Jean Reyner was a 25-year-old female whose life ended on May 15, 1980, inside Manhattan’s Seville Hotel, where a fire drew emergency responders into a room that had been turned into a crime scene. What they found was evidence of a deliberate attempt to erase traces of what happened there: her body had been attacked and mutilated, and the blaze appeared to have been set afterward, as if the person responsible wanted heat and smoke to swallow the clues they’d left behind.
In the telling that emerged later, she moved through the orbit of Times Square’s late-night economy, described in reporting as a call-girl and in other accounts as a sex worker—someone whose disappearance might not have set off alarms quickly enough to interrupt the next step in the killer’s routine. The Seville, with its doors that opened to strangers and its rooms meant for anonymity, became another stage for a pattern investigators would come to recognize: violence behind a locked door, and then fire.
At the time of her death, the name Richard Cottingham was not yet fixed in the public mind as the answer to these hotel-room horrors. But law enforcement in the region was already chasing connective threads—murders and assaults clustered around motels, restraints, and the lingering sense that whoever was doing this understood how quickly a room could be rented, used, and abandoned. In New Jersey, a separate killing left behind something the killer didn’t intend to donate to the investigation: a fingerprint on a handcuff, the kind of small, cold detail that can outlast arson and time.
A week after Reyner was found, that broader hunt snapped into focus. On May 22, 1980, motel staff at a Quality Inn in Hasbrouck Heights heard screams and called police; officers arrived to find an assault in progress and arrested Cottingham. From there, the case against him widened—surviving victims came forward, identification and forensic work strengthened the narrative of a serial offender, and what had looked like isolated nightmares began to read like chapters of the same book.
Cottingham became the central suspect connected to Reyner’s death, and the legal system eventually treated it that way: he was convicted in New York in 1984 for murders that included hers, after earlier convictions and proceedings tied to attacks and killings in New Jersey. The story that began with a hotel fire ended, at least in court, with a name attached to it—an offender already in custody, now formally held responsible for the Seville Hotel killing as part of the larger trail of violence that had stretched across the New York–New Jersey corridor.
