True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology)

by Jack Rosewood

  “In this county alone, we have 30 to 40 dumps every year,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Captain Walt Ownbey.

  A deadly stretch of highway

  There’s a section of California Route 74 known as Ortega Highway that has been a favorite dumping ground for dead bodies for years.

  Between Orange County and Lake Elsinore, where Patrick Kearney loved to go camping, the 44-mile stretch of roadway has been used by many notorious killers, including William Bonin, the infamous “Co-Ed Killer,” who dumped at least four of his victims along the desolate stretch of highway. (For a time, Bonin shared the name the Freeway Killer with Patrick Kearney while police sorted out the killer responsible for the growing pile of bodies.)

  Even Randy Kraft, the killer who kept the title Freeway Killer after Bonin and Kearney were renamed, visited a restaurant along this stretch of road, ordering an avocado sandwich and a Coke at El Cariso Mountain Restaurant.

  But Trash Bag Killer Kearney got there first, and dumped one of his victims there, stuffed into an industrial-sized trash bag, in 1977.

  “There are shallow graves out here that just haven't been discovered,” California Highway Patrol Officer Steve Miles told the Los Angeles Times in 2009 from the comfort of his patrol car. “People will do anything out here.”

  It’s the stuff of both real and imagined nightmares, added true crime writer Dennis McDougal.

  Ortega Highway, he said, “is this kind of unique strip of remote, undeveloped and primitive real estate for people of ill intentions. It gained this dark, negative reputation as a place where evil could be done with impunity.”

  Sadistic and prolific

  When gay serial killers kill because of their inability to accept their sexuality, it comes with exaggerated rage, making them prone to what Harold Schechter, a true crime writer who specializes in serial killers, calls “overkill.”

  Gay serial killers like Kearney usually take sadistic pleasure in the torture, mutilation or dismemberment of their victims. In Kearney’s case, however, he rarely tortured his victims, and only raped, mutilated and dismembered them after they were dead. He saved his torture for his youngest victims.

  He did fit the other part of the profile, though. Gay serial killers are also more prolific, Schechter said.

  While Kearney was only tried for 21 murders, he confessed to many more, but there was not enough evidence to bring about a conviction.

  Based on his confessions, Kearney’s total murder count is believed to be as high as 43 victims.

  Chapter 6: When Kearney went hunting

  For Kearney, the urge to kill most often occurred after he and Hill had had a fight.

  He would then take either his Volkswagen Beetle or his truck for long drives, choosing solitary roads for traveling. Along the way, he would pick up his favorite prey – young male hitchhikers, which were pretty prolific during the peace and free love era of the 1970s, or young men he met while cruising the area’s gay bars.

  It’s likely the mild-mannered, nerdy look of Kearney’s made him seem quite innocuous and safe, but once in Kearney’s car, the young men or boys had little chance, despite Kearney’s small stature, because Kearney usually either shot them or strangled them as soon as he was able to catch them off guard.

  Kearney was a clean, meticulous, detailed murderer. Once he had killed his victim, most often with a shot to the head, he would drive them to a secluded place as if they were going on a romantic rendezvous, and he would then sodomize their corpses.

  Having faced so much rejection during his formative years, its likely Kearney raped his victims after they were dead so they could not reject him. The act also gave him the ultimate sense of power over those victims who resembled his childhood tormenters. By raping them, he put his victims into a submissive role, demonstrating a dominance that he was never able to gain during the years when he was bullied.

  After having sex with his victims, Kearney would take them home, wash them, drain the blood from their bodies in the bathtub and dismember them.

  He would then neatly wrap the parts in industrial-strength trash bags, getting rid of the remains on his way to work, during lunch or late at night when he was driving around in search of a new victim.

  Grisly deeds unearthed

  Police began to have an inkling that more than one serial killer was on the loose beginning on April 13, 1975, when the mutilated remains of 21-year-old Albert Rivera turned up near San Juan Capistrano, home to the cliff swallows that return to the region each spring in a flurry of feathered wings and song.

  This find stuffed into a trash bag was not completely uncommon in California in 1975, given the sheer number of serial killers who were making the rounds during the 1970s, a time when young people from across the country were moving to California in hopes of a better life, making themselves targets by adopting dangerous lifestyles.

  But the neatness of the packaging made Rivera’s death different than the others.

  “The body was wrapped in a fetal position, using heavy-duty nylon fiber tape,” detective Al Sett reported to the district attorney. The body “was then placed in two heavy-duty commercial plastic trash can liners. He was then placed in a common household green plastic trash bag which was also wrapped with tape.”

  Sett communicated with neighboring police agencies, and found that Orange County had a body found in a trash bag, as did Riverside.

  By summer’s arrival, eight more bodies had been found, shot and dismembered, each similarly wrapped and strewn like trash through Los Angeles, Imperial, Riverside, San Diego and Orange counties.

  Given the similarities, police were able to pin the murders on a singular suspect thanks to the M.O. that was so much like a signature.

  All of the victims were gay, all had been found nude, all had been shot in the head with a gun that was a similar make and model, many were dismembered and mutilated and all were stuffed into identical plastic trash bags.

  The pattern gave police a certain number of clues, and while they publicly dubbed the perpetrator “The Trash Bag Killer,” behind closed doors the case was called “fags in bags,” and no one was trying too hard to find the killer.

  Then, for almost two years, things were quiet. The down time, however, was too good to be true.

  Nightmares in bags

  On January 24, 1977, a state employee was working beneath the San Diego Freeway’s Lennox tunnel, when he tripped over a tightly-wrapped garbage bag containing something significantly weighty.

  It turned out to be 28-year-old Nicolas Hernandez-Jimenez, a Los Angeles prostitute.

  Apparently, the Trash Bag Killer had not gone silent after all.

  And police were about to close in on him, like it or not.

  In death, LaMay helps track a killer

  John LaMay, who wore his sandy blond hair long and swept to the side to accommodate a cowlick, was 17 when he left his home in El Segundo for the last time, on March 13, 1977.

  “He’d spent the night at a friend’s house before without telling me,” said LaMay’s mother, Patricia LaMay.

  Still, he’d never done that on a school night, so she knew instinctively that something was wrong.

  Patricia called one of John’s friends, a neighbor who said that he’d seen LaMay at about 5:30 p.m. that Sunday evening, and learned that the teen was headed to Redondo Beach to meet a man named Dave, who he’d met at a local gym.

  When LaMay arrived at Dave’s house sometime after 6 p.m., Hill was not at home, but Kearney invited the teenager to come in and wait for him.

  The two watched television for a while, until Kearney pulled out his .22 Derringer and shot LaMay in the back of the head.

  He stashed the body in a closet to hide it from Hill, then later, dismembered it, washed and wrapped it, then dumped it in the desert south of Corona.

  Five days later, police found John’s body, his corpse dismembered and his torso stuffed inside multiple trash bags.

  His killer had taken the time to car
efully cut his victim up, draining the body of blood and washing the parts before packaging them neatly into five industrial trash bags sealed with ivory nylon tape. Three of the bags were stuffed into a nearby oil drum, while two that apparently didn’t fit were discarded on the ground. LaMay’s head was missing.

  The MO matched the “fag in a bag” killings, but detectives didn’t know that in death, John LaMay would give them the clues they needed to stop the ice-cold killer in his tracks.

  Searching for a killer

  Assigned the case, detectives Al Sett and Roger Wilson began by questioning John’s friends, who said the young man liked to hang out with two guys named Pat and Dave, who lived in Redondo Beach.

  Further questions led them to the home of Patrick Kearney and Dave Hill. They had an idea what they were looking for, based on evidence they had found on not only John’s body, but also on the tape wrapped around the bags he was housed in, including blue fibers.

  Kearney and Hill were completely cooperative when police arrived, and expressed shock over the death of their friend John LaMay. They allowed the officers to enter their home, but as they watched them gather evidence, they became more concerned.

  Police initially took a sample of carpet fibers from the house, and when it matched fibers found on the tape that sealed the trash bags, they returned again.

  This time they painstakingly took samples of Kearney’s pubic hair, Hill’s pubic hair and the hair of their little white poodle. The men complied, but their concern mounted.

  In order to go any further, police needed a warrant, so they returned to the station without Kearney and Hill. When they notified the pair that they now had the warrant they needed and planned a thorough search of their duplex, Kearney tossed all of his revered Dean Corll newspaper clippings, resigned from his job at Hughes Aircraft and the two men fled to Hill’s family home back in El Paso, Texas.

  When Sett and Wilson arrived with their warrant, they had no idea what kind of hell that had just walked into.

  Inside, they found one of their most important bits of evidence - a bloody hacksaw, the one Kearney used to dismember some of his victims, coated in dried bits of John LaMay’s flesh and blood.

  Using Luminal, they found residual blood all over the bathroom, and in another part of the house, found a roll of nylon filament tape like the tape used on the trash bags to wrap up John LaMay.

  A search of Kearney’s office at Hughes Aircraft yielded the source of the industrial trash bags linked to at least 20 murders.

  Meanwhile, Hill’s family members urged the two to turn themselves in.

  Finally, after much prodding, they did, driving back to California and arriving at the Riverside County Sheriff’s station on July 1, 1977.

  When they walked in, they pointed to a wanted poster hanging on the station wall.

  “We’re them,” said Hill.

  “These were not two individuals who wanted to remain on the run,” said Riverside County Sheriff Ben Clark.

  Mother protests son’s arrests

  David Hill’s mother, Edna, immediately came to her son’s defense, and told reporters, “My David would do anything like that. I know the Lord’s going to help. He’ll take care of him.”

  Hill’s father, J.W. Hill Sr., was not around to support the family. He hanged himself in 1948, leaving Edna to pick up the pieces of her broken life.

  Chapter 7: A confession brings horror to an end

  Once in police custody, Kearney decided to make a full confession.

  “He wanted to talk,” Sett said. “For some reason or another, he wanted to talk. I was known as a pretty good interrogator, but Kearney really wanted to talk. He wanted to get this stuff off his chest.”

  His first order of business, however, was to exonerate his lover, Dave Hill, who Kearney claimed had no idea about the murders or the aftermath, since he hadn’t been home and had no idea what dark secrets his longtime lover was keeping.

  During that first 3 ½ hour session, Kearney said he committed the crimes when Hill was away, and only once had been forced to store the corpse of one of his victims in a closet for a few days to prevent Hill from catching him.

  It’s a scenario that seemed unlikely given the meticulous, time-consuming nature of Kearney’s murders, which would have been very difficult to hide, and after Patrick Wayne Kearney started talking, both were arrested and held on $500,000 bonds.

  Still, Kearney told reporters he would “plead guilty all the way” prior to his confession, likely in order to prevent implicating Hill, since there was a moratorium on California’s death penalty at the time, and the most serious sentence he could receive would be life in prison.

  Kearney made a full confession of his crimes, and during the first hours of interrogation admitted to a total of 28 murders, his victims between the ages of 5 and 28. He later copped to seven more.

  After hearing Kearney’s confession, “investigators surmised at this time that there are 15 workable cases. There are at least 13 additional cases that have been discussed by the suspects that may be involved also,” said Ben Clark. “There are at least 28. There may be more, there may be less.”

  On some killings Kearney was vague, unable to remember names or his method of disposal. On others his memories were clear and highly detailed.

  He talked about the victims whose names he didn’t know, and gave sordid details about the ones whose names he did remember.

  He told detectives Sett and Wilson that he committed his first murder while living in Culver City in 1962.

  After shooting the man between the eyes, Kearney said, he dismembered and skinned the corpse. Then he decided to retrieve the bullet so it couldn't be traced to his gun. He used a hacksaw to access the slug.

  Sett and Wilson learned that John LaMay had come over on March 13, 1977, to hang out with Hill, who wasn’t home at the time. Kearney had invited the teen in to watch television to wait for his friend, then shot the teen in the back of his head. Later, he dismembered John’s body, placing much of it in the trash bag and disposing any identifying features such as his head and hands in the desert.

  The desert was Kearney’s favorite dumping ground, for good reason.

  “Things disappear very rapidly in the desert,” he said. “You can put a small animal on an anthill and it disappears right in front of your eyes.”

  Preliminary hearings were set for July 15.

  Boy’s questions led to death

  During questioning, Kearney also talked about Michael McGhee, and said that he hadn’t intended to kill the boy.

  Kearney told police that the camping trip was legit, or at least had been until the duo stopped at the place Kearney shared with Hill to pick up some of the supplies they’d need for the weekend.

  According to Kearney, Michael McGhee was taking too much of an inventory of Kearney’s possessions, which made the older man nervous, given the kid’s arrest record.

  “We were going to spend the weekend just outing and … he kept talking about how he stole this guy’s truck,” Kearney told detectives in his confession. “And, then, when I got him in the house, he kept asking me, he said, ‘Oh, you have all these things around,’ you know, had all my radios and stuff, and he kept talking about, you know, ‘You don't have any burglar alarms, do you? If you do, where are they?’ You know, he kept asking very pertinent questions. I thought, ‘Yeah, I made a mistake in befriending this kid. Letting him know where I live.’ And I shot him before we ever went anywhere. Didn’t go anywhere for the weekend.”

  Well, Kearney did, anyway. He cleaned up any evidence and disposed of what remained of Michael McGhee.

  “I disposed of the body,” he said. “You aren’t going to find him.”

  Robert still lives with the overwhelming guilt of not have caught up with his brother to keep him from getting into Kearney’s car.

  “I just refused to believe it,” said Robert, who used fantasy as a coping mechanism at the time of Michael’s disappearance, and still does. �
�There was no body. There was no physical evidence. I would rather think Michael’s off in Mexico, goofing off, maybe on a beach somewhere.”

  Police hope for more answers

  Kearney initially confessed to three murders, then upped the count to 10, leading officials to believe that many of their unsolved murders could be linked to the prolific Kearney.

  They began asking pointed questions. Did he pick up Marines? Did he subdue his victims with booze and pills? Kearney stared at them blankly.

  When Kearney was asked if he had ever inserted anything into the anuses of his victims, he shook his head indignantly and said, “I am not the Wooden Stake,” unwilling to confess to anything that was not part of his routine.

  (Serial killers are an interesting bunch. One of the other men trolling California’s highways for victims, William Bonin, was also highly offended when he was linked to a murder that included that amputation of a young boy’s penis. “I do not cut the dicks off little boys,” Bonin said.)

  Kearney did say that he used towels to prevent the blood from seeping through his floors as he dismembered the bodies.”

  At their arraignment on July 3, only Kearney responded when asked if he wanted a lawyer. He said, “Yes, I do.” Hill was given a public defender.

  A tour of death

  After his confession, which had allowed police to close the books and several unsolved murders, Kearney then showed officers “six possible locations where he may have disposed of bodies,” according to Clark.

  Some had already been found, and Kearney was able to identify them for investigators.

  Kearney then took police on a grim trek through five counties before reaching the arid desert where many of his sodomized, dismembered victims had been laid to uneasy rest.