Married to The Iceman - Telegraph Winona Ryder as Barbara Kuklinski in 'The Ice Man'. Credit: Anne Marie Fox Today, Barbara Kuklinski lives in a small flat in the basement of a white shingled house in suburban New York State, which she shares with her younger daughter Christin and her boyfriend, and three dogs. At 71, she suffers from arthritis of the spine and a cluster of other chronic illnesses she believes stem from the years she spent living in the shadow of her husband. A nurse visits once a week. Outspoken and direct, Barbara prides herself on her intelligence and strength of will: "Don't ask my opinion," she says, "if you don't want the truth." Once accustomed to the expensively upholstered trappings of suburbia, her husband's arrest left her with nothing and she was forced to look to her children for support. Until recently, her story was being developed as part of a film scheduled to star Mickey Rourke as her murderous former husband; but when the financing fell apart, a rival project broadly based on Kuklinski's life, The Iceman, went ahead, starring Michael Shannon in the title role, and Winona Ryder as the killer's loyal wife. The film will be released this June, but Barbara won't receive a penny from the production and has no intention of seeing it. Never. I won't. I don't like anything violent. And I understand it's extremely violent. It is also, she says, "far from the truth... and who is that Winona Ryder? Are you kidding me? When the film was launched at Cannes, Barbara says she was furious to hear the actress comment of the character she plays in the film, "I'm as guilty as he was." Recalling this, the widow of the Ice Man casts a sardonic eye around the tiny living room, her crochet and the framed family portraits clustered on the TV set. "Yeah," she says. Can't you see how I've benefited? Barbara first met Kuklinski when she was just 18, fresh from high school and newly employed as a secretary at Swiftline, a New Jersey trucking company. A clever, popular girl with a sarcastic sense of humour, her idea of living dangerously was taking a flask of rum out on a Saturday night so she and her friends could spike their Cokes before going for Chinese food and a movie. Barbara had wanted to go to art school, but when she accompanied a friend to an interview at Swiftline and ended up being offered a job herself, she took it. Richard worked on the loading dock there. He was seven years older than Barbara, married with two young sons but, nevertheless, she agreed to go out with him on a double date. "He was the perfect gentleman," she says. We went to the movies and then we went for pizza, and he got up and played Save the Last Dance for Me on the jukebox. The next morning he turned up at her house with flowers and a gift, and she agreed to a second date. "And that was the end," she says now. Barbara had never really had a boyfriend before, and she was flattered by the attention: when she left work in the evenings, she would find Richard waiting for her with flowers; he was charming and courteous, constantly at her elbow. And although he wasn't Italian, her family came to like him. Yet as the months passed, Barbara gradually realised she had become isolated from her friends, and rarely saw anyone but Richard. Sitting in his car one day after work, she gathered the courage to tell him how she felt: that she was only 19 and wanted the space to see other people. Richard responded by silently jabbing her from behind with a hunting knife so sharp she didn't even feel the blade go in. "I felt the blood running down my back," she says. He told her that she belonged to him, and that if she tried to leave he would kill her entire family; when Barbara began screaming at him in anger, he throttled her into unconsciousness. Barbara Kuklinski. Credit: Mark Mahaney The following day, Richard was waiting for her again after work, with flowers, and a teddy bear. He apologised, and told her he wanted to marry her. He would get a divorce from his wife. He had threatened her because he loved her so much it made him crazy. Young, inexperienced and credulous, Barbara believed him. "I don't consider myself a fool, by any means," she says now. But I was raised a good little Catholic girl. I was protected. I had never seen the ugly side of anything. In fact, by the time Barbara had caught her first glimpse of true darkness in Kuklinski, he had already done things more terrible than she could possibly have imagined. Born to a violent alcoholic father and a religiously devout mother, Richard grew up in a Polish enclave of Jersey City. During prison interviews conducted by the writer Philip Carlo in 2004 Kuklinski admitted he killed for the first time at the age of 14. He beat a neighbourhood bully to death with an improvised wooden club and buried his body in the remote Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Over the next 10 years, as he embarked in earnest on a criminal career, committing robberies and truck hijackings, he began murdering with increasing frequency: an off-duty policeman who accused him of cheating at pool, members of his own gang, homeless men whom he killed simply because he enjoyed it. On the instructions of Carmine Genovese, a member of the local Mafia family, he carried out his first professional hit at 18. A true psychopath, he frequently tortured his victims before killing them, and concealed the evidence of his crimes by disposing of bodies in mine shafts or removing their fingers and teeth. According to Carlo's The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, by the time he met Barbara in 1961 Kuklinski had already committed 65 murders, most of which Carlo went on to verify with either Mafia contacts or police sources. But if Barbara initially stayed with Richard out of naivety, that ignorance was soon overwhelmed by fear. After his first apology, he continued to be as charming and attentive as before, but also flew into rages in which he struck her or grabbed her around the throat. Convinced she could never leave him, she agreed to get married. Their first child, a daughter named Merrick, was born two years later, in 1964. At first, Richard apparently tried to go straight and took work in a film lab, but after a while he started staying late to print bootleg copies of films, first Disney cartoons and later pornography. Then he began making extra money hijacking trucks. With one of his first big scores - a shipment of stolen jeans he fenced for $12,000 - he bought a new car, a TV set and things for the house. Kuklinski's illegal proceeds allowed the couple to expand their family - they had Christin and a son, Dwayne - and move into the big house on Sunset Street. Yet Barbara never asked where all the money came from. Richard didn't like questions and was savage and unpredictable even when in an apparently good mood. The idea that he was involved in anything illegal never occurred to her, or, if it did, she won't admit it. "I'll be the first one to say, maybe I was naive, because I never saw anything like that," Barbara says. My family never did anything like that. And it wasn't long before Richard returned to what he did best: killing men for money. By the mid-Seventies, his reputation for cruelty and efficiency had spread across the United States, and he was kept in constant employment by the seven families of the East Coast Mafia: including the DeCavalcantes in New Jersey and the Gambinos, the Luccheses, and Bonannos in New York. He claimed that he would never harm either women or children, but otherwise murdered those who owed the mob money, and others who had slighted or insulted its soldiers and lieutenants, or simply become inconvenient. When the organisation required that senior members die, they called Kuklinski: in 1979, he was responsible for the daylight assassination of Carmine Galante, head of the Bonanno family; in 1985, he was part of the hit squad who shot down Gambino Don Paul Castellano outside the Sparks Steak House in Manhattan. Kuklinski even claimed to have been the man who did in Teamsters union head Jimmy Hoffa, who disappeared without trace one afternoon in 1975. Yet Kuklinski meticulously compartmentalised his life, never socialising with his employers in organised crime, taking care never to reveal anything to them about his family or where he lived. This isolation from the daily relationships of the Cosa Nostra both helped him avoid detection for his crimes, and to maintain his hometown identity as the hearty paterfamilias. Richard Kuklinski with daughters Merrick and Christin. Credit: Courtesy of Barabara Kuklinski/ Mainstream Publishing Here was a man who could never do enough for his children - who sent them all to expensive private schools; who enjoyed feeding the ducks on the pond in nearby Demarest; who charmed the guests at the family's weekly barbecues, to which everyone on the block was invited. Immediately after the assassination of Paul Castellano, Richard ditched his coat and gun, caught the bus back to New Jersey and settled down at home to watch his wife and daughters wrapping Christmas presents. The neighbours never suspected a thing: "They thought he was great," Barbara says. Everybody that met him thought I was the luckiest person in the world. The flower truck there once a week, I had new jewellery, he bought me a $12,000 raccoon coat... Throughout their years together, Richard's obsessive attachment to his wife never diminished, and, as befitted a dedicated country and western listener, he was both feverishly jealous and mawkishly romantic. He nicknamed Barbara "Lady" and, when they went out to dinner together, often phoned ahead to ensure that the Kenny Rogers song of the same name would play in the restaurant as they walked in. But his mood could switch in an instant. During their marriage, he blackened her eyes, broke her ribs, shattered furniture and - with almost superhuman strength - tore the fabric of the house apart with his bare hands. Often, the murderous rages came upon him for no reason at all: they might have a wonderful dinner together, he would bring her a cup of tea before bed, "and the next thing I know it's two o'clock in the morning," she explains, "there's a pillow on my face: "Tonight's the night you die!"" Kuklinski's violence against his wife caused two miscarriages, and the children eventually began to intervene when they feared that he might otherwise kill her. I used to call it anger - it was way beyond anger. He was sick. And there were times when I begged him to seek help," she says. Unsurprisingly, he refused to take medication or see a psychiatrist. When Christin was 16 or 17 she and Barbara plotted to poison her father. Eventually, they realised they just couldn't do it. For one thing, Kuklinski often handed scraps of his food to the family's beloved Newfoundland to eat; but it gave them both hope for a while. "I wished him dead, every day," Barbara says. During the best of times, I wished him dead. Kuklinski was finally undone by the closest thing he had to a friend: Phil Solimene, a local Mafia fence whom the hit man had known for more than 20 years. In that time, Richard and Barbara had dinner with Solimene and his wife just once, but it was a mark of the degree to which Kuklinski trusted him. Solimene proved instrumental in a police sting operation that trapped Kuklinski into discussing a conspiracy to kill on tape. In the hours after he and Barbara were arrested, police entered the house on Sunset Street with a warrant, expecting to discover stashes of weapons; they found nothing. "Believe me, there were no guns in my house," Barbara says, with something like pride. Richard Kuklinski being escorted by police from a court room, Dec. 17, 1986. Credit: AP Images The next day, Kuklinski was charged with five murders. In 1988 he was found guilty of four of them. Later, he was convicted of two more; in interviews he gave later in prison he claimed responsibility for 250 deaths. But Pat Kane - who led the investigation that led to Kuklinski's arrest - believes he may have killed as many as 300 men before he was caught. "He killed who he wanted, whenever he wanted," says Kane, at 64 now retired from the state police. He didn't have a full-time job. That was what he did. Kuklinski revelled in his infamy and never expressed any remorse for his victims. "I've never felt sorry for anything I've done," he said during one of the TV interviews he gave from prison. Other than hurting my family. I do want my family to forgive me. But Barbara remained terrifed he would reach her, her children or other relatives and for 10 years she continued to visit Kuklinski in prison. She took his reverse charge phone calls at home and sent food parcels. But as the children grew up, her personal visits became less frequent. Eight years after his arrest, she got a divorce and began dating again. And when a pair of cable TV documentaries made Kuklinski a kind of celebrity, she had his calls patched through the film production office. Finally, during one telephone conversation with Barbara, he said something ugly about the children and she put the phone down on him. The fourth time he called back, she picked up the phone with a curt, "Yep?" If you ever do that again - he began, and she cut him off. What are you going to do about it, Richard? Do you realise now that there's nothing you could do? If you ever say anything against my children again, I will never accept another call. "But that," she says now, "took a long time." In October 2005, when Richard Kuklinski was 70 and had spent 25 years in prison, his health began to decline and, diagnosed with a rare and incurable inflammation of the blood vessels, was eventually transferred to hospital. In March the following year, Barbara took her daughter to visit him there; he told them he was the victim of an assassination plot. As he lay in intensive care, he wanted to confide one last thing to his ex-wife. "You're such a good person," he told her. You were always such a good person. Barbara left the room without replying. But as she walked down the hallway to leave she turned to her daughter. "I will regret for the rest of my life," she said, "that I didn't just tell him the bastard he is and how much I hate him. I wish the last words he'd heard had been how much I hated his guts. In the days that followed, as Richard Kuklinski's life finally slipped away, he became conscious long enough to ask doctors to make sure they revived him if he flatlined. But before she left, Barbara had signed a "do not resuscitate" order. A week before his death, in the early hours of March 5 2006, the hospital called Barbara to ask if she wished to rescind the instruction. She did not. The Iceman is released today