[image error]I had one of strangest experiences ever in New York this week as convicted serial killer Richard Cottingham, the “Times Square Torso Killer” guided me along its streets from his cell in Trenton via the Department of Corrections-approved app JPAY.  It wasn’t instant because JPAY/DOC reviews all the communications, but it was relatively interactive.   I could send him pictures from the street, also subject to the same review.

He described the location of the “secret” apartment he kept in New York in the 1970s while living in New Jersey with his wife and three children.   He said it was a super dirt-cheap tenement house “directly across First Avenue from the United Nations Headquarters.”   I first thought, “Bullshit, even in the 1970s that would have been valuable high-rent space.  But no way today would it still be around!”

But what ya’ know!   Directly across First Avenue from the United Nations Headquarters today is this rotting tooth of a five story apartment house, just as he described it, still there, all fucked up and frozen in time from the 1970s, like one those woolly Mammoth Mastodons they find encased in Siberian glacial ice – a creep hole of a place, stuck in a dark time tunnel – a serial killer’s secret lair – where the Times Square Torso Killer rested and recuperated, where he kept his stuff, his straps and gags, where he drank and dreamt, from where he sallied into the streets and bars to bring back his roofied nighttime catch, to do with anything he wanted, to torture, to keep or kill.