“Richard was so humiliated and filled with rage that he went back out there and he took it out on those boys and he gave them a terrific beating,” Wellman said. When he got home, bloodied and bruised, his father slapped him and told him to go back outside and fight them. One day Kuklinski was severely beaten by the O’Brien boys, two brothers who lived nearby. The brutalization stage also includes “violent coaching” by an authority figure. “He couldn’t understand why (his brother) wasn’t waking up and he begged him, ‘You got to wake up!' Because, man, you’re the only other guy I have, the only other person who knows what it feels like to be me. He also beat his two sons, once hitting Kulkinski’s 7-year-old brother so hard that he died from his injuries.Ī 5-year-old Kuklinski returned home that day to find his older brother displayed in a pine box in the living room. In Kuklinski’s case, his father was a fearsomely violent man who routinely beat and raped his wife in front of the children. This is when children are exposed to violence, both witnessing and experiencing it. This four-step process of violentization - a combination of the words violent and socialization - begins with the “brutalization” stage. It occurs gradually, kind of like water over sandstone. “Significant experiences that make people dangerous happen over a long period of time,” said Wellman, co-chair of the Ventura College Criminal Justice Department. Like many serial killers, rapists or murderers, he was the product of a process called violentization, she said.

Kuklinski, however, didn’t commit these heinous acts because he was born bad or inherently evil, said Kelly Wellman during her presentation at the 2019 Crimecon in New Orleans. Kuklinski was eventually convicted of two murders in 1988, and six in total, but it is estimated that he killed as many as 250 people, mostly during his time as a mafia hitman. Five years later, he burned a man alive in a car for making fun of him. At the age of 13, he beat a local bully to death and disposed of the body in an icy river. As a child, Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski tortured and killed stray cats and dogs.

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