by John Zenoni
Well I have to say that the latest Netflix entry in the true crime series is a rough one, indeed. I didn't expect the storyline in ‘Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer’ to focus on some of the subject matter that it did, as it was very heavy.
The story begins in 1979 with the NY police/fire department discovering the bodies of two young women in a hotel in Times Square. Both were sex workers, as the victims are primarily referred to most of the time in the series, and had been decapitated as well as having other body parts removed. There were no clues as to the identity of the women until someone came up with the idea to run pics of mannequins wearing the clothes of the victims. One lady came forward and pointed out that a girlfriend had the same clothes and with that they were able to identify the one victim. The sad thing is that the series interviews the daughter of the victim, who was adopted and had been looking for her birth mother only to find out what kind of life she led and how she ended up dying.
There are other murders that take place and the victims all die in the same manner with the killer leaving no clues behind. The one common thread was that the majority of the victims were sex workers and this series, executive produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, spends a lot of time talking about, interviewing participants, and showing real footage of Times Square and the large number of sex/porno shops and sex workers around at that time. The culture at the time unfortunately was a breeding ground for a psychopath like the man who was eventually found (I will leave how he was caught for the viewer to watch) and convicted of the murders. Richard Cottoningham, a programmer at a major healthcare company in NY, eventually confessed to even possibly having murdered over 80 other women. Sad time in New York’s history for sure.
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