In the spring of 1977, investigators working the death of a seventeen-year-old named John LaMay sat in the living room of a small house in Redondo Beach and waited while the two men who lived there went off to make themselves presentable. While they were alone, the investigators clipped a few fibers from the carpet. The carpet was green. So were the threads that had been found stuck to the nylon tape used to close the trash bags that held what was left of LaMay.
The men were Patrick Wayne Kearney, a thirty-seven-year-old engineer at Hughes Aircraft, and D.H., who had been his partner, on and off, since they met in Texas at the end of the 1950s. When they came back into the room they heard the news of LaMay's death, and Kearney did most of the talking. He said that he and D.H. were gay, that both of them had been involved with LaMay for about two years, and that they were afraid. Somebody, he told the investigators, had been killing gay men in southern California for a long time.
On that point he was telling the truth. On April 6, with the visit behind him, he killed an eight-year-old. Merle Chance, whom everyone called Hondo, lived in Venice and was last seen on his bicycle not far from where Kearney worked. Kearney said later that he smothered the boy, kept the body at the house overnight, and left it in the Angeles National Forest off Angeles Crest Highway, about eleven miles north of Altadena. Hondo Chance's remains were found on May 26. He is the last person Patrick Kearney is known to have killed, and he died after the police had already been inside the house.
The fibers matched. Because of the way they had been taken, investigators went back for a proper sample, and on that visit they also asked both men for hair samples. Carpet fiber and a pubic hair recovered with LaMay's remains matched Kearney. A hacksaw found in the house was crusted with dried blood, and the blood matched LaMay's type, which in 1977 was as far as the science could go.
Kearney and D.H. did not wait for the laboratory. In late May, Kearney mailed Hughes a letter of resignation along with his security badge, and a letter went to his grandmother in Barstow asking her to sell the house and pay their bills because they were moving. They drove to El Paso. On June 3, warrants were issued for both men, and the Los Angeles Times reported that a Redondo Beach pair was being sought in a series of murders. Their families talked them into coming home. On July 1, 1977, Kearney and D.H. walked into the Riverside County sheriff's office, pointed at the wanted poster with their faces on it, and said that was them.
Within days the case was no longer about one boy. By July 15 Kearney had signed confessions to twenty-eight killings, twelve of which police had already been able to confirm. By a 1981 wire account, the killings he had admitted came to thirty-two. He drew maps and gave directions. On July 8, officers dug where he told them to, behind the house in Culver City where he and D.H. had lived in the late 1960s, and uncovered a skeleton with a bullet hole in the skull.
Kearney knew the man only as George. He said he had picked him up in San Diego around Christmas 1968 and shot him in the head at the Culver City house, then dismembered him in the bathtub, dug the bullet out of the skull so it could never be traced to his gun, and buried him out back. Forensic examiners put the death somewhere between 1968 and 1970. Kearney said he did not kill again for more than a year, because he was afraid someone would come asking about George. Nobody ever did. George's surname has never been established.
Long before anyone had a name for the killer, investigators had a name for the case. What police came to call the Trash Bag Murders officially began on April 13, 1975, when the body of Albert Rivera, twenty-one, of Los Angeles, was found in a heavy-duty trash bag near Highway 74, east of San Juan Capistrano. Over the next two years the bags kept turning up, along the state highways, in canyons and in the desert, across Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange, San Diego, Imperial and Ventura counties. The dead were male, most of them in their teens or early twenties, and nearly all had been shot in the head with a small-caliber pistol.
How it was done is known because Kearney explained it. He picked up hitchhikers on the freeways or met men in gay bars, and drove them in his Volkswagen or his truck. He held a .22 derringer in his right hand and steered with his left, and he shot his passenger in the temple, just above the ear, while keeping an eye on the speedometer so nothing about the car would look wrong to anyone passing. Some, by his account, were asleep. He drove the bodies to a quiet spot or took them home to Redondo Beach, where he cut them apart with a hacksaw in the bathtub. He drained the blood to control the smell and washed the pieces to get rid of blood and fingerprints. Sometimes he removed the bullet. Then the bags went out along the roads.
The killings tracked the relationship. D.H. was from Lubbock and had been married; he and Kearney moved to Long Beach together in 1961, split when D.H. went back to his wife, reunited, and settled in Culver City in 1964. In December 1969 Kearney bought the Redondo Beach house for $20,750. In June 1971 D.H. walked out again, leaving a note. The series investigators could later document began that month, and the pattern that emerged from Kearney's own account was that he went out cruising when D.H. left after a fight.
The first that month was John Demchik, thirteen, who accepted a ride from Kearney on June 26, 1971. His body lay in the desert about fifteen miles southeast of Calexico until February 1973, and when Imperial County found it, the assumption was that he was a Mexican national who had died crossing the border. Only when the remains were examined more closely did anyone see that a bullet had entered his left ear. He was not identified until 1978, after Kearney had already pleaded guilty, and he is the only one of the victims whose body was not cut apart. James Barwick, seventeen, was picked up hitchhiking on September 22, 1973, and found the same day.
Ronald Dean Smith Jr. was five. On August 24, 1974, he asked his grandmother in Lennox whether he could go to Lennox Park with a friend. The two boys argued there, and Ronnie started home by himself. Kearney stopped for him. When the boy said he was hungry, Kearney took him to McDonald's. His body was found beside Ortega Highway in Riverside County on October 12. The pathologist found abrasions on his nose and chin and bruising on his lips from a hand pressed over his face, and concluded that he had been suffocated.
Larry Gene Walters, twenty, was killed on Halloween 1975 and found, cut apart and bagged, on November 10. By 1976 the killings came almost monthly. Kenneth Buchanan, seventeen, was shot on March 1 and found on April 7. Oliver Peter Molitor, thirteen, was picked up hitchhiking on March 21; Kearney said he buried the pieces in the Palos Verdes landfill, and they have never been recovered. Larry Armendariz was fifteen when he was killed in April. John “Woody” Woods, twenty-three, died in June and was not found until a year later, almost to the day. Larry Espy, seventeen, was found on August 23, and Wilfrid Faherty, twenty, five days after that. Randall Moore, sixteen, was found on October 10. Timothy Ingham, nineteen, was shot while he slept and thrown down a ravine. Robert Benniefiel, seventeen, known as Billy, took a ride when his bicycle broke down. David Allen, twenty-seven, was shot and left at the side of a road near Fallbrook. Mark Orach, twenty, was killed on October 5 and found in Orange County the next day.
Michael Craig McGhee was thirteen and lived in Redondo Beach. He had been in trouble with the juvenile authorities more than once, and in June 1976 he was hitchhiking along Inglewood Avenue near Lennox toward Torrance when Kearney picked him up. According to police, Kearney befriended the boy and invited him on a weekend camping trip to Lake Elsinore. Kearney's version was that McGhee bragged about crimes he had committed and asked where the burglar alarms were in the house, that he came to see the boy as a threat, and that he shot him without warning. He disappeared on June 11, 1976, according to reports at the time; some later accounts put his death five days afterward.
Nicolas Hernandez-Jimenez, twenty-eight, was found on January 23, 1977, cut apart and wrapped in trash bags. Arturo Ramos Marquez, twenty-four, was killed around February 26 and found on March 3. Ten days later came John Otis LaMay. At about 5:30 on the afternoon of Sunday, March 13, LaMay told a neighbor he was going to Redondo Beach to meet a man he had met at a gym. The man was D.H., who had given him the address. D.H. was not home. Kearney invited the boy in to watch television until D.H. got back, and shot him in the back of the head. LaMay's remains were found in the desert five days later. Because he had told a neighbor where he was going, the investigation led back to the house.
D.H. was held with Kearney on $500,000 bond. Kearney maintained that D.H. had no part in any of it, investigators found nothing to show otherwise, and D.H. was released without charge. A Riverside County indictment charged Kearney with the murders of Albert Rivera, twenty-one, of Los Angeles; Arturo Marquez, twenty-four, of Oxnard; and John LaMay, seventeen, of El Segundo. He pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers, Jay Grossman and Steven Harmon, asked the court to seal the transcript of the indictment proceedings and to impose a gag order. By November he wanted neither the plea nor the lawyers. A Riverside judge held up his request to plead guilty and act as his own attorney until a psychological evaluation was done; it came back within weeks, and he was allowed to represent himself. On December 21, 1977, he pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, waived a probation report, asked to be sentenced at once, and received from Superior Court Judge John Hews a life term with the possibility of parole after seven years under the law of the time.
Reporters who caught him in the courtroom afterward got one remark about the killings: "I can't allow myself to think about it much. It's too painful." With the sentence passed, the gag order was lifted, and the first details of what he had told investigators reached the public. He said he had killed "coolly." He said he had taken ideas from the press coverage of the Houston murders, in which Dean Corll, with the teenagers Elmer Wayne Henley and David Brooks, had killed at least twenty-eight boys in the early 1970s, and that when he sensed the police closing in he cleared everything about Houston out of the house.
The remaining cases belonged to Los Angeles, where two sheriff's homicide detectives, Al Sett and Roger Wilson, built them largely out of what Kearney himself told them. In January 1978 he gave them four more names: Ronnie Smith, Michael McGhee, Hondo Chance, and a twenty-seven-year-old Camp Pendleton Marine reported as David Rogers. Whether Rogers is the man listed elsewhere as David Allen, the twenty-seven-year-old left near Fallbrook, the published record does not make clear. The complaint filed in February, seventeen counts at first, was the largest ever filed in Los Angeles County. One more victim was added after the detectives placed an advertisement in the South Bay Daily Breeze describing a teenager Kearney said he had shot in the fall of 1976. A woman answered it, and what she told them was enough to identify the boy as Robert William Benniefiel, seventeen, of Redondo Beach. Nine of the eighteen counts covered the first dozen victims in his confessions; the others included the two children, five and eight years old, and four victims whose bodies had never been recovered.
On February 21 he entered his pleas in municipal court on the fifth floor of the Criminal Courts Building. Judge Dickran Tevrizian told him, "I feel I have some obligation to the 18 people whom you have silenced," and said their families wanted to know why. "Can you tell us why?" Kearney answered, "I prefer not to." He pleaded guilty to all eighteen and was taken to the courtroom of Superior Court Judge Paul G. Breckenridge, who imposed a life term concurrent with the Riverside sentence, called the killings "a series of ghastly and grisly crimes" and said he hoped the parole authorities would never let Kearney out. "He appears to be an insult to humanity," the judge said. The arrangement was reported at the time as a trade: no death sentence, in exchange for a full accounting of the dead. For the four with no body, his own word was the evidence, and the court accepted it. Many later accounts describe twenty-one consecutive life sentences; the term imposed in Los Angeles in 1978 was reported from the courtroom as concurrent.
That made twenty-one first-degree murder convictions. The gap between that number and the thirty-five he admitted to is a matter of proof, not doubt. Police said they were satisfied he had committed the others and could not find the physical evidence to charge them. Among those left uncharged are the three he placed at the very beginning, in 1962: a nineteen-year-old from Louisiana or Oklahoma whom he said he took on his motorcycle into the desert outside Indio and shot; the man's sixteen-year-old cousin, who had seen them leave and came to Kearney asking where he was; and an eighteen-year-old he knew only as Mike. No remains have ever been connected to any of them. If his confessions were accurate, at least seven of his victims have never been identified.
None of it fit the man people thought they knew. Kearney was born in East Los Angeles on September 24, 1939, the oldest of George and Eunice Kearney's three sons, and grew up thin, sickly and bullied, called queer by boys who beat him up in Reseda, and later in Willcox, Arizona, where he picked up the fluent Spanish he would use in San Diego and Tijuana. He said he had begun thinking about killing at about eight. When he was thirteen, according to his biographer Tony Stewart, his father gave him a .22 rifle and taught him to slaughter pigs with a shot behind the ear. He finished high school in 1957, drifted through classes at El Camino College in Torrance, joined the Air Force in 1958, and came out in 1961. By 1962 he was at Hughes Aircraft, where he rose to senior research assistant. His supervisor called him a model worker. A grocer who sold him butcher knives told reporters in 1977 that Kearney always examined the blades and asked about the quality of the steel.
Kearney was the first of the three men the southern California press called the Freeway Killer to be identified. William Bonin and Randy Kraft came later, and the name stayed with Bonin. After his sentencing Kearney told investigators that other people had been involved and that they should look in police evidence for photographs, and especially for films of live torture. No one else was ever charged. In a letter to the Australian author Amanda Howard he claimed to have known Lee Harvey Oswald in the Air Force and to have driven him to the Mexican border; nothing in the record supports it. Stewart, who says he and his brother got away from Kearney as young men, writes that Kearney has refused to attend his parole hearings when victims' relatives are present. His life terms carry parole eligibility, and he has never been released. Reports in 2025 placed him at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, with a parole suitability hearing tentatively set for January 2027.
Two of the boys have never been found. Oliver Molitor's remains went into a landfill. When detectives asked Kearney where Michael McGhee was, he told them he had disposed of the body. "You aren't going to find him," he said. Nobody has.
September 24, 1939: Patrick Wayne Kearney is born in East Los Angeles.
1958 to 1961: he serves in the Air Force.
1962: the year Kearney placed his first three killings, none of them ever charged and no remains ever connected.
Christmas 1968: by his account, he picks up a man he knew only as George in San Diego and shoots him at the Culver City house.
December 1969: he buys a house in Redondo Beach.
June 26, 1971: John Demchik, thirteen, accepts a ride from Kearney; his body lies in the desert until February 1973.
September 22, 1973: James Barwick, seventeen, is picked up hitchhiking and found the same day.
August 24, 1974: Ronald Dean Smith Jr., five, is picked up in Lennox; his body is found beside Ortega Highway on October 12.
April 13, 1975: the body of Albert Rivera, twenty-one, is found in a trash bag near Highway 74, the official start of the Trash Bag Murders.
Halloween 1975: Larry Gene Walters, twenty, is killed.
March 1976: Kenneth Buchanan, seventeen, is shot on March 1, and Oliver Peter Molitor, thirteen, is picked up on March 21; Molitor's remains are never recovered.
June 11, 1976: Michael Craig McGhee, thirteen, disappears; his body has never been found.
January 23, 1977: Nicolas Hernandez-Jimenez, twenty-eight, is found cut apart and wrapped in trash bags.
March 13, 1977: John Otis LaMay, seventeen, is shot at the Redondo Beach house; his remains are found in the desert five days later.
April 6, 1977: Merle "Hondo" Chance, eight, is killed; his remains are found on May 26.
June 3, 1977: warrants are issued for Kearney and D.H.
July 1, 1977: Kearney and D.H. surrender at the Riverside County sheriff's office.
July 8, 1977: officers dig up a skeleton behind the house in Culver City.
July 15, 1977: by this date Kearney has signed confessions to twenty-eight killings.
December 21, 1977: he pleads guilty in Riverside County to three counts of first-degree murder and receives a life term.
February 21, 1978: he pleads guilty to eighteen more murders in Los Angeles and receives a life term reported as concurrent.
2025: reports place him at Mule Creek State Prison, with a parole suitability hearing tentatively set for January 2027.