Kearney took police to six sites near the California-Mexico border where, authorities said, “he may have disposed of bodies.”
“He was pretty calm,” said Imperial County Sheriff’s Sergeant Lon Hettinger about Kearney’s five-hour tour of the arid, isolated desert space he’d turned into a massive graveyard.
After a week, police had recovered 12 bodies.
The final body was unearthed from Kearney and Hill’s former Culver City backyard, just behind the movie studio that once housed Desilu Productions.
“This appears to be the first of the murders,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Ed Douglas. “We believe this is the first residence in which they lived together.”
Officials said the victim had been shot through the head.
First court appearance
On July 14, 1977, Patrick Kearney was formally indicted on two counts of murder, including the murder and mutilation of John LaMay.
By that date, Kearney had signed confessions to 28 murders, with twelve of the cases confirmed by police.
Kearney took full responsibility, and told police he killed because “it excited him and gave him a feeling of dominance.”
The next day, because there was not enough evidence linking him to the crimes, a grand jury failed to indict David Hill, and charges against him were dismissed.
“The evidence against Mr. Hill was weak,” said District Attorney Byron Morton, who dropped the charges against him and recommended his release.
Hill was driven away by his nephew, and under the advice of his attorney, never spoke about the case.
Kearney pleads guilty
On December 21, Patrick pled guilty to three counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of John LaMay, 17, Albert Rivera, 21, and Arturo Marquez, 24.
He was sentenced to life in prison.
But because there was a possibility that Kearney could at some point be paroled, police weren’t done working the evidence they had against him.
“A number of filings with the district attorney is anticipated,” said Sgt. Ted Toguchi. “Any information regarding specific crimes is premature and unfair to the parties involved.”
While behind bars, Kearney penned numerous letters to police, gradually confessing to 18 more murders that he was prosecuted for and 11 more that police didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute, bringing his total to 32 killings and ranking him among the ten most prolific serial killers in U.S. history.
“We had conversations with Kearney, and as a result of these conversations, we filed 17 counts of murder,” said Sett.
Another count was added before the case went to court.
Questions will haunt police forever
Two weeks before he was sentenced in Los Angeles Superior Court for the 18 additional murders, Kearney met one last time with Sett, Wilson, Grossman and Los Angeles police Detective John St. John. The question they kept asking, and the one Kearney couldn’t readily answer, was why?
It was, Kearney said, partly sexual gratification, partly fantasies, sometimes anger at his lover David Hill for running off so much. And, in one case, he killed out of sheer fear of getting caught, when he was sure the boy he'd picked up would tell his mother on him.
“I don’t know if we'll ever know the total, because some bodies may be beyond recovery,” said Lieutenant Edward Douglas of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.
He was charged with 18 more murders in February of 1978, including the first 12 victims Kearney had confessed to back in July.
On February 21, Kearney pled guilty to all 18 counts, and after having his guilty plea accepted, asked to be sentenced as quickly as possible.
Kearney – who told psychiatrists that “killing someone sounded sexually exciting” – clearly illustrated the need for the death penalty, said Municipal Court Judge Dickran Tevrizian, who accepted Kearney’s guilty plea for the 18 new murders, then handed him over to a higher court for sentencing.
Because the crimes were committed before California reinstated the death penalty law in 1978, the maximum sentence Superior Court Paul Breckenridge Jr. could give him for the 21 murders was concurrent life sentences for all the crimes.
Kearney’s attorney, had attempted to dissuade his client from pleading guilty – “I believe he has certain psychiatric defenses which is he refusing to let me raise,” Jay Grossman said. “He didn’t want to bring out certain facts in a jury trial. He was ashamed, I guess.” – but Kearney wanted to bring the entire thing to an end as fast as possible.
“He wanted to be done quickly, so quickly that I don’t think we even had the probation reports (usually reviewed by the court) when I sentenced him,” Breckenridge said.
When he was again asked why, Kearney only offered a vague response.
“I prefer not to answer,” he said. “I can’t allow myself to think about it too much. It’s too painful.”
Breckenridge handed down the strongest sentence he could, which was 18 more life sentences, to run concurrently with the sentence he was already serving.
“It certainly appears the defendant is certainly deserving of whatever punishment the court can prescribe, and I would only hope that the Community Release Board will never see fit to parole Mr. Kearney because he appears to be an insult to humanity,” Breckenridge said during the sentencing.
He has, Breckenridge added, “certainly perpetrated a series of ghastly, grisly and horrible crimes.”
So far, the judge has gotten his wish. Kearney, now 75, continues to serve his life sentence at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California, located southeast of Sacramento.
And that's where he should stay, Sett said.
His victims remembered
According to various sources including the Department of Psychology at Radford University in Radford, Virginia, home to one of the country’s top serial killer experts, Kearney’s victims are as follows:
John Doe, 19, killed in 1962
John Doe, 16, killed in 1962
Mike, 18, killed in 1962
George, age unknown, killed in 1967
John Demchik, 13, killed in 1971
James Barwick, 17, date of death unknown
Ronald Dean Smith Jr., 5, killed in 1974
Albert Rivera, 21, killed in 1975
Larry Gene Walters, 20, killed in 1975
Robert “Billy” Bennefiel, 17, killed in 1976
Kenneth Eugene Buchanan, 17, killed in 1976
Oliver Peter Molitor, 13, killed in 1976
Larry Armedariz, 15, killed in 1976
Michael Craig McGhee, 13, killed in 1976
Mark Andrew Orach, 20, killed in 1976
Wilfred Lawrence Faherty, 30, killed in 1976
Randall “Randy” Lawrence Moore, 26, killed in 1976
David Allen, 27, killed in 1976
Merle “Hondo” Chance, 8, killed in 1977
John “Woody” Woods, 23, killed in 1977
Larry Epsy, 17, date of death unknown
Arturo Romos Marquez, 24, killed in 1977
Nicholas “Nicky” Hernandez-Jimenez, 28, date of death unknown
John Otis LaMay, 17, killed in 1977
Chapter 8: Why necrophilia?
In 1979, Karen Greenlee was working as an apprentice embalmer at a funeral home in Sacramento, California, and tasked with driving the body of a 33-year-old man to his funeral. Instead, she disappeared for two days, and when they found her, they realized she’d been having sex with the week-dead man for 48 hours.
“Why do I do it? Why? Why? Fear of love, relationships. No romance ever hurt like this ... It’s the pits. I’m a morgue rat. This is my rathole, perhaps my grave,” she wrote in a letter she’d left in the grave before attempting to overdose on codeine.
She later confessed to having had sex with as many as 40 corpses, calling it her addiction.
While she was reticent to talk to the media, she did give an interview to the author of the book “Apocalypse Culture,” where she spoke candidly about her desire to have sex w
ith dead men.
“There are different aspects of sexual expression: touchy-feely, 69, even holding hands,” she said. “That body is just lying there, but it has what it takes to make me happy. The cold, the aura of death, the smell of death, the funereal surroundings, it all contributes. I find the odor of death very erotic. There is also this attraction to blood. When you're on top of a body it tends to purge blood out of its mouth, while you’re making passionate love.. You’d have to be there, I guess.”
Well, yes, but preferably as the corpse, given the circumstances.
No chance for rejection
Most psychologists say that necrophilia is a way for people to attain sexual satisfaction without rejection, something Patrick Kearney was all too experienced with, despite his long relationship with David Hill.
While Greenlee’s was considered regular necrophilia, Kearney took things a step further and committed necrophilic homicide, killing to obtain a corpse for sexual pleasure. (About 28 percent of people who suffer from necrophilia fall into this category. Almost all of the rest are situational necrophiliacs, and will land jobs where they have easy access to bodies, such as funeral homes or morgues.)
According to Drs. Jonathan Rosman and Phillip Resnick, the foremost authorities on necrophilia, there is also a category called necrophilic fantasy, which allows people with the disorder to imagine sex with a corpse without acting on their impulses.
For Kearney, killing gave him a sense of power, but by then having sex with the corpse he was able to accentuate the power and his feelings of self-esteem and self-worth because the dead could not reject him, no matter how they felt about him before he used his gun to take their lives.
For a man whose first sexual encounter was with the family dog, it should come as no surprise that Kearney took pleasure in the power of necrophilia.
Other known serial killers who practiced necrophilia include Ed Gein, who would masturbate using the genitalia he’d excised from corpses he’d stolen from area graves, Jeffrey Dahmer, Jerry Brudos, Ted Bundy, Dennis Nilsen, who only masturbated over the dead bodies, declaring them “too perfect and beautiful for the pathetic ritual of commonplace sex,” Gary Ridgeway and Henry Lee Lucas, who said, “I like peace and quiet.”
Edmund Kemper, who also used his victim’s dead bodies to satisfy his sexual desires, said, “If I killed them, you know, they couldn't reject me as a man. It was more or less making a doll out of a human being... and carrying out my fantasies with a doll, a living human doll. I am sorry to sound so cold about this, but what I needed was to have a particular experience with a person, to possess them in the way I wanted to. I had to evict them from their bodies.”
The hints people missed
According to an article appearing in Serial Killer Magazine, Kearney had a fondness for knives that he didn’t do much to try and hide.
He regularly purchased butcher knives at a grocery store operated by Jerry Stevens.
He was, Stevens later told police, “a loner with an eerie sense of quiet about him.”
Only Patrick Wayne Kearney knows how many he murdered, dismembered and dumped.
The Redondo Beach resident told police he began killing in 1962, then started his deadly once-a-month spree in 1974, preying mostly on hitchhikers, hustlers and street kids - one-third of them from the South Bay area.
Killer soon forgotten
Police probably relaxed a little with the Trash Bag Killer behind bars.
But here’s the thing about serial killers.
As soon as one is captured and put away, another one – perhaps inspired by a sadist he’s seen on the news or already on the prowl – is waiting in the wings to take their place.
In the United States alone, experts estimate that there are 40 to 50 serial killers operating at one time.
After Kearney came the Hillside Stranglers, followed by the capture of the Toolbox Killers Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, who tortured teenage girls and forced them to pose for Polaroid photos before raping and murdering them, and Satanist Richard Ramirez, better known as the Night Stalker, who tortured and murdered 13 victims.
Chapter 9: Parole becomes a nightmare for police and families
Because of the laws in place during the time Kearney was committing his crimes and was sentenced, he not only was unable to receive the death penalty – it did not exist at the time – the law also prevented him from being given consecutive life terms, which would have ensured that he stayed behind bars until death.
That means every six years, the detectives who heard his confession, the families who lost their children and siblings, must brace themselves to relive their nightmare, over and over again to ensure Kearney never has a chance to see the world again as a free man.
“I plan to contact as many of those families as I can,” said Sheriff’s Detective Al Sett, who served as lead investigator on the case before he retired. “I have a certain integrity about working homicides. I like to see killers in jail. That’s where they belong. The mere thought this guy could get out. Who knows what a parole board will do after three times?”
Elizabeth McGhee, who didn’t realize her brother had driven off with Kearney until it was much too late, said, “We just always presumed he’d be in prison for more than 100 years.”
“This guy’s a killer, a serial killer,” said sheriff’s homicide Detective Louis Danoff. “He’s got a master’s degree in murder. We’re trying to alert people about him to keep him where he is. One of our concerns is, people have forgotten about him.”
Family continues to fight against parole
Robert Bennefiel’s sister feels as though she has been fighting to keep Patrick Wayne Kearney behind bars for most of her life, a process that insists on unearthing the pain that began the day she, her brother and her parents learned that their brother was a victim of one of California’s most heinous criminals.
Initially they believed the 18-year-old student at Torrance, California’s Aviation High School had run away, and so did police, until a neighbor read a newspaper article about Kearney, and realized the missing man was Kearney’s type.
“Police took a picture to Kearney in 1981, and asked, ‘Is this one of your victims?’” Born said. “Kearney identified him. To this day it eats my other brother up that the picture he took out of his wallet was the one that slime looked at.”
Kearney said he’d dumped Bennefiel’s body in a landfill; his remains have never been found.
In some way, the lack of a body gives Born a bit of comfort.
“I don’t know if it’s doubt or hope,” she said. “We don't have a body. Kearney didn't know my brother’s name. There's always that little bit in your mind. For so many years, you see someone who looks like him, you take a double take, even to this day. We moved on. “But it’s always in your head. It doesn’t go away. There's always going to be anger and bitterness. I mean, my God, he killed my brother!”
Michael McGhee’s sister also continues to fight to keep Kearney behind bars.
“I want to let them know the slime he is," she said. “I want to tell them how he affected people's lives. He needs to account for what he’s done. He took my naivete away. Before this happened, I used to go down to the beach at night and walk along the ocean. But he took that away. I realized I couldn't do that anymore. There were a lot of things I wouldn't do anymore. It wasn't safe. I realized how sick the world is.”
For families of the victims, the case never stops. Not as long as Kearney lives. Not as long as he pleads for parole.
“That son of a bitch,” said Stephen Demchik, who desperately misses his son, John. “That son of a bitch.”
Chapter 10: Confession recanted
In 1981, Patrick Kearney wrote a letter to the Riverside Press-Enterprise recanting his confession, four years after he pleaded guilty to the murders of 21 young men and boys in and around Redondo Beach.
“I have another tidbit of news for you,” Kearney wrote. “I didn’t kill anybody. That’s all I'll say at
the moment.”
In his retraction, he asked to be released from Soledad Prison, where he at the time was serving out his two life sentences.
It was the second petition for release from prison. A month earlier, he had asked Riverside Superior Court to release him, in part because he did not commit the grisly murders, but also because he felt he was unfairly advised by his defense attorney.
“The person in custody pleaded guilty to felonies which he did not commit,” Kearney said. “The pleas were given due to threats and other forms of duress.”
It’s unlikely he’ll ever get out of prison, though, given the nature of his crimes.
Deputy District Attorney Diane Vezzani puts Kearney's chances of ever being released “between slim and none because of the horrible nature of the offenses themselves,” she told one regional newspaper.
Further cementing his life sentence is his unwillingness to attend his parole hearings, which disappoints Vezzani tremendously, since he does not have to face the friends and families of his victims once every six years, although they attend to ensure that his concurrent sentencing terms don’t somehow allow him the freedom to kill again.
“I’d like to tell him, ‘Big man. What a big man you are,’” Vezzani said. “’Had to use a gun to have your way with little boys. What a big, brave man.’”
She’s not the only one who attends Kearney’s parole hearings religiously.
“It’s critical that we testify at his (parole) hearing to make sure we keep him where he belongs,” said detective Al Sett, who sat through Kearney’s grueling 3 ½-hour confession. “This guy’s a killer. A brilliant mind. My fear is if he gets out, he won't make the same mistakes again. And we'd never catch him.”
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 13