35. The Freeway Killer Saga: Part 1 Patrick Kearney

The Freeway Killer Saga - Part 1 

Patrick Kearney " The Trash Bag Killer "

Southern California in the 1970s was a sun-drenched paradise, but its massive, sprawling freeway system became the ultimate hunting ground for a terrifying killer. 

In Part 1 of our exclusive 3-part Freeway Killer Saga, Matt dives deep into the chilling mind and methodical crimes of Patrick Kearney the pioneer of the California highway panic. 

​Known as the "Trash Bag Killer," 

Kearney used his genius-level IQ, his unassuming appearance, and his background as an aerospace engineer to turn the interstates into an assembly line of death. 

We explore Kearney’s early life, his psychological profile as an "inadequate psychopath," his double life with partner David Hill, and the fatal mistake in 1977 that finally brought his horrific twelve-year reign to an end. 

​Listen now to understand how the golden era of hitchhiking became a delivery system for a nightmare.

 ​Known Victims of Patrick Kearney
​Patrick Kearney officially pled guilty to 21 counts of murder to avoid the death penalty, though he confessed to 28 and later claimed his victim count was as high as 43. Below are the names of his known, identified victims. We speak their names to ensure they are remembered as more than just a statistic.

• ​Spring 1962: "Unknown" 1 (Age 19)
• ​1962: "Unknown" 2 (Cousin of "Unknown" 1, Age 16)
• ​Unknown Date: "Mike" (Age 18)
• ​December 1968: "George"
• ​June 26, 1971: John Demchik (Age 13)
• ​September 22, 1973: James Fletcher Barwick (Age 17)
• ​August 24, 1974: Ronald Dean Smith Jr. (Age 5)
• ​April 13, 1975: Albert Rivera (Age 21)
• ​October 31, 1975: Larry Gene Walters (Age 20)
• ​March 1, 1976: Kenneth Eugene Buchanan (Age 17)
• ​March 21, 1976: Oliver Peter Molitor (Age 13)
• ​April 18, 1976: Larry Armendariz (Age 15)
• ​June 11, 1976: Michael Craig McGhee (Age 13)
• ​June 20, 1976: John Woods (Age 23)
• ​August 1976: Larry Espy (Age 17)
• ​August 1976: Wilfrid Lawrence Faherty (Age 20)
• ​August 1976: Randall Lawrence Moore (Age 16)
• ​September 15, 1976: Timothy Brian Ingham (Age 19)
• ​Fall 1976: Robert William Benniefiel (Age 17)
• ​Fall 1976: David Allen (Age 27)
• ​October 5, 1976: Mark Andrew Orach (Age 20)
• ​January 1977: Nicolas Hernandez-Jimenez (Age 28)
• ​February 26, 1977: Arturo Ramos Marquez (Age 24)
• ​March 13, 1977: John Otis LaMay (Age 17)
• ​April 6, 1977: Merle "Hondo" Chance (Age 8)

 • ​(Multiple victims remain unidentified)
 

​Sources & Research
• ​Los Angeles Times Archival Articles (1977–1978): Coverage of the "Trash Bag Murders," the multi-county task force, and Patrick Kearney's eventual surrender in Riverside County.
• ​Riverside County Superior Court Records: The confession and plea deal of Patrick Wayne Kearney.
• ​The Trash Bag Murderer by Rose G. Mandelsberg.
• ​Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky (Analysis of the "inadequate psychopath" profile).
• ​FBI Behavioral Science Unit: Historical analysis of M.O., necrophilia, and geographic profiling related to the California highway murders.
​

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Southern California in the 1970s was sold as a sun drenched paradise. And the arteries of that paradise were the freeways. The 5, the 405, the Pacific Coast Highway, they represented absolute freedom. The ability just to put your thumb out, catch your eye, and disappear into the sunset. But in the shadows of that concrete sprawl, the very thing that promised freedom became a delivery system for a nightmare. Young men and boys were vanishing from the roadside, only to be found discarded along those same stretches of asphalt. At first, the police thought they were hunting just one killer. One horrific, unstoppable monster using the massive web of the California highway system as his personal dumping ground. The media gave this killer a name. But the terrifying truth, the reality that law enforcement couldn't bring themselves to comprehend until it was almost too late, was there wasn't just one killer hunting the California interstates. There was three. Patrick Kearney, William Bonin, and Randy Kraft. Three distinct predators operating in the same area, hiding in plain sight behind each other's chaos. Before we step into the darkness this week, just a bit of housekeeping. Thank you to everyone who's been listening, sharing, and supporting the show. If you haven't already, please take a second to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening right now. It is the single best way to help the show grow. You can also find all the visual media over on our socials. You can find me on Instagram, Blue Sky, TikTok, and all the other major socials at Homicidal Tendency. The link will be down in the show notes. Alright. Housekeeping done. Let's get into it. So for the next three episodes, we're doing something a little bit different. We're embarking on a massive three-part saga. When you look at the history of true crime, there's certain cases that define that area. But the story of the Free Will Killer is unique because it isn't just one story. It's a terrifying, overlapping Venn diagram of pure evil. Over the course of this trilogy, we're going to deep dive into three distinct serial killers: Patrick Kearney, William Bonin, and Randy Craft. We're going to look at their backgrounds, their psychologies, and their brutal methodologies that left nearly a hundred young men dead. But more importantly, we were going to look at how their timelines interlaced, how the chaos caused by one killer provided the perfect camouflage for the next. But to understand how three separate monsters could operate in the same geographic area at the same time without law enforcement realize they weren't hunting different men, you have to understand the hunting ground itself. You have to understand it's a time before cell phones, before interconnected police databases, and long before we knew better to get into a stranger's car. Let's rewind to Southern California in the 1970s. By the 70s, Southern California had built an empire of concrete. The internet state system was sprawling a massive web of asphalt. We had the 5, the 405, the Pacific Coast Highway, thousands of miles of road connecting the beaches to the valleys and the cities to the deep deserts. Despite millions of people living shoulder to shoulder in Los Angeles and Orange County, the freeways were a place of profound isolation. Remember, this is the 70s. Like we said, there's no cell phones, no GPS tracking, no highway traffic cameras. If your car broke down on a dark stretch of the 91 freeway at 2 in the morning, you were completely alone. Your only option was to walk, or wait for the kindness of a passing stranger. And back then, strangers were everywhere. Today, if we see someone standing on the shoulder of an on-rap with their thumb out, our first instinct is usually caution. But in the 70s, hitchhiking wasn't just common, it was a cultural staple. It was an accepted everyday mode of transportation. You had teenagers thumbing rides down to the beach on the weekends, you had young Marines on weekend leave from Camp Pendleton trying to get up to Los Angeles, and you had drifters, musicians, and runaways pouring into the Golden State looking for a new life. There was this prevailing counterculture of peace, love, and sharing the road. Getting into a car with a stranger wasn't seen as a death wish, it's just how some people got around. And this created a highly transient population. Thousands of young men moving up and down the California coast, untethered and largely unnoticed. And unfortunately, it's the perfect environment for a predator or predators. And law enforcement was entirely unequipped to handle what was coming. This was an era before DNA testing, but more importantly, it was an era before interconnected police databases. Information lived on paper, buried away in filing cabinets. If a young man was picked up by a killer in Los Angeles County, murdered while driving through Orange County, and his body was dumped in a ravine in Riverside County, that generated three separate reports across three separate jurisdictions. Three different police departments looking at puzzle pieces, entirely unaware that other departments held the rest of the puzzle. And the first man to truly recognize the bloody potential of this concrete web was a quiet, highly intelligent aerospace engineer named Patrick Wayne Kearney. To anyone passing him on the street or sitting next to him in traffic, he didn't look like a predator. He was slight, quiet, and entirely unassuming. He held down a respectable job as an electronics engineer at Hughes Aircraft. He was, by all documented accounts, highly intelligent, but behind that quiet intellectual facade was a deeply disturbed mind. A man who looked at the transient, trusting population of Southern California, not as human beings, but as prey. Kearney didn't just commit murder, he industrialized it. He used his brilliant analytical brain to turn these endless stretches of asphalt into his own personal assembly line of death. Long before William Bonnen brought his van, and long before Randy Kraft started keeping his infamous scorecard, Patrick Kearney was out there in the dark, perfecting a grim and terrifying routine. But monsters of this scale are rarely born overnight. The psychology of a serial killer is usually a slow, fastering buildup of resentment, isolation, and dark fantasies. To understand how an intelligent and capable man became the pioneer of the freeway panic, we have to look at where the cracks first started to form. We have to go back to his childhood. Patrick Wayne Kearney was born on September 24th, 1939, in Los Angeles, California. He grew up in a post-war America that was obsessed with a very specific, traditional idea of masculinity. Men were supposed to be strong, stoic, and physically capable. Patrick was none of those things. From a very young age, he was exceptionally frail. He was thin, physically weak, and prone to illness. In the brutal hierarchy of childhood and adolescence, he was a walking target. The bullying he endured wasn't just an occasional teasing, it was relentless, physical, and deeply humiliating. But here's the detail that makes Kierany so dangerous. While his body was weak, his mind was operating on an entirely different level. He possessed a genius level IQ. He was brilliant, and that created a toxic, volatile dichotomy inside him. Every day he was being shoved around, mocked, and beaten by boys he knew he was vastly smarter than. He understood his own intellectual superiority, yet he was utterly physically powerless to defend himself. When a highly intelligent mind is subjected to constant humiliation and powerlessness, it doesn't just break, it adapts. It builds a sanctuary. For Kearney, that sanctuary was a rich, isolated fantasy world, but his fantasies weren't about escaping to a better life. They were about retribution. They were about dominance. As he entered his teenage years, Kearney realized that he was gay, which in the 1950s only deepened his profound sense of alienation. He was terrified of rejection, he was terrified of being vulnerable with another human being. Because in his experience, human beings only brought out pain and humiliation. The fear of rejection mutated into something incredibly dark. He began to fantasize about necrophilia. In Kearney's twisted psychology, a dead body was the ultimate perfect companion. A dead body couldn't reject him. It couldn't mock him for being small or frail, and it couldn't fight back. It offered the one thing he had been denied his entire life: absolute, uncontested control. As he transitioned into adulthood, Kearney desperately tried to wear a mask of a normal man. In the late 50s, he enlisted in the United States Air Force. But the military is an institution built on conformity and brotherhood, and Kearney was fundamentally incapable of either. He didn't fit in, he couldn't connect with the other airmen, and he was eventually discharged. He returned to the civilian life and decided to weaponize his higher queue. He landed the job at Hughes Aircraft, working as an electronics engineer. Hughes Aircraft was a highly respected cutting-edge aerospace company. Kearney wasn't some drifter living on the fringes of society. He was professional. He was analytical, methodical, and well paid. The job gave him financial independence, but more importantly, it gave him the ultimate veneer of respectability. And then in the early 60s, he found the final piece of his camouflage. He met a young man named David Hill. Hill was everything Kearney wasn't. He was taller, younger, and physically more dominant. To the outside world, Hill looked like the alpha of the relationship, but behind closed doors, Kearney's intellect allowed him to completely manipulate and control the dynamic. The two became partners and eventually moved in together. To their neighbors, their families, and his coworkers at Hughes, Patrick Kearney was a quiet, dependable, boring guy in a stable relationship. He had successfully built the perfect double life. The frailed, bully kid had become a wealthy, respectable engineer. When criminal psychologists look at serial killers, they often categorize them into distinct types. You have your grandiose narcissists, the Ted Bundies of the world, men who believe they're God's gift and act out a warped sense of entitlement. Patrick Kearney was not that. Kearney fits a much darker, much more pathetic, and arguably more dangerous full for all the inadequate psychopath. Despite his genius level IQ, Kearney knew exactly where he stood in the social hierarchy. He knew people saw him as weak. He knew he was socially awkward. He internalized every instance of bullying, every rejection, and every perceived slight. He didn't just have an inferiority complex, he was consumed by a burning, subconscious rage against a society that made him feel like garbage. And that word garbage is the absolute key to understanding Patrick Kearney's psychology. When a predator feels small, they don't attack people who are larger or more powerful than them. They hunt downward. They look for prey that is even more vulnerable than they are. For Kearney, those targets were the young men, the drifters, and teenage runaways standing on the shoulder of the California freeways. They were boys who had no power, no money, and often nobody waiting for them at home. By picking them up, Kearney instantly flipped the power dynamic of his entire life. Inside the confined space of his car, he was no longer the frail bully kid from East LA. He was the one behind the wheel. He was the one in total control. He was God. But Kearney's psychology required more than just control over a living person. Living people are unpredictable. They can fight back, they can scream, and most terrifyingly to Kearney, they can judge you. This is where his necrophilia becomes the center pillar of his pathology. For Kearney, the act of murder wasn't the finale, it was just the preparation. The gunshot was simply the mechanism he used to transform a living, unpredictable human being into a compliant, silent object. And there's one other layer to add, like there's more you can put to it, there's different type of killers. There's the type of killer that enjoys the process of killing, and then there's what they call a product killer, which Kearney was definitely a product killer. He doesn't love the killing, he just wants the dead body. And once the victim was dead, Kierney could project whatever fantasy he wanted onto them. He finally had a captive audience that could never reject him. But perhaps the most chilling aspect of Kearney's psychological profile is how he compartmentalized the aftermath. Remember, he was an electronics engineer. His daydrequired him to break down complex systems, solve problems, and clean up his workspace. He applied that same exact analytical engineering mindset to his murders. Once his dark, necrophilic fantasies had been fulfilled, the psychological high would wear off, the fantasy would evaporate, and he was left with a horrifying reality. A course. At that moment, the victim ceased to be a companion. They became a liability, an engineering problem that needed to be solved. This is where the brutal mechanical dismemberment began. It wasn't done out of frenzy or passion. It was clinical. He would methodically cut his victims apart, specifically to make them easier to transport, and then he would stuff the remains into a heavy industrial trash bag. Psychologically, you cannot ignore the symbolism of the trash bags. Kearney took young men who had trusted him, he executed them, used them, and then literally threw them out like Sunday's garbage along the side of the freeway. It was the ultimate tragic projection. And so, he turned the young men of Southern California into exactly that. Serial killers rarely start with murder. There's almost always a ramp-up period, a gradual crossing of boundaries where dark fantasies slowly bleed into the real world. For Patrick Kearney, the escalation began behind the wheel. In the early to mid-60s, Kearney started taking long, aimless drives along the Southern California interstates. At first, it was just warriorism. He would cruise the 5 and the 405, watching the young men with their thumbs out, projecting his necrophilic fantasies onto them as he drove past 60 miles an hour. But eventually, just looking wasn't enough. He he needed to test the waters. He started pulling over, started offering rides. Imagine the scene. It's a hot California afternoon. A teenager's been standing on the shoulder of the freeway for an hour, exhausted. Finally, a car pulls over. It's a harmless-looking Volkswagen bug. The driver's a small, quiet, well-dressed man in his late twenties or early thirties. He looks like a high school science teacher, or a mild-mannered accountant. To a hitchhiker, Patrick Kearney was the safest bet on the road. For a while, Kearney would just pick the boys up, drive them to the destination, and let them go. He was testing his own nerve. He was realizing just how incredibly easy it was to get a stranger completely isolated, strapped into the passenger seat of his car, miles away from anyone who knew them. He realized the moment the passenger door closed, he was in total control. The trap was perfect. All he needed was a weapon. Because we just covered the deep dive into his psychology, I want to quickly summarize his his MO, his modus operanda, before we get into the actual timeline. Kearney's methodology was terrifyingly efficient, and it was defined by a lack of warning. Unlike William Bonin or Randy Craft, who would come later and who savored the prolonged terror of their victims, Kearney didn't want to struggle. He didn't want his victims to know what was happening. He would pick up a young man, offer him a beer or a cigarette to get him to relax and start driving. He would wait until the victim was completely at ease, looking out the window or staring at the radio. Then, while keeping his left hand on the steering wheel and his eyes fixed on the road ahead, Kearny would quietly retrieve a handgun, often a twenty-two caliber pistol with his right hand. He would bring it up to the victim's temple, and without a single word. And he would pull the trigger. And if you're like me, you asked this question How do you maintain a spotless normal life when your vehicle is a rolling crime scene? And the answer lies in his weapon of choice and his obsessive engineering mindset. Kearney almost exclusively used a small 22-caliber Derringer pistol. In the world of ballistics, a 22 caliber is a very specific ground. It doesn't typically create the massive explosive exit wounds you see in higher caliber weapons when fired directly into the temple or the back of the head. The bullet often enters the skull and bounces around inside, trapping the catastrophic damage and vast majority of the blood internally. So there was no massive blowback, no blood spraying across the windshield. Kearney would shoot the victim and immediately prop them up against the window. To anyone passing them on the highway, it just looked like a passenger who had fallen asleep on a long drive. Once the victim was dead, Kearney would pull off into a secluded area. He would spend hours with the body, acting out the necrophilic fantasies that had plagued him since childhood. And then the aerospace engineer took over. The fantasy ended, the cleanup began. He would methodically dismember the remains, package them tightly into heavy-duty industrial trash bags, and heave them into the brush along the freeway off-ramps or deep into the riverside county desert. A horrific clinical disposal of human life. And that leaves me with a massive question. Where the hell was his partner, David Hill, while Kearney was running around doing all this shit? Well, here's the answer. Hill and Kearney's relationship was deeply volatile. They fought constantly, and it was this dynamic and domestic arguments that actually served as a trigger for Kearney's hunting. When the tension in the house got too high, Kearney would storm out, get into his car, and go for a solitary drive to blow off steam. Hill would stay home thinking his boyfriend was just driving up the coast to cool down. He had absolutely no idea that his boyfriend was actually out cruising the freeways, looking for a target to project his rage onto. And during the periods when Hill would temporarily leave Kearney, sometimes moving all the way back to his ex-wife in Texas, Kearney's kill rate would violently escalate. The absence of his partner removed the only tether, keeping him grounded in reality. When a serial killer operates for over a decade, their victims often get reduced to a tragic, blurry statistic. But these were young men and boys with families, futures, and lives that were stolen on the shoulders of the California freeways. To really grasp the absolute terror of Patrick Kearney's reign, we need to trace the bloody timeline of his victims. We need to see how the violence escalated from isolated incidents into an unstoppable assembly line of terror. Kearney's first confirmed kills actually predate the freeway killer panic by nearly a decade. In the spring of 1962, he hadn't purchased the Volkswagen bug or the pickup truck yet. He was riding a motorcycle. He picked up a 19-year-old hitchhiker, convinced the young man to get on the back of the bike, and then drove him out into the desolate desert near Indio, California. Out there in the emptiness, Kearney shot him, sexually assaulted him, and left him. A few months later, he repeated the process with a 16-year-old boy. For the next few years, the violence seemed to go dormant. Kearney was building his respectable life. He was working his aerospace job, and he had met David Hill. But by late 1967, the urges returned, and this time, Kearney crossed a massive, terrifying threshold. He brought the horror into his own home. In December of 1967, Kearney lured a young man, a victim who this day is known to authorities only as George, back to the residence he shared with David Hill in Culver City. The audacity of his murder is staggering. While the young man was sleeping in the main bedroom of the house, Kearney walked in and shot him directly between the eyes with his 22 caliber pistol. Then he dragged George's body into the bathtub, and this is where Kearney's clinical engineering mind took over. He didn't just dismember George. He surgically extracted the bullet from the young man's skull so the ballistics could never be traced back to his gun. He then buried the remains in the yard, right behind the garage. He had successfully turned his own home into a slaughterhouse, completely undetected by the man he lived with. But Kearney was terrified the police would come asking questions about George, so he forced himself to stop killing for another few years. By 1971, Kearney was actively hunting the freeways. The transient youth culture of California was at its peak, and Kearney took full advantage. In June of 1971, he murdered 13-year-old John Demchuk. Think about that. A 13-year-old boy, vulnerable, likely looking for a ride or an escape, manipulated by an adult who appeared entirely safe. In September of 1973, Kearney picked up a 17-year-old James Fletcher Barwick. James was executed in the passenger seat, shot in the back of the head, becoming another victim discarded in the brush. But it was in 1975 that Kearney's signature fully materialized. In April of 1975, Kearney murdered 21-year-old Albert Rivera. Kearney brought Albert back to his home, dismembered the young man, and then packaged his remains. But this time, Kearney used something highly specific to dispose of the body. He brought home heavy-duty industrial strength plastic trash bags, the exact type of bags used by his employer, Hughes Aircraft. This was the birth of the trash bag murders. By 1976, Kearney had lost complete control of whatever restraint he possessed. He was in a frenzy. He was picking up young men, executing them, cutting them apart, and tossing the heavy-duty bags along the 91 Freeway, out in the Riverside Desert, and along the Mexican border. He killed at least a dozen young men in that single year. The police were finding the bodies, but because of the scattered dump sites and the massive jurisdictional boundaries of Southern California, the task forces were overwhelmed and disjointed. Patrick Kearney, the serial killer, was wealthy, employed, and in a long-term relationship and entirely off the radar of law enforcement. He had built an untraceable, unstoppable system, but every system has a flaw. And for Patrick Kearney, that flaw arrived on March 13th, 1977. On that day, he picked up a 17-year-old boy named John LeMay. To Kearney, LeMay was just another face, another target. He executed the teenager, subjected him to the exact same postmortem horrors, dismembered him and stopped him into those huge aircraft trash bags. But Kearney had made a fatal catastrophic miscalculation. John LeMay had told his neighbors exactly where he was going. When you look back at this case, like from the modern era, it's incredibly easy to play armchair detective. We look at the staggering body count in 75 and 76, and we ask, how on earth did law enforcement not catch him as sooner? The bodies were literally piling up on the side of the road. But like we hinted to before, you you have to erase modern policing from your mind. Erase the DNA. Erase the cell phone towers. Erase the interconnected digital databases. In the 70s, police work lived on paper, it lived in filing cabinets, and it was strictly originally bound by geography. Patrick Kearney's assembly line of death wasn't just brutally efficient, it advertently weaponized the very map of Southern California against the police and created a bureaucratic nightmare. Imagine the cycle of one of Kearney's victims. A teenager is hitchhiking in Los Angeles County. That's where he goes missing. A missing person's report is followed with the LAPD or LA County Sheriff's Department, but Kearney doesn't kill him there. He drives him south across the county into Orange County and pulls the trigger. Then he takes the body back to his house, dismembers it, and drives it east. He finally dumps the heavy-duty trash bags in a ravine in Riverside County. Riverside authorities find the bags, they open a homicide investigation for an unidentified John Doe. So now you have Los Angeles looking for a missing kid, Riverside looking for a killer, and Orange County entirely unaware that the murder just took place on their own highway. In the 70s, unless a detective in Riverside happened to pick up the phone and call a very specific detective in Los Angeles to compare notes on a hunch, those two pieces of paper were never gonna meet. Kearney was slipping through the cracks of the jurisdictions, but eventually, the sheer volume of the bodies became impossible to ignore. Trash bags were turning up along the 91 freeway, the 110, and out in the desert. The media got wind of at first, and then the police task force had to face the music. They started conducting the dots. They realized that these weren't isolated incidents. Southern California had a massive, unprecedented problem on its hands. And they gave this serial killer the name of the freeway killer. And this is where law enforcement made a fatal, terrifying error. They built the profile for the freeway killer and began attributing all the young men found dead along the highways to one singular killer. They assumed they were dealing with one prolific monster. They had absolutely no idea they were looking for three. An overlapping Venn diagram of pure evil. While Kearney was aggressively dumping his victims in the industrial trash bags in Riverside and LA, an anomaly began to emerge down in Orange County. Eventually different bodies started to be found. These young men weren't shot in the head, they weren't dismembered, and they weren't in bags. Instead, these victims were found carefully and meticulously posed. They had been heavily drugged, often with volume and alcohol, and there were signs of prolonged, horrific torture. It was a deeply sadistic, intimate kind of violence that completely contradicted Kearney's quick clinical executions. When Orange County detectives found these bodies, they threw them into the same file as the freeway killer. They just assumed the killer was evolving. They thought he was changing his MO to confuse them. They didn't realize that they were completely looking at a different game, played on the exact same board. While Patrick Kearney was tearing through his victims in 75 and 76, another predator was quietly operating right alongside him, a man named Randy Kraft. Kraft was using the media frenzy surrounding the trash bag murders as a smokescreen to protect his own deeply twisted scorecard of death. Law enforcement wasn't just looking for a needle in a haystack. They were looking for three different needles in three different haystacks and treating them all like the same needle. At this point, the investigation was drowning in static. The police were overwhelmed, chasing shadows across county lines, completely blind to the actual monsters driving right past them. They needed a miracle. They needed a killer to slip up, and in March of 1977, like we said, Patrick Kearney finally made a mistake that would bring his dark, double life crashing down. For twelve years, Patrick Kearney hadn't successfully built an impenetrable wall between his quiet professional life as an aerospace engineer and the slaughterhouse he was operating on the side of the California freeways. His methodology relied on one absolute unbroken rule: total anonymity. He hunted transients, hitchhikers, and boys who had no connection to him whatsoever. But on March 13th, 1977, Kearney broke his own rule, and it brought the House of Cards crashing down. The victim's name was John LeMay. He was 17 years old, and unlike the dozens of nameless boys Keierney had picked up on the side of the road, John LeMay wasn't a stranger. LeMay actually knew David Hill, Kearney's partner, and he knew where they lived. On that Sunday afternoon, LeMay went over to their house in Redondo Beach to visit. But David Hill wasn't home, only Patrick was there. Kearney invited the teenager inside, and in a terrifying display of how deeply his necrophilic urges had metastasized, Kearney didn't even bother to take his victim out to the car. He didn't wait for a cover of darkness. While Lemay was sitting in the liver room, watching television, Kearney walked up behind him with his 22 caliber pistol and shot him in the back of the head. He lived on his sick fantasy. Then he dragged the teenager into the bathroom, dismembered him, packaged the remains into those industrial trash bags, and dumped them out in the the riverside desert. Kearney washed his hands, cleaned the bathtub, and went back to his normal life, assuming John LeMay would just become another statistic. But John LeMay wasn't transient. He had friends and family who knew exactly what his plans were for that day. LeMay had told a neighbor that he was going over to see David and Patrick at their house in Redondo Beach. When his remains were discovered on May 18th in Riverside County, it didn't take police long to identify him, and once they had a name, they retraced his final hours. For the first time in over a decade, police had a glowing neon arrow pointing directly at the killer of the freeways. Detectives descended on the Redondo Beach house. They knocked on the door, but no one answered. Armed with a search warrant, they breached the home. To the naked eye, the house looked perfectly normal. It was clean, tidy, the home of a respectable professional. But when forensic teams moved into the bathroom, Kearney's clinical cleanup failed him. They found microscopic traces of blood in the plumbing, they found human tissue, they found hair, and hidden away. They found the hacksaw he had used to butcher his victims. The police immediately put out warrants for the arrest of Patrick Kearney and David Hill. The media exploded. The faces of the two men were plastered across every television scream and newspaper in California. The freeway killer has a name. But Kearney and Hill, they were gone. Sensing the walls were closing in, Kearney had convinced Hill to pack a bag and run. They fled California entirely, disappearing into the vast expanse of the American Southwest. They drove straight to El Paso, Texas, slipping right past the fingers of a massive multi-agency manhunt. For several weeks, the state of California held its breath. The monster had been identified, but was in the wind. The catcher of Patrick Kearney wasn't a dramatic guns-blazing standoff. In fact, it was quiet, pathetic, and deeply bureaucratic. While hiding out in Texas, the reality of the situation finally sets in. David Hill, who had been completely oblivious to the murders taking place in his own home and vehicle, was now a prime suspect in one of the most prolific serial killing sprees in American history. And in a twisted, bizarre display of loyalty, Kearney decided he couldn't let Hill take the fall for his crimes. On July 1st, 1977, Patrick Kearney and David Hill walk into a police station in Riverside County, California and calmly surrendered. Detectives put Kearney in an interrogation room, and they expected a monster. They expected a raving lunatic. Instead, they got an aerospace engineer giving a status report. Kearney set across from the detectives and in a flat, emotionless monotone began detailing an assembly line of death that defined comprehension. His only demand was that they cleared David Hill's name. In exchange, he would give them everything. He didn't just confess to the murder of John LeMay. He confessed to 28 murders. He calmly walked them through the timeline, the locations, the gun, the dismemberments, and the heavy duty trash bags. He provided details only the killer would know. He showed zero remorse, zero empathy, and zero emotion. When Patrick Kearney sat in that interrogation room in Riverside in 1977, he officially confessed to 28 murders. He ultimately pled guilty to 21 of them. By taking that plea, he managed to avoid the death penalty, receiving a life sentence instead. But the true scope of his assembly line of terror might never actually be known. In the decades since his capture, Kearney has casually boasted to investigators that his real body count might be closer to 43. And if that's true, it means there's likely dozens more young men and dozens more of those heavy-duty trash bags still buried out in the vast, unforgiving emptiness of the California desert. But perhaps the most unsettling detail of the Patrick Kearney story isn't the final bond account, it's the fact he's still breathing. If you drive up to Amador County today and the Mule Creek State Prison, he's there. The frail bully kid who grew up to be an engineer and one of the most prolific serial killers in American history is still alive, sitting quietly in a cell. He has survived the chaos he created, and the highways they moved on. But the terror on the 1970s freeway was far from over. Because while Patrick Kearney was locked away, law enforcement was about to realize the nightmare hadn't stopped. It just changed lanes. Next time on Homicidal Tendency, part two of the freeway killer saga, we dive into the horrific reign of William Bonnet. So stay safe out there, and I'll see you next time.