50 years after his mother was strangled and thrown off the Long Island Bridge, John Moye finally saw the evil that changed his life forever.
Moye, 55, stared down serial killer and rapist Richard Cottingham in a Nassau County courtroom Monday as the 76-year-old notorious “Torso Killer” admitted to five other sadistic killings decades earlier, and a known number of his brought to 17 – although according to experts, the number of victims could reach 100.
“Everything I was taught about evil was in his presence, in his demeanor, in his eyes,” Moye told The Post. “It was pure evil. I could feel it.”
On July 20, 1972, the body of Laverne Moye of St. Albans, Queens was found in a river in downtown Rockville. Cottingham, a depraved murderer who has been jailed for more than 200 years, has admitted abandoning his 22-year-old mother. two from the bridge – ending his family’s half-century search for answers.
“It means closure,” Moye said of this week’s hearing. “It gave the world a chance to know that Laverne Moye is human. She was a mother, she was a wife, a daughter and a grandmother taken too early. But his light shines brightly against the background of evil.”
On Monday, Moye first laid eyes on Cottingham, who dismembered some of the victims, including two women, whose bodies were found in a Times Square motel in December 1979 without their heads and arms.
“I was shocked that this was a serial killer,” Moye said of her mother’s confessed killer. “I didn’t know what to expect. It was amazing all the way through.”
Moye, who came from Georgia to see Cottingham confess to killing his mother and four other women, said he drew heavily on his Catholic faith when he saw the unrepentant killer on videotape from Southwoods State Prison in New Jersey. . he is serving several life sentences there. Her son said it was especially hard to bear when prosecutors gave details about such gruesome crimes as where Laverne was found.
Moye said of Cottingham: “I was amazed that one man could do all the carnage.” “And he sat down with literally no remorse. He had neither the decency nor the dignity to apologize or even reach out to the families of the victims. He was a coward.’
Cottingham, a divorced father of three who formerly lived in Lodi, NJ, also pleaded guilty to the February 1968 rape and murder of 23-year-old Diane Cusick, a New Hyde Park dance instructor.
According to the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office, Cottingham was charged in June with Cusick’s slaying after DNA evidence linked him to the cold-case killing — the earliest match to lead to the prosecution. was A judge sentenced Cusick to 25 years to life in prison after her brother and only child read emotional statements in court.
Cusick’s daughter, Darlene Altman, told Nassau County District Judge Caryn Fink that her late grandparents raised her after her mother’s horrific murder. They never fully recovered from the monumental loss, he said.
“It’s not something you ever get over,” Altman, 58, told The Post. “I could not even imagine losing my child. It’s not the natural order it should be.”
Altman, who was just 3 years old at the time, said her parents divorced before Cusick was killed. Then he grew up without a father because his grandparents didn’t like him, he says.
“I lost more than my mother that day,” Altman said. “It won’t bring my mom back, but at least I have answers now. Justice has been served and that’s it – case closed. Now I have to get on with my life.”
Cusick, a dance school teacher in the Oceanside community of Long Island, went to Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream to buy a pair of shoes. Hours later, her parents went to the mall and found Diane’s Plymouth Valiant in the parking lot, where her body was found in the back seat. Authorities say she was bound and strangled.
Like John Moye, Altman, who now lives in Ocala, said he struggled to process Cottingham’s brutality.
“A man has no heart, no soul, no feelings,” he said. “It’s hard to understand how someone could be like that. It’s amazing and very scary, especially knowing that there are more of them out there.
Cottingham, a terrorized former computer programmer from 1967 to 1980, also testified Monday that he strangled 21-year-old Mary Beth Heintz in May 1972, three months before he killed Moye, and dumped her body in the same river.
The then-confessed killer killed Sheila Hayman, a 33-year-old mother of three, in July 1973 in her home in North Woodmere, New York, after her husband found her after returning from shopping.
Five months later, the serial killer struck again, strangling 18-year-old Manhattanite Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves, originally from Puerto Rico. Crews found her body wrapped in plastic bags and wrapped in a gray blanket near the Jones Beach bus stop.
Cottingham, whose lawyer did not respond to requests for comment, claims to have killed as many as 100 women. Canadian writer Peter Vronsky He is now writing his second book about the gruesome murders that culminated in May 1980 at a New Jersey motel, where police arrested Cottingham after he handcuffed, stabbed and bit an 18-year-old woman. The attendant called the police after hearing the teenager’s distressed screams.
“I think he was killed between 85 and 100,” Vronsky told The Post. “Of course, it’s completely believable. Given the close of business yesterday, I have complete faith in him.”
Vronsky, a frequent visitor to Cottingham in prison, said he had checked into the Travel Inn motel in the early hours of December 2, 1979, and was about to have sex when he met the prolific killer in the elevator. Times Square.
Cottingham had just raped, tortured and decapitated two sex workers in a motel room before setting her on fire. On his way out, he hit the author on the leg with a bag that appeared to contain bowling balls, Vronsky said.
Six months later, Vronsky learned that the man he encountered in the elevator was Cottingham, as the killer’s face appeared in newspapers across the region. He became known as the “Times Square Torso Ripper” – sparking Vronsky’s lifelong fascination with serial killers.
In 2004, Vronsky published his first book on homicidal maniacs, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of the Beasts, a comprehensive look at the executions of the ancient Roman era. He later detailed his brief encounter with Cottingham in 1979 in the film The Times Square Torso Ripper: Sex and Murder at the Deuce. His upcoming book about the evil predator is due out next fall.
Vronsky, who helped investigators secure the indictment in June, is trying to get as much confession as possible from the aging, 300-pound serial killer, but the clock is ticking because he suffers from diabetes and kidney disease, he said.
“He used to describe to me the ways he drove,” Vronsky said of Cottingham over the five years he wrote about his murders in letters and interviews. “So he remembers something on the road: a race or a shopping mall. In the case of Diane Cusick, it was a car that is no longer there … He remembers the features of the victim, but cannot remember their names.
Vronsky’s writings include an authoritative catalog of 17,000 years of pathological murder, which Cottingham says sought out his victims before turning from a family man into a savage monster.
“Like a wolf,” Vronsky told The Post. “And every night was a full moon for Cottingham.”
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