Merrick now produces a clear plastic shopping bag. I’ll keep him until I pass on,” she says. “Careful, it’s pretty heavy.”Īsked why she keeps his ashes, she pauses. Positioned carefully behind the photo is a grey-green enameled metal urn containing her father’s cremated remains. Upon entering the cramped living room, the first thing that catches my eye, to my surprise, is a framed 8×10 photograph of Kuklinski, prominently placed in a bookcase at the nexus of two sofas, and surrounded by swan figurines and Elvis Presley dolls.Īnd then there is a second surprise. The SUV arrives at a tiny, worn apartment building where Merrick lives with her daughter. “I’m really more of a listener than a talker.” “I’m a very private, quiet person,” she says. Despite her imposing presence, she is mild and easy to laugh.
Silver bracelets and rings festoon her wrists and fingers. She wears multiple earrings and piercings. She is clad in a loose fitting black dress, black tights and leather boots. Her striking blond mane is partially braided. She has her father’s broad shoulders and large hands. The oldest of three siblings and a mother of two, Merrick is almost six feet tall. She has agreed to take me on an impromptu tour of her past life. On an unseasonably warm day in early March, the day after the anniversary of Kuklinski’s death, Merrick is a passenger in a friend’s SUV driving west into New Jersey. He barely missed the death penalty. Prosecutor Bob Carroll called him “one of the most dangerous criminals ever come across in this state.” He added, “We may never know how many people he killed.” When he met Kuklinski, the undercover agent Dominick Polifrone thought, “This is the devil.” In 1988, a New Jersey jury convicted him of the murders of five business associates and sentenced him to life in prison. He was finally caught in 1986, in an undercover sting.
Law enforcement dubbed him “The Iceman” because he froze the bodies of victims, held them for months and then dumped them, so the time of death would be harder to establish. In all, before and during his years as a mob hitman, he claimed to have poisoned, torched, shot, fatally beaten, stabbed and strangled more than 100 people. He also boasted he poured gasoline on a man who slighted him in a bar and burned him alive. He later claimed to have beaten his first victim to death in his early teens. As a teen, he left home, and took to hanging in pool halls and getting into fights. He channeled his rage into torturing cats. They beat him constantly, as if they were trying to create a sociopath.
He was born in 1935 to an alcoholic father and a domineering mother in the Jersey City projects. He was a bear of a man, 6-foot-4 and 290 pounds, with enormous hands and shoulders, and a volcanic temper, set to a hair trigger. Kuklinski died in prison at age 71 in 2006. “Once you say it, you have to deal with it.” “If you don’t say it out loud, you don’t have to deal with it,” she tells me. Even now, 10 years after his death in prison, she is still hesitant to confront life in Kuklinski’s orbit. Instead, filled with contradictory feelings of love and loyalty for her father and horror at his deeds, she jammed those memories into secure boxes. Despite many opportunities over the years, however, Merrick, now in her 50s, has talked little about her painful, chaotic upbringing. And so, after the screening, she walked up to Ryder, and said, “If the character you played had been my mother, my life would have been very different…Good movie. Particularly, she was bemused at the movie’s gauzy depiction of domestic bliss. As the actor depicting Kuklinski committed multiple murders on mobsters’ requests and chopped up his victims, Merrick was profoundly focused on how her home life was portrayed. One evening in 2012, Merrick Kuklinski attended the premier of a film about her late father, Richard, the notorious New Jersey killer and reputed mafia hit man. The film, titled “The Iceman,” stars the rangy Michael Shannon as Kuklinski, and the waifish Winona Ryder as his wife, Barbara.
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