Patrick Wayne Kearney pleaded guilty to twenty-one counts of first degree murder committed in southern California between the 1960s and 1977, and is serving twenty-one concurrent life sentences at Mule Creek State Prison. He confessed to thirty-five killings; prosecutors could evidence twenty-one. He is eighty-six and one of the longest-serving prisoners in the state. He was the first of the three men the California press called the Freeway Killer to be identified. The others were William Bonin and Randy Kraft.
He was born in East Los Angeles on September 24, 1939, one of three brothers, and raised by both parents, George and Eunice Kearney. He was small, often ill and badly bullied, and said later that he had begun fantasising about killing at about eight. He served in the Air Force from 1959 to 1962 and then worked as an aeronautics engineer at Hughes Aircraft in Los Angeles.
In 1960, in Texas, he met David Hill, an Army veteran and high school dropout. The relationship lasted years and was volatile, with repeated separations and reconciliations. They lived together in Redondo Beach, where many of the killings happened.
The victims were young men and boys, ranging in age from five to twenty-eight, taken across Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange, San Diego, Imperial and Ventura counties. He picked them up hitchhiking on the freeways or met them in gay bars. He shot them in the head with a small calibre pistol, usually as they sat beside him in the car.
He then took the bodies home. He drained the blood to control the smell, washed the dismembered parts to remove blood and fingerprints, had sex with them, and cut them up with a hacksaw. The parts went into industrial rubbish bags dropped along the state highways and in the desert. The press called it the Trash Bag Murders, and him the Trash Bag Killer. The California press called him the Trash-Bag Killer, and for a period the Freeway Killer, a name later attached to William Bonin.
The last of the known victims was John Otis LaMay, seventeen, killed in March 1977. LaMay had called at the Redondo Beach house looking for Hill; Kearney invited him in, sat him in front of the television, and shot him in the back of the head. His remains were found days later, and they were found because LaMay had told someone where he was going.
Police traced LaMay to the house and questioned both men, who cooperated and then fled to El Paso as soon as the officers left. Their families persuaded them to give themselves up. On July 1, 1977 the two walked into the Riverside County sheriff's station, pointed at a wanted poster of themselves, and said that was them. Hill was released without charge; it was clear he had no part in the killings.
In custody Kearney confessed to twenty-eight murders and then to seven more, thirty-five in all. Investigators were satisfied by the detail, he described methods and disposal sites and led them to further remains, but the evidence would only support twenty-one charges.
He pleaded guilty in two batches: in Riverside County on December 21, 1977, and to eighteen further counts in Los Angeles County on February 21, 1978. The death penalty was not available to the state for killings of that period, and he received twenty-one concurrent life terms. Court records identify all twenty-one victims, though some names were withheld to protect families.
Twenty-one convictions stand against thirty-five he admitted to, and estimates that run to forty-three. The fourteen he confessed to and was never charged with are a straightforward evidence problem: he had washed the bodies.