“I figured he might be up in San Francisco,” Demchik said. “I used to spend my weekends just driving around the city and on the highways just to see if I could spot him.”
The disappearance of his son haunted his desperate father.
“I dreamed of him up there,” Demchik said. “The last dream I had, he was in a dungeon. He was calling me, ‘Come and get me.’ I asked him, `Where are you?’ He never answered me. I went through a lot of hell.”
It would be six years before Demchik’s abused body was discovered, and that would only be because Kearney had confessed to the murder and told police where he’s left the boy to die.
Demchik was identified by his mother, who was shown a scrap of clothing he’d been wearing on the day that he disappeared.
In was devastating for the mother, and after that, John’s sister said, “I think she just didn’t want to go on.”
Norma died not long after identifying her son’s clothing.
Decades later, Stephen Demchik was living in the same house, but with his wife and son dead, his four other children grown, it was nothing like a real home, especially given that it had once been one that had been filled with so much love and laughter.
A photo in a frame and too few memories are all Demchik had left.
“He’s not coming back. There’s nothing that can bring him back. I knew that after the police called and his mother identified his clothes. I said, ‘That’s him. There's no use grieving over it anymore.’”
But still, he can’t help himself from reliving his pain, especially on John’s important days.
“There are times when I remember him on his birthday or at Christmas. That’s hard.
But I have to reach back and say, `He's not coming back.’”
No matter how hard he tries, Stephen continues to grieve what Kearney callously stole from him.
Troubled boy meets sad fate
“I thought my world was coming to an end when my son was murdered,” said Elizabeth McGhee, whose 13-year-old son Michael was one of Kearney’s victims.
While Michael had a cherub’s face, the boy with the brown hair and sweet smile was often in trouble. His short life was punctuated by truancy and a host of crimes.
The local cops were well aware of the boy, who’d dropped out of school at age 12 in favor of burglary, car theft and other offenses, including incorrigibility (incapable of being corrected or amended, essentially a juvenile delinquent).
His sister called him a “rebellious teenager.”
Michael had met Kearney in early June of 1976 when he had picked him up hitchhiking and invited him to go camping with him at his favorite spots, Lake Elsinore.
McGhee almost slipped out of Kearney’s clutches, since he was unable to go that time, but the boy made the mistake of telling Kearney to ask him again later. Because of that fateful car ride and conversation, McGhee wouldn’t make it past his 13th birthday.
The next week, McGhee’s sister opened the door when Kearney stopped by, and although she told the older man, “a little guy” in glasses wearing camouflage, that her brother was grounded and couldn’t go camping with him, McGhee was slipping out the back door even as his sister and Kearney were talking.
Kearney left, but McGhee ran to catch up.
Michael McGhee’s brother, Robert, tried to stop the 13-year-old from going off with Kearney, but that day – June 16, 1976 – was the last day any of the McGhees saw young, incorrigible Michael.
Another family faces heartache
Decades after his death, a page devoted to 8-year-old Merle Chance, who went by the name of Hondo, was peppered with notes of love from his classmates, who never forgot the dark-haired boy with the sweet smile.
“You will always be my friend,” said one post, while another showcased the boy’s sense of right and wrong, justice and evil.
“Hondo was a brave and helpful child who protected my brother from awful bullies that were much older. If he had not been murdered and had been allowed to live I can only imagine the strength of character and wonderful things he could have done. He had a heart of gold,” another friend added.
One girl, a year younger than Hondo, remembered the boy as her protector, four decades after his ill-fated encounter with Patrick Wayne Kearney.
“My best friend as a small child, he was my hero, with his large heart and protective spirit. I loved to see him ride his bike up and he always looked after me, because no one else did. I have searched for years for a picture or some celebration of him (I was seven years old when he was taken), and to see the celebration of him is such a blessing. He will forever be ‘looking out’ for all of those he loved left that are still behind. He will always be in my heart, for his spirit is what saved me in many ways...Thank you Hondo. You made such a difference in my life.”
Hondo’s death decimated his family. His mother, Bertha, carries the blame for the death of her son, who vanished on April 6, 1977, when he was riding his bike in Kearney’s neighborhood.
Kearney took him home and smothered him, then sodomized the small corpse, which he later dumped in Angeles National Forest, where Hondo became a true angel.
“I had four other kids, but he was my baby,” said Chance. “I can’t describe what it made me feel like. For a long time, it wasn’t easy. It was not easy. I stayed by myself every day. I went out to his grave every day. I would take flowers and sit and talk to him. If people saw me, they thought I was crazy because I was sitting there talking to a headstone.”
Her husband blamed her, too, she added.
“He got real cold to me the day they said they found our son. He blamed me for his disappearance and his death. He said if I hadn’t bought him his bicycle it wouldn’t have happened. I guess he had to blame somebody.”
Chapter 4: A sick obsession
Patrick Kearney was hiding a lot of sick secrets, especially so his interest in Houston Heights serial killer Dean Corll, a Texas madman who bribed two boys in his neighborhood with booze and weed to bring their friends over to his place “to party.” The only one having any fun, however, was the sadistic Corll, who had a torture board that kept his victims from escaping while he tortured them – sometimes amputating their penises while they writhed in pain on the blood-soaked slab of wood – sodomized them repeatedly and finally, when his fun was over, killed them.
Most were buried at a boat storage shed Corll rented, and the night detectives dug up the bodies was one that never left them.
Corll had wrapped the bodies in plastic that he’d put down beneath the board to catch any blood or entrails as he tortured his victims, and then covered them in a dusting of lime. The lime, however, had helped speed decomposition, and eventually as detectives dug deeper, they were only finding body parts or bones simmering in a putrid gelatinous liquid.
“It was a hot day, and the smell would just knock you over,” said Houston Post photographer Jerry Click.
Sgt. David Mullican of the Pasadena Police Department still remembered the smell, almost 40 years later, as he remembered while giving an interview over lunch with Texas Monthly magazine.
“I can go back to that first day at the storage unit when we started digging,” he said, “and just like that, the smell comes back to me, the smell of all those rotting …”
Mullican was unable to finish his sentence, or his meal that day.
It was sick stuff, and Kearney reveled in it, collecting as many newspaper clippings about Corll’s murders as he could find.
Hillside Stranglers
While Dean Corll’s terrorizing of Texas was Kearney’s favorite bit of news, he also followed the Hillside Stranglers, who were operating in Los Angeles between October of 1977 and February of 1978.
While police always knew they were dealing with two killers, since cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono both left semen at the scene, they didn’t immediately let on to the press that there were two men at work in the Hollywood Hills.
It was Buono who was the leader of the tw
o, and in order to encourage his cousin to participate in the crimes, he told him, “You can’t let a cunt get the upper hand. Put them in their place.”
Because Kearney killed to also put people “in their place,” he likely related to the rage that guided these two monsters as they sought out more victims.
While initially the two worked as pimps and forced two runaway girls to prostitute themselves or face severe beatings, eventually they weren’t satisfied with simple rape and torture. And once they graduated to murder, they were almost unstoppable, killing three young prostitutes in a matter of three weeks, then kidnapping two young girls off a school bus to rape and strangle a week later.
In the end, the two were convicted of raping, torturing and murdering 10 females between the ages of 12 and 28.
From them, Kearney likely decided age didn’t matter, which would explain the varied ages of his victims.
They received life sentences.
The Zodiac Killer
Police have been looking for the Zodiac Killer since 1969, and Patrick Kearney has been following their progress.
Between December of 1968 and October of 1969, a mere eight-month period, at least four men and three women were killed by a monster who sent a series of letters containing cryptograms to the Vallejo Times Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner, demanding front page attention or he would kill again.
While the Zodiac Killer – a name the mystery murderer gave himself – lay claim to 37 murders, only seven were directly linked.
Of the four cryptograms sent to the newspapers, only one has been decoded.
It contained misspellings along with a few letters that were never deciphered, but it helped explain what the Zodiac Killer was all about.
“I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD GAME IN THE FORREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUE ANAMAL OF ALL TO KILL SOMETHING GIVES ME THE MOST THRILLING EXPERENCE IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN GETTING YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL THE BEST PART OF IT IS THAE WHEN I DIE I WILL BE REBORN IN PARADICE AND THEI HAVE KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES I WILL NOT GIVE YOU MY NAME BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO SLOI DOWN OR ATOP MY COLLECTIOG OF SLAVES FOR MY AFTERLIFE EBEORIETEMETHHPITI,” it read.
All of the letters from the attention-seeking Zodiac were signed with a circle with an X superimposed on top. Some included bits of evidence from crime scenes to prove the connection.
It was demented, and that alone made it an obsession for the dark, twisted little man who turned childhood torment, something many kids endure without breaking down into madness, into a reason to kill.
Chapter 5: A bad time to be gay
In the late 1970s, just when Kearney was perfecting his murderous modus operandi, former beauty queen and orange juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant had just made headlines across the nation for succeeding in shutting down gay rights efforts across the nation, using the argument that many gay men prey on young boys, making them a risk to society in the roles of teachers or Boy Scout leaders.
“What these people really want, hidden behind obscure legal phrases, is the legal right to propose to our children that theirs is an acceptable alternate way of life. [...] I will lead such a crusade to stop it as this country has not seen before,” she said in 1977 as part of her discriminatory “Save Our Children” campaign, which was backed by religious leaders including Jerry Falwell, who regularly ended up being featured as “Asshole of the Month” in Larry Flynt’s graphic political/porn publication Hustler.
“As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children,” she said, and with those words was ultimately able to bring about the repeal of a Florida law banning discrimination against the gay community.
“If gays are granted rights, next we'll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters,” she added.
While Bryant’s hate campaign prevailed in Florida, the gay community retaliated by boycotting orange juice and raising money for their own campaign.
Meanwhile, Patrick Kearney was taking advantage of the gay men living across the country in California, where many men had fled looking for a more accepting place to live.
Among Kearney’s favorite hunting grounds were gay cruising areas including Hollywood’s Selma Avenue and MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, and as his victims began turning up, along with those of the other two men preying on the region’s gay men, the press had a field day.
Are gay men more apt to kill?
While the 1970s were a time of both freedom and oppression for the gay community, a growing body of experts was quick to protest the idea that gay men were more likely to be predators than their straight counterparts, despite the escalating body count turning up along California’s highways.
“When it’s a homosexual who kills ten people or twelve, or whatever, the headline is HOMOSEXUAL KILLS. It sticks in your mind. You never get the headline HETEROSEXUAL KILLS,” said Robert Gould, a professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College who estimates that heterosexuals and homosexuals are likely to murder at a similar rate.
Others suggested that gays were more likely to kill than heterosexuals, but there were experts to dispute those claims.
“I don't think there is anything inherent in homosexuality that makes them disturbed people,” Judd Marmor, past president of the American Psychiatric Association, told Time magazine.
Still, the turmoil caused by the stigma of being gay, especially when coupled with bullying at school at a young, impressionable age– could cause problems that aren’t inherently related to homosexuality itself, but manifest themselves because of it. That’s especially true when gays feel a sense of self-hatred because they are unable to accept their own homosexuality.
“I think you will find more disturbed homosexuals. The extra fillip of pathology in the homosexual is due to cultural opposition and discrimination,” said Gould.
Homosexuals as targets
At the time when so many gay men were turning up dead alongside California’s highways, experts suggested one of the reasons could be related to the amplified aggression that’s potentially present between two men in a romantic relationship. But still, they said, the most common reason for attacks on gay men – at least in the 1970s – was the inherent danger of sexual hookups between total strangers, a common part of the gay scene.
“Homosexuals are an easy population to get access to in some anonymous way,” said Berkeley psychologist Michael Evans.
“Gays are easy prey,” said Chicago Police Sgt. Richard Sandberg.
And California – with its beaches and anonymity and promise – was a big draw, especially given a new 1975 law repealing a statute making homosexuality between consenting adults a crime.
Murders damages civil rights efforts
Still, the climate was such that many people remained closeted, and at a time when gay advocacy groups were struggling to overcome Anita Bryant’s message of intolerance, news of the Trash Bag Killings was hardly beneficial.
“The timing obviously couldn't have been worse,” Peter G. Fritsch, an organizer of a successful homosexual political action committee, told the magazine The Advocate. “A lot of money has to be raised, and it is hard to raise money when people are fearful. A murder like this one sends people back to their closets in droves.”
It also helped further Bryant’s discriminatory cause by preying upon people’s fears.
“These murders have reminded people that the Houston murders [Dean Corll] were homosexually oriented and that there are many crimes involving homosexuals,” said Orange County State Sen. John Briggs, who campaigned with Anita Bryant in Florida. “It has reminded them that there was a sexual strain in the Corona [Juan Corona, who killed 25 migrant workers in 1971] murders.”
“The effect on us,” says Fritsch, “is something like what would it be if you had a black man arrested for murdering 10 white people during a civil rights drive in
the '60s. There's just no way it can help.”
Hitchhiking made murder easier
For the young people who were lured to California for its free-spirited, Haight-Ashbury vibe, hitchhiking was usually the transportation mode of choice.
For the estimated five percent of gay men who become predators, mostly because of a deep-seated hatred for themselves and their sexual preferences, having such easy access to so many young people was beyond enticing, and Kearney was among the serial killers who couldn’t resist the draw.
And because hitchhikers are usually far away from anyone who knows them intimately, their killers are long gone and on to a new victim before anyone even notices the first victim went missing.
“During the '70s and early '80s, more than a hundred young hitchhikers caught rides on the streets and freeways of southern California and didn't live to tell about it,” said Dennis McDougal, author of the book “Angel of Darkness.”
If they did survive their travel as hitchhikers, many soon learned that survival was tricky in the Golden State, and some found themselves turning to prostitution to make enough money to pay for food, drugs, housing or anything else they might need. Of course that made them as vulnerable as they were when they were on the open road, their thumb out bumming a ride.
In 1980, a year after Patrick Kearney was behind bars, police made it painfully clear how high the murder rate was in California, especially given the number of serial killers at work. (The state comes in fourth for total number of serial killers, surpassed only by Florida, Nevada and Alaska, which takes the top spot, likely due to the long, dark winters that have to drive people crazy.)
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 11