Jean Reyner was 25 when her life ended on May 15, 1980, inside a room at Manhattan’s Seville Hotel. Responders arriving after a fire found her body had been attacked and mutilated, and investigators concluded the blaze appeared to have been set after the assault, as if intended to destroy evidence.

Reports place Reyner in the orbit of Times Square’s late-night economy, described variously as a call-girl or sex worker, and note the Seville’s anonymous rooms and open doors as the setting for a pattern of violence investigators were tracing at the time: assaults and murders behind locked doors followed by fires. In New Jersey, a fingerprint on a handcuff from a separate killing became a key forensic lead.

A week after Reyner’s death, officers arrested Richard Cottingham at a Hasbrouck Heights motel during an assault on May 22, 1980; that arrest prompted surviving victims and forensic links that expanded the investigation and placed Cottingham at the center of the Seville Hotel killing. Did anyone who knew Jean Reyner or who stayed at the Seville around May 15, 1980, ever notice anything unusual that night?