Richard Kuklinski – The Iceman
The Iceman and the Psychiatrist

Coming Soon

Get into the mind of the 'Iceman killer', as psychiatrist Dr Dietz peels away at the life of Richard Kuklinski to see how he became a human killing machine.
A self-confessed Mafia contract killer and possibly one of the most dangerous and cold-blooded men to have walked this planet, Richard Kuklinski conducted a murderous career for three decades. Dabbling in other crime, such as car theft, drugs and guns, his abusive childhood had given him a burning rage and the ability to be a human killing machine. Eventually dubbed the ‘Iceman’ due to his habit of storing his victims’ corpses in a freezer.




He was born Richard Leonard Kuklinski on 11th April 1935 in the projects of Jersey City, New Jersey to poor Polish parents, Stanley and Anna Kuklinski. Stanley, who worked as a railway brakeman, was an alcoholic, had a terrible temper and was abusive to his wife and children. Anna, a devout Catholic who worked at a meat processing plant, was very strict with her children and reportedly beat them with broom handles and other household objects.

Kuklinski was the second of four children. His elder brother Florian died in 1940 as a result of vicious beatings from their father. Kuklinski was five-years-old at the time and his parents tried to cover it up, saying he fell down the stairs and hit his head. Stanley Kuklinski abandoned his family shortly after the birth of his fourth child.

Kuklinski attended the local Catholic grammar school and was an altar boy at the neighbourhood church. However, he was a troubled young boy and began showing behavioural and conduct problems, including torturing and killing neighbourhood cats, some very typical indicators of sociopathic behaviour. He was beginning to develop an unreasonable temper and constantly threatened to hurt or kill people who angered him. He particularly loathed ‘loudmouthed people’ as they were a reminder of his father. Kuklinski dropped out of school in the eighth grade and was steadily drawn into gang life and petty crime.

There was a gang of six boys who would often torment and beat Kuklinski. In 1949, aged 14, Kuklinski removed the hanging rail from his wardrobe and followed the gang leader, Charlie Lane. He waited until Lane was on his own and then beat him to death with the metal pole. In an effort to hide his victim’s identity, Kuklinski removed Lane’s teeth and cut off his fingers before throwing his body in a lake. The body was never found.

Kuklinski then went to find the other gang members and beat them all close to the point of death with the pole. Years later in an interview, Kuklinski claimed the killing of Lane demonstrated to him that it was “better to give than to receive” and that after the murder, he had felt empowered for the first time in his life.

[quote]“There are a lot of people all over the country that have died from something that wasn’t natural, let’s put it that way.” - [b]Kuklinski[/b][/quote]

In 1960, aged 25, Kuklinski met and fell in love with 19-year-old Barbara Pedrici. He wooed her with flowers and gave her his undivided attention. The couple were married on 8th September 1961 and they settled in Dumont, New Jersey. They went on to have two daughters, born in 1964 and 1965, and a son, born in 1969.

It was the early 1960s when Kuklinski developed a relationship with mobster Roy DeMeo, a capo for the infamous and powerful Gambino family. DeMeo introduced Kuklinski to the Gambino family and he began on small assignments for the mafia. These included robberies, selling pirate pornographic movies from the film laboratory where he worked, stealing cars and trading in drugs, guns and food.

Kuklinski’s imposing stature and growing reputation as a ruthless man meant that the Gambinos decided to test him out with a view to him working as a ‘hired gun’. He was 6’ 4” (1.93 m) tall and tattooed, big (about 300 lb/135kg) and bearded, and took no nonsense from anyone. DeMeo took him out for a drive one day, randomly selected a man walking his dog and told Kuklinski to kill him. With no hesitation, Kuklinski got out of the car, walked towards the man and as soon as he had passed, turned and shot the man in the back of his head. It was 1965 and he was hired as a contract killer for the Mob. DeMeo became his mentor.

He was nicknamed ‘The Polack’ due to his Polish heritage and worked with a gang operating from the Gemini Lounge in Brooklyn, New York City. Kuklinski often worked as a debt collector and his brutality brought results. Most people knew they would be killed without hesitation, so usually paid their debts.

In 1969 Kuklinski’s younger brother Joseph, 25, was arrested and given a life sentence for the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl. After killing her, he threw her body and her dog off a rooftop. He was sent to Trenton State Penitentiary, New Jersey.
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By the 1970s, Kuklinski had built up substantial wealth from his work for the Mafia, reportedly earning $50,000 per hit, and the Kuklinski family had moved to an expensive home in a good neighbourhood. Posing as a successful businessman, the Kuklinskis appeared to neighbours to be a happy family. However, things behind closed doors were very different and Kuklinski had started to treat his wife and children abusively.

George Malliband from Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, was in the illicit trade of pornographic films with Kuklinski. In early 1980 Malliband owed DeMeo money and had arranged to go with Kuklinski to meet with DeMeo to pay his debt. En route, the two had a disagreement and Kuklinski pulled over to the side of the road and shot Malliband five times with his .38 revolver. He placed the body in a 55-gallon drum and rolled it off a high cliff in the Palisades. On 5th February 1980 the drum and its grisly contents were discovered. When police traced the victim’s identity, they linked Malliband to Kuklinski.

Paul Hoffman, a pharmacist, was involved in a prescription drug deal with Kuklinski when he disappeared in the spring of 1982. A year later, his car was found in the rented warehouse that Kuklinski used for his car theft racket. Hoffman’s body was never found. Kuklinski later confessed to this murder, saying he first shot Hoffman but he didn’t die immediately, so Kuklinski knocked him out using a tire iron. He then shoved Hoffman’s body into a 55-gallon drum, cemented closed the lid and left it next to a hot dog stand in Little Ferry, New Jersey. He periodically checked on the drum to see if had been discovered and eventually it disappeared.

On 27th December 1982, the decomposing body of Gary Smith was found under the bed in a room at the York Motor Hotel. Smith had worked with Kuklinski stealing cars but the police were investigating him and there was a warrant out for his arrest. He was apparently a weak man and Kuklinski was afraid he would talk. The autopsy showed Smith had been poisoned with cyanide and strangled. It later emerged that the car meant for the removal of the corpse had never arrived and Kuklinski had left the body under the bed. Due to the noxious odour of decomposition, the body was discovered by guests a few days later.

Daniel Deppner was a fellow car thief who had aided Kuklinski in the murder of Smith. There was a warrant out for his arrest, which bothered Kuklinski, in case he was picked up by the police and would begin talking. He was murdered, dismembered and decapitated and found on 14th May 1983 by a man out cycling in the Clinton road area of New Jersey, near the Blazing Bucks Ranch. The body parts had been wrapped in two large green rubbish bags, taped together.
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In the early 1980s, Kuklinski had met and befriended Robert Pronge, known as ‘Mister Softee’; a military-trained demolitions expert turned hit man. Pronge taught Kuklinski how to kill with cyanide and shared his theories about freezing a victim’s body to confuse medical examiners about the time of death, thereby eliminating the need for alibis. Kuklinksi warmed to the idea and decided to try it out for himself.

On 1st July 1981 Loius Masgay had gone to meet Kuklinski about a deal involving the sale of videotapes. Instead he was poisoned with cyanide and then shot. Kuklinski kept the corpse frozen in an industrial freezer for two years before wrapping it in green plastic bags and dumping it in Rockland County, New York, where it was discovered on 25th September 1983. Police were faced with some puzzling initial observations. Whilst Masgay had been missing for two years, he was found wearing the same clothes he had been when he had disappeared but the time of death seemed fairly recent.

Kuklinski had slipped up this time and, due to the fact that it was wrapped in plastic bags and had been discovered sooner than Kuklinski had planned, the body had not had enough time to thaw completely. During autopsy, the medical examiner discovered ice in the muscle tissue, and it became clear what had happened. Police linked Masgay to Kuklinski, who became their chief suspect in his murder, and began calling him the ‘Iceman’.

In 1984, Pronge threatened Kuklinski’s family, which was enough to incite Kuklinski to kill. Pronge was found shot to death in his Mister Softee ice-cream van in his North Bergen garage, directly across the road from Kuklinski’s garage. Many believed it was Kuklinski who killed him, although a killer was never found.

Once in prison, Kuklinski was eager for publicity and granted interviews about his life and his career of crime to writers, television producers, psychiatrists, criminologists, prosecutors and other specialists, including Dr Park Dietz, perhaps best-known for his interviews with American serial killer Jeffey Dahmer. Kuklinski bragged about his crimes, enjoyed giving minute details of how he killed and at different times claimed to have killed between 33 and 200 people. Not everything he claimed was believed.

The public had developed a sickly fascination for the Kuklinski case and were hungry for an insight into one of the most cold-blooded, ruthless and dangerous criminals in history. HBO aired two television documentaries following interviews with Kuklinski, ‘The Iceman Confesses’ (1991) and ‘The Iceman Tapes: Conversations With a Killer’ (2001).

In the documentaries, Kuklinski described murdering with no emotion but then spoke of his love for his family and even shed tears at the thought that he had hurt the only people he ever really loved. His view on why he had turned into a killer was due to suffering abuse as a child and claimed he was sorry he had not killed his father. Kuklinski stated he had never killed any children and he that he probably would never kill a woman.

[quote]“I’m a hard working expediter of sorts.” - [b]Kuklinski[/b][/quote]

He apparently always carried on his person, a knife and three guns but used a variety of methods to kill and would always carry out a test run first. He killed by strangulation, poisoning, guns, knives, ice picks, hand grenades, crossbows, and even a bomb on remote-control toy car. In something that sounds a little far-fetched, Kuklinski apparently kidnapped a victim and tied him up with the ropes drawing blood. He left the man in a cave in the wilderness, where he was eaten alive by rats.

He said his most cruel killing, the only one he regretted, was when a victim began praying to God to save him from death. Kuklinski told the man he would give God 30 minutes to save him but once the time was up he would be killed. Kuklinski felt that he had acted sadistically by making the man wait half an hour for his inevitable death.

He would use chain saws to dismember bodies, but never as a murder weapon, as he preferred a cleaner option. His favoured method became poisoning with cyanide, as it was swift and difficult to detect in toxicology tests. He would administer it variously by injection, in the victim’s food, spilling onto the victim’s skin, and by nasal spray bottle into victim’s face.

Kuklinski’s favourite corpse disposal method was in a 55-gallon oil drum but he also used burial, dismemberment, putting the corpse in the boot of a car and having the car crushed at a junkyard. He even claimed to have left dead bodies sitting on park benches a few times.
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Becoming somewhat carried away with the headiness of public interest in his life, Kuklinski agreed to collaborate with crime writer Anthony Bruno in the writing of a book as as a spin-off from the initial HBO documentary. The book, ‘The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer’ (1993) held claims from Barbara Kuklinski that she had suffered beatings from her husband, including once being hit so hard in the face it broke her nose. He had also pointed a gun at her, tried to smother her with a pillow, and tried to run over in a car. ‘The Ice Man’ (2006) by Philip Carlo was another book based on hours of interviews with Kuklinski.

Despite Kuklinski claiming to have been a prolific killer, many of his supposed victims were found to have been victims of other criminals who had become witnesses for the government. Roy DeMeo was murdered in 1983, for which Kuklinski claimed responsibility. However, taking the available evidence and testimony into account, police suspected three other hired killers. They were Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter, who worked for DeMeo, and Anthony Gaggi, DeMeo’s supervisor in the Gambino family.

Kuklinski was linked to the death of Bruno Latini, found murdered in NYC in 1971. In addition, in 2003 Kuklinski pleaded guilty to the 1980 murder of New York City police detective Peter Calabro. This was not taken to trial, as a further 30 years added to his existing sentence would have been somewhat meaningless to a man who knew he would be in prison until he died, as he was be ineligible for parole until the age of 111.

At 1.15 am on 5th March 2006, Kuklinski died, age 70, of unknown causes. He was being held in a secure wing of the St Francis Hospital in Trenton, New Jersey. Authorities believed he had died of natural causes but there was some suspicion surrounding the timing of his death.

Firstly, Kuklinski was scheduled to testify against Sammy Gravano, a former Gambino family underboss who was serving a 19-year prison sentence for running an Ecstacy drug distribution operation in Arizona. Kuklinski was to testify that he had murdered a New Jersey police officer in the 1980s on Gravano’s orders. Secondly, Kuklinski had reportedly told some members of the Gambino family that he thought he was being slowly poisoned. Shortly after Kuklinski’s demise, prosecutors dropped all charges against Gravano, stating that without Kuklinski’s testimony, there was insufficient evidence to continue.

In April 2006 it emerged that Kuklinski had reportedly confessed to author Philip Carlo that, under Tony Provenzano’s orders, he had killed the famed union boss, Jimmy Hoffa. Kuklinski described how he and four other men had kidnapped and murdered Hoffa in a parking lot in Detroit. Other rumours existed that Hoffa’s body had been placed in a barrel, inside a Japanese car that was compacted with many other cars and shipped overseas. Kuklinski never conclusively linked to this murder.

Whether the Iceman murdered 33 or over 200 victims, the brutal and heartless way this disturbed man killed for profit will be recorded in our history and our minds as one of the most chilling.

Carey Latimore

New Jersey State Police detective Pat Kane began work on the Kuklinski case in 1980. By the mid-1980s, increasingly more evidence was pointing to Kuklinski as their prime suspect in many murders. The investigation was stepped up a notch and became a joint operation between the New Jersey Attorney General’s office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Special Agent Dominick Polifrone, a specialist in undercover work on Mafia cases, became vital to the case. Taking the name Michael Dominick Provenzano, or ‘Dom’, he posed as a fellow criminal, in order to meet and eventually gain Kuklinski’s trust. It took over 18 months but Polifrone finally set up a drugs and weapons deal with Kuklinski, who then asked for cyanide to be added to the order, indicating he was planning another murder.

Usually so careful to cover his tracks, Kuklinski began discussions with Polifrone about the details of murder by cyanide poisoning and also about the freezing of Masgay, although he never named any victims. These detailed conversations were secretly taped and formed a vital part of police evidence in the case against Kuklinski.

In order to trap Kuklinski, Polifrone approached him to help in the killing of a bogus victim, using a sandwich laced with cyanide. The two men met on 17th December 1986 to carry out the crime and Kuklinski took the sandwich from Polifrone and drove off, saying he would return. When he did not come back, the Task Force feared Kuklinski might have begun to suspect Polifrone was a police officer, so decided to move in and make the arrest.

Police and federal agents blocked off Kuklinski’s street and entered the Kuklinski family home. They arrested both Kuklinski and his wife, Barbara, who was charged with possession of a firearm. The gun had been found in Kuklinski’s car but the vehicle was registered in Barbara’s name. Kuklinski became furious when one of the arresting officers placed his foot on Barbara’s back whilst detaining her and it took five men to finally restrain the killer.





Born
11th April 1935

The Victims
1949 - Charlie Lane
Early 1960s - Man walking dog
1971 – Bruno Latini
1980 - Peter Calabro
early 1980 – George Malliband
Spring of 1982 - Paul Hoffman
December 1982 - Gary Smith
14th May 1983 - Daniel Deppner
1st July 1981 - Louis Masgay (body discovered 25th September 1983)
1984 - Robert Pronge

Arrested
17th December 1986

Trial
1987-1988 – New Jersey Supreme Court - two trials for five murders

Convicted
25th May 1988 – two accounts of first-degree murder

Sentenced
25th May 1988 - two consecutive life sentences in prison, without possibility of parole until age 111

Died
5th March 2006

To the shock of Kuklinski’s family, he was initially charged with five counts of murder and faced two separate and widely televised trials, held at the New Jersey Supreme Court, presided over by Judge Kuechenmeister. In the first trial, Kuklinski faced the charges of the murders of Daniel Deppner and Gary Smith and prosecution were seeking the death penalty. Police based their case almost entirely on the testimony of Agent Polifrone, and the taped conversations with Kuklinski, as they had very little concrete evidence linking Kuklinski to the murders. Barbara Kuklinski was also called on to testify against her husband.

Rich Patterson, an ex-fiancé of one of Kuklinski’s daughters, told of a time in 1983 when Kuklinski had asking for his help to move something that turned out to be a dead body. The young man had feared for his own life and immediately broken off his engagement and moved away. Police suspected this had been the body of Daniel Deppner, found on 14th May 1983.

Whilst Kuklinski had casually confessed to all five murders and referred to his killings as merely business, he could not be given the death penalty as there had been no eyewitness reports of his crimes.

[quote]“I would move heaven, hell and anything in between to get you. You wouldn’t be safe anywhere if I was mad at you.” - [b]Kuklinski[/b][/quote]

In order to save the expense of a second trial, the District Attorney suggested a plea bargain. They would drop the charges against Barbara Kuklinski and a drug charge against one of the Kuklinski children if Kuklinski confessed to the murders of Malliband, Hoffman and Masgay. The plea bargain was agreed and Kuklinski confessed to killing Malliband and Masgay. It transpired however that whilst he could tell the court where he had placed the drum containing Hoffman’s body, he had no idea who had taken it.

On 25th May 1988, the jury took four hours to reach a guilty verdict. Kuklinski, 53, was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences in prison for the murders of George Malliband and Louis Masgay. He was sent to Trenton State Penitentiary, New Jersey, where his brother was serving a life sentence for the 1969 rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl. Kuklinski would not be eligible for parole until he reached 111 years of age.






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