Joe Berlinger enjoys a reputation as one of the most renowned documentary filmmakers in contemporary America, largely thanks to works that promote the cause of social justice and raise awareness of various social wrongs in America and the wider world. The best known of these is Paradise Lost, the trilogy dedicated to the infamous case of the Memphis Three, which ultimately resulted in three teenagers being released from prison after nearly two decades served for a vicious child murder that many doubt they had actually committed. Paradise Losz also inspired Netflix to produce the similarly-themed Making a Murderer, a highly regarded documentary series that in many ways defined the modern-day "true crime" genre. In 2021, Netflix brought Berlinger in to produce an anthology of true crime documentaries titled Crime Scene; the first instalment was The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, followed immediately by The Times Square Killer.
The case depicted in the series relates to Richard Cottingham, a computer operator who between 1965 and 1980 killed at least twenty women in New York and New Jersey. His victims were mostly prostitutes, and his modus operandi often included deliberate mutilations made to prevent the identification of bodies. At least three of his victims were working as prostitutes in the area of Times Square — a neighbourhood that, in the 1970s and early 1980s, was notorious as a den of the sex industry, and whose tawdry grandeur had long since displaced whatever glamour the name once carried. The murders generated a great deal of publicity, with the killer being branded the "Torso Killer" by the press well before his arrest and eventual conviction.
Berlinger attempts to place Cottingham's crimes within a broader socioeconomic and cultural context. He points to the anti-prostitution laws that made Cottingham's real and potential victims wary of contacting the authorities about his suspicious and disturbing behaviour — a woman engaged in illegal trade could hardly expect sympathetic treatment from the police of that era, and this vulnerability was precisely what a predator like Cottingham exploited. Berlinger also notes that the absence of what are now taken for granted — video surveillance, modern forensics, computer databases and inter-agency cooperation between the police departments of New York and New Jersey — allowed Cottingham to continue his reign of terror for well over a decade. In this respect, the series continues the analytical ambition Berlinger displayed in The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, although this time the contextual material serves the narrative rather than drowning it.
Technically, Berlinger adopts the same approach as in the previous instalment, building the story around interviews with police detectives, reporters and scholars who collectively paint a vivid picture of a pre-Giuliani New York City that is long gone — a city of grinding fiscal crisis, casual venality and streets where the rules of ordinary civilisation had visibly broken down. For viewers raised on the sanitised, tourist-friendly Manhattan of today, this evocation of a lost urban inferno is arguably the most valuable element of the series.
The whole series, consisting of only three episodes, is much shorter than its predecessor — and this brevity proves to be its greatest virtue. Where The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel stretched a banal tragedy across four bloated hours, padded with repetitive establishing shots, tedious dramatisations and an unhealthy fixation on amateur internet sleuths, The Times Square Killer does not outstay its welcome. It is very focused and direct, and although it does not reveal anything particularly new or enlightening about either Cottingham himself or the era in which he operated, the story is well told and satisfying, readily meeting the appetite of most true crime aficionados.
This reviewer, having been thoroughly unimpressed by the previous instalment of the anthology, regards the second as a marked improvement. The Texas Killing Fields, the later third instalment directed by Jessica Dimmock, would again demonstrate how easily the format can stumble — its muddled, rushed final episode squandering two hours of solid build-up — which makes the taut discipline of The Times Square Killer all the more welcome by comparison.
Nevertheless, the series is not without flaws. The contextual ambitions occasionally feel like a series of prepared talking points rather than organic insights, and some interviewees — particularly the more academic ones — speak in generalities that add little. The victims themselves, despite the filmmakers' best intentions, remain somewhat sketchy figures, known more for what was done to them than for who they were. This is a familiar weakness of the genre, but one might have expected a filmmaker of Berlinger's pedigree, with his record of humanising society's marginalised, to do rather better.
On balance, however, Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer is a compact, competent and watchable piece of true crime filmmaking — evidence that the anthology's format works best when it trusts its material and resists the urge to sprawl.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)
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