On December 3, 1928, a drunk man staggered up to a police traffic booth in Detroit and told the officer he was wanted by the police. Asked whether he meant for murder, he said, "You'll find out." He had already confessed once, to a jailer who laughed at him while he was being held for public intoxication, and had been let go when he sobered up. This time Detroit detectives took him seriously, and Peter Kudzinowski told them about the seven-year-old boy he had killed in the New Jersey meadows. "I'm willing to pay the penalty, and the sooner it's over, the better," he said. "I had to confess. It was troubling me."
He was born on August 13, 1903, in Dickson City, Pennsylvania, the youngest of four sons of Polish immigrants, Paul and Veronica Kudzinowski, and grew up around Scranton; he is often wrongly described as having been born in Poland. In sixth grade he fractured his skull diving into a shallow pool, and afterward refused to go back to school. He worked in the Lackawanna coal mine and later in the Lackawanna Railroad yards at Secaucus. He was an alcoholic, and he said that every one of his killings was done drunk.
On March 8, 1924, he killed a friend, Harry Quinn, twenty, in Scranton. They were traveling together to Spring Brook Township, where Quinn hoped to get a job with the Spring Brook Water Supply Company, and Kudzinowski had introduced himself to members of Quinn's family that day as Ray Rogers and Roy Lambert. They fought over a bottle of whiskey, and he crushed Quinn's head with a rock. His older brother remembered later that Kudzinowski came to see him, said he had been in a scrape and needed money to leave town, and said nothing more. Quinn's family, hearing nothing from him for years, assumed he had abandoned them and put advertisements in the papers trying to reach him.
On August 19, 1928, five-year-old Julia Mlodzianowski of Jersey City was at a school picnic at Lake Hopatcong. He lured her away from her parents, strangled her and dismembered her body, which he disposed of in the Delaware Water Gap; after his capture he told reporters he had doubts that he had really killed her.
Late in the afternoon of November 17, 1928, half drunk, he was on First Avenue in the East Village. Two children he approached there ran away. Then he met Joseph Storelli, seven, and promised him a box of candy and a picture show. He took the boy on the Hudson tube to Journal Square in Jersey City and walked him out to the meadows near Secaucus. When Joseph tried to get away he knocked him down and hit him several times, and then, afraid that the boy's crying would carry to passing cars, cut his throat. He covered the body with the boy's own overcoat and left. The family's name appears in accounts as both Storelli and Storella.
Brought quickly to Jersey City for trial, he was described by the state's medical expert as a psychopathic personality, while the defense had its own experts examine X-rays taken after his childhood diving accident. He was convicted of first-degree murder in January 1929; the verdict is dated January 17 in some accounts and January 11 in others. Asked if he had anything to say before sentence, he said nothing, and he was sentenced to die in the electric chair the week of February 24. He said he was ready to die and would probably kill again if he were ever freed.
His father suffered a complete breakdown and died on June 23, 1929, while his son was on death row. Kudzinowski lost his appeal on October 14, and on December 17 Governor Morgan Foster Larson refused to commute the sentence to life on grounds of insanity. On the night of December 21, 1929, at Trenton State Prison, he was nervous and could not repeat the prayers his priest said with him. He had asked for ice cream as his last meal, and he made no final statement. He was twenty-six. Joseph's father later took the family back to Italy, leaving behind only the boy's older brother, who served a year in prison, was once arrested for robbing a high-stakes card game, and was eventually shot dead by police. Kudzinowski was also suspected in the 1927 disappearance of Billy Gaffney, which Albert Fish later claimed, and in that of Irving Pickelny, who vanished from Brooklyn in February 1927; neither was ever tied to him.