Authors: Anthony Bruno
Investigator Paul Smith was already sitting in the chair opposite her desk. He had his hand over his mouth.
Bob Carroll showed his palms. “What did I do now?”
Dr. Natarajan whipped an eight-by-ten color photograph from her desk and held it up for him to see. It was one of the photos taken of Danny Deppner’s body when it was found in the woods. The toe of someone’s shoe had gotten into the picture on the left side, a bright red pump.
“Paul says you won’t crop out my foot,” she said. She was smiling mischievously now.
“You know I can’t do that, Geetha. That’s tampering with the evidence.”
“But what if the defense attorney gets me on cross and he pulls out this picture and says, ‘Doctor, is this your red shoe in this picture?’ That will destroy my credibility with the jury. What kind of doctor wears silly red shoes like this? You tell me. It looks like I’m walking through Oz.” She was laughing.
Her laughter was so infectious Bob Carroll couldn’t help but smile. It put him at ease as he settled into the other chair in her minuscule office. Putting this case together was turning out to be a monster, and he’d been putting in long, tedious hours. He was going to prosecute it himself, so he wanted everything to be perfect, no room for error. That’s why he was happy to have Geetha working on this one. She was an excellent pathologist and very difficult to discredit on the stand. He got right down to business.
“Have you guys come up with anything on Deppner that we can use?”
“Well,” Paul Smith said, “it’s pretty much the way we thought. Danny Deppner’s death is consistent with cyanide poisoning, but we just don’t have as much as we have with Gary Smith.”
The attorney looked at the doctor. “How about the hemorrhaging you found on his neck? Isn’t that indicative of strangling?”
“It could be, but trauma like this could also have been caused by several other things. With Gary Smith, the ligature marks were very clear. The neck trauma on Deppner is open to a great deal of interpretation, I’m afraid. It’s a shaky premise for trying to prove that the man was strangled.”
“What about the stain on the rug?”
She shook the ice in an empty soda cup. “Pulmonary edema. After death the lungs fill with fluid, and the gravitational flow sends it out the mouth and nose.” She sucked on the straw. “All it tells us is that Deppner was left facedown on the rug after he was killed.”
Paul Smith had his chin in his hand. He looked glum. “All that work pulling up that goddamn carpet …”
Bob Carroll leaned back and linked his fingers behind his head. The pictures of Smith and Deppner in death ran through his mind as he searched for a connection between the two murders, something they hadn’t considered yet. He remembered the close-up of the deep ligature mark on Gary Smith’s neck and started thinking out loud.
“There were no defense wounds found on Gary Smith, right?”
Dr. Natarajan shook her head. “Not on the neck or the hands. Usually in strangulation asphyxia, you find scratches and cuts indicating that the victim struggled to save herself. But in some cases there is no sign of struggle because the victim was impaired by drugs or alcohol.”
“Or cyanide,” Paul Smith added.
Bob Carroll’s brows were knit. He leaned forward and looked at
Dr. Natarajan. “Why did you say ’herself? ‘The victim struggling to save
her
self.’ ”
“Because healthy adult men are rarely strangled to death. It’s much more common with women and children who can be overpowered by a stronger person.”
“And a man can’t be overpowered by another man?”
“Not a healthy adult, not usually. A man under attack, even by another man, will struggle successfully and prevent the strangulation.”
“Do you have statistics on that?”
“I can get them for you. Give me a minute.”
Dr. Natarajan swiveled to her computer terminal. Bob Carroll and Paul Smith were on the edges of their seats. It took several minutes for the doctor to weed through the data bases and pull up the information.
“Here we go,” she finally said. “I’ve gone back ten years and searched for all the healthy, unimpaired adult males who died by strangulation in the state of New Jersey. There were none.”
Paul Smith bounced in his seat. “None! Out of how many strangulation murders in this state over that time period?”
Dr. Natarajan rolled her eyes. “Oh, several hundred, at least.”
But Bob Carroll wasn’t ready to celebrate yet. “Just for the sake of argument, Geetha, if there had been any strangulations of healthy, unimpaired men, how would you say they would have died?”
The doctor shrugged. “They probably would have been bound, handcuffed, something like that. Or perhaps in the case of an exceptionally small man, he might have been overpowered by a stronger person. Perhaps.”
“Okay, so what do have now?” Carroll was thinking out loud again. “Healthy adult males do not die by strangulation unless they are impaired in some way. There were no defense wounds on Danny Deppner—”
“His stomach was practically full,” Dr. Natarajan added. “No
gastric emptying, which indicates that he died shortly after eating a meal.” She shuffled through her notes on Deppner. “Stomach contents included … pinkish beans, some partly burned on one side. I would say this food was homemade. What restaurant could get away with serving burned beans?”
“And the Tupperware on the counter,” Paul Smith said. “The Patterson kid said he remembered seeing that stuff at Kuklinski’s house.”
Bob Carroll picked up the train of thought. “So Kuklinski brought the food from his home and gave it to Deppner. Food poisoned with cyanide because Deppner showed pink lividity on his skin and he died right after he ate.”
“And pulmonary edema would be consistent with cyanide poisoning,” Dr. Natarajan threw in, “which would account for the stain on the carpeting.”
“So whether Kuklinski strangled him or not is almost beside the point. The circumstances are the same as with Gary Smith’s poisoning. It shows a pattern of behavior, a pattern of poisoning his victims’ food.”
Paul Smith’s eyes lit up. “Which was what he was going to do to me, the rich Jewish kid. Cyanide in the egg sandwiches.”
Bob Carroll grinned. “And we’ve got that all down on tape, thanks to Dominick. Kuklinski gave him a lesson in how to put cyanide in someone’s food. It all fits.”
Smith pounded on the desk in triumph. “I think we’ve got him on Deppner.”
Carroll nodded, faintly grinning as he tried to find a hole in their reasoning. But he couldn’t come up with one. “I think you’re right, Paul. I think we’ve got him on Deppner. I do.”
Dr. Natarajan beamed at the two men, her eyes sparkling. “See? I’ve solved another case for you.” She pointed to the photo on the edge of her desk. “
Now
will you take my shoe out of the picture?”
On January 25, 1988, thirteen months after the arrest, jury selection began on the case of the
State of New Jersey
v.
Richard Kuklinski
. The counts against Kuklinski were divided so that there would be two trials. The first was to try him for the murders of Gary Smith and Danny Deppner; the second for the murders of George Malliband and Louis Masgay. The state’s position was unequivocal: They were seeking the death penalty.
Without Paul Hoffman’s body, the state did not have enough evidence to win a conviction on that murder. They offered instead to let Kuklinski plead to those counts in the hope that he would reveal the location of the pharmacist’s body so that the family could give the man a proper burial. After giving several false leads, Kuklinski eventually told state investigators about the steel drum abandoned next to Harry’s Corner, but despite exhaustive efforts to trace that barrel, Paul Hoffman’s body was never found.
The prosecution team consisted of Bob Carroll and Charles E. Waldron, another deputy attorney general from the state. Chuck Waldron’s litigation skills complemented Bob Carroll’s investigative talents. Tall, fit, and
prematurely gray, Waldron was a long-distance runner in his spare time, and this case had already required a marathoner’s stamina just to prepare it for trial.
The defense was handled by Public Defender Neal M. Frank. Given the enormity of the charges against his client and the negative publicity that the Iceman nickname had generated, Frank had his work cut out for him. He planned to give Richard Kuklinski no less than his best effort to get an acquittal, but in reality, the attainable goal was keeping his client out of the gas chamber.
Presiding over the trial was the Honorable Frederick W. Kuechenmeister, a stern, compact sixty-one-year-old man who wore large metal-frame glasses and combed his thin hair straight back. Around the Bergen County Courthouse in Hackensack, Judge Kuechenmeister had a nickname: they called him the Time Machine. When it came to sentencing, the maximum allowed by law was the minimum allowed by Kuechenmeister. Lawyers who had defended cases in his court knew that he also believed in swift justice. According to Judge Kuechenmeister, a murder trial should take no longer than three days. He had once completed a murder trial in half that time. He also believed that the bench should not be used as an instrument for social work. A judge’s primary responsibility is to protect the public, and if that means getting a criminal off the street forever, so be it. He did not approve of the so-called country club prisons, and on many occasions he had stated for the record that if the penal system were under his control, he’d have prisoners “pounding boulders into rocks, rocks into stones, stones into pebbles, and pebbles into
sand
.”
It must have been a happy day at the Attorney General’s Office in Trenton when they learned that the Iceman’s fate would in the hands of the Time Machine.
The prosecution began presenting its case on February 17, 1988. Through a series of police witnesses, the events leading up to Gary Smith’s death were unfolded: the stolen car ring that specialized in Corvettes; the arrest of Percy House, the foreman of the gang; the
subsequent flight and search for the two workers, Gary Smith and Danny Deppner.
Danny Deppner’s ex-wife and Percy House’s current companion, Barbara Deppner, was then called to the stand. The painfully thin woman trembled visibly in the presence of Richard Kuklinski. Even though she was living out of the state with a new identity under protective custody and Kuklinski had not seen freedom since the day of his arrest, her fear of the accused flashed in her eyes as she testified. Under Bob Carroll’s questioning, she told of Kuklinski’s efforts to hide Smith and Deppner in one motel after another. She told of going to the York Motel just before Christmas 1982 and meeting her ex-husband, Danny, who told her that Kuklinski had made up his mind to get rid of Gary Smith because he was too much of a risk.
Bob Carroll asked her what Danny Deppner had told her on the evening of Gary Smith’s murder.
“Richard Kuklinski was bringing back hamburgers from someplace,” Barbara Deppner testified, “and Gary Smith’s was going to have a drug on it. They knew which one Gary’s would be because his didn’t have pickles on it.”
She was later asked to recount the description of Smith’s death as told to her by her ex-husband after it had happened.
After Gary had eaten his hamburger, “he had fallen back on the bed and they [Danny Deppner and Richard Kuklinski] were laughing at him because his eyes were so goofy.”
Kuklinski’s lawyer, Neal Frank, tried to discredit this testimony with allegations that the state’s Division of Criminal Justice had improperly interfered with efforts made by the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services to take Barbara Deppner’s minor children away from her and her allegedly abusive live-in companion, Percy House. Frank’s contention was that the Division of Criminal Justice wanted to keep its star witnesses happy so that they’d cooperate fully in this trial. A Division of Youth and Family Services legal counsel, a woman who happened to be a deputy
attorney general just like the two prosecutors, testified that she had been approached by another lawyer from the Division of Criminal Justice who had asked her to drop the legal actions against Barbara Deppner concerning her children.
But the heartbreaking sight of that pale, frightened mother of nine trembling on the stand proved to be a hard image to shake from the minds of the jurors.
Percy House was called to the stand next. Gruff and burly, House made no attempt to sugarcoat his involvement with Richard Kuklinski. His attitude was blunt: He was what he was, take it or leave it. Under questioning by Chuck Waldron, House admitted to ordering Gary Smith’s execution from his jail cell because he was afraid Gary would rat on him, but he also revealed that Richard Kuklinski had admitted to him at a later meeting that he had eliminated both Smith and Deppner for the exact same reason.
Given House’s involvement in Gary Smith’s death, his previous involvement in another unrelated murder, and the fact that he was granted immunity in exchange for his testimony, Neal Frank had a golden opportunity to trash this witness’s credibility—until his client cut his legs out from under him.
As court broke for lunch and Percy House was leaving the stand, prosecutor Waldron saw Kuklinski glare at his former associate as he pointed his finger and cocked his thumb as if he were firing a gun at House while mouthing the words “You’re dead.” The jury was still in the courtroom when this happened, and Waldron immediately brought it to Judge Kuechenmeister’s attention. The end result was that the jury accepted the prosecution’s contention that as bad as Percy House was, he was only the foreman in the gang. Richard Kuklinski was the boss.
Gary Smith’s wife, Veronica Cisek, testified to the events on the night of December 20, 1982, when her husband arrived home unexpectedly while he was on the run. He had been hiding out from the police, but he had risked coming back to see his daughter one last time. She testified that when her husband walked in the door,
“He was very upset. He was very nervous. He couldn’t relax or even sit still. In fact, he walked into my daughter’s room and just stood there and looked at her and stood there crying.”