In bed with THE ICEMAN

Growing up with cable television in my bedroom no doubt deprived me of more than forty winks throughout my youth. The TV remained on all day, but more importantly all night as well, and because of this I got to see a lot of great nudity and a lot of scary monsters. Though apart from just generalized Adult Content, I discovered an endless wealth of more substantial media that kept me awake in more exciting ways: indie features, music videos, TNT's 100% Weird, public access, and classic TV reruns. But one of the biggest late nite staples was documentaries: PBS aside, this is when The Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel were focused on history and nature as opposed to risky careers and circus freaks. But most notably, True Crime didn't have as much coverage or shameless popularity as it does today, so when it struck, it struck loud, and one of the best sources for this subject matter was HBO's America Undercover. 

Sometimes sexy, sometimes scary, sometimes gross, always riveting snd informative. Yet through all the weird and wild tales they told me, the one that haunted and fascinated me the most, and just became one of my general interests, was called The Iceman Tapes: Conversations With a Killer. 

First airing in 1992 and running just under an hour, the main thread of the documentary is an interview with Richard Kuklinski from inside the walls of Trenton State Prison where he was serving multiple life sentences for multiple homicides. The show also talks to prosecutors, investigators, the undercover cop who caught him, the coroner who performed autopsies on his victims, and Kuklinski's wife, who along with their children, claimed to have no knowledge of his life as a serial killer. There are a few photos and some sparse lo-fi reenactments throughout, but the real heavy set pieces are the on-camera confessions of "the devil" himself. 

He spends much of the interview as laid back, pensive, stoic, and reluctant but forward. When asked how many people he's killed, he's thoughtful throughout a pregnant pause and lands on "...over 100 people." A number that high just dissipates into a statistic, but the remainder of the interview fleshes out nearly a dozen of those murders and you start to get a sense of not just a history of violence, but how a sociopath isn't just one grey marker streak through a psych evaluation; through heredity and environment this man was made to take lives without remorse, and we get to hear him explain.

At this age I was already aware (dare I say fascinated?) with Manson and Gacy and Jack the Ripper (not to mention Silence of the Lambs and Goodfellas) but to curl up in the corner of my bed and see and hear a real life mass murderer describe various ways to take a life and dispose of a body made my darkened bedroom that much blacker. His accounts are delivered with a sinister nonchalance that comes across like a campfire tale, with just enough detail that leaves room for your own imagination to pull from your sickest ideas to fill in the rest. It challenges anyone of any age, but as a 9-year-old it forced me to confront not just the horrors of the world, but of my own mind. 

I suppose it's not appropriate to have a "favorite" serial killer, but anyone who's interested in this lurid realm of humanity knows what I mean when I say that Richard Kuklinski has always sorta been "my guy" when it came to real life monsters. The details of this doc stayed with me throughout the 90s and the episode may've even been repeated a couple times, so imagine my shock and satisfaction when HBO produced a legit sequel: released in 2001, The Iceman Confesses: Secrets of a Mafia Hitman brings us back into prison to talk to Kuklinski once again to give the graphic details, as well as expand on his supposed connection to the Gambino Crime Family and his very supposed connection to the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. It's been asserted that some of that may've been fabricated, as he was known for not living an entirely honest life, but he clearly mixes lies with the truth - he may embellish his mob ties to maintain some sorta status, but his accounts of rage and apathy and murder and torture are too imaginative and sincere to be false. 

Note that I've not actually explained much of who he was or described what he's done, and that's intentional: partly because there are too many intricate and violent anecdotes that I'd basically be recounting the documentaries kill for kill (but without the gravitas or necessary inflection to make me sound like less of a deviant), but mostly because I encourage you to watch them on your own and see if you find them as engrossing as I. Granted you're not a little kid in his room with the lights off on a potential school night, but see if you draw the same kind of morbid inspiration I drew from them.

What I mean by that is that these stories stayed with me throughout the decade, to the point that my imagination convinced me I'd actually witnessed them. Ultimately by the time I was 18 and the followup installment came out, I attempted to write a feature length biopic -- which became difficult after about 60 pages when I couldn't figure out how to make such an unlikable protagonist function in a traditional narrative. In 2012 they finally did put out a movie titled The Iceman with Michael Shannon (eerily excellent casting) as Kuklinski, and sure enough it was watered down and under budget and overly sympathetic and forgettable. Don't bother. You want scary stories with a memorable monster this season, go watch these America Undercover episodes that are way more fulfilling than any Saw sequel or Exorcist boner.

- Paul