Revised & Updated 05-04-2025
Copyright ©2021-2025 Justice for Lisa Thomas.org All Rights Reserved
Introduction:
Real Justice for Lisa
Thomas
In
2022, serial killer Richard Cottingham admitted murdering Lisa
Thomas in 1974 in Nanuet, Rockland County, New York. But
nothing is being done by police in Rockland County to either verify
or to discredit Cottingham's admission because of decades of
inter-jurisdictional rivalries and conflicted politics between the
local Clarkstown Police Department investigating the murder and
detectives from the Rockland County District Attorney's Office whose
mandate is to co-investigate murder with local police and prosecute
it once an accused is indicted and charged.
See WPIX Channel 11 News report.
From December 2020 to August 2022, a Cottingham murder victim's daughter, the late Jennifer Weiss, and investigative historian Dr. Peter Vronsky, assisted Rockland County, New York District Attorney's Office in the investigation of Richard Cottingham, a notorious serial killer suspected in the cold case murders of Lorraine McGraw in 1970 in South Nyack and Lisa Thomas in 1974 in Nanuet, NY.
Weiss and Vronsky had direct personal access to Cottingham who had been incarcerated since May 1980 in the Trenton State Prison in New Jersey, and they facilitated and successfully negotiated for multiple agencies in New York and New Jersey, ten confessions from him in 2021-2024, including his confession to the murder of Lorraine McGraw in 1970 in Rockland County.
The Lorraine McGraw case had remained cold for fifty-one years, until Peter Vronsky identified it in January 2021, and with the help of Lorraine McGraw's grand-daughter, Vronsky and Weiss facilitated Cottingham's confession to her murder in May 2022 to Detective Conor Fitzgerald from the Rockland County District Attorney's Office. See Media Reports
The information on the Lorraine McGraw murder case closure was withheld from the public in May because Cottingham was also in the midst of confessing to the murder of Lisa Thomas at the same time. Cottingham had admitted to murdering Lisa in February 2022 in a phone conversation and a text to Vronsky, who shared the information with Detective Conor Fitzgerald while he was in the midst of interviewing Cottingham about the McGraw murder.
Cottingham confirmed in an off-the-record (no Miranda Rights) interview with Fitzgerald the claim he made in a text to Vronsky which unambiguously described his murder of Lisa Thomas.
With the Lorraine McGraw case formally closed in May 2022 and her family notified through her grand-daughter, Detective Fitzgerald, Vronsky and Weiss, now turned to formally accomplishing a case closure in the Lisa Thomas case next. As in the previous closed cold cases, what Fitzgerald was looking for was something the geriatric serial killer could remember that was did not appear in the newspapers or in the television reports at the time of the murder; something only the perpetrator would know. While the text Cottingham said had details in it, there was nothing in it that had not been in reported in the public record in the 1970s.
Richard Cottingham had been originally arrested in 1980 and convicted at trial in five murders in New York and New Jersey and sentenced to life imprisonment. After a 30-year silence he admitted to having murdered between 85-100 women and teenage girls over a 17-year period from 1963 until his sudden arrest in May 1980. From 2010 to 2024, Cottingham had made an additional 14 confirmed confessions to unsolved murders from 1967 to 1975: 6 in Bergen County, NJ; 5 Nassau County and 1 (Lorraine McGraw) in Rockland County, and one recently in December 2024 from the mid-1970s, currently undisclosed by the jurisdiction involved. Weiss and Vronsky assisted in ten of the murders, and Vronsky reviewed the original case files in all of the confessions that unfolded in Bergen County, including the ones he was not directly involved in.
With the case of Lorraine McGraw closed and confirmed in May 2022, Fitzgerald was working on confirming Cottingham's admission to having murdered Lisa Thomas in 1974.
But things went terribly wrong when the McGraw cold case closure was suddenly and prematurely announced at Detective Fitzgerald's behest by Rockland County on June 28, 2022, two days after Cottingham was indicted in another case identified by Vronsky and Weiss in Nassau County, NY.
(The case was the 1968 murder of Diane Cusick which Cottingham described to Vronsky in 2021 in a series of recorded phone calls, giving Vronsky directions to enter into Google Maps, turn by turn, from his mother-in-law's house in Queens Village, to a shopping mall parking lot in adjacent Valley Stream, Nassau County in Long Island. Vronsky identified Cusick as the victim Cottingham had been trying to describe and then discovered and alerted police that perpetrator DNA is available in the case and had been previously used to clear another suspect several years earlier. In June 2021, Vronsky met with and advise Nassau County PD to test the DNA they had with Cottingham's on file in CODIS, the national Combined DNA Index System databank. Nassau County PD and their District Attorney's Office did the test and it matched. Vronsky testifying before a Nassau County Grand Jury in March 2022, and Cottingham was indicted in June.
Two days after the indictment in Nassau County, Conor Fitzgerald and the Rockland County DA suddenly decided to make the Lorraine McGraw case closure public, in the midst of the on-going Lisa Thomas investigation. Peter Vronsky immediately objected to making the McGraw cold case closure public by Rockland County in the way it was going to be done, because it would imperil the integrity of the Lisa Thomas investigation. It was too early to make the McGraw case public. Fitzgerald's ambition to be associated with a notorious serial killer, out-weighed for him the integrity of the Lisa Thomas investigation.
Despite Vronsky's protests, the announcement in the Lorraine McGraw case was posted on June 24 in Rockland County District Attorney's social media.
Making matter worse, although Vronsky did not know it at the time, the ambitious Fitzgerald from the DA's Office had "poached" the Lisa Thomas case from the current jurisdiction and its lead investigator, Clarkstown Police Department Detective Chris Maloney. It was still their case. It had been since 1974, but Fitzgerald did not make Maloney privy to the admissions Cottingham was making and during the investigation misled Vronsky, whom Fitzgerald told he would keep Maloney "in the loop."
Vronsky had met with Maloney the previous year in June 2021 and reviewed the Lisa Thomas murder case files and crime scene photos made available to him. Maloney and Vronsky agreed: they were "50/50" on Cottingham as a suspect. Maybe yes; maybe no. No evidence one way or the other. (See next page.)
But that was nine months prior to Cottingham's admission to killing Lisa Thomas in February 2022.
By 2022 Vronsky was working routinely with Fitzgerald on the McGraw case, originally a South Nyack PD case, which Maloney and Clarkstown PD were not involved in. Fitzgerald assured Vronsky that he would represent the Rockland District Attorney on the Lisa Thomas case, and would keep Maloney 'apprised' and 'don't worry about it; just send everything through me.'
Even though District Attorney's Office investigators usually work jointly with local detectives from police departments like Clarkstown PD Detective Maloney, Fitzgerald did not brief on Cottingham's admissions when he began making them, and sandbagged Vronsky from following up with Maloney until Fitzgerald bungled it with the pre-mature announcement.
Richard Cottingham admitted to both murders. In February 2022, Cottingham admitted in writing to the murder of Lisa Thomas and in May 2022 verbally cofirmed the murder of Lorraine McGraw which was subsequently closed.
In June 2022 Rockland County then announced the case closure of the Lorraine McGraw murder based on Cottingham's confessions but bungled his confession to the Lisa Thomas murder and compounded the bungling with an egregious failure to follow up on Cottingham's written confessions from February 2022.
Peter Vronsky makes no claim to Cottingham's guilt or the validity of his confession; that is Clarkstown Police Department's and District Attorney's duty as the 'fact finders.' They have the case file information against which they can either verify or discount Cottingham's confession upon interviewing him.
BUT THEY NEED TO DO THE INTERVIEW and not dismiss Cottingham out-of-hand without further investigation, and especially not, on the claim that the murder of Lisa Thomas "is not consistent with Richard Cottingham's MO" [modus operandi/method of operation.]
That is utterly and completely wrong - the murder of Lisa Thomas is highly consistent with Richard Cottingham's MO as it is now determined over 19 confirmed cases.
Moreover, according to the long-time Thomas family's lawyer and confidant, Mavis Dugan Ronayne in Pearl River, NY, the Clarkstown PD have falsely claimed that Cottingham had refused to accept a visit from their detectives to interview him about Lisa Thomas. This is not correct and untrue if they made such a claim to Ronayne.
Clarkstown PD have made no attempt to interview Cottingham since 2022. Cottingham has never been contacted by Clarkstown PD with a request to meet for an interview, and he is willing to accept a visit from detectives to discuss with them his February 2022 admission to murdering Lisa Thomas. (It is an inmate's right to refuse police interviews.)
Nobody from Rockland County has made such a request to him or shown up to listen to what he has to say and check it against the Lisa Thomas case files.
Peter Vronsky acknowledges that there were plausible suspects in the Lisa Thomas murder, in particular the "three boys in the woods" that have been accused from the first days of the murder in 1974. The boys had undergone polygraph lie detector tests and their alibis were investigated and confirmed, and the boys were cleared as suspects in the weeks following the murder. The boy who was accused of leading the other two in the assault and murder of Lisa Thomas is now deceased, having lived his entire life as a suspect in Lisa's murder without any evidence forthcoming.
Since the summer of 2022, Peter Vronsky has been lobbying the Clarkstown PD and/or the Rockland County District Attorney to do their duty and conduct a prison interview with Richard Cottingham to either ascertain the veracity of Cottingham's confession or clear him of any further suspicion in the unsolved murder of Lisa Thomas. One or the other.
In
2022, serial killer Richard Cottingham admitted murdering Lisa
Thomas in 1974 in Nanuet, Rockland County, New York. But
nothing is being done by police in Rockland County to either verify
or to discredit Cottingham's admission because of decades of
inter-jurisdictional rivalries and conflicted politics between the
local Clarkstown Police Department investigating the murder and
detectives from the Rockland County District Attorney's Office whose
mandate is to co-investigate murder with local police and prosecute
it once an accused is indicted and charged.
See WPIX Channel 11 News report. From December 2020 to August 2022, a Cottingham murder victim's daughter, the late Jennifer Weiss, and investigative historian Dr. Peter Vronsky, assisted Rockland County, New York District Attorney's Office in the investigation of Richard Cottingham, a notorious serial killer suspected in the cold case murders of Lorraine McGraw in 1970 in South Nyack and Lisa Thomas in 1974 in Nanuet, NY.
Weiss and Vronsky had direct personal access to Cottingham who had been incarcerated since May 1980 in the Trenton State Prison in New Jersey, and they facilitated and successfully negotiated for multiple agencies in New York and New Jersey, ten confessions from him in 2021-2024, including his confession to the murder of Lorraine McGraw in 1970 in Rockland County.
The Lorraine McGraw case had remained cold for fifty-one years, until Peter Vronsky identified it in January 2021, and with the help of Lorraine McGraw's grand-daughter, Vronsky and Weiss facilitated Cottingham's confession to her murder in May 2022 to Detective Conor Fitzgerald from the Rockland County District Attorney's Office. See Media Reports
The information on the Lorraine McGraw murder case closure was withheld from the public in May because Cottingham was also in the midst of confessing to the murder of Lisa Thomas at the same time. Cottingham had admitted to murdering Lisa in February 2022 in a phone conversation and a text to Vronsky, who shared the information with Detective Conor Fitzgerald while he was in the midst of interviewing Cottingham about the McGraw murder.
Cottingham confirmed in an off-the-record (no Miranda Rights) interview with Fitzgerald the claim he made in a text to Vronsky which unambiguously described his murder of Lisa Thomas.
With the Lorraine McGraw case formally closed in May 2022 and her family notified through her grand-daughter, Detective Fitzgerald, Vronsky and Weiss, now turned to formally accomplishing a case closure in the Lisa Thomas case next. As in the previous closed cold cases, what Fitzgerald was looking for was something the geriatric serial killer could remember that was did not appear in the newspapers or in the television reports at the time of the murder; something only the perpetrator would know. While the text Cottingham said had details in it, there was nothing in it that had not been in reported in the public record in the 1970s.
Richard Cottingham had been originally arrested in 1980 and convicted at trial in five murders in New York and New Jersey and sentenced to life imprisonment. After a 30-year silence he admitted to having murdered between 85-100 women and teenage girls over a 17-year period from 1963 until his sudden arrest in May 1980. From 2010 to 2024, Cottingham had made an additional 14 confirmed confessions to unsolved murders from 1967 to 1975: 6 in Bergen County, NJ; 5 Nassau County and 1 (Lorraine McGraw) in Rockland County, and one recently in December 2024 from the mid-1970s, currently undisclosed by the jurisdiction involved. Weiss and Vronsky assisted in ten of the murders, and Vronsky reviewed the original case files in all of the confessions that unfolded in Bergen County, including the ones he was not directly involved in.
With the case of Lorraine McGraw closed and confirmed in May 2022, Fitzgerald was working on confirming Cottingham's admission to having murdered Lisa Thomas in 1974.
But things went terribly wrong when the McGraw cold case closure was suddenly and prematurely announced at Detective Fitzgerald's behest by Rockland County on June 28, 2022, two days after Cottingham was indicted in another case identified by Vronsky and Weiss in Nassau County, NY.
(The case was the 1968 murder of Diane Cusick which Cottingham described to Vronsky in 2021 in a series of recorded phone calls, giving Vronsky directions to enter into Google Maps, turn by turn, from his mother-in-law's house in Queens Village, to a shopping mall parking lot in adjacent Valley Stream, Nassau County in Long Island. Vronsky identified Cusick as the victim Cottingham had been trying to describe and then discovered and alerted police that perpetrator DNA is available in the case and had been previously used to clear another suspect several years earlier. In June 2021, Vronsky met with and advise Nassau County PD to test the DNA they had with Cottingham's on file in CODIS, the national Combined DNA Index System databank. Nassau County PD and their District Attorney's Office did the test and it matched. Vronsky testifying before a Nassau County Grand Jury in March 2022, and Cottingham was indicted in June.
Two days after the indictment in Nassau County, Conor Fitzgerald and the Rockland County DA suddenly decided to make the Lorraine McGraw case closure public, in the midst of the on-going Lisa Thomas investigation. Peter Vronsky immediately objected to making the McGraw cold case closure public by Rockland County in the way it was going to be done, because it would imperil the integrity of the Lisa Thomas investigation. It was too early to make the McGraw case public. Fitzgerald's ambition to be associated with a notorious serial killer, out-weighed for him the integrity of the Lisa Thomas investigation.
Despite Vronsky's protests, the announcement in the Lorraine McGraw case was posted on June 24 in Rockland County District Attorney's social media.
Making matter worse, although Vronsky did not know it at the time, the ambitious Fitzgerald from the DA's Office had "poached" the Lisa Thomas case from the current jurisdiction and its lead investigator, Clarkstown Police Department Detective Chris Maloney. It was still their case. It had been since 1974, but Fitzgerald did not make Maloney privy to the admissions Cottingham was making and during the investigation misled Vronsky, whom Fitzgerald told he would keep Maloney "in the loop."
Vronsky had met with Maloney the previous year in June 2021 and reviewed the Lisa Thomas murder case files and crime scene photos made available to him. Maloney and Vronsky agreed: they were "50/50" on Cottingham as a suspect. Maybe yes; maybe no. No evidence one way or the other. (See next page.)
But that was nine months prior to Cottingham's admission to killing Lisa Thomas in February 2022.
By 2022 Vronsky was working routinely with Fitzgerald on the McGraw case, originally a South Nyack PD case, which Maloney and Clarkstown PD were not involved in. Fitzgerald assured Vronsky that he would represent the Rockland District Attorney on the Lisa Thomas case, and would keep Maloney 'apprised' and 'don't worry about it; just send everything through me.'
Even though District Attorney's Office investigators usually work jointly with local detectives from police departments like Clarkstown PD Detective Maloney, Fitzgerald did not brief on Cottingham's admissions when he began making them, and sandbagged Vronsky from following up with Maloney until Fitzgerald bungled it with the pre-mature announcement.
Richard Cottingham admitted to both murders. In February 2022, Cottingham admitted in writing to the murder of Lisa Thomas and in May 2022 verbally cofirmed the murder of Lorraine McGraw which was subsequently closed.
In June 2022 Rockland County then announced the case closure of the Lorraine McGraw murder based on Cottingham's confessions but bungled his confession to the Lisa Thomas murder and compounded the bungling with an egregious failure to follow up on Cottingham's written confessions from February 2022.
Peter Vronsky makes no claim to Cottingham's guilt or the validity of his confession; that is Clarkstown Police Department's and District Attorney's duty as the 'fact finders.' They have the case file information against which they can either verify or discount Cottingham's confession upon interviewing him.
BUT THEY NEED TO DO THE INTERVIEW and not dismiss Cottingham out-of-hand without further investigation, and especially not, on the claim that the murder of Lisa Thomas "is not consistent with Richard Cottingham's MO" [modus operandi/method of operation.]
That is utterly and completely wrong - the murder of Lisa Thomas is highly consistent with Richard Cottingham's MO as it is now determined over 19 confirmed cases.
Moreover, according to the long-time Thomas family's lawyer and confidant, Mavis Dugan Ronayne in Pearl River, NY, the Clarkstown PD have falsely claimed that Cottingham had refused to accept a visit from their detectives to interview him about Lisa Thomas. This is not correct and untrue if they made such a claim to Ronayne.
Clarkstown PD have made no attempt to interview Cottingham since 2022. Cottingham has never been contacted by Clarkstown PD with a request to meet for an interview, and he is willing to accept a visit from detectives to discuss with them his February 2022 admission to murdering Lisa Thomas. (It is an inmate's right to refuse police interviews.)
Nobody from Rockland County has made such a request to him or shown up to listen to what he has to say and check it against the Lisa Thomas case files.
Peter Vronsky acknowledges that there were plausible suspects in the Lisa Thomas murder, in particular the "three boys in the woods" that have been accused from the first days of the murder in 1974. The boys had undergone polygraph lie detector tests and their alibis were investigated and confirmed, and the boys were cleared as suspects in the weeks following the murder. The boy who was accused of leading the other two in the assault and murder of Lisa Thomas is now deceased, having lived his entire life as a suspect in Lisa's murder without any evidence forthcoming.
Since the summer of 2022, Peter Vronsky has been lobbying the Clarkstown PD and/or the Rockland County District Attorney to do their duty and conduct a prison interview with Richard Cottingham to either ascertain the veracity of Cottingham's confession or clear him of any further suspicion in the unsolved murder of Lisa Thomas. One or the other.