Barbara Kuklinski was married to Richard Kuklinski for 25 years before she discovered that he was responsible for at least five murders — and possibly hundreds more.
Barbara KuklinskiA photo of Barbara Kuklinski and her husband, Richard, who allegedly moonlighted as a mafia killer.
Barbara Kuklinski knew her husband, Richard, could be violently abusive. He frequently beat her and had even broken her nose on multiple occasions. But she didn’t know that he’d purportedly murdered 65 people before they met — and that he’d go on to kill many more.
Indeed, Richard Kuklinski was an alleged mafia hitman known as the “Iceman.” Though he was eventually convicted of just five murders, Richard later claimed that he’d killed as many as 200 people.
His arrest in 1986 came as a surprise to Barbara, who’d spent the last 25 years raising their three children alongside him in suburban New Jersey. But it wasn’t a complete shock. When detectives told her what Richard was accused of, everything suddenly made sense.
“All of a sudden it was like, ‘I knew that,'” Barbara later remarked. “I knew he was a murderer.”
This is the story of Barbara Kuklinski, the wife of Richard Kuklinski.
‘He Was Obsessed With Me’
Barbara Kuklinski (née Pedrici) met Richard Kuklinski in 1961 when she was just 18 years old. The Telegraph reported in 2013 that Barbara was fresh out of high school and working as a secretary at a New Jersey trucking company where Richard, married and seven years her senior, had a job at the loading dock.
Richard pursued Barbara intensely. After their first date, he gave her flowers and a gift and invited her to a second one. Before long, he would wait for her after work every evening with flowers. But Barbara wasn’t sure she was ready to commit to one person.
“He was obsessed with me,” she told The Scotsman in 2008. “He would say over and over again, ‘I love you, Lady’. I would just say, ‘Me too. Me, too.’ I never loved him and I never told him I loved him.”
HBORichard Kuklinski in an undated photo. He was seven years older than his wife Barbara when they met.
One day, as they sat in his car, Barbara told Richard that she wanted to see other people. Richard exploded. He jabbed her in the back with a hunting knife, deep enough to draw blood, told her that she belonged to him, threatened to murder her entire family, and choked her until she passed out.
Richard apologized the next day. He blamed his outburst on his intensity of feeling, and told Barbara he wanted to marry her. Reluctantly, she agreed.
By the time they married, Richard Kuklinski had allegedly already committed 65 murders.
Richard Kuklinski, The Iceman
By his own account, Richard Kuklinski had already killed dozens of people by the time he first asked Barbara Pedrici on a date. His violent crimes purportedly started in childhood, when he claimed he beat the town bully to death at the age of 14.
In the 1950s, while working in a film lab, Richard started covertly bootlegging movies after work and soon broke into the bootleg porn industry. This line of business introduced him to a number of seedy characters, and before long, the six-foot-five Richard — who weighed about 300 pounds — allegedly got involved with the Mafia.
He started by working with mobster Roy DeMeo of the Gambino crime family, trafficking illegal pornography, administering beatings, and other tasks.
According to Philip Carlo’s biography of Richard Kuklinski, The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, when DeMeo learned that Richard had done some “special work” for the De Cavalcante crime family, he recruited him as a hitman for the Gambino family.
Richard would allegedly go on to work for all five New York crime families, as well as two New Jersey families.
Bettmann/Contributor/Getty ImagesRichard Kuklinski after his arrest. He later claimed that he’d killed more than 200 people.
Not only did Richard obey his official orders, but he also purportedly carried out murders of his own. He began to prowl the Upper West Side of New York City, where he claimed he’d target people who annoyed him or who had slighted him somehow.
His methods were varied. Richard shot, stabbed, strangled, poisoned, or bludgeoned his victims. And along the way, Richard Kuklinski also concocted an ingenious way to throw the police off his scent — by leaving the bodies of his victims in industrial freezers for months or even years. Then, once investigators found the remains, they would have difficulty determining when exactly the victim had died. This technique earned Richard the nickname “The Iceman.”
But to Barbara Kuklinski, he was her husband — someone who returned to her each night at their home in suburban New Jersey. And he quickly became someone to fear.
Inside Barbara Kuklinski’s Violent Marriage To The Iceman
According to The Scotsman, Barbara married Richard “under great duress” because he told her he’d hurt her family if she didn’t. But she held onto some hope that his violence could be tempered.
“I thought I could change him, but he was a jealous, jealous man,” she recalled. “I knew if I tried to escape, he would hunt me down and tear me limb from limb.”
They had three children together: Merrick, Christin, and Dwayne. And, from the outside, they appeared to live an idyllic suburban life. They went to church every Sunday, where Richard served as an usher, and hosted weekend barbecues. Barbara has claimed that she didn’t know where her husband’s money came from, but it allowed them to buy a nice house with a pool, and luxuries like a new TV and car.
Barbara KuklinskiRichard Kuklinski and his daughters. Barbara Kuklinski claims that the Iceman never hurt his own children, though he did beat her frequently.
“I’ll be the first one to say, maybe I was naive, because I never saw anything [illegal],” she told The Telegraph.
But Barbara certainly saw Richard’s violent side. Though she claims he never hit their children, he certainly abused her. He allegedly broke her nose three times, once tried to run her down with a car, and often woke her up in the middle of the night by holding a pillow over her face and threatening to kill her.
Meanwhile, he presented himself as a loving husband to their neighbors, who never suspected a thing.
“They thought he was great,” Barbara told The Telegraph. “Everybody that met him thought I was the luckiest person in the world. The flower truck there once a week, I had new jewelry, he bought me a $12,000 raccoon coat…”
This illusion, however, was shattered in 1986.
Richard Kuklinski Is Arrested
Shortly before Christmas in 1986, Richard and Barbara Kuklinski piled into their car and set out to grab breakfast nearby. But before they could get very far, police suddenly surrounded them. As officers swarmed Richard at gunpoint, one threw Barbara onto the ground.
Soon thereafter, a detective told her what was going on: “He’s a murderer.”
Barbara Kuklinski had little difficulty believing it.
Getty Images/Ed Clarity/NY Daily NewsBarbara Kuklinski and one of her daughters after Richard Kuklinski’s arrest.
Her husband was charged with five murders. He was found guilty of four of them, and later convicted of one more. While in prison, Richard Kuklinski claimed that he’d killed more than 200 people — though many investigators believe Richard, who had a reputation for grandiosity, greatly exaggerated these numbers.
Richard died on March 5, 2006 while serving out his consecutive life sentences. Barbara claimed that his last words were about how much he loved her. For her part, she regrets that she didn’t tell him “[what a] bastard he is and how much I hate him.” She added: “I wish the last words he’d heard had been how much I hated his guts.”
With that, Barbara Kuklinski’s nightmare was over. But she was left with scars — both physical and psychological. And the story of Richard Kuklinski’s double life is haunting to this day.
Indeed, perhaps the most frightening thing about the story of Richard and Barbara Kuklinski is just how normal they seemed from the outside. No one who knew them guessed that Richard was beating his wife — or that he was a violent killer with countless victims.
“We were the perfect all-American family,” Barbara told The Scotsman. “We were so perfect it would make you sick. The way we lived was surreal.”
After reading about Barbara Kuklinski, the wife of the “Iceman” Richard Kuklinski, discover the story of Pupetta Maresca, the glamorous mob wife who shot her husband’s killer. Or, learn about Sharon Marie Huddle, who was married to the Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo for more than 40 years.
