NEW YORK 1968 Cold Case Solved After 54 Years — The Torso Killer’s Oldest Victim 

On February 15th, 1968, a 23-year-old dance instructor named Diane Cusick told her parents she was driving to the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, Long Island to buy a pair of dancing shoes. She left her little girl Darlene with them and headed out into the cold February night. She never came home. By 10:30 that evening, her parents were worried enough to drive to the mall themselves.

They found Diane’s white Plymouth Valiant still sitting in the parking lot near a steak house. Her father opened the car door, looked into the backseat, and found his daughter’s body. She’d been bound, her mouth taped shut, strangled to death. The police collected evidence that night. They interviewed dozens of people.

 They retraced every step Diane took from the moment she left the house. And then, slowly, the investigation stalled. For 54 years, nobody was charged. Nobody was held accountable. Diane Cusick became a name in a filing cabinet, a cold case gathering dust in a Nassau County storage room. That was February of 1968. By early 2022, a DNA sample preserved from that night, a sample collected before DNA testing even existed, had been retested and matched to a man already sitting in a prison cell, a man responsible for at least 16 murders across New York and New

Jersey. A serial killer the world knew as the Torso Killer. What Nassau County’s District Attorney said next made national headlines. She called it the oldest DNA hit to ever lead to a prosecution in the history of the United States. This is the story of how Diane Cusick’s case came back from the dead.

 And she wasn’t the only one. If this is the kind of [music] case you want to see covered, the ones that went cold for decades and finally broke open, you’re in the right place. Like this video so more people can find these stories and subscribe to Cold Case Redemption if you haven’t already. Before Diane Cusick became a case number, before her name ended up in a homicide file, she was a young woman building a life on Long Island in the late 1960s.

She was 23 years old, living with her family in New Hyde Park, a quiet residential neighborhood in Nassau County, just east of the Queens border. She worked as a dance instructor at a school in Oceanside, spending her days teaching children how to move, how to carry themselves, how to find rhythm. It was the kind of work that required patience and energy and genuine love for what you were doing.

And Diane had all three. She was also a mother. Her daughter Darlene was three or four years old at the time, a little girl who depended on her completely. And she was close with the rest of her family, her parents and her brother Jim. The kind of tight-knit household where everyone knew where everyone else was going and when they’d be home.

Where a missed curfew wasn’t something that got shrugged off. It got noticed. That mattered enormously on the night of February 15th, 1968. Long Island in the late 1960s was deep in the middle of the post-war suburban boom. Families by the thousands had poured out of New York City in the previous two decades, settling in the new developments and bedroom communities of Nassau and Suffolk counties.

The highways were expanding. Shopping centers were being built on old airfields and farmland. And the culture of suburban life, the car trips, the malls, the parking lots, the feeling of safety that came with being far from the chaos of the city, was the fabric of daily existence. People drove everywhere. They in big open lots.

They didn’t think twice about it. It was a Thursday, two days after Valentine’s Day, and the February cold had settled over Long Island. Diane told her parents she was heading to the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream to pick up a pair of dance shoes for work. It was the simplest kind of errand, the kind you don’t even think about.

 20 minutes there, a quick stop in a shoe store, 20 minutes back. She left Arlene with her parents, got in her white Plymouth Valiant, and drove the short distance south to the mall. Green Acres was one of the first major shopping centers on Long Island, built in 1956 on the old Curtis airfield land, and enclosed into an indoor mall to draw the growing suburban families pouring out of New York City into Nassau County during the post-war boom.

By 1968, it was a landmark anchored by J.C. Penney and Gimbels, surrounded by restaurants and parking lots with the Sunrise Drive-In movie theater right next door. The first drive-in theater in the state of New York, in fact, opened back in 1938. It was the kind of place families went on Friday nights, the kind of lot that filled up with cars and emptied out by midnight.

On this particular Thursday evening, Diane parked her Valiant near a steakhouse between the mall and the drive-in theater. She went inside to shop. At some point during or after her visit, a man approached her in the parking lot. Detectives would later determine that he posed as a store security guard or a police officer and accused her of shoplifting.

It was a ruse to gain control, to get close. Diane Cuesick weighed 98 lb. She fought back. The defensive wounds on her hands prove that. But it wasn’t enough. Hours passed. [music] When Diane didn’t return home by 10:30 that night, her parents got in their car and drove to the mall. They found her Plymouth Valiant still sitting in the lot.

Her father walked up to the car, opened the door, and looked into the backseat. His daughter was there. Her hands bound, adhesive tape over her mouth. She had been beaten in the face and head. And she had been strangled to death. Diane Cusick was pronounced dead at 1:40 in the morning on February 16th, 1968. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death as asphyxiation due to strangulation.

She was 23 years old. She’d gone to buy dancing shoes. And the man who killed her walked away into the Long Island night without leaving behind a name, a face, or a trail that anyone could follow. He disappeared into the sprawl of parking lots and highways and anonymous suburban darkness.

 Just another figure in a crowd. I mean, think about that for a second. A father walking across a mall parking lot at 10:30 at night because his daughter is late coming home. He sees her car. He probably feels a moment of relief. She’s still here. Maybe she lost track of time. Maybe the store was crowded. He walks up to the Plymouth Valiant and opens the door. And then his world ends.

That moment. That specific moment in the parking lot of the Green Acres Mall stayed with the Cusick family for the next 54 years. Jim, Diane’s brother, would later describe it in a courtroom. He remembered their father carrying Diane’s body, not knowing if she was alive or dead, not knowing what had happened, not understanding how a trip to buy dance shoes could end this way.

 The family went home that night with a hole in the center of their lives that would never close. And little Darlene, who had been waiting at home with her grandparents for her mother to walk through the door, would grow up without her. She’d be raised by her grandparents. She’d grow into a woman who by her own account stepped right into Diane’s shoes.

 But the woman who wore those shoes first, who danced and taught and loved her little girl, was gone. If this story is already hitting you, stay with it. There’s a lot more to come. And if you’re the kind of person who thinks these cases deserve to be [music] told properly, consider subscribing. We go deep on these stories every [music] single time.

The investigation that followed Diane Cuesix’s murder was thorough by the standards of 1968. Nassau County detectives fanned out across the Green Acres Mall and the surrounding area. They interviewed employees at the stores, patrons who had been shopping that evening, workers at the steakhouse near where Diane’s car was [music] parked.

 They retraced her movements from the moment she left New Hyde Park to the moment she arrived at the mall. They canvassed the neighborhood around the Sunrise Drive-In. They talked to anyone who might have seen something. And critically, the investigators at the scene did something that would turn out to be the single most important [music] decision anyone made in the entire case.

They collected a biological sample from the crime scene, a semen sample, and they preserved [music] it. They sealed it, cataloged it, and stored it in the Nassau County Forensic Evidence Bureau. In 1968, they had absolutely no way to use it. DNA profiling did not exist. The science that would eventually allow forensic analysts to build a genetic profile from a biological sample and match it to a specific individual was still 17 years away from being invented.

Alec Jeffreys, the British geneticist pioneered the technique, wouldn’t publish his groundbreaking work until 1984. The FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS, wouldn’t launch as a pilot program until around 1990. The DNA Identification Act of 1994, which enabled CODIS as a national database, was more than a quarter century in the future.

So, the evidence sat there, locked in a storage room, waiting for a science that hadn’t been imagined yet. The detectives kept working the case for a while. They followed leads that went nowhere. They cleared suspects using what tools they had available. At one point, the preserved sample was reportedly used to exclude another person of [music] interest.

 But, without a match, without a name, without a witness who could identify the killer, the trail went cold. And that was it. The case file was shelved. Diane Cusick murder became one of thousands of unsolved homicides from the late 1960s that simply ran out of road. Her parents took on the task of raising Darlene.

 Her brother Jim carried the weight of what happened in that parking lot. The image of their father finding Diane in the backseat >> [music] >> for the rest of his life. The family didn’t talk about Diane much. According to Darlene, her mother’s memory wasn’t kept alive in the way you might expect. The pain was too deep. The absence too big.

So, they lived with it quietly, the way families of unsolved murder victims often do. Not because they forgot, but because there was nothing else they could do. The 1970s passed. Women in Nassau County continued to go missing, continued to be found dead, and nobody connected those cases to the man who had killed Diane Cusick.

The 1980s arrived. DNA profiling was invented across the Atlantic by Alec Jeffreys, and for the first time in human history a biological sample could be tied to a specific individual. The first DNA-based conviction happened in 1987. The technology spread to police departments and crime labs across the United States.

It was a revolution in criminal justice, the kind of breakthrough that rewrites the rules of what’s solvable and what isn’t. Then the 1990s CODIS grew from a pilot project into a national database containing millions of offender profiles. The DNA Identification Act of 1994 made it federal law. Cold case units were established in police departments and district attorney’s offices across the country staffed by detectives and prosecutors whose entire job was reopening old investigations with new tools.

 Modern short tandem repeat profiling gave forensic analysts the ability to build usable genetic profiles from tiny, degraded, decades-old samples that would have been useless just a few years earlier. The 2000s came and went. Then the 2010s. Genetic genealogy emerged as yet another tool with investigators using public DNA databases to identify killers through family connections.

The Golden State Killer was caught that way. The BTK Killer’s daughter’s DNA helped confirm his identity. The science kept advancing, kept reaching further back in time, kept making the impossible possible. And through all of it, that sample from the parking lot of the Green Acres Mall sat in a Nassau County storage room filed away, untested against any national database, unmatched, unresolved, waiting for for moment.

54 years is a long time to wait for anything, but evidence doesn’t forget. And sometimes the thing that cracks a case open isn’t a new clue. It’s the same clue tested with tools that didn’t exist when the crime was committed. This decision seemed small at the time. Cataloging a sample, storing it properly, making sure it survived.

 It wasn’t While Diane Cusek’s case sat cold in Nassau County, the man who killed her was still out there. And he didn’t stop. Richard Cottingham was born on November 25th, 1946 in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx. His father was a vice president at Metropolitan Life Insurance. The family moved to New Jersey where Cottingham grew up in a middle-class household and graduated from Pascack Valley High School in 1964.

He got a job as a mainframe computer operator at Blue Cross Blue Shield in Manhattan, commuting from New Jersey into the city every day. He married in 1970 and had three children. They lived in Lodi, New Jersey, a small borough in Bergen County. His wife filed for divorce in 1978. To anyone on the outside, he looked like an unremarkable suburban commuter, suit and tie, office job, kids in school.

But starting in the late 1960s, Richard Cottingham was living a parallel life that nobody around him fully understood. He targeted women across across New York and New Jersey. His approach was consistent and calculated. He would pose as a figure of authority, a security guard, a police officer, a hotel detective, someone with a built-in reason to be trusted and obeyed.

He used that false authority to gain control of his victims before they had a chance to resist. Then he would overpower them, bind them, and strangle them. He collected personal items from his victims as trophies, jewelry, clothing, small objects, things he could keep, things that connected him to what he had done.

 His geographic range was enormous and deliberate. Bergen County, New Jersey, Manhattan, Nassau County on Long Island. He frequented the bars and hotels around Times Square during the era when that neighborhood was at its most lawless. He drove the highways of northern New Jersey and Long Island. He moved between jurisdictions the way a commuter changes trains easily and without friction.

 And in the 1960s and 1970s, that movement between jurisdictions was essentially a cloak of invisibility. There was no centralized database connecting police departments across state lines. New Jersey homicide detectives had no automated way to compare their open cases with unsolved murders in New York. Nassau County investigators had no system for checking their files against Bergen County’s.

 Each department was an island. Each investigation existed in its own silo. And a killer who was disciplined enough to spread his crimes across multiple jurisdictions could operate for years without anyone connecting the dots. Cottingham understood this. Maybe not consciously, maybe not strategically, but instinctively, he understood that the system had gaps.

And he lived inside those gaps for over 12 years. The crimes [music] escalated. By the late 1970s, Cottingham was committing murders in Manhattan’s Times Square district, targeting women in the cheap hotels that lined the area during that era’s peak of urban decay. In December 1979, firefighters responded to a blaze at the Travel Inn Motor Hotel on West 42nd Street.

Inside one of the rooms, they found the bodies of two women. Both had been set on fire. Both had been decapitated. Their heads and hands had been removed, making identification nearly impossible. That crime scene earned Cottingham the name that would follow him for the rest of his life. The Torso Killer.

 Some media outlets also called him the Times Square Killer. One of the two women was eventually identified as Dita Godarzi, a 22-year-old with a young daughter. The other victim has never been identified. She is still listed as a Jane Doe. If you’re wondering how someone commits crimes this horrific across two states for over a decade without getting caught, so is everyone else.

But the answer is simpler and more disturbing than you’d think. In the era before DNA databases, before CODIS, before interstate information sharing systems, a killer who moved between jurisdictions was almost invisible. New Jersey detectives had no automatic way to compare their open cases with open cases in New York.

Nassau County had no reason to check their unsolved files against Bergen County’s. >> [music] >> Every department was working in isolation. Cottingham exploited that gap for more than 12 years. His luck ran out on May 22nd, 1980 at a Quality Inn Motel in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. An 18-year-old woman named Leslie Ann Odell screamed loudly enough to alert the motel staff.

They called the police. >> [music] >> When officers entered the room, they found Cottingham with Odell, along with a collection of items that told a story all by themselves. Leather restraints, a switchblade, replica pistols, prescription sedatives. He was arrested [music] that night. And when detectives started pulling at the threads, the full scope of what Cottingham had done began to come into focus.

The trials unfolded across multiple jurisdictions. In New Jersey in 1981 and 1982, >> [music] >> he was convicted of the murders of Mary Ann Carr and Valerie Ann Street, along with multiple assaults. In New York in 1984, he was convicted of three Manhattan murders, including [music] the two Times Square victims.

The sentences added up to more than 200 years. He was sent to [music] South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, New Jersey. By 1984, the world thought the [music] Richard Cottingham story was finished. A monster caught, convicted, and locked away for the rest of his natural life. But the detail that everyone missed at the time was how far back his crimes [music] actually went.

 The convictions covered the late 1970s. The murders went back much further. And the evidence linking him to those earlier killings was sitting in storage rooms across Long Island and New Jersey, waiting for someone to ask the right questions. It was 1967, and Nancy Schiavo Vogel was living a quiet life in Little Ferry, New Jersey.

She was 29 years old, married, and the mother of two children. She and her family lived in the same small Bergen County town where Richard Cottingham also happened to live. They knew each other, at least in passing. Small town, familiar faces. On the evening of October 28th, 1967, Nancy told her family she was going to play bingo with friends at Saint Margaret of Cortona Roman Catholic Church. She never made it to the church.

Instead, she stopped at the Valley Fair store in Little Ferry. Cottingham found her in the parking lot. He abducted her. He drove her in her own car to an isolated area, reportedly a cornfield in Montvale. He strangled her with a rope. Two days later, on October 30th, two young girls discovered Nancy Vogel’s body in her car, parked on a residential street in Ridgefield Park.

 She had been beaten, bound with a thin cord, and strangled. Her clothes were folded neatly beneath her. Nancy Vogel was 29 years old. She had two children waiting for her at home. And the man who killed her was living just blocks away. Walking the same streets, blending into the same neighborhood. >> [music] >> The case went unsolved for 43 years.

Four decades of silence. Nancy’s children grew up without their mother. Her family lived with the not knowing, the specific kind of grief that comes when someone you love is murdered, and nobody can tell you who did it or why. >> [music] >> The person who finally changed that was the retired Bergen County Chief of Detectives named Robert Anzalone.

Starting in 2004, more than two decades after Cottingham’s arrest, Anzalone began making regular trips to Southwoods State Prison to sit across from a man convicted of multiple murders and just talk. Not interrogate, not threaten, not bargain, talk. This is the part of cold case work that never makes it into the television version.

There’s nothing dramatic about it, nothing cinematic. Just a retired detective driving to a prison, sitting in a visiting room, and having long, careful conversations with a serial killer over the course of months and years. Building familiarity. Establishing a rapport. Finding the cracks in the wall that a man like Cottingham builds around himself.

 Learning which topics he’ll engage with and which ones make him shut down. Chess played at the speed of geology, and Anzelone played it for years. The payoff came in 2010 when Cottingham confessed to killing Nancy Vogel. He pleaded guilty in Bergen County Superior Court before Judge Donald Venezia. Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli said the resolution was the culmination of years of traveling to the prison, years of patient work.

 Nancy’s brother and her two children were in the courtroom when Cottingham entered his plea and offered a brief apology. He received a life sentence to run alongside the two centuries he was already serving. Nancy Vogel’s murder was now confirmed as Cottingham’s first known killing. It happened in 1967, more than a decade before his arrest, and it opened a door that would eventually lead back to Long Island.

Because Anzelone was not the only person working on Cottingham during those years, a parallel effort was developing along completely different lines. Dr. Peter Vronsky, a criminologist and true crime author based in Toronto, had begun conducting extensive interviews with Cottingham for a biography. The two spoke in a series of recorded prison phone calls that stretched over years, long conversations in which Vronsky methodically documented Cottingham’s recollections, his rationalizations, his geographic knowledge of crime scenes.

Vronsky approached it as a researcher. His goal was the historical record, but the calls were producing something more than material for a book. They were producing confessions. And then there was Jennifer Weiss. Her story is one of the most unlikely threads in this entire case. Weiss was the daughter of Dita Godarsi, one of the two women murdered and dismembered in the 1979 Times Square Hotel Fire.

Weiss had been a child when her mother was killed. She grew up with the knowledge that a man named Richard Cottingham had taken her mother from her in the most violent way imaginable. And in 2016, she made a decision that almost nobody in her position would ever consider. She started writing letters to the man who killed her mother.

Her first visit to South Woods State Prison was in 2017. She sat across from Cottingham and spoke to him face-to-face. Not as an investigator, not as a prosecutor, as the daughter of one of his victims. And something about that connection, that vulnerability, that willingness to enter his world on personal terms, opened doors that law enforcement alone could not open.

Between Anzalone’s interrogation expertise, Vronsky’s research persistence, and Weiss’s deeply personal motivation, an unlikely alliance had formed around a single shared goal, getting Cottingham to talk about the murders nobody knew about yet. The ones buried so deep and so long ago that even the case files had been forgotten.

And Cottingham’s health was declining. He was confined to a wheelchair. His body was failing. He was spending his days in the medical wing of a prison he would never leave. And for reasons that probably only made sense to him, whether it was ego or a need to control the narrative of his own legacy, or simply the knowledge that time was running out, he started talking about Long Island.

If you’ve made it this far into this story, you already understand why these cases matter. Cold Case Redemption exists to tell the stories that everyone else forgot. If that’s something you value, hit subscribe. We cover cases like this every week and there’s always more to uncover. Diane Cusick was not the only woman Richard Cottingham killed on Long Island. She was the one with the DNA.

She was the one who could be proven in court. But Cottingham had more to say and what he admitted to during his December 2022 plea hearing revealed a pattern of violence stretching across Nassau County in the early 1970s. Under a non-prosecution agreement because Cottingham is already serving more than 200 years and will die in prison.

 He allocated to four additional murders. He provided details about each crime scene that according to District Attorney Anne Donnelly only the killer would know. These are their stories, not the way they died, but who they were before this man took them. Mary Beth Heins was 21 years old. She grew up in Mineola, a small town in the heart of Nassau County and was working as a mother’s helper at a family’s home in Bellmore.

On May 10th, 1972 around 10:45 in the morning, her body was discovered floating face-down in a muddy stream in a wooded area along Main Avenue in Rockville Centre. She had been thrown from the Peninsula Boulevard bridge into the creek below. The medical examiner determined she had been strangled to death with contusions on her face and neck.

 She was found without shoes. For 50 years Mary Beth Heins’s murder went unsolved. Her sister Jean Heins never stopped pushing investigators to reopen the case. She made phone calls. She wrote letters. She kept her sister’s name in the conversation long after the rest of the world had moved on. When Cottingham finally admitted to the killing in 2022, Jean said her heart was full.

 She said they were celebrating justice for Mary Beth. 50 years of pushing. 50 years of refusing to let go. That’s what it took. Laverne Moy was 23 years old. She was from St. Albans in Southeastern Queens, a historically black middle-class neighborhood with deep community roots. She was a mother of two children and she worked as a ward clerk at Nassau Hospital, a job that required organization, reliability, and care.

Her fingerprints on file at the hospital were what eventually confirmed her identity. On July 20th, 1972, just over 2 months after Mary Beth Hines was found, an 11-year-old boy walking near the creek in Rockville Centre discovered another body in the water. Laverne Moy had been thrown from the same Peninsula Boulevard bridge.

She had been strangled. The same creek, the same bridge, >> [music] >> the same method, the same killer, 2 months apart. Two women from completely different backgrounds, different neighborhoods, different walks of life, both ending up in the same muddy stream in Rockville Centre. And in 1972, without DNA, without CODIS, without any way to connect biological evidence across [music] cases, nobody linked the two murders.

Laverne’s son, John Moy, was a young child when his mother was killed. He grew up carrying the weight of her unsolved murder through every stage of his life, through school, through college, through the early years of his career. He could have let it define him in the worst way. >> [music] >> Instead, he built a life of extraordinary public service.

He worked under Governors Mario Cuomo and Andrew Cuomo in New York State government. He went on to serve with the National Urban League, one of the country’s most important civil rights organizations. He became a man of genuine consequence and purpose. And through all of it, through every achievement and every milestone, >> [music] >> the question of who killed his mother sat in the background like a shadow that never quite lifted.

Sheila Hymans was 33 years old, a mother of three children, [music] and employed at a Brooklyn book company. On July 20th, 1973, exactly 1 year to the day after Laverne Moy was found in that Rockville Center Creek, [music] Sheila was killed inside the bathroom of her own home in North Woodmere. She was bludgeoned to death, struck at least 15 times, suffering multiple skull fractures, a broken jaw, and fatal injuries.

Her children were away at summer camp. Her husband was out shopping. And for decades, the suspicion fell on her husband. Without another suspect, without a lead, without evidence pointing elsewhere, the assumption lingered. Her husband lived under that cloud until his death in 2004, never cleared, never vindicated.

You’d think someone would have said something. Nobody did. Not until 18 years after his death, when Cottingham admitted to the killing and Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly stood in a courtroom and said clearly and loudly that Sheila Hymans’ husband did not murder his wife. Their daughter, Randy Childs, was in the courtroom to hear those words.

Imagine waiting your entire adult life to hear that your father was innocent. Imagine getting that answer from the confession of a serial killer. Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves was 18 years old. She had come to the mainland United States from Puerto Rico, like so many young people in the early 1970s who were drawn by the promise of opportunity and independence.

She was living in New York City, splitting her time between Manhattan and the Bronx. She had a boyfriend. She had the kind of future that an 18-year-old imagines when everything is still ahead of her. On October 30th, 1973, Maria sat down and wrote a letter to her mother back home in Bayamon, Puerto Rico. She enclosed $100.

She asked her mother to send family photos. Think about what that letter represents. A daughter far from home sending money she probably couldn’t afford to spare, asking for photographs of the people she missed. It’s the kind of letter that a mother keeps in a drawer for the rest of her life. Less than 2 months later, around December 27th, 1973, Maria was strangled.

Her body was found near a Jones Beach bus stop in a wooded area on the north side of Ocean Parkway by workers who were out pruning trees. She was wrapped in plastic bags and a gray blanket with rope marks on her neck and her hands tied. She was 18 years old. And here is the part of Maria’s story that may be the most painful of all.

For nearly 50 years, the people who might have grieved for her the most, her mother in Bayamon, her family in Puerto Rico, may not have even known she was dead. Authorities struggled for decades to locate her surviving relatives. A cousin living in Lawrence, Massachusetts, had identified Maria’s body back in 1974, and she was buried in Massachusetts.

But reaching her immediate family, the people’s the people who received that letter with the $100 and the request for photographs, proved nearly impossible across the decades. At the 2022 hearing, prosecutor Jared Rosenblatt made a public appeal for anyone connected to Maria’s family to come forward. Because even after the case was solved, even after the killer admitted what he had done, Maria’s story remained incomplete.

There were still people out there, perhaps in Puerto Rico, perhaps in New York, perhaps somewhere else entirely, who deserved to know what happened to the girl who sent money home and asked for pictures of the family she loved. Five women, five families shattered, five investigations that hit dead ends and stayed there for decades.

Marybeth Heinze, Laverne Moyé, Sheila Hymon, Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves, and Diane Cusick. Each one reduced to a name in an unsolved case file, waiting for something to break. And the timing of what happened next was almost too perfect, because the break, when it finally came, started with a phone call from a prison cell.

During those years of recorded phone conversations between Peter Vronsky and Richard Cottingham, something shifted. Cottingham’s health was deteriorating. He was in his mid-70s, confined to a wheelchair, spending his days in the medical wing of South Woods State Prison. And whether it was ego or a desire to control his own legacy, or something else entirely, he began talking about crimes that nobody had connected to him.

In 2021, during one of their calls, Cottingham described a murder in a shopping mall parking lot. He didn’t name the victim, but he gave Vronsky something more useful than a name. He gave directions. Turn-by-turn directions from his mother-in-law’s house in Queens Village to a mall parking lot in Valley Stream.

The kind of specific geographic detail that you don’t make up and you don’t forget. Vronsky took those directions and followed them. They led to the Green Acres Mall. He cross-referenced the location with unsolved murders in the area and identified the victim as Diane Cusick, the 23-year-old dance instructor killed in February of 1968.

Then Vronsky learned something else. There was preserved DNA evidence from the Cusick crime scene, a biological sample collected in 1968 that had been sitting in Nassau County’s forensic evidence bureau for over 50 years. The technology to analyze it hadn’t existed when it was collected, but it existed now. Vronsky contacted Nassau County homicide detective Daniel Finn.

 He laid out what Cottingham had told him. He told them about the preserved sample. And he said four words that changed everything. Test the evidence. The Nassau County Office of the Medical Examiner, Division of Forensic Sciences, retested the biological evidence from Diane Cusick’s 1968 murder. They applied modern short tandem repeat profiling, the same technology that had transformed forensic science over the previous three decades, to a sample that predated the invention of DNA testing by nearly two decades.

In early 2022, they generated a DNA profile, a clean, usable genetic profile from a sample that had been collected before the moon landing, before Watergate, before the internet, before cell phones, before the entire modern world as we know it. They uploaded it to CODIS, the National Combined DNA Index System, a database that now contained millions of offender profiles from across the country.

And it hit. It matched Richard Cottingham. Not a partial match, not a familial connection that required further investigation, not investigative genetic genealogy, the technique that had cracked the Golden State Killer case through public DNA databases. This was something simpler and more direct. A cold hit against a known offender’s profile already sitting in the national database.

The biological evidence from a parking lot in Valley Stream, Long Island, collected on the night of February 15th, 1968, matched the DNA of a man who had been sitting in a New Jersey prison cell since 1980. 54 years. That’s how long it took for those two data points to find each other. A crime scene sample from the Johnson administration and an offender profile uploaded decades after the conviction.

Two dots that existed in separate systems in separate eras, finally connected by the machinery of modern forensic science. The critical piece of the puzzle was this. When Cottingham was originally convicted in the early 1980s, the law did not require convicted offenders to submit DNA samples. The database didn’t exist yet.

His genetic profile was only added to CODIS after a later guilty plea in New Jersey. So, the match couldn’t have happened in the ’90s. It couldn’t have happened in the early 2000s. The system needed both pieces to be in place at the same time. The sample from 1968 retested with modern technology and Cottingham’s profile in the database for it to hit against.

For 54 years, those two pieces existed in separate worlds. The evidence in Nassau County. The offender profile in CODIS, waiting for someone to bring them together. Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnely would later call it what it was. We believe this may be the oldest DNA hit to lead to a prosecution in the United States.

Cottingham was indicted by a Nassau County grand jury on June 22nd, 2022. He He arraigned virtually before Judge Corrine Fink on one count of second-degree murder. >> [music] >> He pleaded not guilty. Cold Case Bureau Prosecutor Jared Rosenblatt told the court that the DNA evidence and other case materials proved Cottingham was the killer.

The man who killed Diane Cusick in 1968 was finally going to face a courtroom. But Diane wasn’t the only victim whose name was about to be spoken aloud in that room. Because while investigators were building the Cusick case, they were also reviewing what Cottingham had told Bronsky, Weiss, and Anzelotti about other Long Island killings.

And the five names that emerged, >> [music] >> five women killed between 1968 and 1973, >> [music] >> represented something larger than any single prosecution. They represented a reckoning that was 50 years overdue. But this wasn’t just about Cottingham anymore. It was about the families who had spent their entire lives waiting for this moment.

On the morning of December 5th, 2022, the families of five murdered women filed into a Nassau County courtroom. Some of them had been waiting for this day for more than 50 years. Some of them had been children when their mothers were killed. Some of them had spent their adult lives not knowing whether their own father was a murderer.

All of them were about to look at a screen and see the face of the man who had destroyed their families. Richard Cottingham appeared via video link from South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, New Jersey. He was 76 years old wearing a hospital gown sitting in a wheelchair in the prison’s medical unit. The man on the screen bore almost no resemblance to the person he had been in 1968 or 1972 or 1979.

The serial killer who had terrorized New York and New Jersey for over a decade, who had been convicted of 11 other murders, who had boasted in private conversations about killing as many as 100 people, was now a frail and diminished figure staring into a camera from a room he would never leave. But the families in that courtroom were not looking at a frail old man.

They were looking at the person who had taken their mothers, [music] their sisters, their daughters. And some of them had been waiting more than 50 years for this exact moment. Judge Karen Fink presided. The courtroom was full. Prosecutors, defense attorneys, investigators, journalists, and above all, the families.

The people for whom this day was the culmination of lifetimes of grief, of anger, of unanswered questions. Cottingham pleaded guilty to one count of second-degree murder for the killing of Diane Cusick. The sentence was 25 years to life, to run consecutively with the more than 200 years he was already serving.

 It was, in a practical sense, symbolic. He will die in prison regardless. But the plea meant something that no sentence length could capture. It meant that after 54 years, someone had finally said Diane Cusick’s name in a courtroom and held her killer accountable. Then came the allocutions for the four additional murders, one by one. Cottingham admitted to killing Mary Beth Hynes, Laverne Moy, Sheila Hymon, and Maria Amarita Rosado Nieves.

He answered the prosecutor’s questions with single words, mostly just yes. When Judge Fink offered him the chance to address the families of the women he had killed, he said one word. No. And no, that’s not a typo. After 54 years of silence, after destroying five families, after being given the floor to say whatever he wanted to the people whose lives he’d ruined, his only word was no.

That’s the kind of emptiness you’re dealing with when you’re dealing with someone like Cottingham. A void where a conscience should be. District Attorney Anne Donnely addressed the courtroom and the press. She called it one of the most emotional days the Nassau County District Attorney’s office had ever experienced.

She said that in the case of Diane Cusick, her family had waited nearly 55 years for someone to be held accountable. Prosecutor Jared Rosenblatt, the chief of the DA’s Homicide Bureau and director of forensic science and cold case prosecutions, spoke with his voice breaking. He said that for more than 50 years, these five families waited, hoped, and wondered if they would ever find out who killed their loved ones.

He said he hoped there was some justice in knowing that Cottingham would live and take every breath in a prison [music] cell. Then the family spoke. And this is where the weight of 54 years landed in full. Darlene Altman, Diane Cusick’s daughter, stood in the courtroom wearing a gold ballet slipper necklace, a tribute to her mother’s career as a dance instructor. She was in her late 50s.

She had been three or four years old when her mother was killed. She had grown up without her. She had spent her entire life wondering who and why. She told the court that she had stepped right into Diane’s shoes, that her mother wasn’t spoken about growing up. That Diane’s memory wasn’t kept alive the way you might expect because the grief was too heavy and the absence was too vast.

She said the day Cottingham murdered her mother, the lives of everyone who loved Diane changed forever. She said she would never know what her life would or could have been if this hadn’t happened. And she said she had spent the last 54 years of her life wondering who murdered her mother. When she looked at Cottingham on the screen, she later described a dead stare.

She said it felt like he was looking right at her. Diane’s brother Jim confronted Cottingham directly. He pointed at the screen and shouted that Cottingham had done this to her. He said Cottingham turned their lives upside down. He remembered their father, the man who had walked up to that Plymouth Valiant in the parking lot and opened the door.

He said his dad carried her body not knowing if she was alive or dead. And he asked the courtroom to imagine that. Then he looked at the screen and said he wished he and his brother could have torn Cottingham apart. John Moy, Laverne Moy’s son, stood before the court holding a framed photograph of his mother.

 The little boy who lost his mother in 1972 was now a man who had served under two New York governors and built a life dedicated to public service. He looked at the photo and spoke directly to her. He told her he loved her. He told her she could rest in peace. He said there had been dark days behind them, but that today the sun was shining brightly because justice had been served.

 Jean Hines, Mary Beth’s sister, the woman who had spent 50 years calling investigators, writing letters, and refusing to let her sister’s case be forgotten, celebrated justice for Mary Beth. She said her heart was full. Randy Childs, Sheila Hymans daughter, heard the words she had waited her entire adult life to hear. District Attorney Donnally told the courtroom loudly and clearly that Sheila Hymans husband did not murder his wife.

 He had died in 2004, never cleared during his lifetime, 20 years too late for him, but not too late for his children to finally know the truth. Judge Fink looked at the video screen, looked at the frail 76-year-old man in the hospital gown and called him purely evil. She said there was no sentence she could impose that would truly be enough.

With the December 5th plea, the total number of murders officially tied to Richard Cottingham reached at least 16 across New York and New Jersey. In private conversations with Vronsky and others, he has claimed responsibility for as many as 100 killings. Whether that number is accurate, exaggerated, or somewhere in between, nobody can say for certain.

What investigators do know is that Cottingham operated across multiple states for more than 12 years before his arrest, and the full scope of his crimes has never been established. Following the hearing, Nassau County investigators announced they were reviewing all unsolved murders of women in the county between 1967 and 1980.

Every case, every file, every piece of preserved evidence that might, with modern testing, yield a profile that hits against a known offender. The story of Richard Cottingham’s victims, [music] in other words, may not be finished. And for the families still waiting for answers, the fact that investigators are now actively looking is itself a kind of hope.

There’s a detail from the beginning of this story that means something different now. On February 15th, 1968, investigators in Nassau County collected a biological sample from the backseat of a white Plymouth Valiant in a shopping mall parking lot. They didn’t know what it was worth. They couldn’t test it.

 They couldn’t match it. They couldn’t do anything with it except seal it, catalog it, and put it on a shelf. And they kept it there through five decades, through changes in leadership, changes in technology, changes in the entire landscape of criminal justice. Someone at every step along the way made the decision to preserve that evidence, to not throw it away, to not lose it in a move, to not let it degrade beyond usefulness.

That might sound mundane. It isn’t. Across the country, evidence from cold cases has been lost, mishandled, destroyed, or simply forgotten. The fact that this sample survived from 1968 to 2022 in usable condition is itself a small miracle of institutional discipline. And it mattered. It mattered more than anyone in 1968 could have imagined.

Because that sample connected a 23-year-old dance instructor from New Hyde Park to a serial killer who had operated across two states for over a decade. It connected Diane Cusick to Mary Beth Hynes, to Laverne Moy, to Sheila Hymon, to Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves. It gave Darlene Altman the answer she waited 54 years to hear.

 It cleared a dead man’s name. It let a son tell his mother she could rest in peace. This case is a story about DNA and forensic science, yes. It is a landmark in the history of cold case prosecution, a proof of concept for the idea that no case is ever truly dead >> [music] >> if the evidence survives and the science keeps advancing.

But reduce it to the forensics alone and you miss the point. >> [music] >> Because this is also a story about the people who refused to stop. Robert Anzalone, the retired detective who drove to a prison year after year, sitting across from a serial killer, building the kind of trust that eventually cracks open confessions that nothing else can reach.

 Peter Vronsky, the criminologist who spent years on the phone with Cottingham and recognized in a casual description of a parking lot the signature of an unsolved murder from 1968. Jennifer Weiss, the daughter of a victim who chose to write letters to the man who killed her mother because she believed that personal connection might lead to answers for other families whose cases were still open.

Detective Daniel Finn, who took Vronsky’s tip and ran with it. Prosecutor Jared Rosenblatt who built the case and stood in the courtroom with tears in his eyes. District Attorney Ann Donnelly, who made the call to pursue a non-prosecution agreement that [music] would give four additional families the answers they deserved.

And Jean Haines, Mary Beth’s sister who pushed for 50 years 50 years to keep her sister’s case in front of investigators. None of them had to do what they did. Every single one of them could have walked away. Could have accepted that these cases were too old, too cold too far gone. All of them chose not to. And then there’s Darlene Altman.

She was three or four years old the last time she saw her mother. She grew up without knowing who killed her or why. She stepped into her mother’s shoes, her mother’s life, her mother’s absence. She said she never thought she’d see the day when someone would answer for what happened. She saw the day. Diane Cusick was 23 years old.

 She was a dance instructor. She was a mother. She went to the Green Acres Mall to buy a pair of dancing shoes on a cold February night in 1968. And 54 years later her daughter stood in a courtroom wearing a gold ballet slipper necklace and said her name out loud. That’s not just justice. That’s redemption. If this story stayed with you, I’d ask you to do one thing.

 Like this video and subscribe to Cold Case Redemption. Every case we cover here is a story that went cold, sometimes for decades, until someone refused to let it stay buried. If you believe these victims deserve to be remembered for who they were and not just how their stories ended, you’re already part of what this channel is about.

There are more stories like this one waiting to be told. We’ll see you in the next one.