The Iceman’s Survivors: A Serial Killer’s Children Speak

D
wayne Kuklinski was doing a big construction job back in January when he noticed a guy on his crew eyeing him. “You look just like the Iceman,” the man told him, taking in his 

piercing brown eyes, neat goatee, and imposing frame. 

The guy was referring to a towering figure in New Jersey history, a ruthless killer who claimed to have mob ties. He was convicted of murdering five men in 1988, once freezing a body to obscure the time of death, hence his nickname. A famous braggart, the Iceman claimed to have killed far more — a notion cops scoff at. Still, nobody doubts he was a murderer, a nightmare made manifest.

Kuklinski paused in his work. “Yeah, well, that’s my dad,” he replied. The guy laughed, but stopped abruptly when he realized Dwayne wasn’t joining in.

“[The man] came back to me and apologized,” Dwayne tells me now. “He was scared.”

Dwayne’s co-worker had no reason to be afraid. The 57-year-old might look like his father, Richard Kuklinski, but he’s not that man. For one, when he smiles he doesn’t look like he’s going to eat you. For another, he’s never killed anyone. Sitting across from me at a New Jersey diner, Dwayne is speaking with a journalist for the first time about his father, 40 years after his arrest. Still, he can’t understand why anyone would aggrandize a murderer.

He’s dealt with that cohort — “fans” who DM him on Facebook professing their admiration. “I can still show you friend requests, four or 500 from people who idolize my dad,” Dwayne says. “I really don’t get it. But then again, look at society. People idolize the Kardashians. Was my dad a role model? Absolutely not. Should he be anybody’s role model? Why would you want that to be your role model?”

Regardless, the Iceman’s legend has been inflated to the degree that he and the Jersey Devil inspire similarly gleeful morbid curiosity. There’s books, movies, and any number of websites and internet forums about Kuklinski, painting him as a tough-talking, evil motherfucker with a hair-trigger urge to kill. Still, to those whose lives he ended, and the dozens more whose lives he changed for the worse, he’s all too real a horror. Though these days serial killers have TV series and cult followings, they’re not fictional villains — they’re tornados of pain, leaving an ever-widening gyre of destruction and hurt in their wake. Kuklinski’s family should know.

“Does this affect our lives? Yes,” says Merrick Grayson, Dwayne’s sister. “Have we healed? Probably not.”

AS SOMEONE WHO COVERS TRUE CRIME, I’m all too aware of the fascination people have with serial killers. When an immersive serial-killer exhibit was announced earlier this year — promising “a VR investigation that places you at the crime scene” — well-meaning friends sent me the ticket link. I wasn’t that interested in entering the mind of a serial killer, though — I’ve always been more concerned with the people who caught them, and the people who survived.

The Iceman isn’t part of that exhibit, but there’s enough mythos surrounding him that he’d fit right in. I first came across him in Weird New Jersey, a magazine dedicated to compiling local lore. “We did this special issue years ago called Weird New Jersey’s Local Heroes and Villains and we included the Iceman,” Weird New Jersey publisher Mark Sceurman tells me. “I guess somebody in the Trenton prison must have gotten hold of a copy. And he showed it to Kuklinski, and he loved it. He actually made a copy of it and signed it and sent it back to us.” That shows what kind of man Kuklinski was, before he died in 2006 — eager to inflate his own legend, to revel in his exploits. The fact that he’s been famously free with his story with journalists has ensured that that legend endures.

The facts of Kuklinski’s story, then, shouldn’t be taken at face value. He ended up at New Jersey State Prison, in Trenton, thanks to a protracted mission by the New Jersey State Police, the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. But according to the late crime writer Anthony Bruno’s 2012 book, The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer, Kuklinski had been cutting a swath of violence through New York and New Jersey since he was a kid. (That book culled from extensive interviews with Kuklinski. Law enforcement accepts it as largely accurate.) An abused child growing in the Jersey City projects, the future serial killer claims to have murdered his first victim, a childhood bully, in 1950, at age 14. Sick of the incessant name-calling — Hobo Richie, Richie the Rag Boy — Kuklinski lay in wait for him one night, then beat him to death with a closet rod.

From there, Bruno writes, his criminal machinations only intensified; he worked at a Manhattan film lab in the 1960s, where he copied and sold pornographic movies on the sly, and claimed to have got in with the Gambino crime family. While he was building his own gang of criminals, Kuklinski lived a parallel life as a suburban dad, marrying a whip-smart, beautiful blonde named Barbara Pedrici in 1961 and raising three kids — Dwayne, Merrick, and their sister Christin — in tidy, tan split-level in leafy Dumont, New Jersey, located in the affluent Bergen County. Behind those walls, though, Kuklinski terrorized his family. 

“I was the youngest, so I don’t remember a lot,” says Dwayne. “He used to have violent rages and smash up things. They tried to get me out of the house as much as possible. You didn’t want to drive in a car with him. We didn’t really do a lot together. We never went to, like, a baseball game,” he says. In fact, Dwayne stashed weapons all over his bedroom — a bat by the door, a hatchet next to his bed — in case his dad came for him in the night.

Merrick Grayson, 61, was Dwayne’s eldest sister, and tried to shield her brother from their father’s outbursts. A proud mother and grandmother with bright blonde hair like her mother’s, Grayson tried to manage her dad’s anger, which was often directed at Barbara. “I called my mother three times a day from school from a payphone to see if everything was still OK,” she says. “There’s something terribly wrong with that amount of rage. It’s just a lot of rage, an unbelievable rage, uncontrollable, unbelievable, horrible.” (Neither Barbara nor Christin replied to my emails and letters.)

When Kuklinski was arrested in 1986 for multiple murders, the family vacillated between relief and disbelief — especially Dwayne. At age 16 he watched, enraged, as his father slapped his mother one day toward the end. And, for the first time, he intervened. “I took a step forward and he grabbed my arms,” he says. “He looked at me and he said, ‘I knew this day would come.’ He wound up leaving, and then he got arrested shortly thereafter.” Dwayne pauses, then asks if I’ve spoken to ATF Special Agent Dominick Polifrone, the man who caught the Iceman. “If you do, tell him thank you.”

DOMINICK POLIFRONE MAY HAVE JUST turned 80, but sporting a leather jacket and slicked-back silver hair, he still looks like the spry cop he was in his youth. We’re meeting at the Vince Lombardi Service Station off the New Jersey Turnpike to nurse black coffee and discuss the biggest bust of his career. “You’ve done your homework,” he tells me, surveying the station where he traded words with Richard Kuklinski four decades back. The station’s had a makeover since then, when traffickers huddled at the dirty payphones, murmuring orders, and undercover agents watched from cars and booths as the two men talked. 

The cops became aware of Kuklinski’s reputation around 1985, when an informant fingered him and his crew for a rash of burglaries around North Jersey. Authorities soon connected him to five unsolved murders, seeing as how Kuklinski was the last to see the men alive. Soon, a task force between the ATF and the Attorney General formed, Operation Iceman, in an effort to take him down. 

An ATF agent at the time, Polifrone was enlisted to go undercover as “Dominic Provenzano,” a mob-connected weapons and drug runner who hung out at the Store, a non-descript building in Paterson, New Jersey, where lowlifes convened to hash out deals. 

Polifrone spent 18 months hanging out at the Store, trying to make contact with Kuklinski. It’s not like he could just waltz up to the man and ask him to hang out. He had to establish his reputation first. Polifrone finally broke through when Kuklinski was looking to purchase his weapon of choice — cyanide — which a fellow lowlife at the Store told him “Provenzano” could provide. They met at a nearby Dunkin Donuts, where Polifrone tried to play it cool. 

Sitting across from all six-foot-four, 250 pounds of Kuklinski, his eyes flat behind orange shades, Polifrone tried to contain his nerves — and excitement. He was finally meeting the man he was tasked with taking down. He couldn’t mess this up. So when Kuklinski tested the waters, asking if he could get, say, cocaine, Polifrone adopted a bluster. Coke was going for about $30,000 a kilo at the time, he says, so he offered that. “And he says, ‘Well, I can get it for about 28,’” Polifrone tells me. 

“I said, ‘If you can get it for 28, go with your guy.’ And he goes, ‘Well, I don’t know if I can trust him,’” Polifrone continues. “And I look at him, and I said, ‘You must be a fucking jerk.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t deal with anybody I didn’t trust.’ He turned around, and he looked at me like this.” He levels me with a dead-eyed glare. “It was the longest five seconds that you can imagine, like he was trying to reach my soul and wanted to kill me. Then he leans back and he goes, ‘You’re right.’”

From then on, Polifrone led Kuklinski on a winding chase, meeting up at the service station to hash out deals, a recorder running every step of the way. Eventually, Polifrone was able to get Kuklinski to confess to five murders on tape, and Kuklinski was arrested Dec. 17, 1986, in his car, right in front of the family’s home, Barbara in his passenger seat.

“I got direct evidence from Kuklinski right here at the Vince Lombardi Service Station,” Polifrone tells me. “He told me how he murdered people, how he used the cyanide, how he froze some of the bodies, how he murdered another individual at the York Motel — and everything was on the tape — and how he strangled them. He was a mean son of a bitch, and everything that they wanted on the murders that he committed, I got from his own mouth.”

In March 1988, Kuklinski was found guilty of murdering 42-year-old George Malliband in 1980, when Mallibrand met up with him to buy videotapes; 51-year-old pharmacist Paul Hoffman in 1982, after Hoffman tried to rope Kuklinski into selling pharmaceuticals on the sly; and his 37-year-old criminal partner Gary Smith in 1982 with a cyanide-laced burger, after Smith tried to go clean. 

Kuklinski was also found guilty of killing 50-year-old Louis Masgay in 1983, also over a deal to buy videotapes, and then freezing his body to try to throw cops off about the time of death. Despite Kuklinski’s nickname, this is the only such murder he was convicted of — not that such a crime isn’t horrific. And then there was the 1983 murder of another member of his crew, Daniel Deppner, whose body was discovered by a cyclist along Clinton Road, a densely forested stretch known as the most haunted road in America. 

In Bruno’s book and the subsequent 2012 movie by the same name — starring Michael Shannon as Kuklinski and Winona Ryder as Barbara — the story of these crimes is told with an air of cinematic danger. It probably didn’t help matters that, back in the 1980s, the press approached the story with a kind of farcical levity that undermined the seriousness of the crimes. “BURGER MURDER,” the cover of the Daily News trumpeted, all in caps — a reference to his claim that he smeared cyanide inside the sandwich that killed Gary Smith.

Until his death in prison in 2006, Kuklinski leaned into the press, filming three separate HBO documentaries in 1992, 2001, and 2003, in which he bragged about torturing animals, leaving men to be eaten by rats in caves, road-rage killings, and confessed to murdering high-ranking members of the mafia. He claims he killed hundreds of people. (Polifrone and other members of law enforcement say that they believe he was lying, and likely killed between 10 to 15 people.) All the while, he directed a steely gaze to the camera and spoke like a mafioso in a movie, as though he’d rehearsed. “Nothing haunts me,” he says in the 1992 special. “No murders haunt me. Nothing. I don’t think about it.”

The 2003 interview was conducted by forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, who was enlisted by HBO to dig into Kuklinski’s psyche. “He could not be taken at his word about anything he had to say,” Dietz tells me. Kuklinski told Dietz about a road rage incident in Georgia where he killed a car full of men; Dietz says state police told him there was no record of such a killing. 

“I think he tells tall tales [not just out of] self aggrandizement, but also intimidation,” Dietz adds. “In a prison setting, it is of great value to be seen as the scariest guy in the room, and I think he embraced that role. His physical stature certainly gave him an advantage at being intimidating. Attention seeking was one of the few things he had the freedom to go for once he was incarcerated, and he went for it with zest.” 

THOSE TALL TALES, THEN ONLY add to the legend of the Iceman — keep his crimes alive, torture the loved ones of the people onto whom he’s already inflicted so much harm. I reached out to victims’ families while reporting this story, hoping to show the impact of Kuklinski’s crimes on them — to show the world who these people were aside from murder victims. As is often the case, there’s very little about these men out there that’s not about their deaths. I was sitting at the diner where I talked to Dwayne when I got an email from one of those family members. I won’t quote that email or identify this person here to protect their privacy. In their eyes, though, I was doing what all the books and movies did. I was revictimizing families by reaching out. I was profiting off of pain.

In my decade-plus of covering true crime, I have received very few messages of this sort, so it took me aback. I considered dropping the story. The last thing I want to do is hurt the people I claim to want to give voice to. But, then, in a sense, there’s no going back when it comes to Kuklinski. His exaggerated legend is out there already — plus, his children had already trusted me with their stories. So, I kept reporting, but vowed to keep descriptions of Kuklinski’s crimes to the minimum. Because this isn’t a story about a devil, but about the people who survived him.

Dominick Polifrone is proud to have collared Kuklinski, to be sure. But he also regrets the time he lost with his children while he played mafioso. “I missed a lot with the kids growing up,” he says. “You can’t get that back. It’s a full-time case.” Also, he gets his share of hate from Kuklinski’s “fans.” “He has a cult following. [And they say] I should have been killed,” the former lawman says. “I should have been killed because he was a good guy. I’m the one that was fucked-up. I’m no good.”

A self-described former high school burnout, Dwayne calls his 20s his “lost years” but he doesn’t blame his father for the choices he made during that time. “How much do you take responsibility for your own actions?” he says. After getting arrested at age 27, Dwayne started working construction, and when his son was born 12 years back, he straightened himself out. “When I held my son for the first time, it changed my world,” he says. “It was actually the first time in my whole life that something was more important to me than me. I wish I had done things differently now, but at the time, I was living my best life, not really planning for the future. My biggest failure in life would be if my son feared me, because I feared my father, and I would never want that.”

His sister, Merrick, has more complicated feelings — after all, to her, the Iceman was “Dad.” She remembers going to a shoe store in the Paramus mall with him to buy a new pair of Mary Janes, and leaving with those plus a new pair of boots, grabbing lunch on the way home. A father-daughter moment etched in her brain 50 years later. Of course, she also remembers clutching the door handle on the journey back, terrified that her dad would fly into a fit of road rage if some unlucky driver dared to cut him off. She loved him, sure, but says she would have worn the cheapest of shoes for one normal day. “I was the only one who loved him,” she says now, staring at his gray marble urn of his ashes on her mantelpiece. No one else wanted them. Her mother asked for her ashes to be kept in another room when she dies.

“It’s an ongoing nightmare. No one would know seeing me,” she says. “I’m very friendly. I can keep all of this in my filing cabinet in my brain. Yes, it bothers me, but I don’t expect anyone to understand that.”

Not least the men who idolize her father, who send Dwayne message after message praising him as some sort of Tony Soprano figure — whose victims get up and walk off set after the cameras stop rolling. Or to the folks who stroll through those serial killer exhibits, shrieking with freaked-out delight over dioramas of a hell they can only imagine. These are real people — from the family member who emailed me to Merrick, Dwayne, and Polifrone. And real wounds don’t heal as fast as they do on TV.