SERIAL KILLERS Adele Smith >Jimmy Yarrington

RICHARD KUKLINSKI - (April 11 th, March 5 th, 2006) - A convicted murderer and notorious contract killer. - He worked for several Italian families and claims to have killed over 200 men. - His first murder was at the age of 13.

BIOGRAPHY -Richard Leonard Kuklinski was the second of four children born to Stanley Kuklinsky and Anna Kuklinsky (née McNally) of Polish and Irish origin. Kuklinski was born on April 11, 1935 in Jersey City, New Jersey. His mother Anna was born in Dublin and her parents emigrated to Jersey City in His father Stanley had emigrated from Warsaw, Poland and after a three month courtship married Anna, Richard's mother, in July He was heavily abused as a child.

ICEMAN -Kuklinski earned the nickname "Iceman" following his experiments with disguising the time of death of his victims by freezing their corpses in an industrial freezer.

HOW? -He favored the use of cyanide since it killed quickly and was hard to detect in a toxicology test. He would variously administer it by injection, putting it on a person's food, by aerosol spray, or by simply spilling it on the victim's skin. One of his favorite methods of disposing of a body was to place it in a 55-gallon oil drum. His other disposal methods included dismemberment, burial, or placing the body in the trunk of a car and having it crushed in a junkyard. He also claimed to have left bodies sitting on park benches, thrown bodies down "bottomless pits" and fed still-alive victims to giant rats in Pennsylvania.

HOW HE GOT CAUGHT? -Eventually Kuklinski started making mistakes and the New Jersey State Police were watching him. When three associates of Kuklinskis turned up dead, a task force was organized with the New Jersey authorities and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Special Agent Dominick Polifrone went undercover and spent a year and a half disguised as a hitman and eventually met and gained Kuklinski's trust. Kuklinski bragged to the agent about his proficiency with cyanide and boasted about freezing a corpse in order to mask his time of death. Afraid Polifrone would soon become another of Kuklinski's victims, the task force moved quickly after taping some of his confessions and getting him to agree to do a hit with Polifrone.

PUNISHMENT -On December 17, 1986, Kuklinski was arrested and charged with five counts of murder which involved two trials. He was found guilty in the first trial and reached an agreement in the second trial and was sentenced to two life sentences. He was sent to Trenton State Prison, where his brother was serving a life sentence for the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl.

-Over his lifetime, he claims to have killed over two hundred people. He says that he feels no remorse for murdering people, but probably wouldn't do it if he didn't have to. He says that he doesn't think about his actions because they do bother him if he thinks about them enough. He regrets being a hit man since he now feels that he could have done something better. When he was interviewed in 1991 for a documentary, he showed little emotion, except when asked about the impact on his family, at which point he began tearing up.

WHY? -When asked why he had become one of the most diabolical mass murderers in history, he cast blame on his father's abuse and admitted the one thing he was sorry for was for not killing him.

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