Sometime in 1911, little Peter Kudzinowski, 9, dove into a pond near his family’s home in Scranton, Pa., and smacked his head on a rock. He quickly recovered from the skull fracture he received, and no one gave much thought to the incident or him until 1928.
That’s when Detroit police picked up a drunk during the first week of December. As he dried out in his cell, he talked a lot, most of it gibberish. But then, the topic turned to his remorse over a “bad thing” he had done back east three weeks earlier.
A day later, Inspector John Underwood of the Jersey City Police received a telegram from Detroit.
“Holding Peter Kudzinowski, alias Roy Lambert, alias Roy Rogers. Admits murder of 7-year-old boy in meadow near Susquehanna Bridge, between Jersey City and Secaucus, Nov. 17 last. States he lured boy from east side of New York City. Advise if you want him.”
In Detroit, Kudzinowski’s incoherent raving had turned into a detailed confession of a horrible crime, with a description of his young victim and his dumping ground for the child’s corpse. During the same boozy soliloquy, Kudzinowski admitted that he committed another murder, this one of a friend — Harry Quinn, 28, who vanished in Scranton four years earlier.
Jersey detectives started searching the marshes around Secaucus for a body. But New York police did not have to look far to find the identity of a likely victim.
A child who had vanished on the date Kudzinowski mentioned was big news in the city.
On Nov. 17, Joseph Storelli was playing with his sister, Magdalena, 6, in front of the Lower East Side tenement where his family lived. His mother, Louisa, saw the pair as she returned from work. They were watching fish swimming in a tank in the window of a fish market.
Magdalena went home, but Joey, fascinated by the fish, stayed behind. When his mother later yelled “supper” from the tenement window, there was no response.
One of the missing boy’s playmates, Salvatore Grassa, 11, told police that a stranger in a brown suit had approached him and Joey.
“Come with me, and I’ll buy you some candy,” Grassa recalled him saying. Grassa ran away, but Joey went with the man.
Police and volunteers — including some of Joey’s school chums — searched every cellar, vacant tenement, alleyway, junkyard, and loft for nearly 80 blocks. The Daily News ran a photo of Magdalena holding one of Joey’s shoes up to the nose of a German Shepherd. “Now, go find my brother,” The News quoted her saying.
Police believed that Joey would join the growing list of mysterious child disappearances in the neighborhood — until the telegram came from Detroit on Dec. 5.
“FIEND SLEW STORELLI BOY,” The News headline blared the next day.
It took little time for Jersey City police to locate Storelli’s battered, frozen body, the throat slashed so deeply that the wound nearly severed the boy’s head.
It was all exactly as Kudzinowski said it would be.
Kudzinowski told police how he met the boy, bought him candy, and took him to a movie. From there, they hopped on a train to Secaucus and walked out into the marshes. Joey became frightened and tried to escape.
“He yelled ‘Mamma’ three times. I slapped my hand over his mouth,” Kudzinowski said. “I took out my pocketknife … I pulled it across Joe’s throat. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
He dumped the body and fled, finally landing in a drunk tank in Detroit.
During questioning by New Jersey police, Kudzinowski spoke of another child murder. On Aug. 25, he was working a railroad job near Lake Hopatcong when he spotted a few families having a picnic. One girl — Julia Mlodzianowska, 6 — wandered away from the group. Kudzinowski asked her if she would like to go on a boat ride. She said yes, and they started to walk toward the lake.
“When I attempted to attack her, she screamed, so I choked her and beat her to death,” he said.
In a panic, he wrapped the body up and carried it along when he jumped into a boxcar. Three hours later, he got off near Blairstown, N.J. “But I could not bear to leave the body, so I lowered it out of the car,” he said.
He later wrapped the dead girl in newspapers, weighed the package down with a brake shoe, and tossed it into the Delaware River.
On Jan. 9, 1929, Kudzinowski went on trial for Joey’s murder. The bodies of Quinn and Mlodzianowska were never found.
The killer’s confession formed the basis of the prosecution’s case. For the defense, Kudzinowski’s lawyers tried to prove he was insane.
Defense experts blamed his brutality on that long-ago swim in which Kudzinowski fractured his skull. Jurors examined X-rays of his head, showing physical evidence of the accident. The defense argued that the injury left him prone to mental problems, including recurring brainstorms that turned him into a monster.
The jury favored the prosecution’s view. Skull fracture notwithstanding, Kudzinowski was sane enough to know that slitting the throat of a child was wrong.
He was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Witnesses said that the man who seemed calm and often bored during his trial was cringing and whimpering as he walked to the chair.
But an hour earlier, he appeared to have accepted his fate.
“I am ready to go,” he said when his lawyers reported that their efforts to gain a last-minute reprieve had failed. “If I got out of here, I probably would do the same thing again.”
