Series Review: "Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer" (2021).

"A playground of pleasure. A killer on the loose." This is Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer. This documentary series directed by Joe Berlinger. In 1970s New York City, the "Torso Killer" preys on women to fulfil his grotesque fantasies while eluding police.

Between 1967 and 1980, American serial killer from New Jersey, Richard Francis Cottingham (born November 25, 1946), perpetrated murders in New York and New Jersey. He was nicknamed The Torso Killer and Times Square Torso Ripper after his dismemberment and decapitation of two victims on December 2, 1979 in a hotel on West 42nd Street and Tenth Avenue in the vicinity of Times Square. He tortured and murdered sex workers Deedeh Goodarzi, age twenty-two, and a still unidentified teenage victim, severed their heads and hands, and set their torsos on fire. Cottingham fled the scene with the severed heads and hands, which were never recovered. On May 22, 1980, he was eventually apprehended in a New Jersey motel in the act of torturing a teenage sex worker, Leslie Ann O’Dell, age eighteen, he had lured and driven to the location from New York City. From 1981 to 1984, in a series of trials in New Jersey and New York, Cottingham was convicted of five murders, two in New Jersey and three in New York, plus multiple charges of kidnapping and sexual assault. In 2010, Cottingham pleaded guilty to the 1967 murder of Nancy Vogel, age twenty-nine. He confessed under immunity to the murders of New Jersey school girls Jackie Harp, age thirteen; Irene Blase, age eighteen; and Denise Falasca, age fifteen, between 1968–1969 in Bergen County, New Jersey. In 2021 he confessed and pleaded guilty in the double abduction rape/murders of Lorraine Marie Kelly, age sixteen and Mary Ann Pryor, age seventeen. Officially, Cottingham killed eleven people, but he claims to have committed between eight-five and one-hundred murders. Cottingham is currently serving a life sentence and is incarcerated in New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, New Jersey.

While the series is the story of a bright, adventurous young woman going on holiday and never coming home, it's also a mediation on the true crime genre itself. The series is beautifully shot and structured so uniquely that it almost feels like an actual suspense/thriller movie rather than a documentary. Berlinger somewhat overdoes it with the creepy dramatic re-enactments, but the series benefits from a raft of solid talking heads and a central whodunit that proves continually intriguing. An effortlessly bingable, yet uniquely melancholic true crime documentary saga that plays with audience expectations of the genre. Sophisticated, gripping, and full of perspectives usually absent in the genre, the series is an expertly-paced mystery and a thought-provoking discussion on classism, mental health, and the ethics of true crime. If you don't know the story of the Torso Killer, this is sure to keep you guessing from beginning to end. If you do, you will probably still learn something from this show.

Simon says Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer receives:

Also, see my review for Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.