Killer’s body count bravado
QUESTION Did killer Richard Kuklinski lie about how many people he murdered?
RICHARD Kuklinski was one of America’s most notorious killers – and his crimes inspired the 2012 movie The Iceman, in which he was portrayed by Michael Shannon.
A career criminal, he was convicted in 1988 of four murders and given a life sentence. He was hit with an additional 30-year term in 2003 after admitting the 1980 killing of a police detective.
While incarcerated, he gave media interviews in which he spoke openly of his crimes.
He claimed he killed between 100 and 200 people, and worked as a hitman for the Mafia.
The cold, detached manner in which he described killing fascinated fans of true crime, and footage of these interviews, available on YouTube, certainly makes for riveting, if horrifying, viewing.
However, it is now widely believed Kuklinski grossly exaggerated the scale of his crimes.
In 2006, Paul Smith, who was involved in the operation to arrest the killer, commented: ‘I checked every one of the murders Kuklinski said he committed, and not one was true.’
And in 2020, retired special agent Dominick Polifrone, who helped bring Kuklinski to justice in an undercover operation, commented: ‘He liked to boast about all the s*** he was doing, but I don’t believe he killed 200 people. I don’t believe he killed 100 people. I’ll go as high as 15, maybe. I can document five.’
The rather far-fetched nature of some of Kuklinski’s stories aroused suspicion. For example, he claimed to have left victims in a cave in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to be eaten alive by rats.
However, Richard Kranzel, a local authority on the county’s caves, said the Durham Mine was the only place big enough to hide human remains – but numerous people had been inside it since Kuklinski’s time, and no human bones were found.
He also doubted the claims about flesh-eating rates, commenting: ‘The only rats I have encountered in caves are “cave rats”, and they are reclusive and shy creatures, and definitely not fierce as Kuklinski claims.’
Another of Kuklinski’s outlandish claims was that he was involved in the still-unsolved murder of union boss Jimmy Hoffa in 1982. However, former FBI agent Robert Garrity insisted Kuklinski was never a suspect in Hoffa’s disappearance. ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ he scoffed.
Doubts were also expressed about Kuklinski’s ‘mob ties’.
Former Mafia man Michael Franzese commented: ‘I spent 25 years in that life, on the street. I never heard his name mentioned once. Not once... I think the guy is a pathological liar.’
Regardless, Kuklinski has taken the truth to his grave, as he died of cardiac arrest in 2006, aged 70.
Francis Grogan, Dublin.
QUESTION Which is the largest roundabout in the UK?
ON the north side of Cardiff, at junction 32 of the M4, is the Coryton roundabout. It is the largest in the UK, with a circumference of nearly a mile. L. T. Graham, Chepstow, Monmouthshire.
QUESTION Did David Bowie borrow the pose featured on his Heroes album from a painting?
IN 1975, David Bowie was living in Los Angeles but his life was spiralling out of control; he was obsessed with the occult and was surviving on a diet of milk, peppers and cocaine.
In 1976, he decamped to West Berlin, accompanied by his acolyte Iggy Pop. There, he produced his groundbreaking triptych of albums: Low (1977), Heroes (1977) and Lodger (1979).
Bowie became fascinated by the work of German Expressionists and was deeply affected by Erich Heckel’s Roquairol (1917), which hung in Berlin’s Brucke Museum.
This was a haunting portrait of Heck- the artist Kirchner.
Kirchner had suffered a nervous breakdown and the image showed him in a state of nervous collapse with his left arm contorted.
Under Bowie’s direction, Iggy Pop mimicked the pose in a black-and-white photograph for the cover of his album The Idiot.
Bowie’s Heroes portrait, pictured above, was created in collaboration with photographer Masayoshi Sukita. It too borrowed the stylised pose of Roquairol, with Bowie’s weirdly stiff arm and hand position, but it also took inspiration from Heckel’s Mannerbildnis (Portrait Of A Man), from 1919, with its gaunt and melancholy face.
Simon Wilson, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire.
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