It was being run from Salomon's desk at the DEA-NYPD-NYSP Joint Task Force in New York, headquartered in the DEA's bunker in Chelsea off the High Line. 

Yan had been assigned a desk job in his last year before retiring, with not much to do, but a burning passion for cold cases and missing persons kept him up nights. He came on board in November 2020 with Jennifer Weiss and me to try to help everybody close some of the 85 to 100 unsolved murders that serial killer Richard Cottingham, the Torso Serial Killer, was very plausibly claiming to have perpetrated from 1967 to 1980. (I personally believe, since 1963.)

We assembled a list of about twenty-five cases across New York City, Long Island and Hudson Valley regions. 

Lorrain McGraw was not on our list.

None of us knew she existed in December 2020, when Yan and Conor sat down with Cottingham to interview him.

 

Detective Conor Fitzgerald had been brought in a few weeks earlier, and was interested in talking to Cottingham about an old case, a 1979 murder of 17-year-old Shirley Smith in Nyack, NY, brutally stabbed to death in the early morning hours in a parking lot of a Nyack bar and restaurant. 

This was unusual because her murder was a closed case!

The killer had been caught and convicted and sent to prison in 1980!

The perpetrator of Smith's murder - seventeen-year old necrophile Amer Zada, had been arrested at the scene of the crime, attempting to sodomize Shirley's corpse behind a dumpster in the parking lot where he dragged her after stabbing her twenty-four times.

A routine village police patrol was dispatched to respond to calls from neighbors complaining of a woman screaming. On their arrival at the scene, they came upon a macabre tableau lit up by the headlights of their car. Zada was on top of Shirley Smith with his pants down to his knees, erect penis out, covered in her blood, attempting to anally rape her corpse. He attempted to flee like a monkey up a chain link fence but was quickly apprehended by the shocked small-town cops who had never seen anything like this in Nyack - other than in a horror movies.

At first Zada tried to claim he was attempting to "help the girl" that he "just happened to" come across behind a dumpster.

When that did not work, Zada and his family claimed that he was being framed because he is Muslim (the family was from Jordan) and that the police and Rockland County District Attorney are conspiring to prosecute and destroy the entire Zada family - the father and three sons and a daughter - Amer was the youngest - because they were Muslims.

It is true that Rockland County prosecuted Amer's father and his two older brothers, Samir and Nazir, in multiple separate cases over the previous decade. And they were indeed all convicted in jury trials in the early 1970s, of violent assaults, drug dealing, pimping, and one of the brothers, Samir was a convicted in 1973 as a serial killer in two brutal torture murders. (His brother Samir was deported to Jordan after his parole in March 2014, even though he was a strong suspect in a third murder.) The other brother, Nazir Zeda, a paroled pimp and a drug dealer, died on the floor of a prison visiting room while on a visit to his serial killer brother Samir, after a balloon of heroin that he was smuggling to his brother up his anus, burst and killed him.

Little seventeen-year-old brother Amer Zada was the up-and-coming new baby in the violent Zada clan of pimps, drug dealers and a serial killer. They had terrorized the people of Rockland County for over a decade.   

Regardless of family reputation, a jury easily convicted Zada at trial in 1980 of second-degree murder, first degree attempted sodomy and aggravated sexual abuse. 

The necrophile killer was sentenced to a term of twenty-five years to life. He served 38 years, insisting he was framed, but filed numerous appeals, including that "Zada’s defense counsel was ineffective for failing to raise an insanity defense" which would entail an admission that he actually committed the murder but was insane.

Zeda was finally paroled in 2018, promptly re-arrested for violation of his parole, and paroled again.  He is today a Registered Class 3 Sex Offender in New York State, the most dangerous class of sex offenders.

A New York City filmmaker and Innocence Project advocate for the wrongfully convicted and innocent, with nothing better to do, and very vulnerable to manipulation by the charming and charismatic grand-fatherly paroled psychopath necrophiliac killer, swallowed hook, line and sinker his absurd claims of being a victim of primitive Rockland County law enforcement 'Irish hillbilly' conspiratorial Islamaphobia.  She made his claims of innocence a cause of her own.

Along the way she got Vice TV documentary deal to tell the story and document and fund her cause. (Same kind of TV deal I had with a different company to tell a story, and document and fund my cause; just like her.)

She alleged that a cabal of Nyack police and Rockland County District Attorney functionaries had knowingly conspired to frame Amer Zada at his trial back in 1980, by concealing evidence and rewarding and/or intimidating witness testimony against him.  She ended up filing the dreaded (by law enforcement) FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) petitions for access to police and prosecution files, in a search for evidence of misconduct back in 1980. (See Part 8)

If true, if she is correct and if Zada was innocent, Rockland County is potentially facing a multi-million dollar money train lawsuit from Zada, who spent 38-years in prison before being paroled.

If true, the question was now, if Zada did not murder Shirley Smith in June 1979, who did?  A good question.

Richard Cottingham, the Torso Serial Killer, was obviously on the list of potential candidate suspects.

Conor was doing some 'just in case' due diligence for the people of New York when he brought up the Shirley Smith murder with Cottingham in an interview.

"A GIRL OFF 9W"
Cottingham immediately denied killing Smith, but very casually, as he often does, said that in the 1960s and 1970s he had often frequented bars and clubs in Rockland County, along Route 9W and that [by the way] he remembers murdering a girl there, but he could not remember when precisely, or who or where.  But it was not Shirley Smith, who was an African-American, whom would have remembered.

Cottingham stated that all he could remember was, "It was before I got married. A girl off 9W."

Conor and Salomon asked me to dig back in my files and sources, if I could identify any potential Cottingham murders in the vicinity of 9W in Rockland County around the time he was married that could be a fit.

That's how the case of Lorraine McGraw began.

Lisa Thomas Cold Case Murder 1974
The only murder I had mapped in Rockland County that fit like a glove Cottingham's MO and signature at the time, was the 1974 murder of 15-year-old Lisa Thomas, in Nanuet, who had been attacked and battered to death in a wooded area adjoining the nearby Nanuet Mall parking lot in the middle of the afternoon. She frequently used it as a short cut, and police never determined if she was on her way to the mall or back from it.  The murder in many ways was identical to Cottingham's murder of Jackie Harp in 1968. (See Part 4: 2017 - Closing the 1968 Jackie Harp Cold Case Murder).

Except the Lisa Thomas murder I had put on the task force list already.

Conor himself, in police parlance, "liked Cottingham for Lisa Thomas" too, independently of my own suspicions.

The Lisa Thomas murder was coming into his jurisdiction as he was soon moving from S. Nyack PD to the Rockland County District Attorney's Office as an investigator there.  Conor was one of those ambitious 'contract cops' working for multiple agencies, including Homeland Security, hoping to one day land a permanent job and advancements that come with it. (Like contract adjunct professors like me.)

But Nanuet was about 5-6 miles drive from 9W, not exactly "in the vicinity" nor was Lisa Thomas's murder related to any bars or clubs on 9W.

I went back to see if I missed anything in the newspaper files.

Sure enough I ferreted out a 9W related unsolved murder case on newspapers.com that matched Cottingham's MO and signature and his forensic geography that I had not come across in my earlier searches. Adding the search term "9W" rendered a hit on the case.

The website is a valuable tool for cold case investigators, but one very limited by text search terms one enters.  It is only as good as the search terms renders, and I did not always hit on cases I should have. Fortunately there is a network of cold case researchers who would hit on cases I did not and would alert me to those they thought I should be looking at, like the mysterious anonymous Murder, Inc.   who runs a cold case blog and is very talented in identifying forgotten cold cases.

"THE NUDE BEAUTY"
The murder case I hit on, was reported on March 1, 1970, a murdered woman found in South Nyack, two months before Cottingham got married.

S. Nyack was on the opposite side of the Hudson River, north of New York City, where the Tappan Zee Bridge (Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge) crosses the river and connects to 9W. 

Rockland County, New York, bordered on Bergen County, New Jersey, where Cottingham had told me he frequently would drive from his home in Bergen County across the state line into Rockland County because they had more liberal drinking laws and the bars stayed opened later. There was a lot of clubs and resorts and action along Route 9W.

Cottingham's Uncle Edward's house as well, a geo-forensic 'secondary anchor' (See Part 1-C: Mapping the Torso Serial Killer's Mind and Murders) was off East Saddle Road and bordered on the New Jersey-New York state line north of Montvale, where Cottingham had his "killing field", an orchard and corn field in which he murdered Nancy Vogel in 1967 and near which he left the bodies of Lorraine Kelly and Mary Ann Pryor in 1974 and where the "three dead girls in the well" were located that BCPO Chief of Detectives Robert Anzilotti and I were searching for. (See Part 2: 2010 - Solving the Nancy Vogel 1967 Cold Case Murder)

Cottingham at the time of the murder had been working in Manhattan since 1964, but was still living at home in his parents house in River Vale on eve of his upcoming marriage in May 1970. The Rockland-Bergen County state-line and the bars and clubs along 9W were definitely 'Cottingham country.' 

New York - New Jersey Police Department Joint Cold Case Open Data Portal www.nynjpd.org 

The victim was found in a remote hilltop forested 'lover's lane' just outside of South Nyack, New York.  For about a week after being found, nobody knew who she was.

Typical of the era, the press salaciously dubbed the unidentified woman as the "Nude Beauty."

THE CRIME SCENE
Her body had been discovered on a Sunday afternoon by four teenage hikers from Pearl River, NY, in a forest near an abandoned water tank at the end of a small dead-end unpaved fire lane running off Tweed Boulevard, a two-lane road weaving through the hills north west of South Nyack.

(Top Row) (left) Entry at Tweed Blvd; (right) looking back toward entry from scene;
(Bottom Row) approaching scene from Tweed; at the scene. Photos Copyright © 2021 Peter Vronsky

The crime scene had Cottingham's MO and signature all over it.

She was completely nude, no personal belongings, no clothes or identification were found in the vicinity. She was laying on her back, face up, on a rocky tree branched slope. Her legs were elevated, draped at the knee over a log. She had been murdered by ligature strangulation. The ligature was taken away by her killer.  There was a blunt instrument injury resulting in a four-inch fracture over her right ear, the weapon also missing from the crime scene.

Her body had been carried up the slope, not dragged.  Her arms and limbs were slightly bent, whereas when a victim is dragged, often they are found with their arms raised straight above their heads, as the killer either drags them by the wrists or the ankles. Nor were there any major drag marks or scratches or disturbance in the foliage. She was found almost immaculately naked.  Her killer must have cradled her in his arms, carrying her up the slope, like a monster. 

According to the medical examiner, she had sexual intercourse recently, but there was no evidence of forcible rape.  He estimated that she had been there anywhere for 28 to 48 hours, since Friday night likely. That would fix actual date of her death as February 27, or perhaps the early morning hours of February 28.

She was petit, 4-feet-11-inches, 105 pounds, dark hair and pierced ears and tattoos on her right and left upper arms,  uncommon in the 1960s for a woman. She also had "small scars on both lower arms" and a 1" scar on her left arm. She had given birth at some point in her life. 

The police theorized to reporters, "she may have been an entertainer because of the high lustre of the polish remaining on her fingernails and toenails."

SANPAKU EYES: "SINS AGAINST THE ORDER OF THE UNIVERSE"
Rockland District Attorney Robert Meehan stated that the unidentified woman was a "very pretty Latin type" and "extremely beautiful."

A newspaper described her as "beauteous, apparently of Latin extraction, with almond-shaped eyes, slight features and good teeth." 

There was something special about the woman's eyes; they had a hypnotic draw even in death, those "almond-shaped eyes." 

She had sanpaku eyes.

The term “sanpaku eyes” gets its name from the Japanese language. It means “three whites” and refers to the white part of the eye, the sclera, showing either above or below the iris and its pupil. In Western medicine, the condition is known as "scleral show" and can be inherited or can be the result of aging, injury or disease or caused by complications from blepharoplasty (cosmetic eyelid lift surgery).   

In Japanese traditions sanpaku eyes are rooted in superstition and folk lore.

The hereditary sanpuku eyes of Lorraine McGraws' granddaughter. 
Copyright © 2022 Peter Vronsky All Rights Reserved

In traditional Chinese and Japanese physiognomy (face reading) when the white sclera part of the eye is visible beneath the iris, it represents physical imbalance in the body and is claimed to be present in alcoholics, drug addicts, and people who over-consume sugar or grain.  When the upper sclera is visible it is said to be an indication of mental imbalance in people such as psychotics, murderers, and anyone full of rage. In either condition, it is believed that these people attract accidents and violence.

Nyoichi Sakurazawa, a Japanese practitioner of alternative medicine, wrote:

"For thousands of years, people of the Far East have been looking into each other's eyes for signs of this dreaded condition. Any sign of sanpaku meant that the person's entire system — physical, physiological and spiritual — was out of balance. They had committed sins against the order of the universe and were therefore sick, unhappy, insane, what the West has come to call "accident prone". The condition of sanpaku is a warning, a sign from nature, that one's life is threatened by an early and tragic end."
(Nyoiti Sakurazawa, William Dufty translator (1965) You Are All Sanpaku, p. 70, Citadel Press, New York.)

These were old time Japanese traditions and superstitions, but here she was dead naked on a hilltop - on superstition mountain.  How did she get there?

THE HAUNTED WOODS: "TO UNDERSTAND THE ARTIST, LOOK AT HIS WORK."
When Conor and I went to walk and survey the scene of the murder in 2021, it had not changed much since 1970, other than a locked gate at the Tweed Boulevard entry.

The rock formations remained the same and it was easy to find the exact position where the body had been found.

I don't know whether my knowing what had transpired there triggered my imagination, but as the breeze passed through the trees I heard a pained sigh. 

We walked the ground in the late spring, but the murder had occurred in the barren winter months on the last days of February, about eight weeks before Cottingham was going to marry on May 3, 1970. It might have been his last "bachelor murder" - he killed one woman every six weeks on average, give or take a few weeks here or there, from (confirmed) 1967 until May 1980, but I suspect it was from 1963 when he was a high school junior in New Jersey to 1980 when he was arrested at random. 

Ground can have strange ghostly temporal qualities and dead ground can come back and haunt you the way people do.

As a historian I had surveyed crime scenes, battlefields, death camp sites, siege works, sunken mass graves and massacre ruins. I had descended with my colleague cinematographer Tony Wannaker into an execution pit from 1938 and extracted with my gloved hands jaw bones with rows of teeth and cranial fragments with executioners' bullet holes through them. 

When you see and walk that kind of ground in the same light filtering through the trees leafed out the same way, you sometimes see indescribable 'things' in the arc of the light and hear 'things' through the rustle of the foliage or dig out.

When you 'un-cork' the dead in their restless falling places, things can happen.  I was on a dig of the clothed remains of a woman buried for 54-years caked in mud, and when she was exposed to the air, as the mud cracked, a short micro-second waft of perfume came off her mud-encrusted baby blue cashmere sweater draping her bones and semi-mummified shoulders. It shot up like a dead fairy princess shooting star into my nostrils, just before the musty smell of dead mud caught up and she was gone. I don't know who she was but I will never forget her and always think of her when on rare occasions I catch the scent of that perfume on somebody.  I make sure to never discover what brand of perfume it is; to know the perfume and start tripping out to the dead on it to the other side would be dangerous; the risk was not being able to find your way back.

The closer you come to the dead ground as it was in the time of the occurrence the closer you come to its dead.  The Civil War historian Shelby Foote talked about it, how he walked the fields of Shiloh on the same day and hour his ancestors had fought and died there in April 1862, and "seeing ghostly soldiers" in the gleam of the light filtering through the treetops.

Things shimmer and shimmy in haunted woods, and the breezes murmur and moan, things snap, crack and crunch behind you, and if you pause and stop and look and listen and turn yourself inside out, they don't so much show or say things to you, but light a path to them, an almost holy sendero luminoso.

Sometimes like a thistle's burr the unquiet dead attach themselves to you and don't let go. The way this victim would. My first real cold case--one on my hands, not someone else's being written about by me.

I came back in the night, and walked the scene again in the dark on the trail through the woods the way they would have been when her killer brought her there and took her life.  It was a dark and spooky and lonely place to die once the sun had set.  

I wondered why she was left there up on the slope so visible and exposed, and not further down out of sight near the end of the road, closer to the abandoned water tank, where the road took a slight descent downwards into a hollow. As I pondered this question, behind me about two hundred yards back where the entry gate was on Tweed Blvd, the trees and the road began to glow with an ethereal light.  The light got brighter and brighter, the trees almost almost turning a glowing white until a set of headlights broke into view and whipped past the gate, leaving behind the pitch black again.

Cottingham had told me very early on in my interviews with him, that when he "dropped off" bodies he was always careful to choose locations where he could see vehicles approaching from a long distance away. Always.  When I looked down the trail at night, as cars would approach on Tweed Blvd, I realized the road and trees at the gate would get gradually brighter until the headlights and the car broke into view. He would see the light long before even the vehicle arrived.

Cottingham always kept a wolf-cunning animal line of sight like this at his crime scenes. Had he gone any further down the fire lane, his view would have been obstructed in the hollow of the road.

Cottingham also said he "dropped off" his victims out in the open so they could be found quickly, "I didn't want the animals to get at them.  Out of respect for them."

It took me some time before I caught on what he meant in his serial killer's logic by "dropped off" and "respect." I was thinking at first 'dropped off' like in "I dropped off the kids at school; I dropped off my date at her house." He couldn't bring himself to say he 'dumped' them. But that's what he did. And then he did not think about them further.  He said, "once it was over, I never dwelled on it."

By then, in 2021, I knew a Cottingham crime scene the way I knew the veins in my hand.

As, the pioneering FBI "Mindhunter" profiler, John Douglas once said, "If you want to understand the artist, look at his work."

This murder was Cottingham's "work" no doubt:

• victim ligature strangled but ligature taken away;

• victim non-lethal head injury, intended to 'stun' them;

• sexual intercourse but no sign of forcible rape;

• belongings missing;

• body left near a vehicle-accessible location;

• line-of-sight distant view of approaching traffic;

• victim left out in view where they would be quickly found 

This one was his, with all his MO and signature emblazoned on it as if he signed it as the last thing he did before he left to go marry his fiancée in Queens Village on the opposite side of his New York murder map.

WHO WAS LORRAINE MONTALVO MCGRAW?
When S.Nyack PD and the Rockland County District Attorney's Office began attempting to identify the "Nude Beauty" with the sanpaku eyes, they had some difficulty lifting her finger prints in the first few days, as the forest moisture had wrinkled them.  Eventually the ME managed to lift prints and they were sent to local neighboring agencies and the FBI.

This is all before computer networks and data links. Queries took days and sometimes weeks to be processed, not the seconds that they can be done in today.

The FBI fingerprint check came back first, with a record of a former inmate by the name of Diane Boyd who in 1965 served a year sentence in the Westfield State Farm Reformatory (Bedford Hills Corrections Facility today) in Bedford Hills, in Westchester County, upstate New York, on a possession of a controlled substance and possession of a hypodermic syringe for illegal use.

The name "Diane Boyd" was at first entered into the Rockland County Records as the name under which her body had been found and it is the last item that was punched into her police record as well, before it was locked down closed: "Diane Boyd, Prts. Recd." [Prints Received] and "DOA [Dead on Arrival] Died of Strangulation, Found 3-1-70 in Wooded Area in Nyach,[sic] NY."

But then other record inquiries began to file responses and by the end of the week it became evident that "Diane Boyd" had multiple arrests under a string of aliases: Susanne Kennelly, Deborah Ann King, Sherrie Daniels, Karen Connolly, Edith Bablove, Terry Rivers, and eventually arriving at her actual legal name, Lorraine Montalvo McGraw.

Her name was released to the media on March 7, 1970.

Lorraine Ann Montalvo, 26-years-old, was born on March 10, 1943, making her ten days short of twenty-seven when she was murdered. She was a mother of two children, a nine-year-old girl Emily "Emi"* (pseudonym) and eight-year-old boy Billy* (pseudonym) at the time of her murder.

She was not a local woman from Rockland County; she was from New York City, quite a distance from this remote hilltop lane where she came to be strangled and battered to death. 

Lorraine grew up in the Queensbridge Houses public projects, in Long Island City in Queens, something that will gain further significance and scope as her cold case murder investigation and its solution will unfold.

Lorraine Montalvo was sixteen when she married Robert McGraw in 1959.

She was seventeen when she had her first child, her daughter Emi* in May 1960, followed by Billy* a year later.

THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF LORRAINE McGRAW
In determining whether a suspected perpetrator murdered a victim, you need to know the victim as well as the perpetrator.

As I reviewed the records on Lorrain's background and came to her criminal record, the first thing that jumped out at me was that she was twenty-two years-old when she was first charged with any crime (at least as an adult), when her kids were four and five years old. (State of New York, Executive Department, Identification and Intelligence System files, March 15, 1970, McGraw, Lorraine (Montalvo), DCI No. 11308594V.)

Lorraine had been reasonably far along in her young adult life, married, and a mother of two, when her first arrest on the record occurs on June 8, 1965, under the alias "Diane Boyd", in the NYPD 25th Precinct in the northern section East Harlem, north of E 115th Street, a predominately Puerto Rican neighborhood at the time. 

It was a double charge, and serious too; a PHL §3305 (Public Health Law) violation, possession of a controlled substance; and PL §1747-E (Penal Law) charge, possession of a syringe for narcotics use. She was shooting heroin; or carrying for someone who was. 

Perhaps Lorraine had a juvenile record, perhaps she had evaded being arrested, but this was her first arrest as an adult that resulted in a charge. Unusually late in her life, twenty-two years old. 

Despite newspaper reports that she had "multiple" narcotics arrests, this would be the only drug arrest on her record. Nor was Lorraine's criminal record as extensive as the newspapers hinted; between her first charge in 1965 and her death in 1970, Lorraine had only eight arrests on her record, one of them a minor charge of driving without a license. Lorraine's rap sheet was meagre poor two pages only, from her first arrest to her death.

Perhaps something went wrong in her life in her twenty-second year, propelled her off her path, "triggering" Lorraine that summer and autumn of 1965 to suddenly spiral and lurch into multiple arrests, one after another, under different names and aliases. Maybe it was the heroin; maybe it was something that led her to heroin. Heroin is a powerful substance.  They say, if God made anything better, he didn't tell anybody about it. They say, heroin is better than sex; it's love. Literally. Some users feel the bliss of love on heroin, pure indescribable pleasure and euphoria, and they become broken hearted in pain without it. When the time comes, they will do anything for a fix.

Lorraine's next series of arrests began three weeks later, in the NYPD 16th Precinct in midtown Manhattan.

LORRAINE AT THE "CROSSROADS OF THE WORLD"
Today the 16th Precinct is a fictional non-existing precinct featured in the popular television series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and the movie Police Academy 2, but in 1965 when Lorrain was arrested, the 16th Precinct station house was on West 47th Street near Eighth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, a block from Times Square, known as "crossroads of the world." Later it would be split up between Midtown South Precinct, and the 10th Precinct, where coincidentally Cottingham was going to murder Deedeh Goodarzi and the unidentified girl in the Travel Inn in 1979.  One of many coincidences that the Cottingham saga is rife with.

Lorraine was going "big time" in the 16th Precinct, in the Times Square district and on the "Deuce" or the "Forty-Deuce", the W 42nd Street 'movie theater strip' between Broadway-Seventh Avenue and Eighth Avenue, and the warren of side streets that ran behind it.

In 1965 Times Square and the Forty-Deuce were in their early stages of transformation into what would become the epicentre of New York's illicit sex industry as the peep shows, massage parlors, adult book stores, porn theaters and grind houses, were beginning to flourish in the wake of multiple US Supreme Court decisions on the definition of obscenity, freedom of speech and the definition of vagrancy under which street sex workers had been futilely arrested in New York for decades.  A Supreme Court judge in 1964 when ruling on what might be the legal language for a threshold definition of obscenity, had famously said, "I know it when I see it." (Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964.) What he meant, was that each community has its own standard for obscenity, and they would know it when they saw it, they needed no law defining it, and of course we know that New York City had hardly any standards for it at all.  Anything goes in New York.

It was the beginning of a "porn and rub & tug peep show renaissance" and transformation of Times Square and the Forty-Deuce into New York's 20th century version of Victorian London's Whitechapel and Richard Cottingham was going to be its Ripper, the quintessential American Werewolf. It would be a feast for a beast.

By the 1970s, some forty-thousand sex workers would daily work various locations in New York City with Eighth Avenue above W. 42nd Street and the Port Authority bus terminal, the hot zone track, the Mecca of low strolls, the ground-zero of the pump, of street sex work. So many sex workers on Eighth Avenue, that the NYPD had to put up parade barricades to keep them from spilling out into the avenue and getting run over by a car.
(Claire H. Cooney and Janet Quint, Prostitution in New York City: Answers to Some Questions, Publication of New York Women in Criminal Justice in collaboration with the Prostitution Task Force: New York, 1977.)

On June 30, 1965, three weeks after her first arrest on a heroin possession charge in East Harlem,  Lorraine is arrested in the 16th Precinct on a minor charge as "Susan Kennelly" for the unlicensed operation of a vehicle. No big deal.

August 4, 1965, she is arrested again, this time on a CCP §887-4A (Criminal Code of Procedure) charge as "Deborah Ann King" on a prostitution offense, which at the time was rooted in New York State's vagrancy laws. (CCP, Part 6, Title VI, Of Proceedings Respecting Vagrants, paragraph §887-4 defined a vagrant as "A person who offers or offers to secure another for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other lewd or indecent act.")

No disposition for the charge is indicated on her record, which suggests this very likely was her first arrest as a sex worker, and she was ROR (Released on Own Recognizance):  a one-time 'stay out of jail for free' card.

October 28, 1965, Lorraine is arrested again three months later, again in the 16th Precinct, as "Karen Connelly" this time, on a second CCP §887-4A prostitution charge and this time she is made to serve a 15 day sentence, it being her second sex work charge. 

IN "THE TOWERS" AT NEEDLE PARK
The address Lorraine gave police at the time of her October 1965 arrest was the Hotel Manhattan Towers on Broadway and W. 75th Street, one of the worst SROs (Single Residency Occupation) welfare transient shelters in New York City. Rooms went for about $10 and up per night for a single and $150 monthly. It was a haven for junkies and sex workers, the site of a murder, rapes, and multiple robberies; 15 percent of all robberies in the 20th Precinct where the hotel was located, took place inside the Hotel Manhattan Towers. 

The Towers was conveniently located three blocks away from "Needle Park", as Sherman Square and Verdi Path at the triangle of Broadway, Amsterdam and 72nd Street were known, an open air market for heroin, vividly captured in the 1971 Al Pacino movie directed by Jerry Schazberg and shot on location just a few years after Lorraine had lived near there, The Panic In Needle Park. ("God help Bobby and Helen. They are in love in Needle Park.")

(R) Today the former Hotel Manhattan Towers is re-branded as The Opera Co-op where small apartments start at  $1.7 million to purchase.

Lorraine could not have brought her two children into the Towers with her even if she wanted to.  It's unclear whether in 1965 she was still with her husband Robert McGraw, or who was caring for her children, but probably it was Lorraine's mother, "Cookie" Adeline Montalvo.

The Manhattan Towers was not a good place for Lorraine to be. This was an area in New York City frequented by Cottingham, who told me that he would hang out in Needle Park to watch "the floor show" as undercover cops were busting junkies. It was a game for him to spot the undercover cops. He told me enough about his ventures around Needle Park and Broadway that I would successfully connect him to another cold case murder linked to the Manhattan Towers Hotel. 

HOT DOGS AND HOOKERS: THE MURDER OF MARIA EMIRITA ROSADO NIEVES
Across from Needle Park, on the south-west corner of Amsterdam and 72nd Street intersecting with Broadway, was Gray's Papaya Hut that both Cottingham and I at separate times had patronized in the 1970s. It had some of the best hot dogs for the money and Pina Colada juice out of those stainless steel barrels which Cottingham and I both reminisced about. Cottingham had put in a lot of time in that neighborhood, especially in the later 1970s when the infamous Plato's Retreat sex club opened in the basement of the landmark Ansonia Hotel, two blocks from the Manhattan Towers. Who knows, maybe in 1975-1980 I even bought a hot dog in Gray's when he was in there, without knowing it.  It is still in business today, last time I looked. See: Part 1-A: Building a Rapport with the Torso Serial Killer)

These two old men reminiscences of ours about hot dogs and hookers, led me to identify a cold case murder victim that in 2022 which Jennifer and I assisted in closing in Nassau County: the 1973 murder of Maria Emerita Rosando Nieves, a Puerto Rican woman who was found on Jones Beach, in Long Island.  Nieves was strangled, and found bundled in a plastic bag wrapped in a blanket with its ends tied together. Her wrists bound together with a "light cord" just like Nancy Vogel in 1967 but behind her knees. See: Part 2: 2010 - Solving the Nancy Vogel 1967 Cold Case)

Nieves was living in the Hotel Manhattan Towers on the day of her murder in December 1973 and in 2020, when I identified the Nieves case, that was the red flag that made me start suspecting Cottingham in her murder.  I wasn't wrong. He confessed to her murder and on December 5, 2022 it was one of the five cold cases that Nassau County closed.

The murder of Nieves would lead me in August 2024 to my first active Cottingham murder investigation outside of the states of New York and New Jersey, to the 1975 murder in East Haven, Connecticut, of Patricia Meleady Newsom, whose body was found wrapped in a similar way.  At the time, East Haven PD could not identify her.  Her fingerprints were not on the record for any previous arrests.  Her younger sister Maryann Collette for 48-years wondered what happened to her sister after she disappeared in 1975 while attending a boarding school either in New York State's Rockland County or Bergen County in New Jersey.  In 2023 she submitted her DNA to GEDmatch.  It matched the DNA sampled from the unidentified girl found in East Haven.  Maryann became aware that Cottingham lived and frequented locations where her sister might have been sent to boarding school.  Like previous victim family she wrote to Cottingham and she and East Haven PD reached out to me whether Cottingham was active in Connecticut in the 1970s.  He was, I confirmed, a suspect in at least one murder there, and definitely passed through East Haven on at least one occasion. The Newsom crime scene, was consistent with Cottingham's signature and MO.  At this writing it's an open case with my facilitation of interviews with Cottingham. 

That how it works sometimes - from an address in Lorraine's criminal record, to a confirmed victim ten years later found on Jones Beach in Long Island, to a third victim found in Connecticut, dead girls gathered and strung back together like scattered pearls from a broken necklace.

It could have been just as easily Lorraine in 1965, who had been found as far away from New York City in Rockland County in 1970, as Nieves was found in the opposite direction in Nassau County in 1973, or Newsom in another state, Connecticut.  That was Cottingham. That was his modus operandi; his signature; his forensic geography.

His murdered women were the geographic polar cap and equator of his appetites, women like Maria Emerita Rosando Nieves and Lorraine Montalvo McGraw and Deedeh Goodarzi.  Lorraine was half Italian on her mother's side, half Puerto Rican on her father's, Nieves was full Puerto Rican, and Jennifer's mom, the exotic Deedeh Goodarzi, was of Persian Bakhtiari blood, a tribal sub-ethnicity in Iran. Cottingham was a gourmet world traveler of almond shaped eyes and killing them.

LORRAINE IN PRISON: THE FUGAZI LOSER LUCK "CURSE OF THE McGRAWS"
1965 was not a good year for Lorraine. 

Just before Christmas in December 1965 Lorraine was sentenced on the "Diane Boyd" drug charges from her first arrest in East Harlem back in June.  There was no leniency for her on her first and only drug offense on her record. She was sentenced to a term of 18 months in the Westfield State Farm Reformatory for Women (Bedford Hills Correctional Facility today), a minimum-and-medium-security facility for women in Bedford Hills, in upstate New York, in Westchester County.  

The grim fortress-like prison for female inmates was originally opened in 1901 and was a more severe place than the term "reformatory" suggests; it had a death row for women condemned to the electric chair (although New York State had not executed anyone since 1963 and the last woman put to death by New York State was serial killer Martha Beck "Honeymoon Killer" in 1951.  (Ethel Rosenberg was the last woman executed in New York in 1953, but by the federal government, for espionage. Her husband Julius was executed minutes later, in the same chair. They were the last Americans put to death for espionage, and the first executed for spying for an adversary (Russia) with which the U.S. was not a war with at the time.

The all female prison when first established, did have a family-centered reform program, encouraging incarcerated mothers to remain in contact with their children. There was a even a prison nursery for infants born to pregnant inmates.  But by the mid-1960s when Lorraine arrived there, the nursery and the children's visiting area, had become dilapidated and program largely abandoned. 

In the 1970s a Catholic nun volunteer, who counselled inmates, Sister Elaine Roulet, would revitalize the family programs and the nursery. Since then new mothers incarcerated at Bedford Hills are separated from the general population and can participate in the Infant Development Center. Children could stay in the nursery until they are 12 months old, with the possibility of extension up to 18 months so that the mother can be released with her child. It is the longest operating prison nursery in the USA and to this day serves as a model for other similar prison programs in the United States.

Sister Roulet also organized buses from New York City for older children to visit their mothers in prison and summer "camps" where children stayed with nearby host families so they could visit their mother daily during weekends and summer holidays.  She founded a network of ten Providence Houses in New York to shelter released mothers and their children to insure they do not end up in SROs like the Manhattan Towers, or become homeless or fall back on crime to survive. (By the late 1970s, the SROs were housing women with their children. I remember seeing little kids playing in broken glass and used condemns on the sidewalks in front of some of the SROs around the Forty-Deuce and Times Square, while their moms were turning tricks in their room; places like the Hotel Carter and the Times Square Hotel.) But none of this good work that Sister Roulet was going to do, would be there for Lorraine who was incarcerated there in 1965-1966, before Sister Roulet arrived on the scene.

Lorraine had been cursed with what appears to be a bloodline of bad-timed loser luck that shouldn't have been - the "curse of the McGraws."

Lorraine appears to have stayed straight and clean as an adolescent and teenager, the most vulnerable years, apparently doing all the things that Church, State and family had encouraged her to do.  She worked, she got married, she had children.  And then after all that, at the late mature age of twenty-two, she suddenly ups and goes wild. It shouldn't have been that way. She was good all those years and did all the right things.

And now her loser luck brought her to prison, but even there, Lorraine's luck is again mistimed, compounded, when she missed by just a few years an era with an opportunity that being incarcerated at Bedford Hills could have and should have given her to re-connect with her two children, had she only been arrested or born just a few years later.  A could've should've fugazi.

Instead, Lorraine served a hard and lonely year in prison and perhaps it was then that her marriage to Robert McGraw had come apart, if it hadn't previously.  The curse of the McGraws had no upside to it; there was no silver lining; there was nothing but lots of luck, and all of it always bad, it always ended bad, and especially so when it shouldn't have been. Not after doing everything they told her to do.

LORRAINE ON PAROLE
On December 16, 1966 Lorraine was paroled and it does not look like she returned to Queens or to her children, or if she did it did not last long.   

On parole in throughout 1967, Lorraine perhaps tried to pull her life together, she listed her occupation in that period as a typist.

August 31, 1967, 9 months after her release from Westfield, she was arrested again in the 16th Precinct in midtown Manhattan, again on a CCP §887-4A prostitution charge, under a new alias, "Edith Bablove." Now that for once was not like the luck of the McGraws!  Lorraine got a break. On September 1, the next day, a new more severe prostitution law was coming into force, PL§230.00 (Penal Law), and the charge was dropped in the midnight hour confusion. 

In that arrest, Lorraine gave police her occupation as "typist" and the address of her residence as 67 W. 46th Street, which today is a massive new glass and aluminum office building, but at one time was either an apartment house or later a transient hotel, before being demolished.

For a year after that one lucky-break arrest, either Lorraine was keeping straight, or maybe she really was working as a typist, or she was successfully evading further arrests, but from September 1967 to September 1968 is a missing year for Lorraine in my story here; I have no idea where she was or what or how she was doing.

September 13, 1968 Lorraine reappears on the record.  She is arrested in different precinct, the 20th Precinct, on the Upper West side under the name of "Terry Rivers." 

The charge was the new one: a PL §230.00 (Penal Law) prostitution offense, which in 1967 had replaced the old CCP §887-4A vagrancy laws that were more difficult to enforce.   Lorraine was arrested under the new more strict laws on sex work.  Today PL §230.00 remains the current law defining prostitution in New York State as a Class B Misdemeanor, however, New York City as of 2021 is not enforcing the law and decriminalization is being contemplated.

Lorrain's charge sheet, however shows no disposition on that arrest. Probably because of what happened next.

LORRAINE UNHINGED HOLLERING WILD FROM THE CENTRE TO THE MADHOUSE
On October 16, 1968 something went terribly wrong for Lorraine.

The only thing preserved on her record for that day, is Lorraine's claim that she is a housewife, and the address she was living at when police made contact with her.  249 W. 80th Street.

Today that address is to a side door entry to a building on the corner of Broadway and W 80th Street in which the famous upscale Zabar's gourmet food emporium is located. Zabar's was there on the ground floor since 1934 as an ordinary neighborhood grocery store, but after the Upper West side became gentrified in the 1980s-1990s, Zabar's became the battleground of the Brie cheese and caviar wars for the conspicuously wealthy who were super-gentrifying the already gentrified Upper West Side.

But in 1968, 249 W. 80th Street around the corner was actually the entry into another notorious SRO, the Centre Hotel, on the floors above Zabar's.

The Centre Hotel 249 W. 80th Street, then and now.

If the Hotel Manhattan Towers near Needle Park was a junkie haven, the Centre was the end of the road, a decrepit flophouse for broken-down female derelicts who had no place left to go. It was like an uptown version of a Bowery chicken-wire ceiling flea bag doss-house. The place was too disgusting for prostitution, no client would step inside.

I found a set of photographs shot inside the Centre Hotel by inspectors from HPD (Housing Preservation and Development Department), in 1966, just two years before Lorraine moved in there.  The premises around the time when Lorraine was living there in 1968 looked like something out another century, reminiscent of the 1890 Jacob Riis photos of destitution and degradation in the slums of New York, How the Other Half Lives, not the mid-1960s. 

New York City Housing Preservation and Development Department (HPD) inspector's photos inside the Centre Hotel in 1966.
(NYC Department of Records & Information Services, Municipal Archives.)

Lorraine was not well, desperate, and perhaps something broke in her that day, perhaps Lorraine had a meltdown, became unhinged, was unmanageable and hollering wild at the hotel staff or at other tenants, and police were eventually called to the Centre Hotel that October 16.  Or maybe it happened elsewhere in New York City on October 16 and she had just given that address when police took her into custody.  The contact file did not survive in the NYPD archives.

I can only speculate and surmise what the triggering incident entailed, but the next day, on October 17, 1968, still under the name of "Terry Rivers", Lorraine was  "certified" on MHL Section §208.4(a) (Mental Hygiene Law) for an "involuntarily admission" into a state mental hospital.

October 17, 1968 " Lorraine McGraw, aka. Terry Rivers "Certified Section 208.4 (a) Mental Hygiene Law (MHL)" From: State of New York, Executive Department, Identification and Intelligence System files, March 15, 1970, McGraw, Lorraine (Montalvo) DCI No. 11308594V

A "certified Section 208.4 (a) involuntary admission" was a sanitized term used by New York State in its public mental health laws for "forced commitment."  New York state replaced the term "commitment" in 1933 to a more 'friendly' medical sounding "certified involuntary admission." (Vincent Joseph Guarrera, The Definition of Mental Illness, The Provisions for Care and Treatment of the Mentally Ill and the Procedures for Their Commitment and Discharge, Masters Thesis, Fordham University, 1968.)

To be 'admitted' under the involuntary class, a person had to have "a mental illness for which care and treatment in a hospital is essential to such person's welfare and whose judgment is so impaired that he is unable to understand the need for such care and treatment." Being "a danger to others" was also a criteria.  (Marvin A. Stone, "The Right of the Psychiatric Patient to Refuse Treatment," Journal of Psychiatry and Law no. 4 (Winter 1976): 515-534) 

Lorraine was forcibly committed under a new procedure in the Mental Hygiene Law updated in 1967. 

The curse of the McGraws. Bad timing with a short punch-drunk temper and a loud mouth to go with it.

Prior to a series of reforms to the law in 1965-1967, Lorraine could not have been sent to a mental hospital without getting a court hearing in front of a judge first, and probably would have calmed down in time and taken control of herself to persuade the judge she was just fine. 

Not with the new changes in 1967.  It was sufficient for two physicians (they did not have to be psychiatrists) to sign off on a commitment, at the request of a family member, a spouse, or a state agency (like the police) or social service (like welfare or a housing authority), to issue a so-called "two-physician certification of involuntary admission." Any two physicians would do - and by law they had to be physicians who were not treating Lorraine. (To keep it objective, in theory.)

There was no judge, no court, no stenographer, no cross-examination, no appeal, no defence, no habeas corpus, no rights other than a twisted notion that a mentally ill person had the right to treatment; even if it had to be forced upon them for their own good without their consent. 

A person certified Section 208.4 could be held locked up in a psychiatric ward for 60 days under "doctors orders."  

After sixty days, if the hospital wanted to hold her longer, the facility would need to get a court order to extend Lorraine's involuntary committal unless she had been "converted" to a voluntary patient status; hopefully 'persuaded' to 'convert' in the 60-days of forced confinement. That was the strategy behind the sixty-day confinement periods.

(A "single physician certification" in case of extra urgent need was available too, but it had to be converted into a "two physician certification" within 15 days of committal.)  

The idea in the 1960s behind excluding judges and courts, was that it was 'anti-therapeutic' to expose a mentally ill patient to a judicial adversarial procedure, and best just 'medicalize' the process without a judge and court. The cops loved it.

The result was, as one MD editorialized in Psychiatric Quarterly:

"The biggest innovation hailed by some as a milestone in the treatment of the mentally ill was the substitution of medical for legal action at the initial stage of hospitalization. But, in contrast to past procedure, of 100 recent serial admissions at one New York state hospital 35 patients were brought in by police officers. And the need for hospitalization is "certified" often by a resident with one month's experience in psychiatry.

"Thus does the current law seem to equate hospitalization for mental illness with imprisonment for crime. Medical treatment in the hospital is likened to deprivation of civil rights and liberty. It is, in effect, punishment for falling sick and therefore should be handled like punishment for crime.

"Misbehavior has become the only issue. If misbehavior does not get you into jail, it gets you into the mental institution. And so it appears to some that the hospital must operate like a jail...."
(Newton Bigelow, M.D. Editor "Mental Hygiene Law, 1967", Psychiatric Quarterly, 10/1967, Volume 41, Issue 4)

The new Mental Hygiene Law became a tool for police to take misbehaving "trouble-makers" - people who "mouthed off" to police, were disrespectful, or disorderly and disruptive to business - but without actually committing any crime, to be taken off the street and locked up in a mental hospital for sixty days; "That will teach them a lesson." It was the equivalent to giving a "repeat offender" who the police could not get sufficient evidence against to charge, an old school 'trimming' in the back room of the precinct house; a mental beating, so to speak. 

LORRAINE CAGED BY THE BLUE AND WHITE
So the cops just handcuffed and caged Lorraine and the next day transported her to a mental hospital and dumped her there for the duty physician and whatever cooperative colleague he could round-up that day to certify her.  Simple as that.

No judge heard, sentenced or ordered Lorraine for committal into a madhouse.  Cops decided to have Lorraine administratively 'certified' to be 'put away' with just a sweep of the state's arbitrarily powerful social-control broom, have her swept under the rug like a bug for the 'good of society' with the excuse that it was 'for her own good.'  It's always for ones 'own good' that the do-gooders fuck over people to their death. 

Under the new 1967 law, the courts now had a new function.  Rather than being the venue of a patient's committal, the court became supposedly the guardian of a psychiatric patient's rights.... by doing nothing.  While Lorraine could not be held for longer than sixty-days, without a court order, and should she be "cured" before the sixty-days expired, the facility was required to release her early, yet she had to assert herself to claim the rights she had to regain her freedom. It wasn't going to come early to her. 

Lorraine had the right to demand a hearing before a court within five days of her committal and she was supposed to have received written notice of her rights upon her arrival at the facility.  But the onus was on her to understand she had that right and to take positive action within the five days, assuming she had her shit together.   All those rights that involuntarily committed patients had, fell between the cracks of bureaucratic malaise, and people in a state of shock of being forcibly dragged into a madhouse and passively 'giving up' and not doing anything was the norm.

Even today you do not have to be insane, not to understand your rights, or hesitate to act on them in the face of authority. Most people don't.

Especially in the face of the blue and white authority, the NYPD and the physicians.

For more on the evolution of the New York State Mental Hygiene Law "reforms" under which Lorraine McGraw was arbitrarily committed, see:
~ Joyce Daryl Chaikin, "Commitment by Fiat: New York's New Mental Hygiene Law," Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems 1 (1965): 113-124; ~ Vincent Joseph Guarrera, The Definition of Mental Illness, The Provisions for Care and Treatment of the Mentally Ill and the Procedures for Their Commitment and Discharge, Masters Thesis, Fordham University, 1968; ~ Mary Ann Priore Tague, Psychiatric Aftercare: A Study of the 1965 Changes in the Admission Laws of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene as They Affect Treatment at the Queens Aftercare Clinic, April 1966-December 1966, Masters Thesis, Fordham University, 1967; ~ Gene L. Jameson, "Insane Persons-New York Statute Replaces Judicial Certification of Involuntary Mental Patients With a System of Medically Determined Commitments N.Y. Mental Hygiene Law §§ 72-74 (Supp. 1964)", Texas Law Review 43, no. 4 (March 1965): 596-604; ~ Newton Bigelow, M.D. Editor "Mental Hygiene Law, 1967", Psychiatric Quarterly, 10/1967, Volume 41, Issue 4; ~ Joyce Daryl Chaikin, "Commitment by Fiat: New York's New Mental Hygiene Law," Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems 1 (1965): 113-124; ~ Marvin A. Stone, "The Right of the Psychiatric Patient to Refuse Treatment," Journal of Psychiatry and Law no. 4 (Winter 1976): 515-534.

"REHAB" HORROR HOUSE: MATTEAWAN
Lorraine was forcibly committed (or "involuntarily admitted" in bureau-speak) to the "Rehab Center" inside the Dickensian-like Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, originally opened in 1892 and part of the Fishkill Correctional Facility in upstate Dutchess County, in Beacon, New York.

Some of the most notorious Hannibal Lector-Michael Myers type offenders, too crazy to stand trial or be incarcerated with "normal" serial killer psychopaths and mass killers, were ordered by New York Courts to be confined at Matteawan.

Courtesy of Rob Yasinsac at Hudson Valley Ruins

The so-called "Rehab Center" at Matteawan was not the plush Dr. Drew Celebrity Rehab from the TV show.

It was more like a Dr. Frankenstein 1960s American pulp noir torture chamber rehab with dungeons, electric shocks and mind bending drug injections and experimental brain surgery lobotomies, with Dr. Joe Mengele to assist. 

A New York Times 1975 article would describe Matteawan as a "horror house". (Alfonso A. Narvaez, "Change is Urged for Matteawan,"  New York Times, Aug. 17, 1975, p.25.) 

Electric and insulin shock treatments were used extensively, the same Sodium Pentothal "truth serum" injections that the teenage suspects in the Jackie Harp murder were getting injected with, (see Part 4: 2017 - Closing the 1968 Jackie Harp Cold Case Murder) along with hypnosis and gauntlet "group therapy" and lobotomies where cross-eyed surgeons with alcoholic trembling hands and dirty fingernails, would cut and hack synapse connections between the frontal lobe and other parts of a "misbehaving" patient's brain, permanently altering their personality to that of docile compliant zombie. These were surgeons recruited from the bottom of the medical barrel, for what neurosurgeon other than veterinary one, or a desperate failed one, would go to work in a State facility like Matteawan for the meagre state pay. 

Dr. Newton Bigelow wrote

Inevitably, hospital psychiatrists have reacted to this debasement of role. Morale is very low; as this was written there were 480 vacancies for doctors in the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene.
(Newton Bigelow, M.D. Editor "Mental Hygiene Law, 1967", Psychiatric Quarterly, 10/1967, Volume 41, Issue 4)

At issue was not only the psychological and physical torture and abuse of patients and inmates at Matteawan, but New York State's policy of involuntary forcible commitment of inconvenient 'ordinary' citizens under MHL Section §208.4 - like Lorraine, and the way she was packed away in October 1968 without a trial or a conviction on any offense or a court order. (New York in the late 1980s, attempted to routinely "certify" the homeless for involuntary confinement in state mental hospitals, but the courts overturned the attempt. See the case of Joyce Patricia Brown also known as Billie Boggs.)

Lorraine must have been just raging and raising a fuss and yelling that day in October when the NYPD was called to respond wherever it was she was making a scene. But she was not raising enough of a fuss to charge her with anything. She wasn't committing any violent act for which she could be arrested.  So the police - probably at someone's complaint, simply transported her to Matteawan for "her own safety" and she was rubber stamped and locked up in a bedlam on an involuntary psychiatric admission.

The laws were soon afterwards reformed again and Matteawan was finally shut down permanently and put out of its misery in 1977.  Too late to be of any help to Lorraine.

Had Lorraine got there a year earlier, or kept it together for few years more, that involuntary commitment could not have been used against her the way it was. 

The curse of the McGraws. Bad timing.  Loser luck.  She just couldn't win, even though she should have, over and over.