by Ray Black
Masgay’s carcass was reported to have hung for a time in an industrial freezer in a warehouse rented by the Iceman. However, it is also believed to have spent some time in the freezer in Prongay’s ice cream van, lying there while Mr Softee dispensed cornets to the children of North Bergen.
When Masgay’s corpse was discovered, two years later, wrapped in plastic bags, the medical examiner thought it strange that the clothing he was wearing was the same as on the day he had left home with the cash. And yet, the body looked fresh. However, all became clear when, in the course of the autopsy, Masgay’s tissue was found to contain crystals of ice and his heart was discovered to be still partially frozen. Kuklinsky had been either too careful in wrapping Masgay’s body in layer after layer of plastic or too impatient to let the body thaw completely. He became the cops’ chief suspect and the name ‘Iceman’ began to stick.
As for Prongay, he now knew too much and Kuklinsky shot him to death in his ice cream van in 1984.
In the midst of the mayhem he was creating, lay Kuklinsky’s family. He maintained a normal, fairly affluent family life in a New Jersey suburb and his neighbours had no clue as to how he earned his living. In an interview with the writer, Anthony Bruno, he said: ‘I’m not the Iceman. I’m the nice man.’
He had married his wife, Barbara, in 1961, but behind closed doors she lived in constant fear of his fierce and violent temper. She disclosed after he had been imprisoned, that at different times he had attempted to smother her with a pillow, had pointed a gun at her, had tried to run her over with a car and had broken her nose no fewer than three times.
He had drifted into crime while working at a film lab, selling porn videos on the side to the Gambinos. At first they were suspicious of his enthusiasm for killing and they limited his activities to smaller crimes. But Kuklinski told DeMeo that he would do anything for money and to prove he had what it took, DeMeo took him for a walk. They were close to a man who was out walking his dog. Without a moment’s hesitation, and on command, Kuklinski walked past the man and then turned and shot him dead. From that point on, they decided to exploit his love of killing. He would kill men he could lure into deals involving large amounts of cash being handed over for non-existent goods or fellow criminals who knew too much. He carried out contract killings for the Mafia or took care of people who just annoyed him.
Gary Smith, an associate of Kuklinsky, fell into the category of a man who knew too much. He would steal cars and Kuklinsky and he would re-sell them. But the police were on to him and, just before Christmas 1982, a warrant was issued for his arrest. The last thing Kuklinsky needed was for Smith to start talking. So, he shielded him, moving him from one New Jersey motel to another, helped by another car thief, Danny Deppner. Smith was hard to control, however, and it was just a matter of time before he would be picked up. There was only one way to deal with the situation.
Smith was holed up in the York Motel off Route 3, close to the Lincoln Tunnel. Kuklinsky brought hamburgers to him and Deppner and Smith grabbed the bag of food, not realising that Kuklinsky had rustled up a recipe of his own for the ketchup, adding just a dash of cyanide. Smith hungrily wolfed down the burger and at first nothing happened as the two men watched. Then, the poison began to work and Smith began to choke. It was taking time, however, so Deppner put a chord from one of the lamps around his throat and tightened it until Smith was no longer breathing.
The plan had been for Deppner’s wife to show up with a car to remove the body but when she failed to show, the two men decided to hide Smith’s body beneath the mattress and box springs of the bed. It took four days for the stench in the room to be reported and the mattress to be removed to reveal the bloated body of Gary Smith. In that time, three couples had used the bed.
Deppner, of course, now knew too much. His body was discovered in January 1983, only a few miles from a ranch at which Kuklinsky’s family were known to go riding. The cause of death was stated as ‘undetermined’. However, pinkish spots – a sign of cyanide poisoning – were noted and photographs of them were taken.
Kuklinsky became the chief suspect and the net began to tighten on him. It was decided that Special Agent Dominick Polifrone would lure him into a deal so that he could be caught on tape admitting something or be caught in the act of planning a murder.
When Polifrone eventually hooked up with Kuklinsky in 1986, pretending to offer an arms and cocaine deal, Kuklinsky began to brag about his methods, especially the use of cyanide. He asked Polifrone if he could get his hands on some cyanide for him.
To expedite matters, Polifrone asked Kuklinsky to help him take care of a ‘rich Jewish kid’ who wanted to buy coke from them and would be carrying a lot of cash. They decided to put cyanide in an egg sandwich. However, the ‘cyanide’ Polifrone brought was actually just quinine. On the day, however, Kuklinsky took the sandwiches and left. He failed to return and the task force that had been formed to manage the case, believing their undercover agent to be in mortal danger, moved in and Kuklinsky was arrested.
At his trial, he was found guilty of five murders, but the lack of eyewitness testimony meant he escaped the death penalty. He was given two sentences of life imprisonment, for each of which he would serve a minimum of thirty years. He would be 111 years old before he would be eligible for parole. He didn’t make it, though. He died in Trenton State Prison – the same one in which his brother was incarcerated – in March 2006. He was seventy years old.
Bianchi and Buono: The Hillside Stranglers
Kenneth Alessio Bianchi was born on May 22, 1951, to a seventeen-year-old alcoholic prostitute who worked the streets of Rochester, New York. A baby was the last thing she needed and Kenneth was immediately put up for adoption. He found a home within a few months with Frances Bianchi and her husband, a worker at the American Brake Shoe factory.
Bianchi was a difficult child from the start and it was not long before Frances realised that the child she had taken in was a compulsive liar. Not only that, he also did not sleep, was prone to anger and temper tantrums and was a chronic bed-wetter. When his mother took him to hospital to find out what was wrong, the doctor noted: ‘Mother needs help’.
Frances sought help again when Kenny was five years old. She described how he would lapse into what seemed to be trances, his eyes rolling back in their sockets. The doctors diagnosed these episodes as petit mal syndrome or absence seizures. Frances was assured there was no cause for concern; Kenny would probably grow out of them.
However, by the age of eleven, he was being treated at DePaul Psychiatric Centre for a whole range of issues including ‘involuntary urination, tics, absenteeism and behaviour problems’. To deal with his bladder problems, his mother made him wear sanitary towels.
His education also presented problems and he moved schools a few times around this time because of his inability to get on with his teachers. He was lazy, inattentive and angry, but not stupid – he had an IQ of 116. Nevertheless, his grades never reflected this and he was a chronic underachiever in class.
Kenny’s father died of a heart attack when the boy was thirteen, but he received the news without any outward sign of emotion. Psychiatrists suggested that he was overly dependent on his mother.
He got through high school without any real problems; he was a clean-cut kid who seemed to respect his elders and he dated. At eighteen, a proposal of marriage he made to a girlfriend was turned down. But, he was still an odd kid. Around this time, in a letter to a girlfriend, he claimed to be the Alphabet Killer who was making a name for himself in the area. She didn’t take his claim seriously.
When he graduated in 1971, Kenny married Brenda Beck, but the marriage failed after just eight months, perhaps because his wedding vows had never stopped him seeing other women. Nonetheless, when Brenda packed her things, left and filed for an annulment, Kenny felt betrayed. Another contributory factor to the marriage breakdown were the high standards he imposed upon his women. According to an acquaintance, his Catholic education led him
to confuse ordinary women with the Virgin Mary, and their human frailties exasperated him to the point of anger. He did not like his women to wear V-neck sweaters or tight jeans and demanded absolute devotion and faithfulness, even while he was out playing the field.
He took courses in police science and psychology, but dropped out and, following a rejected application for a job in the sheriff’s department, he worked as a security guard, using his position to steal things for girlfriends. But Rochester was a dead end for him and in 1975, aged twenty-six, he moved to Los Angeles, living initially with his older cousin, Angelo Buono.
Angelo was not a nice man. A car upholsterer and a pimp, he had been married several times and had a number of children whom he abused both physically and sexually. Nonetheless, his course vulgarity and downright ugliness did not deter him from being a ladies’ man. Like Bianchi, he had been born in Rochester but had moved with his mother and older sister to Glendale, California, following his parents’ divorce. He, too, was a Catholic, but neither religion nor education can be said to have meant anything to him. He was into sadistic and brutal sex and he initiated Bianchi into his perverted world.
Kenny soon got a job, his own apartment in Glendale and a 1972 Cadillac sedan that he could barely afford. Before long he had moved in with a woman he had met at work, Kelli Boyd. When Kelli told him in May 1977 that she was having a baby, Kenny wanted to marry her, but his jealousy, immaturity and compulsive lying made her reluctant to share her future with him.
As well as his dayjob, Bianchi obtained a fraudulent degree and credentials, rented an office and set himself up as a psychologist, giving Kelli even more reason not to marry him. Fortunately, he did not have too many clients.
In late 1977, when the Hillside Strangler was starting to cause widespread panic on the streets of Los Angeles, Bianchi made a pretense of being seriously ill; he started coughing and saying that he was having difficulty breathing. He told Kelli that he had lung cancer and would require chemotherapy and radiation treatment. He took time off work and on one of his days at home he was questioned by detectives about the strangler case. One of the murders may have taken place in the apartment building he and Kelli lived in. They did not consider him a suspect, though, and he even managed to get himself recruited for the LAPD’s ride-along programme which allowed civilians to travel in police cars. All Bianchi talked about to his police companions was the Hillside Strangler.
Not long after the birth of their son, Sean, Kelli decided she had had enough. She left Bianchi and went home to her parents in Bellingham. Bianchi found himself abandoned by yet another woman. Before too long, however, she agreed to give him another chance and he drove to Bellingham to be with her.
The killing had started a few months earlier, in October 1977, when Angelo and Kenneth had decided they would pimp out young girls. A couple of women, Deborah Noble and Yolanda Washington, sold them a list of potential male clients that the two men discovered to be fake. They went looking for revenge and eighteen-year-old Yolanda’s body was discovered not long afterwards on a hillside close to a cemetery, with the cloth that had been used to strangle her still tied around her neck. She had been a part-time waitress and prostitute which meant that the police did not consider relevant the fact that she had had sex with two men before she died.
A few weeks later, on November 1, sixteen-year-old Judy Miller was found. She, too, had been raped and strangled and her ankles, wrists and neck bore ligature marks. Five days later, Linda Kastin’s naked body turned up near a Glendale country club. The twenty-one-year-old waitress had been raped, sodomised and strangled, and she bore similar ligature marks to Judy Miller.
It was only when a couple of younger girls were murdered that the police began to really take the killings seriously. Until this point, the victims had been women who led lives that contained an element of risk. Now the victims were nice girls from middle class backgrounds. Dolores Capeda, twelve, and Sonja Johnson were schoolgirls who were last seen getting off the school bus on November 13 and going over to a large two-tone sedan to talk to someone on the passenger side. Their raped and strangled bodies were found by a nine-year-old boy and bore the Hillside Strangler’s characteristic ligature marks.
Seven days passed before Kristine Weckler’s nude body, complete with ligature marks, was stumbled upon on a hill near Glendale. Bianchi later told how she died: ‘She was brought into the kitchen and put on the floor and her head was covered with a bag and the pipe from the gas stove was disconnected, put into the bag and then turned on. There may have been marks on her neck because there was a cord put around her neck to make a more complete sealing.’ It took ninety minutes for her to be asphyxiated.
Bianchi and Buono had been busy. Twenty-eight-year-old Jane King turned up on a sliproad near the Golden State Freeway on November 23 and Lauren Wagner was found six days later. Both carried the tell-tale ligature marks, but Lauren’s palms showed a new twist – electrical burns; she had been tortured before being strangled.
Police surmised correctly that more than one killer was involved. The bodies had been killed elsewhere and dumped. It would have taken two people to carry them to some of the locations. They also noted the elements common to each murder – bodies left on hillsides and death by ligature strangulation.
Kenny and Angelo took a break. There were no more deaths for a fortnight, but on December 13 it started up again when seventeen-year-old Kimberly Diane Martin, also known as Donna, was found – the strangler’s ninth victim. The tenth was spotted by a helicopter on February 16, 1978. Cindy Hudspeth’s body was in the boot of an orange Datsun which had been pushed over a cliff.
Bianchi, by this time in Bellingham with Kelli and their son, now went solo. Working as a security guard, and looking after a house for some people who were abroad, he paid Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder a hundred dollars to housesit for a couple of hours. As he showed them round the house, he strangled them both and left their bodies in their car in a heavily wooded area. In January 1979, however, a woman called the police to complain about an abandoned car and they found the bodies of the two young women and vital evidence that tied Bianchi to the crime. In his home, they found jewellery belonging to Yolanda Washington and Kimberly Martin. The game was up.
When Bianchi was arrested, he claimed the killings had been carried out by one of his multiple personalities and, under hypnosis, his evil personality, ‘Steve Walker’ introduced himself. This character confessed to the murders and implicated Angelo Buono. The doctors were convinced at this point that Bianchi was indeed suffering from multiple personality syndrome. One was suspicious, however, especially when the Steve personality used ‘he’ instead of ‘I’. He decided to test him. He told Kenny that it was unusual for there to be just one other personality. Kenny responded almost immediately by inventing another personality called Billy, and so was found to be faking it. Confronted with this fact, he agreed to testify against Buono in return for being spared the death penalty.
Explaining their methods, he told how he and Buono would pretend to be police officers and would tell prostitutes that they were being taken to a police station to be booked. Or, they would simply ask for directions and grab their victim. All were raped and strangled; some were tortured.
Before he went on trial, Bianchi dreamed up a scheme with Veronica Lynn Compton, with whom he had been corresponding from his prison cell. Compton offered to kill a woman and place Bianchi’s semen at the scene, showing that the Hillside Strangler was still operating, thus causing confusion. He smuggled his semen to her in a rubber glove hidden in a book. She fluffed the attempt at murder, however, when her victim fought back, and was arrested and convicted in Washington in October 1980.
At Buono’s trial in 1981, Bianchi agreed that he had faked multiple personality disorder and claimed not to know whether he had been telling the truth when he said Buono had been involved in the murders. He said he was not even sure that he was guilty. Buono was re-tried in 1982 and was convicted of nine murders,
but was not sentenced to death. He died of a heart attack, aged sixty-seven, in Calipatria State Prison on September 21, 2002.
Kenneth Bianchi was given to two life sentences in the state of Washington. He was immediately transferred to California where he was sentenced to additional life terms. There he remains at the age of fifty-six.
Doctor Crippen
Hawley Harvey Crippen was born in Coldwater, Michigan in the United States in 1862 to Andresee Skinner and Myron Augustus Crippen, a fairly prosperous couple who ran a dry goods store. As a child, Crippen had always wanted to be a doctor and by the age of twenty-one he had achieved his ambition, graduating from the University of Michigan before gaining an MD degree from the Homeopathic Hospital in Cleveland. He also received a diploma from the Ophthalmic Hospital in New York as an eye and ear specialist. Around this time, Crippen travelled to England with the intention of improving his knowledge of medicine, but discovered that he was insufficiently qualified to practise in the United Kingdom. Returning to the United States he worked in a number of different cities, and by the early 1890s he was married to Charlotte Bell, an Irish nurse. They had a son, Otto, but when his wife died of apoplexy in January, 1892, the boy was sent to live with his grandmother. He would never see his father again.
Not long after, back in New York, Crippen took the plunge again, marrying a nineteen-year-old girl who went by the name of Cora Turner. She was actually of Russian-German parentage and her rather more exotic real name was Kunigunde Mackamotsi. Cora had left home at the age of sixteen and had launched herself into a theatrical career, using her not inconsiderable sexual charms to get on. She had taken the stage name Belle Elmore. Critically, though, her talent was fairly negligible and her career never really amounted to very much. For Crippen, this larger-than-life character made for an unlikely mate; his upbringing had been rigidly Protestant and her life was far removed from his. For Cora, however, Crippen’s status as a doctor offered a chance of wealth and respectability.