Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer

What Is the Series About?

Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer is a Netflix documentary series about Richard Francis Cottingham, one of the most prolific and brutal serial killers in American history. Released on December 29, 2021, and directed by acclaimed true crime filmmaker Joe Berlinger, the three-episode series traces Cottingham's decade-plus campaign of sexual violence and murder across New York City and New Jersey, with its narrative anchor firmly planted in one of the most shocking crime scenes of the late 1970s: a burning hotel room near Times Square containing the dismembered bodies of two women.

The series is the second installment in Netflix's Crime Scene anthology format, which pairs specific criminal cases with the distinctive social and physical geography of iconic locations. Here, that location is Times Square in the late 1970s — a neighborhood then defined by poverty, sex work, crime, and urban decay — and the series uses that atmosphere as both backdrop and character.

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The Case

Richard Francis Cottingham: The Torso Killer

Richard Francis Cottingham was born in 1946 and lived an outwardly ordinary life as a computer operator for Blue Cross Blue Shield in New York, with a wife and children in New Jersey. Behind that facade, investigators would eventually discover, he had been committing acts of extreme sexual violence and murder for more than a decade.

Cottingham targeted vulnerable women — many of them sex workers — in the New York and New Jersey area beginning as early as 1967. His methods were characterized by kidnapping, prolonged torture, sexual assault, and, in many cases, post-mortem mutilation including decapitation and dismemberment. These latter elements earned him his most notorious nickname: the "Torso Killer." The "Times Square Killer" alias derived directly from the crime that would ultimately unravel his double life.

The Times Square Motel Murders — December 2, 1979

The case that forms the dramatic center of the Netflix series began on the morning of December 2, 1979, when firefighters responding to a blaze at the Travel Inn Motor Hotel near Times Square discovered two women's bodies in a room. Both victims had been tortured, sexually assaulted, stabbed, decapitated, and set on fire in what investigators described as a scene of extraordinary brutality.

One of the victims was identified as Deedeh Goodarzi, 22 years old. The second victim — a teenage girl found alongside Goodarzi — was never formally identified and remains listed as a Jane Doe. The discovery generated widespread media attention and intensified pressure on investigators to identify the perpetrator.

Other victims named in connection with Cottingham's broader killing spree include Valerie Street, Maryann Carr, and Jean Reyner, though the sources available do not provide complete biographical details for all confirmed victims.

Investigation and Arrest

The investigation into the Travel Inn murders, combined with growing evidence linking Cottingham to other crimes, eventually produced enough pressure to break the case. Investigators built their case through a combination of victim descriptions, physical evidence, stolen "trophy" items Cottingham kept from his victims, and critical testimony from a coworker named Dominick Volpe.

Cottingham was arrested in May 1980 — more than a decade after his crimes began — after a survivor managed to raise an alarm at a New Jersey motel where he had taken her.

Trials, Convictions, and Sentencing

Cottingham faced separate criminal proceedings in New Jersey and New York between 1981 and 1984. He was ultimately convicted of 11 murders across both states. His sentencing in New Jersey alone amounted to between 173 and 197 years in prison; when New York convictions were added, his aggregate sentence exceeded 200 years, making any prospect of release functionally impossible.

He has been held at South Woods State Prison in New Jersey.

Later Confessions and Claimed Victim Count

Decades after his initial convictions, Cottingham did not fall silent. He reportedly confessed in 2009 to additional killings beyond those proven at trial. Then, in April 2021 — just months before the Netflix series premiered — he made two additional confessions that helped New Jersey investigators close a cold case dating back to 1974.

Perhaps most disturbingly, Cottingham has claimed responsibility for as many as 80 to 100 murders, a figure vastly exceeding his 11 confirmed convictions. Investigators and journalists have never been able to fully verify or definitively refute this claim, and the true total number of his victims remains unknown.

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Production

Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer was directed by Joe Berlinger, a filmmaker with a long and distinguished career in true crime documentary work, including the Paradise Lost trilogy and the Netflix series Conversations with a Killer. Berlinger's approach in this series situates Cottingham's crimes within the specific social conditions of late-1970s New York City — a period when Times Square was a hub of prostitution, crime, and neglect — arguing implicitly that the environment enabled a predator like Cottingham to operate with relative impunity for so long.

The series runs to three episodes and was released in full on December 29, 2021, consistent with Netflix's standard full-season drop format. It carries the IMDb title ID tt16027926.

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Reception

Critical reception for the series described it as a "gritty docu-series about a horrendous murder spree" that effectively evokes the menace and atmosphere of Times Square in its most dangerous era. Reviewers noted that Berlinger's dual focus — on both the crimes themselves and on the social geography of the location — gave the series a texture beyond a standard murder procedural.

The series drew significant public interest, in part because of the timing of Cottingham's April 2021 confessions, which had already returned the case to news headlines just months before the premiere. Audience discussion focused heavily on Cottingham's staggering claimed victim count and on the brutal nature of the crimes against women who were often overlooked precisely because of their social vulnerability.

Controversy surrounding the series has centered on questions familiar to the true crime genre: whether documentary treatments of extreme violence adequately center the humanity of victims, many of whom were sex workers whose deaths received minimal attention at the time. The series has also reignited debate about how many victims Cottingham may actually have claimed — a number that official records alone cannot resolve.

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The Case Today

As of the time of the series' release, Richard Francis Cottingham remains alive and imprisoned in New Jersey. He is one of the oldest living convicted serial killers in the United States. His continued willingness to make new confessions — and investigators' continued efforts to match those confessions to unsolved cold cases — means the full accounting of his crimes may not yet be complete.

The Jane Doe victim found alongside Deedeh Goodarzi at the Travel Inn on December 2, 1979, has never been publicly identified, a fact that stands as a stark reminder of how many of Cottingham's victims were women whose lives and deaths went largely unrecorded. Advances in forensic genealogy have given investigators renewed tools to pursue such identifications, and the case remains open in that respect.

For the neighborhood that gave one of his aliases its name, the story is almost unrecognizable today: Times Square has been transformed beyond all resemblance to the crime-ridden district where Cottingham hunted. The Travel Inn Motor Hotel itself no longer exists. But the crimes committed there in 1979 have not been forgotten — and this Netflix series ensures they won't be.