9, 1984, his body was found hanging out the side of his ice cream truck. The only verification that Prongay existed and may have known Kuklinski is that an ice-cream man by the name of Robert Prongay was killed in his ice cream truck, shot twice in the chest. When Prongay began to talk about poisoning an entire reservoir just to kill one family, Kuklinski shot him.

The Iceman claimed that Mister Softee asked Kuklinski to kill his wife and young son for him, which Kuklinski declined. He could kill anyone without feeling anything at all, but he wouldn’t kill innocent women and children.

Kuklinski claimed to have a very firm moral code when it came to killing. Not much is really known about the real Prongay. A man who is allegedly Robert Prongay serving ice cream from his Mister Softee truck. It was from Prongay that Kuklinski said he learned to freeze bodies to mask time of death. In Kuklinski’s words, Prongay used his ice cream truck as a surveillance van to follow around his potential victims, whom he would kill using aerosol cyanide and remotely-detonated grenades. Prongay told Kuklinski he was an Army Special Forces veteran, trained in using explosives and poisons. They summed each other up and realized they were both contract killers. Kuklinski was known as “The Iceman” to law enforcement and Prongay was called “Mister Softee.” According to Kuklinski, the two men met at a New Jersey motel while stalking the same mark. “ But he was extremely crazy… he’d go into these neighborhoods and sell ice cream to the kids, then maybe kill one of their fathers.“ Prongay was played by Chris Evans in the 2013 movie about Kuklinski, ‘The Iceman.’ “ He taught me a lot,” Kuklinski once said.

In one of those murders, he used a hamburger laced with cyanide, a murder technique he picked up from a man he described as a Special Force veteran-turned-ice cream man, Robert Prongay. These victims were small-time drug and porn dealers in the mid-1980s. Kuklinski was only ever convicted of five murders, but it was enough to put him away for the rest of his days.

Known as “The Iceman” for masking his victims’ times of death by freezing their corpses, Kuklinski claimed to have killed more than 100 people for the five families of the New York City mafia - and he claimed to have learned his skills from a Special Forces veteran. The story of Robert Prongay gets more confusing the more anyone retells it, but it all begins with prolific serial killer and alleged mafia hitman, Richard Kuklinski.

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