Kuklinski was growing. For the first time someone in law enforcement was looking at the pieces, carefully scrutinizing them, making sense of where they fit.
However, when Kane told his superiors and colleagues what he had, what he thought, they flat out didn’t believe him; in fact they mocked him, snickered behind his back, made jokes at Kane’s expense. They sarcastically dubbed Kane’s file on Kuklinski “the Manhattan Project,” after the A-bomb project, because the file had become so big, now containing crime-scene and morgue photos, maps, and police reports from numerous jurisdictions.
Kane was right on target. Yet, they treated him like a fool.
“Pat,” one of his bosses condescendingly said, “you’re saying you’ve got a guy here that poisons, shoots, and strangles victims, cuts legs off too. There’s no consistency here. Come on, open your eyes, Pat.”
Still, Pat Kane believed with all his heart and soul that Richard Kuklinski was a diabolical serial killer hiding in plain sight—a master criminal—and he was intent upon proving it. But how? Where to start?
Kane knew too that if he was right about Kuklinski, he and his own family might very well be in danger. He was sure Percy House was capable of telling Kuklinski about him. He knew Percy House might try to use Kuklinski to take him, Kane, out of the picture. With Kane gone, House would have a better shot at getting out of trouble. It was Pat Kane who had built the case against House, who had dotted all the
Kane’s boss, John Leck, was worried about the young Kane. He believed he was suffering from some kind of delusional fantasy. Resources were scarce. Leck could not afford to tie up one of his investigators in murders that took place in other jurisdictions, let alone whose victims were thieves and degenerate gamblers, the very dregs of society. Who cared? Leck wrote up Kane’s ineptness to his youth, and he warned Kane to focus on other cases, to get over “this obsession you have here.”
“Yes sir,” Kane said, clenching his teeth.
Late that February, Roy DeMeo contacted Richard, and a meeting was set up for the following day. Richard left for Brooklyn a little after noon. He had a short-barreled .38 stuck in his pants, a pistol and knife strapped to his calf.
Richard met Roy as planned at the Gemini. Roy didn’t look good at all. Richard hadn’t seen him in a month or so, but Roy looked as if he had aged ten years. He was gaunt, his hair was uncombed, and there were eggplant- colored circles under his eyes. They got into Roy’s Cadillac, and as Roy drove, he told Richard about his concerns, about the cases against him, about how federal prosecutor Walter Mack was going to charge him with the murder of both Espositos.
Roy, Richard thought, seemed like a beaten man, a man at his wits’ end. They parked in a desolate spot in Sheepshead Bay and Roy went on and on about his troubles, how everything had turned against him. Richard had always viewed Roy as a tough, stand-up guy. But the man sitting next to him now was a mere shell of the man he knew.
Richard was concerned…indeed, very concerned: after all, DeMeo knew the intimate details of numerous murders Richard had committed. Sitting there listening to DeMeo whine, Richard remembered how DeMeo had pistol-whipped him, pointed the cocked Uzi at him, embarrassed him in front of everybody.
Rage soon began replacing any empathy Richard might have felt for DeMeo, and Richard made up his mind there and then to finally get even, and before DeMeo knew it Richard pulled out his .38 and let loose, shooting DeMeo five times, twice in the head, killing him. Richard then struck DeMeo numerous times with the butt of the .38, just as Roy had struck him, cursing him as he did so. Richard opened the trunk of DeMeo’s car, threw him in it. There was, Richard noticed, a lamp on the rear seat of the car. Richard knew it belonged to Roy’s wife, Gladys, and he removed the lamp from the rear seat and gingerly put it on top of Roy’s body. He didn’t want, he explained, anyone to steal it. He closed the trunk and left DeMeo there like that, the lamp resting on his body.
As Richard began to walk in the direction of Flatbush, he had mixed feelings about what he’d just done. On the one hand, he was elated: he finally had his long-awaited revenge. On the other hand, he was sad; a part of him had taken a liking to Roy. They were, he knew, in many ways alike. Be that as it may, Richard walked on, glad DeMeo was dead, for dead men tell no tales.
It was a large, dark brown, mean-eyed turkey buzzard, and it was intently picking at something wrapped up in black plastic, violently tearing away pieces of flesh.
By pure happenstance a man on a dirt bike came riding down the lonely stretch of road near the West Milford reservoir, spotted the bird, slowed to see what it was eating. Through a hole in the bag, no doubt made by the sharp beak of the buzzard, the cyclist discerned a human arm, definitely a skeletonized human arm sticking out of the bag, seeming to wave for attention, for help. Disturbed, the buzzard took flight. Not sure if the arm was real or not, the cyclist moved closer and now saw a human head sticking out of the bag. It had a Fu Manchu mustache and missing front teeth. The bicyclist immediately went to summon the police, pedaling so hard he nearly fell twice as he went.
The police removed the bag with the remains to the medical examiner’s office. As the ME peeled away the plastic, which had a tendency to preserve a body, a huge cloud of flies left the corpse, and then came hundreds of fast-moving carrion beetles out of every orifice. The ME found a billfold in the dead man’s pocket filled with photographs of children. She laid these photos out in the hall of the medical examiner’s office, hoping maybe someone recognized the children.
Again, by pure happenstance, a detective who knew Pat Kane and the case he’d been working on did recognize the children: they were Barbara Deppner’s kids. Danny Deppner had been found. Pat Kane was soon notified. He hurried over to the medical examiner’s office and quickly confirmed that the children in the photos were the Deppners’. Barbara Deppner was brought over, and she verified that the wallet and the photos were Danny’s.
“I told you! I told you!” she kept saying.
The cause of death, Kane was first told, was strangulation, though there were no signs of a struggle, and a little digested meal of burned beans was still in Deppner’s stomach, indicating, in Kane’s mind, that he, like Gary Smith, had been poisoned and strangled. Then, however, Kane was informed that Danny had been shot in the head.
For Pat Kane this verified what he’d been saying and thinking all along, but his superiors
Who could blame him? To work off his frustrations Kane beat a heavy bag he had set up in his basement. He went for long, arduous runs. What would have to happen, he wondered, asked out loud, for his bosses to see the light, to understand that there was a cunning, remorseless serial killer roaming free, murdering at will, when and where and how the hell he pleased?
Richard was concerned about Robert Pronge. He was beginning to think Pronge was truly crazy, completely out of touch with reality. The beginning of the end of their relationship came when Pronge asked Richard to murder his wife and eight-year-old son. As remorseless a killer as Richard surely was, he would not kill a woman or a child. For him that was anathema, an unspeakable infamy, and he told Pronge just that. This created a chasm of sorts between the two men, and Richard was concerned. He had come to know Pronge as a raging psychopath and he was thinking Pronge might very well kill him for refusing to murder his wife and child—for
The second issue that drove a stake between the two men was Pronge’s plan to poison with ricin a small reservoir that acted as drinking water for an upstate community. Pronge said a man would pay him several hundred thousand dollars to do the job, which was to kill a particular family that used the water from this reservoir. The problem was many other households used the water, and Pronge’s plan would kill hundreds of innocents, women and children. This truly incensed Richard, who made up his mind to stop Pronge.
In mid-August, Richard walked in rubber-soled shoes to the garage where Pronge kept his Mister Softee truck. Pronge had actually laid gravel on the ground so it would be difficult for someone to walk on it without making noise, but Richard used his catlike abilities and silently made his way right up to the truck. Pronge was inside cleaning it up. Without a word, Richard shot him five times with a .22 pistol equipped with a silencer, killing him, and left him there like that, dead, in his Mister Softee truck. It seemed appropriate, Richard thought. Pronge never
