Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer’ On Netflix, A Docuseries About Grisly Murders And Times Square’s Seedy Past

If you’ve been to Times Square in the past 30 years, you’d have no idea that the area has not full of family-friendly retail shops, Olive Gardens, and knock-off Elmos soliciting money for pictures. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, it was the porn and sex work capital of New York, especially the area around 42nd Street. It was in that environment that the NYPD investigated some grisly murders in 1979 and 80, which ended up being the handiwork of a serial killer who had been murdering sex workers since the late 1960s. It’s the subject of the second season of Joe Berlinger’s Crime Scene series.

CRIME SCENE: THE TIMES SQUARE KILLER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A sky-high view of Manhattan, as we hear old-time radio descriptions of Times Square. We are then shown an overhead look at the 2021 version of the famous tourist attraction.

The Gist: That’s not the Times Square that the new season of Joe Berlinger’s Crime Scene series is examining. Subtitled The Times Square Killer, the acclaimed true-crime docuseries director takes a 3-part look at a series of grisly murders that rocked even the relatively lawless version of Times Square that existed in December, 1979. That’s when NYPD officers stumbled on a room on fire at the Travel Inn Motel, only to find the bodies of two young women, heads and hands missing for both. However, there were no blood spatters, the fire destroyed none of the tiny amount of evidence left behind, and there was no way to identify the victims in those pre-DNA days.

Through the usual combination of archival news footage (most of which comes from the station then called WNEW, now WNYW), reenactments and interviews with journalists and law enforcement investigating the case, Berlinger paints a picture of how much different Times Square was in the years the serial killer, later identified as Richard Cottingham, was flummoxing the NYPD.

Much of the area, especially around 42nd Street, was rife with peep shows, and XXX movie theaters, much of which was owned by the city’s mafia families. Prostitution and drugs ran rampant, to the point where the police couldn’t do much to stem the activity.

As the NYPD investigates, getting a tip that led to one of the victims being identified as Deedeh Goodarzi, we hear from Goodarzi’s birth daughter, who found out about her when she was researching her lineage. We also hear about porn king Marty Hodas, who created the first peep show in the area in the late ’60s. In the intervening decade-plus, the presence of porn and sex workers grew exponentially, bringing with it more crime and more violence. It’s that world that the police needed to negotiate in order to prevent more killings.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The pace and tone is similar to the first season of Crime Scene, which examined some mysterious murders at Los Angeles’ Cecil Hotel. But this version has a better grasp on the history of the area where the murders happened.

Our Take: Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer is really as much about “old Times Square” as it is about the case itself. Cottingham spread his spree into New Jersey, where he was eventually caught in 1980 and convicted in a number of trials in the early 1980s. He claims to have killed more than 80 people between 1967 and when he was caught, though he was proven responsible for 11 murders.

So the idea that Cottingham terrorized Times Square is actually secondary to an examination of what the area was like back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, how it got that way, and the stigmatization that sex workers suffered, even in death. In that regard, it goes way beyond the trope most docuseries fall into when examining Times Square of the era and New York City in general; instead of just saying that it was seedy and isn’t like it was now, they actually examine the origins of how Times Square got that way. They also acknowledge that porn and sex work was just one aspect of a region that, even back then, was “crossroads of the world,” where tourism, commerce and, yes, sex work came together in one fascinating place.

This season of Crime Scene is only three parts, which tells you just how much will be about the killings and the pursuit of Cottingham. Considering he is caught in 1980, it’ll likely be more about the murders he admits to that were already cold cases for authorities in New York and New Jersey. Trying to infuse drama into what is actually more of a backwards-looking case is challenging, and Berlinger relies a bit too much on file footage that doesn’t match the timeframe of the case, as well as leaning on grisly reenactments of the crime scenes themselves. But it’s not padding, just the result of a lack of dynamic footage — at least we hope that’s the case.

Sex and Skin: Of course, porn and sex work is discussed throughout the episode, and we do see some archival footage of naked sex workers in live sex shows. But it’s less prurient and more instructive.

Parting Shot: Dominick Volpe, who was a co-worker of Cottingham’s in the computer room of the Pan Am building, talks about how the third victim was found at the Seville Hotel in early 1980, and how Cottingham, instead of expressing shock, said that “anyone” could do something so depraved.

Sleeper Star: Veronica Vera, who was a porn star and a journalist who wrote about the porn industry, has a good perspective on Marty Hodas and how the world around the “old” Times Square was 40-odd years ago.

Most Pilot-y Line: The reason why we cited the file footage in our review above is that footage of the NYPD officers supposedly going into the Travel Inn in December 1979 looked more like footage from the early 1970s, given the predominance of green-and-black cruisers in the footage. By 1979, NYPD cars were blue with white trim, which any of the extensive news footage from the era easily shows. That kind of sloppiness isn’t something we expect from Berlinger.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer is as much a deep dive into how Times Square got its seedy reputation in the ’70s and ’80s than it is about Cottingham’s killing spree. And that’s a refreshing way to approach the usual true crime format.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer On Netflix