A convicted serial killer known as the "Times Square Killer" was expected to plead guilty Monday morning to five more murders on Long Island.
Richard Cottingham, 76, who is also known as the "Torso Killer," is already in prison for 11 homicides in New Jersey and New York between 1967 and 1980. He was expected to appear in Supreme Court in Nassau County at 10 a.m. to admit to the 1968 murder of dance teacher Diane Cusick and four others, Newsday reported.
Cusick disappeared outside the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream after going there to buy dance shoes and never came home.
Cottingham will also plead guilty to the murders of four other women in 1972 and 1973, Newsday reported.
Cusick was linked through DNA to Cusick's murder and charged in June 2022. Nassau authorities alleged he sexually assaulted her and strangled her in a parked car on Feb. 16, 1968.
"That evening, she told her parents that she was going to purchase a pair of shoes at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream," Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly said in June. "She never returned home."
Cusick's father found her body in the backseat of her car.
Investigators previously said Cottingham pretended to be a police officer or mall security officer and accused Cusick of shoplifting before he strangled her.
In 2021, he pleaded guilty to the killings of two New Jersey teens in August 1974. He was already serving a life sentence in New Jersey.
Toward the end of his 13-year rampage, Cottingham killed and dismembered three prostitutes in Times Square and then set them on fire, earning the nicknames "Torso Killer" and "Times Square Killer."
Before that, his first victim was a New Jersey woman murdered in October 1967. He also killed five teenage girls in Jersey including a 13-year-old walking home from band practice in July 1968.
