Robert Jones

This essay might be of special interest to writers of detective and mystery stories who would like to enrich their stories by presenting their readers with a gift of extra detail. It might also be of general interest to many other readers.

Although the following describes a sufficient number of gruesome activities to give readers a fairly good idea of what Richard Kuklinski was like, many much more gruesome activities were not included.

Richard’s early years were spent in an unfortunate environment. He was the second of four children. According to Richard, his father was an alcoholic who beat him, often for no apparent reason. His mother was a strict Catholic, and she also beat him, once even breaking a broom handle in the process. He was also beaten by priests and teachers. When Richard was five years old, his father beat his older brother so severely that he died. His mother told hospital personnel that he had fallen down stairs. A short time later, his father left.

Having experienced such an outstanding introduction to life, it is not surprising that Richard did not follow a life path that might have been recommended by the Boy Scout Handbook. In probable response to his beatings, he tortured and killed just about every wild cat and dog in his neighborhood. For a time, he continued to receive beatings and harassments from the leader and members of a small gang. He finally decided that he had received his last beating. With a thick, wooden, closet rod in hand, he caught the gang leader alone and, with all the hatred in him fired by the beatings given him by his parents and all the others, beat him with it. His intention was to teach the leader a lesson, but he couldn’t stop beating and kicking him until he was well beyond dead. Richard drove the body in the trunk of a stolen car to a swampy area in South Jersey. He checked the body for anything that would identify it. From having read stolen crime comics, he knew that a body could be identified by its teeth and fingerprints, so he knocked out all the teeth and chopped off all the finger tips before dumping the body from a small bridge. Richard was 14.

That was when Kuklinski discovered it was “better to give than to receive.” It was apparently a credo that guided him throughout the rest of his life. He had to feel that he was always in control.

As an adult, Kuklinski was a busy man. He was always involved in one deal and/or another. He dealt in stolen cars and expedited the illegal distribution of guns, drugs and pornography.

Kuklinski also began doing jobs for crime families and said he was willing to kill for money. As a test to ensure he could follow an order to kill without questioning it, he was driven to an inner city area where a man was walking his dog. He was told to kill the man. Kuklinski got out of the car. He walked past the man, turned and shot him in the back of his head. The car pulled up. Kuklinski got in. The car pulled away. Kuklinski had passed his test.

Kuklinski was to be a contract killer for more than 30 years. The tools of his trade included his hands, fire, lamp cords, ropes, bats, a lump hammer, ice picks, screw drivers, knives, guns, hand grenades, a crossbow, rats and poison. During a documentary, he said that he usually carried two Derringers in his pockets and another gun attached to his ankle.

Kuklinski didn’t work exclusively for the crime families, but would kill anyone for anyone who would pay his fee. His only exceptions were women and children. At different times, he claimed that, during the next three decades or so, he had killed between 33 and 200 persons. He was an attentive viewer of the CSI television programs and attributed much of his success at avoiding arrest to what he had learned from them. He also had a habit of killing anyone who knew anything that could be used as evidence against him.

Whatever the actual number of persons killed by Kuklinski is, the murders left the police searching for a suspect. He stuffed one of his victims into a 55-gallon steel drum. The body was found, and the police traced its identity. They learned from the victim’s brother that he had been in great fear of Kuklinski. This finally presented the police with a suspect. They tracked Kuklinski for years, but were not able to pin anything on him.

Kuklinski would sometimes “accidentally” spill cyanide onto a person. It would eventually be absorbed through the skin and do its intended job. He also sometimes put it onto a person’s food. Once he put cyanide onto the hamburger of someone he had invited to lunch.

He “field tested” a crossbow by pulling his car over and lowering his window as if to ask a passer by for directions. As the man leaned down, Kuklinski shot him with the crossbow, Its projectile passed through his forehead and into his brain. When asked if that killed the man, he answered, “It sure did.”

Kuklinski partnered for a time with a man named Robert Prongay, who had been a military-trained demolitions expert. Oddly, Prongay drove about in a Mr. Softee truck from which he actually sold Mr. Softee to kids. Prongay knew quite a bit about various kinds of drugs and other chemicals that could be used to terminate a person’s life, and he taught Kuklinski such things as spraying cyanide at a person’s face while walking past him. The victim would inhale the cyanide and die very shortly thereafter. He also discussed freezing a body so that the time of death could not be determined, thus relieving a killer’s alibi concerns.

The partnership with Prongay ended soon after an argument. Prongay had made the huge mistake of threatening Kuklinski’s family. His body was found shot to death in his Mr Softee truck, which was parked in his garage, which happened to be across the street from Kuklinski’s rented garage.

Kuklinski kept the body of one man he had shot in a frigid well for two years before dumping it in upstate New York. The body was found a few days later. It appeared to have been dead for only a day or so. The body was wearing the same clothes that the man had been wearing when, carrying $90,000, he went to have dinner with Kuklinski. An autopsy revealed ice crystals within the body tissue, which indicated that the body had been frozen. Fingerprints identified the body, and Kuklinski was promoted from suspect to chief suspect. It was then that the police began referring to him as the Iceman.

It took an undercover agent a year and a half to establish a relationship with
Kuklinski. During subsequent meetings, he recorded many conversations during a number of which Kuklinski incriminated himself. The two even planned a murder-robbery. When his superior thought Kuklinski might kill the agent, which he was actually planning to do, he was arrested, tried for murder and sentenced to Life in prison.

It didn’t help Kuklinski’s standing with the jury when, as his defense attorney was attempting to discredit a witness who was testifying that Kuklinski had admitted to two murders, Kuklinski pointed his finger as an imaginary gun at the witness.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

1. Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz were known as serial killers. Kuklinski was not; he did not derive psycho-sexual gratification from his murders, and he was not known to have ever killed a woman.

Kuklinski had a brother, Joseph, who had raped and killed a 12-year-old girl and threw her and her dog from the roof of a building. He drew a life sentence at the same prison (Trenton State Prison) Richard Kuklinski would later call home for life. They both died there. Richard had used their history as an example of how such an upbringing as theirs can twist the lives of children.

Kuklinski’s emotional distancing is consistent with those suffering from dissociative identity disorder, but he apparently does not have multiple personalities but, as defined by his moods and behavior, he certainly has two sides–one good and one very bad–. His wife stated that, when in a good mood, he could be loving, generous and protective. When in a bad mood, he could threaten and beat her. If he couldn’t do that, he would even beat up on himself.

When engaged in his “business,” he got his victims to give him whatever he wanted before he killed them. He interpreted perceived insults as threats to his strictly maintained self-image. Control was always the major factor.

Research indicates that one cause of sociopathic behavior such as that exhibited by Kuklinski is abnormalities in the frontal lobe of the brain. Self control, planning and judgment are the responsibility of this area. Another cause has to do with the environment within which Kuklinski and his violent brother were both raised.

During an interview, Kuklinski said that he did have one regret: that he had hurt his family, who supposedly never knew exactly what he did for a living. To neighbors, he was simply a “business man.”

2. Until recently, tests could reveal elevated levels of cyanide within a body for only about two days before it degrades into carbon and nitrogen. Even its infamous bitter almond odor soon departs, leaving only lividity evidence in the form pinkish spots on the skin. The spots indicate oxygen starvation, but carbon monoxide can also produce such spots. Absent any additional evidence, the latter sometimes causes medical examiners to overlook cyanide as a possible cause of death.

A recent study revealed that a biomarker, ACTA, was found to have been significantly increased in liver samples of a person who had been subject to a sublethal dose of cyanide. Hopes are that the biomarker will substantially extend the window within which cyanide poisoning can be detected to weeks or months.

Readers interested in chemistry might care to know that ACTA is 2-aminothiazoline-4-carboxylic acid. Actually, it’s the same for those readers who don’t care to know.

3. A coroner and a medical examiner are not the same. A coroner, especially one in a rural county, might not be required to have any medical qualifications. His or her duties would often be limited to confirming that a body is dead, identifying the body, notifying the next of kin, returning personal belongings to the deceased’s family and signing a death certificate. If an autopsy is required, a nonmedical coroner can request that a medical examiner perform it. Many coroners, however, are physicians trained to examine dead bodies.

Medical examiners (MEs) in most counties are required to have a medical degree, although, in many, it does not have to be in pathology. Their duties typically include examining bodies of persons who have suddenly, unexpectedly and/or violently died to determine the cause and time of death and whether it was a natural death, a suicide or murder, or a death due to unknown causes. They also typically supervise the collection of evidence from a body, identify bodies and skeletal remains, determine any contributory factors associated with the death and sign s death certificate. In some counties, they might be in charge of a crime lab. They also provide expert testimony in court and often explain, in easily understood terms, forensic evidence to the judge and jury.

4. A detailed description of an autopsy can be found in the archives of Storytellers Unplugged. It is titled MORE FORENSIC DETAILS, and was published on August 30, 2007. The description is also among the 30 forensic essays in my e-book titled FORENSICS 101: A FRIENDLY PRIMER FOR WRITERS (which is available from Amazon.com).

5. During the last century or so, handling the dead has had a rather shady history. For example, at one time, coroners in New York City were paid by the body. Reportedly, some were pulled from the Hudson River, issued a John Doe death certificate , and slipped back into the river. This procedure was even repeated a number of times with the same body. For an under-the-table bonus, a corrupt coroner would protect the reputation of a family by declaring a suicide to be a natural death. For a much larger bonus, the coroner would protect the reputation of a killer by declaring a murder to be a natural death. In 1914, the office of medical examiner replaced that of coroner. Unfortunately, coroners and medical examiners are still under pressure by district attorneys and other officials to “assist” in obtaining convictions when evidence may be a bit scant.