REAL JUSTICE FOR LISA THOMAS UNCENSORED

About Real Justice for Lisa Thomas Uncensored

In February 2022, serial killer Richard Cottingham admitted in writing to investigative historian Peter Vronsky to murdering Lisa Thomas in 1974 in Nanuet, Rockland County, New York.  See: WPIX Channel 11 News Report. 

Lisa's murder was very similar to other murders Cottingham committed in Bergen County, New Jersey, bordering on Rockland County.  Despite the fact that Lisa's murder had remained unsolved for fifty years now, nothing was done by police in Rockland County to either verify or discredit Cottingham's admission by interviewing him about his admission. 

The reasons are daunting and perplexing but include personal ambitions, political agendas and decades of institutional inter-jurisdictional rivalries and conflicts between the local Clarkstown Police Department investigating the murder since 1974 and detectives from the Rockland County District Attorney's Office whose mandate it became to co-investigate the murder and prosecute it once an accused is indicted and charged.  

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Text Message from serial killer Richard Cottingham sent to forensic historian Dr. Peter Vronsky on February 27, 2022 on the prison e-mail system (JPAY) unambiguously describing his murder of Lisa Thomas.  The full name of the "other Lisa" he is referring to has been redacted as "Lisa X" at the request of NY State Police and family. Jump to Chapter Three for more details.

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Jump to Chapter Three for more details.

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Recent Lisa Thomas Case News Updates

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Go To Archived Lisa Thomas Murder News

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Go to Chapter 1: "Getting Away With Murder" The Lisa Thomas Case 1974

Introduction: more background on Lisa Thomas Case and the Cottingham admission to murdering her.

From December 2020 to August 2022, a Cottingham murder victim's daughter, the late Jennifer Weiss, and investigative forensic 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. 

Vronsky was also given unhindered access to Cottingham case files in some of the Cottingham cases in New Jersey and New York.

The Lorraine McGraw case had remained cold for fifty-one years, until Peter Vronsky identified it in January 2021. 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 and because the victim's granddaughter wanted time to prepare her mentally distraught mother (the victim's daughter who was a child at the time of Lorraine's murder) for the news. See Sonia Ruiz (McGraw) Interview. 

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 invoked) interview with Fitzgerald the claim he made in a text to Vronsky which unambiguously described the murder of Lisa Thomas.

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 in Nassau County, NY.  Fitzgerald and Rockland County rushed the announcement to take advantage of the press on Cottingham resulting from the indictment two days previously and of a "detective of the year award" recently presented to Fitzgerald. (See Chapter 3) 

(The Rockland County 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.

When 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. Dr. Vronsky 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.

Furthermore, Lorraine McGraw's granddaughter - Sonia Ruiz - also objected to the sudden and premature announcement, not having the opportunity to notify her mentally distressed mother - the daughter of the victim - prior to the announcement being made available on the internet.

Despite Vronsky's protests, and his own withdrawal of his name from the case closure credits,  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."   

Richard Cottingham admitted to both murders.  In February 2022, Cottingham admitted in writing to the murder of Lisa Thomas and in May 2022 verbally confirmed the murder of Lorraine McGraw which was subsequently closed but not announced until June.

In June 2022 Rockland County then announced the case closure of the Lorraine McGraw murder based on Cottingham's confessions but bungled terribly his confession to the Lisa Thomas murder and compounded the bungling with an egregious failure to follow up on Cottingham's written confessions to murdering Lisa Thomas 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.]  See the Richard Cottingham's MO case statistics and the Cottingham MO Matrix Chart.

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 Ms. 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 had been accused from the first days of the murder in 1974.  (See Chapter 1: "Getting Away With Murder" The Lisa Thomas Case)

One of the three boys had been allegedly accused by Lisa in the weeks before her murder of burglarizing the Thomas home. The three boys, as viable suspects at the time, had undergone polygraph lie detector tests and their alibis were thoroughly 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 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.

Continue to Chapter 1: "Getting Away With Murder": The Lisa Thomas Case