Richard Francis Cottingham (born November 25, 1946) is a convicted serial killer and rapist who murdered at least eighteen young women and girls in New York and New Jersey between 1967 and 1980. He was nicknamed as: The New York Ripper, The Torso Killer and The Times Square Killer. Cottingham was arrested on May 22, 1980 and convicted of numerous murders. He was sentenced to multiple life sentences in prison. In 2009, decades after his first five murder convictions, Cottingham told a journalist that he had committed at least 80 to 100 "perfect murders" of women in various regions of the United States.