Richard Kuklinski | The "Iceman" Mental Health and Personality

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel hello this is dr. grande today's question asks I can analyze the mental health and personality characteristics of richard kuklinski otherwise known as the Iceman Kuklinski was convicted of four murders in 1988 and a fifth murder in 2003 he was made popular in part due to the HBO specials that were made about him including one where he was diagnosed by a clinician named dr. DS this was somebody who's interviewing him as part of the special now richard kuklinski was a real person so just a reminder I'm not diagnosing anybody here in this video only speculating about what could be happening in a case like this so first a look at the timeline and then take a look at the mental health and personality characteristics we see in this case who Quin ski was born in 1935 in Jersey City New Jersey in the United States he was mistreated horribly in his childhood by both his father and his mother including being physically beaten regularly and at one point his mother attempted to kill him Kuklinski had an older brother a younger sister and a younger brother his father allegedly killed his older brother by beating him to death Kuklinski said that the family claimed that his older brother fell down the steps now the older brother did in fact die but we really don't know if he was murdered or not there's no corroboration for that part of the story his younger brother committed murder in 1970 and was still in prison in 2003 when he died and this of course comes from more reliable sources than just richard kuklinski we see that cocoon ski said that he committed his first murder when he was around 13 or 14 years of age killing a neighborhood bully there's no evidence that this murder ever happened no one was missing from that neighborhood at that time over time the story also changed quite a bit from his original story as a child kou-kun ski killed both cats and dogs in his neighborhood and this is often considered a key sign of psychopathy we see he was married had two sons later he was married again and had a son and a daughter Kuklinski's second wife described him as having a good mood sometimes and a bad mood other times so there was times when he was a generous and loving father and husband and times when he would be violent now other than the murder he allegedly committed when he was younger it seems that he started out with smaller crimes and then moved up this is also very common with psychopathy he worked in a film lab they gave him access to master copies of movies he used those to make illegal copies and he sold them he was involved in a number of burglaries and car thefts before he was arrested for the series of murders he committed later on we see that he was only arrested once for passing a bad check and those charges were dropped when he'd paid back the money that he had stolen because koukin ski tended to lie a lot it's actually pretty hard to know what murders he actually committed so we'll go through a few that seemed to be pretty clear these are murders that it is believed that he committed and there's several different sources that would support this so looking at February of 1980 we seek Lou Krinsky shoots and kills a criminal associate after they had an argument but his motive for that killing is not really known right he indicated that it was because of an argument but again we don't see any other sources indicating what motive might have been there the murder though clearly did happen July 1981 kuklinski kills a criminal associate and he takes his money he puts the body in a freezer for over two years and eventually dumped it near a park the body was found in September of 1983 this is where he got the name the Iceman because he used the freezer the motive for this murder was theft in April of 1982 he killed another criminal associate so we see kind of a pattern emerging here using a gun and a tire iron his motive for this murder appears to have been money that he stole from the victim now we see in this murder when kou-kun ski was using this gun he did not kill the victim with the first shot and then the gun jammed after this so even a point-blank range he couldn't murder this person with one bullet he had to then use the tire iron to kill him so we can see that cocoon ski doesn't seem to be really good at planning out these crimes in December 1982 he once again kills a criminal associate this time using cyanide and strangulation the motive here appears to be that he was afraid that this criminal would have testified against him so again we see the use of multiple methods the cyanide probably would have worked but he got impatient so he ended up strangling the victim again evidence of impulsivity and just not really careful planning now sometime between February and May of 1983 began he uses cyanide and strangulation to kill another criminal associate that victim's body was found in May of 1983 the motive in this particular murder was not clear then going to August of 1984 we see that he kills yet another criminal associate by shooting him twice in the chest while sensibly as a result of an argument between the two men so now moving to December 17th 1996 over two years since that last murder we see that he's arrested for five murders and many other lesser charges he was convicted for two of the murders largely based on his own confession to an undercover officer he later pled guilty to two more murders and confessed to another murder but with that last murder he was not convicted because it was part of a deal that he had made he would confess and the charges would be dropped the state really didn't have a good case on that last murder they didn't have a body in 2001 during an interview for an HBO special he confessed to murdering a police officer and was convicted of that crime as well but it really didn't make any difference in terms of how long he would spend in prison because he was already serving what was functionally a life sentence it's really not clear if he actually committed this murder richard kuklinski died in March of 2006 while still in custody from cardiac arrest let's now take a look at the mental health and personality factors that could be a play in this case I'll start with personality because this seems fairly clear using the five factor model it seems that kuklinski had mid-range openness to experience low conscientiousness we see a lot of evidence for this in his crimes low extraversion extremely low agreeableness so he was highly antagonistic and high neuroticism now the neuroticism score might seem a bit surprising usually we think of psychopathy as being associated with extremely low neuroticism but that's factor 1 psychopathy and we see the kuklinski has a mix of both factor 1 and factor 2 psychopathic traits so he was a bit emotionally reactive and impulsive and therefore again we would think of him as having high neuroticism I mentioned before that kook in ski became popular because of these HBO specials we see that in one of the specials he claims to have killed over a hundred victims in his interview with dr. Dietz that number moved to over 200 victims we see he tells all kinds of stories about using different methods of killing victims like a crossbow explosives fire rats throwing somebody off of a building poison sharks some people he said that he randomly killed just to test his method other people aggravated him and some owed him money he also claimed to be a mafia hitman this was never really established either although he may have had some connection to certain mafia figures as I understand it all these claims were investigated and no evidence has found that he committed any of these other murders so we see in one of his interviews with dr. Dietz that clinician diagnoses karinski with antisocial personality disorder and paranoid personality disorder so give my thoughts on this diagnostic theory this impression as well as provide my own theory although it's worth noting that dr. Dietz spent a lot of time with kook Winsky and I'm sure he had a lot of information they learned that wasn't revealed in the HBO specials right there's something different about being face-to-face with somebody so even if everything that was recorded was made available we see the doctor date still has an advantage in terms of assessing kuklinski now the antisocial personality disorder diagnosis I'll just call this APD this makes complete sense to me that is a personality disorder associated with sociopathy so factor to psychopathy so you have somebody who's committing crimes deceitful impulsive aggressive they have a reckless disregard for the safety of others they're consistently irresponsible and have a lack of remorse so again we see that it appears Kuklinski has all the symptoms required for APD so we see factor 1 and factor 2 psychopathic traits I think the problem for cocoon ski is the degree to which he expressed all the symptoms his tendency to commit crimes his impulsivity his aggression his disregard for safety were so severe that he ended up committing several murders it would be no surprise then to also think of his pathological lying as being extremely severe we see the cuckoo in ski has told a number of stories about these other murders he's supposedly committed and when we hear the story for the second time it becomes more unbelievable than the first time he embellishes and he adds even more fantasy to it there's no way to know for sure but if I had to guess I would say that kuklinski got caught for just about every murder that he committed I'm not convinced at all that he was a mafia hitman and I'm not convinced he committed all these seemingly random murders because he was angry aggravated or he committed them simply for no reason at all it just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense a more reasonable explanation would be that kuklinski was narcissistic after he was sentenced to prison he still had that need for attention and admiration and people gave him attention so he capitalized on that opportunity and made up all these stories he used the actual murders that he did commit to bolster his credibility when talking about the murders that he likely made up so this brings me to dr. deetzes second diagnosis which again was paranoid personality disorder I'll call this PPD I think this is an interesting way to approach this case it's not particularly common to see cluster B personality pathology and antisocial as in cluster be mixed with cluster a personality pathology where we see paranoid but of course it does happen and it seems really hard to deny that cocoon scheme eats a few of the symptom criteria for that diagnosis the disorder requires four of seven criteria to be met so let's take a look at the symptom criteria compared to cook oonski's behavior we start out with suspects others are exploiting harming or deceiving them right that's the first symptom criterion so I would say here maybe this is the case because of the circumstances he was in but I'm not sure this was actually part of his personality so I would say no with this first one next one preoccupied with unjustified doubts about the loyalty of friends and associates now at first this one seems very clear he certainly had a distrust of his criminal associates but he must have had a lot of people in his life or at least some people in his life that he didn't distrust so again it would appear that it was the context of his criminal activities where we would see this symptom occur so again I would say no moving to the third symptom reluctant to confide in others probably when he was actively committing crimes although I think his narcissism got the best of him a few times even there he was convicted largely based on a confession to an undercover officer as I mentioned so overall here I would say no now moving to the fourth one reads hidden meaning or threatening meanings into benign remarks I'm not sure about this one but I think there is evidence that points toward this so I would say yes number five bears grudges I think this one is fairly clear he would meet this one moving to the six criterion perceiving attacks and quick to react angrily I think there's not much doubt with this one this one seems like yes and then the last one number seven believes their spouse is cheating I can picture this one being true but I don't see any direct evidence to support this he was horrible to his second wife but it's not clear if he believed that she was cheating so I'd have to say no for this last one so he seems to meet three of the seven criteria but one could certainly make an argument that is likely that at least one of the other criteria was met so there's a path for getting to this diagnosis so it could be that cuckoo Sookie's paranoia combined with his psychopathy really made him an extremely dangerous person a person that would lose trust or never develop it in the first place and the extreme psychopathy would enable him to act on the paranoia I think dr. Dietz could have been correct with this diagnosis but I've seen many arguments that people have put out there against the PPD diagnosis in this case let's look at a few of those arguments the one I hear the most is the idea that paranoia occurred in the context of his criminal activity and I factored this into my analysis when I was going through the PPD symptom criteria kou-kun skee had the option of not committing crimes but he chose to he chose to expose himself to all that risk and to activate that paranoia if he was really consumed by paranoia why didn't he just stop or why did he start at all so the idea here would have been that you really can't evaluate paranoia in the context where somebody should be paranoid if someone is committing multiple felonies including murder on a regular basis they should be worried that someone's going to talk to the police somebody's going to find out what they're doing that's a legitimate fear many criminals who have a PD antisocial personality disorder and no other comorbid disorders do this on a regular basis they suspect other people's motives they worried that other people might be out to get them it's a function of being a criminal the next argument against the PPD diagnosis is cocoon skis appearance during those interviews that we see on HBO clearly there was at least one camera in that room and at least one microphone was there he didn't seem paranoid there he didn't seem to be afraid of dr. Dietz he answered all kinds of questions personality disorders don't change because of context if he had paranoid person is order he would be paranoid even during that prison interview the paranoia would not simply go away because he believed he didn't have anything to lose symptoms of personality disorders are typically not conditional like that now the last argument against the PPD diagnosis is the fact that kou-kun ski did kill for money at least with some of the murders it wasn't because he was criticized it wasn't because he was afraid the person was gonna turn him in it wasn't because of a grudge he wanted the money many of his crimes were committed simply to earn or steal money so I think there are some legitimate arguments against the idea of PPD it is a little hard to explain how he doesn't seem to have it in prison but he had such a pronounced version outside of prison that have facilitated him in committing murder it could simply be that the antisocial personality disorder pushed him toward criminality and the paranoia pushed him away but the antisocial characteristics one out so in a sense through extending his antisocial behavior he attempted to satisfy his paranoia now if we move away from the paranoid personality disorder diagnosis is there another way to conceptualize this case it's hard to imagine without antisocial personality so I think that part would have to stay but I think we could use the antisocial personality and vulnerable narcissism to really get to the same place maybe even in a way that's a little bit more consistent with this presentation so again the apt facilitated criminal behavior but here we would see the vulnerable narcissism made him distrustful hyper sensitive to criticism cold distant and defensive all those characteristics of vulnerable narcissism we can see in his life as a killer and in the prison interviews so in one sense there's good evidence for PPD but there's also good evidence for vulnerable narcissism even though narcissistic person I disorder NPD is mostly associated with grandiose narcissism he technically meets enough of the criteria for a diagnosis of NPD specifically a grandiose sense of self-importance requiring excessive admiration a sense of entitlement a tendency to manipulate others a lack of empathy and arrogance so six of the nine symptoms when only five would be required for the diagnosis we also can't rule out the possibility that both were present at the same time with richard kuklinski he had both NPD and PPD along with of course the antisocial person I sort another important behavior that the vulnerable narcissism explains is the content of his lies the lies he tells in prison about all these other murders point to narcissism he wanted to be admired for being the most dangerous mafia hitman for having a quick temper for being willing to kill somebody with almost no provocation for being incredibly dangerous now of course for most people they wouldn't consider these things something to brag about but if we look at this through the lens of psychopathy then all of these different things he brags about would seem like accomplishments from his perspective so it comes down to this he wanted to be feared I find the richard kuklinski case to be one of the most fascinating serial killer cases not for all the stories he told about murders that he likely did not commit but for the behavior that we know happened we see somebody here with no toleration for criticism impulse control problems and a lot of aggression whose personality was formed through heredity and the environment and on both fronts he had terrible contributions all these factors came together to give him a particular combination of personality traits that made him extremely dangerous to people who knew him when most serial killers would be more dangerous to strangers so richard kuklinski was quite a bit different than most serial killers so I know whenever I talk about topics like serial killers there will be a variety of opinions please put any opinions and thoughts in the comment section they always generate early interesting dialogue as always I hope you found my analysis of this topic to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 415,462

Keywords: Richard Kuklinski, Iceman, the devil himself, conversations with a killer, secrets of a Mafia hitman, confessions of a Mafia contract killer, serial killer, Dr. Park Dietz, antisocial personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, factor 1 psychopathy, factor 2 psychopathy, sociopathy, vulnerable narcissism, hypersensitivity to criticism, mental health, counseling

Id: yo2uVWfODYM

Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2020