel near Times Square in December 1979.
One of the beheaded victims was identified as 22-year-old sex worker Deedeh Goodarzi, but the other young woman has never been identified.
He was busted after a maid at a New Jersey motel heard a woman screaming inside his room, and cops found the 18-year-old victim alive, but she had been handcuffed and had suffered knife wounds and bite marks to her breasts.
His horrifying exploits were detailed in the Netflix series, “Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer,” which was released in December 2021.
