Peter Kudzinowski was born in Poland in 1903 and worked as a railroad section hand and as a miner. He had a brother, Julian, who lived at Greenwood near Scranton, Pennsylvania.
In 1924, near Scranton, he killed a man named Harry Quinn. The body was never found.
On August 19, 1928, Julia Mlodzianowski, five, was at a school picnic at Lake Hopatcong in New Jersey. She lived on Gilchrist Street in Jersey City. He lured her into the woods and killed her, and later told police he had thrown her body into the Delaware from a moving freight train. It was never recovered.
On the evening of November 17, 1928 he was on First Avenue in New York City. He approached two children there and they ran away from him. He then met Joseph Storella, who was seven, took him to a cinema, took him on the Hudson tube train to Journal Square in Jersey City, and walked him out to the meadows at Secaucus. When the boy tried to get away he knocked him down and struck him several times, and then, worried that his crying would attract passing cars, cut his throat. He covered the body with the boy's own overcoat and left him there.
He was captured in Detroit in December 1928 and confessed. His confession is what led Jersey City detectives to the Storella boy's body. Brought back to Jersey City, he admitted to the reporters' accounts that he had tried to lure two other children before he met Joseph. He was questioned by detectives and by the mayor of Jersey City, Frank Hague, until four in the morning, and then signed a confession to the killing of Julia Mlodzianowski, which cleared up a case that had been unsolved since August. He was unnerved while confessing it. He afterwards took police to the spot at Lake Hopatcong. His mother berated him while the police questioned him.
He was tried for the murder of Joseph Storella. The jury took sixty-three minutes. He was unmoved by the verdict, and his counsel said they would appeal.
He was suspected of two killings that were not his. One was Billy Gaffney, taken in 1927, to which Albert Fish later confessed; both men were killing children in the same area at the same time. The other was Irving Pickelny, who disappeared from Brooklyn in February 1927.
He was electrocuted at Trenton on December 21, 1929.
Two points about the record. Of the three people he killed, only Joseph Storella's body was ever found. And a widely reproduced summary gives his conviction as November 17, 1928, which is the date he took Joseph Storella; the newspaper report of the trial puts the verdict on January 11, 1929.