Later on, after college and a stint in the military, Kearney gave marriage a try, but the short-lived union ended in divorce.
Then, as fortune would have it, he met the man who would eventually become his longtime lover, and when Kearney fled back to California to start over yet again, his new partner David Hill soon followed.
As an adult, Kearney had developed into a man with the buttoned-up look of an accountant, sort of like New Jersey’s John List, who was a fugitive for almost 18 years after murdering his entire family and moving across the country to take on a new identity. Kearney appeared mild-mannered and studious, and the electrical engineer could have had it made. He landed an engineering job at Hughes Aircraft, founded by none other than the eccentric and successful Howard Hughes, whose friends and lovers included Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Ginger Rogers, Gene Tierney and Joan Fontaine.
But Kearney couldn’t really shake that troubled childhood of his, no matter what good fortune later came his way.
While he didn’t learn to hobnob with the rich and famous during his years at Hughes Aircraft, he did take away one thing from his time in California. He learned that his buttoned-up looks were appealing enough to some of the young men who were part of the burgeoning gay scene, and Kearney took advantage of it.
Unfortunately for many of those boys and young men, usually thin and blond with side-swept long hair, they resembled Kearney’s childhood bullies and they would be the ones forced to pay for the others’ torment, as Kearney’s fantasies festered and finally burst open in a bloody torrent of gunshots, necrophilia and dismemberment.
“This guy’s got a master’s degree in murder,” said Los Angeles County detective Louis Danoff.
Chapter 1: Murder in the making
Growing up, Patrick Wayne Kearney described his childhood as comparable to the nightmare youth suffered by fictional teen Carrie White in the Stephen King novel of a high school prom gone wrong. The story was brought to life on the silver screen in a movie starring Sissy Spacek, who sought deadly revenge on her fellow students after being drenched in pig’s blood while wearing the homecoming queen crown.
The oldest of three boys, Kearney did not get the luck of the draw, and was a slight, effeminate, wimpy little boy who wore glasses with thick lenses. His classmates didn’t let him forget any of it for a minute. His fellow students called him “girly-boy,” “queer boy” and “little faggot.”
Unfortunately, the cruel bullying was occurring during some of the most important, formative years of Kearney’s life.
The consequences of bullying
Bullying has long been linked to criminal behavior, in part because the emotions and experiences that shape our thinking are for the most part formulated in our younger years, experts say.
Not only do our experiences as youth shape how we think, they also shape how we see ourselves, since peers have the most influence on our self-esteem.
In 1902, sociologist Charles H. Cooley suggested that our perception of ourselves comes from how others see us, and our peers’ opinions essentially represent a “mirror image” of ourselves.
As for Kearney’s looking glass?
“As a kid he was often beat up by others since he was small and called queer by his peers though he was interested in girls,” said psychiatrist John McMullen.
Kearney eventually established a long-term romance with a man, so it could be his classmates saw something in him that he himself did not, or that their cruel words sparked ideas at a time when he was developing sexually.
Somebody would pay
While it’s likely that during the time he was being bullied, he outwardly did what most tortured children do - which is to not only pretend not to hear the words, but to also pretend they don’t hurt - inside, Kearney seethed, and he had no intention of forgetting any of the pain his classmates caused him.
Instead, all the while he was being teased and tormented by his peers he was perfecting his fantasies of murder, which were growing more detailed and heinous with every passing year.
“Victims [of bullying] are at greater risk for later criminal activity,” wrote Dr. Laura Finley, an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Barry University. “Studies have shown victims may act out later in life as a way to feel powerful. Many victims become the aggressor.”
For Kearney, whose torment seemed relentless, aggression was putting it mildly.
Kearney’s simmering rage took hold early, and by early adulthood it had boiled over.
He was desperate for revenge, and there was likely no turning back once his fantasies of murder became linked with sex – the ultimate power play for someone who has felt like an underdog for much of his life.
His later actions would suggest that for Kearney, those endless unpleasant experiences with his peers developed into a self-loathing that eventually turned outward. Unable to exact revenge on his tormenters, he instead found targets that served as stand-ins or substitutes for those who had bullied him.
If he couldn’t go back in time to make his bullies pay, he would find someone else to make things right. Targeting young gay men also allowed him to kill some part of himself that caused him immense hatred.
A dangerous outlet
Of course, his rage might have come out in some different, less deadly, way had his father not purchased a .22 caliber rifle to hunt animals when Kearney was just 13. Even at this early age, burgeoning on adolescence, it wasn’t animals Kearney was planning on hunting.
His father also gave him some hunting tips, and told him that the ideal place to shoot a pig was above and behind the left ear, which would result in the least amount of blood and would better ensure a kill as the bullet was likely to lodge in the brain.
Kearney used these tips to perfect his skills on animals, all the while fantasizing about killing humans, instead. He must have found the idea arousing, because he also later confessed that he had had his first sexual experience around the same time, albeit with the family dog.
Kearney switched schools when he entered junior high, but a new school – this time the Diane S. Leichman Special Education Center – didn’t mean less abuse. Physically he hadn’t changed, and it’s possible his classmates could tell somehow that he was the type to fuck the family pet.
As any bullied student will know, school days were hell for Patrick Wayne Kearney.
It was just as well, then, that George decided to leave the LAPD and become a salesman with a travel agency, a job that would mean moving the family to Arizona.
This time, although still faced with bullying at school, Kearney was better able to ignore the abuse, and he immersed himself in his education, where he developed a love of languages and became fairly fluent in Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.
After graduating from high school, Kearney attended El Camino Community College in Torrance, California, where he studied engineering.
After graduation in 1958, he joined the U.S. Air Force, hoping to travel the world and put his education to good use overseas, but instead of some exotic locale like he’d hoped, he instead found himself stationed in Texas.
Life, luck, changes
There was some luck to be had, however, because in 1960, just before receiving an honorable discharge from the Air Force, he met David Hill, a high school dropout from Lubbock, Texas, who had been discharged from the army for an undisclosed personality disorder, presumed to be homosexuality, which was considered by the military to be a mental disorder and disallowed within its ranks.
The two were immediately attracted to one another, despite Hill’s high school sweetheart turned wife back at home.
Hill was tall and muscular with the looks of a construction worker. He was the antithesis of Kearney, who at 5’5” was much shorter and skinny, like the teen getting sand kicked in his face in those old Charles Atlas ads in the backs of comic books.
But in this case – like in many relationships – opposites attracted, and the two began what
would be a tumultuous on-again, off-again love affair that lasted 15 years, even as Hill struggled to choose between his wife and his gay lover.
Eventually Kearney tired of Texas and decided to return to California, maybe to escape the sweltering Texas heat, and in 1961, Hill chose to follow. The two settled in Long Beach, and Kearney’s life was finally looking up.
It wouldn’t be long, however, before Hill began feeling restless, and after about a year, Hill left Kearney to hitchhike around the country, eventually making his way back to his wife in Lubbock.
Chapter 2: Murder and a descent into madness
Looking for anything to push pass the pain of his loss, 22-year-old Kearney began taking history classes at California State University at Long Beach, but soon found that nothing really distracted him.
For Kearney, the rejection was monumental, and it unleashed a hotbed of pent-up rage that resulted in a campaign of death that would last for more than a decade.
Losing his lover brought back all of Kearney’s childhood aggressions, and he began taking them out on hapless young men he encountered along the way.
The first victim, a 19-year-old from either Louisiana or Oklahoma, made the mistake of accepting a ride on Kearney’s motorcycle. As soon as they were somewhere secluded, Kearney put his hunting lessons to use and shot the young man in the back of the head, behind the left ear like his police officer father had taught him.
Kearney then had some fun, sodomizing and mutilating the young man’s body before abandoning it out somewhere off of California State Route 86.
The second murder was an act of protection on Kearney’s part, because his first victim’s 16-year-old cousin had seen the older teen ride off with him, and the older man didn’t want to leave behind any witnesses.
In order to protect himself, Kearney returned to the place he’d picked up his first victim and enticed the younger cousin to also go for a ride. It would be the last decision the teen would make.
An 18-year-old named Mike would be the next to die, but David Hill’s return would quiet Kearney’s rage and bring this first string of murders to an end.
It was 1963, and Kearney landed that dream job at Hughes Aircraft, founded in 1932 by Howard Hughes. His new position not only came with prestigious, but also a generous paycheck. To celebrate, the lovers moved to Culver City, where they found a place not far from the movie studio that had once housed Desilu Productions.
Coworkers later said Kearney was an exemplary employee. A “model worker,” said one.
Murders become more dangerous and detailed
In 1966, David Hill and his wife Linda finally divorced, and for almost two years, things were completely normal in the Kearney-Hill household.
This is, until the spring of 1967, when the two went to Tijuana, Mexico, where they ran into one of Hill’s old friends, George, who invited them to stay at his place for the duration of their vacation. It would be a fatal mistake for George, because Kearney was a rather nasty houseguest.
Instead of being appreciative of having a place to stay, Kearney shot George as the man slept in his master bedroom, then dragged the body into the bathtub, first for sex, then to dismember him. He also painstakingly skinned the body with an X-Acto knife and removed the bullet from George’s head to lessen his chances of being caught. He then buried the remains both in George’s backyard as well as behind the garage.
It has been taking a chance to kill George while Hill was in the house, especially given the time Kearney had spent with the body. But perhaps the thrill of discovery was also something that excited him, or maybe Hill knew about the murders all the while, despite Kearney’s later admission that Hill had had nothing to do with any of his crimes.
We may never know if Hill knew what was going on in the night while they were visiting his friend George.
And as for the man from Tijuana, his remains would not be discovered for a decade.
California dreams turn to dust
Something about the murder of George – nerves, the fear of getting caught or possibly, Hill’s anger if he had in fact been a witness to any part of the grisly murder scene – made Kearney decide to lie low for a bit, and he bought a house in Redondo Beach, spending just over $20,000 on the purchase.
While he anticipated a love nest, he and Hill fought often, and whenever they did, Kearney jumped into his Volkswagen Beetle and headed back to Tijuana, where he is believed to have killed several more men, dismembering them and disposing of their bodies in trash bags.
Kearney eventually went off the rails when he awoke one morning to find Hill gone again, this time only leaving behind a note.
His only way to vent his rage was to kill, but it would be almost 10 years before any evidence from Kearney’s revenge killings would be noticed.
And by then, the overwhelming number of bodies turning up along California’s highways – Randy Kraft and William Bonin were also trolling the state for young men they often dumped along the roadside like so much trash – had become a nightmare for California’s police force.
Blood is the drug
By 1974, Kearney was addicted to the thrill of killing, and his murder rate had escalated to at least one victim a month.
As his rate increased, his patterns evolved.
He either picked up unsuspected hitchhikers or trolled gay bars and bathhouses in search of men who were bigger than he was, allowing him the thrill of being in control after all those years as a child when he wasn’t.
He usually didn’t waste any time, and once they were in his vehicle, Kearney shot them with a Derringer .22 pistol, leaving them slumped over in the passenger seat as if they were sleeping as he drove somewhere secluded where he could rape their dead bodies.
He later told police he shot his victims while they were asleep or distracted, and chose to shoot them behind the ear “because they did not bleed much when shot there.”
Kearney rarely left the corpses where he sodomized them. Instead he would bring them home to drain their blood and dismember the bodies, placing the remains in industrial-strength plastic trash bags that he would either dump in the desert, along California’s less traveled freeways, in the canyons behind Los Angeles or beneath tons of trash in area landfills.
Chapter 3: Parents face worst nightmares
On August 24, 1974, five-year-old Ronald Dean Smith was late for dinner.
He’d been playing in the park with a friend, and although the other boy was at home, Ronnie had failed to make it back to his grandmother’s house, where he was staying while his mom was out of town.
As it got later, Shirley O’Conner began to panic, and she called the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lennox Substation to report her missing grandson.
Police learned that the two boys had been playing in the park’s sandbox when they got into what the little boy called “a sand fight.” He had gone home to clean up, while Ronnie, in tears, remained at the park.
Police immediately searched the park and interviewed neighbors in a door-to-door canvass, but nothing turned up. It was as if Ronnie Smith had vanished into thin air.
“There were no clues. Nothing,” said Lt. Ray Gott. “The boy had just disappeared.”
A week after Ronnie’s disappearance, his divorced mother, 22-year-old Joann O’Connor, made a heartfelt plea for the return of her son at an emotional press conference she held at the police station.
“The reason we wanted you all to come here is to tell whoever had Ronnie how much we want him back. We definitely do feel in our hearts that he’s alive and OK and that he’s safe. I just want to tell whoever he’s with now that he’s very important to me, that he’s… he’s all I’ve got. And that I love him so very much. I know that whoever took Ronnie took him because they wanted a little boy to love, and I know you took him because he’s so beautiful and that you won’t hurt him.”
If only she’d been right about her assumptions.
On Sunday, October 13, 1974, almost two months after Ronnie’s disappearance
, some kids were collecting cans along Riverside County’s Ortega Highway when they discovered the body of a badly decomposed young boy.
The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department was soon on the scene, and based upon the clothing the corpse was wearing, along with an autopsy, they realized they’d found the missing 5-year-old Smith boy.
There were no suspects in the boy’s death, although police later learned that the boy had been held for two days and was raped and tortured before being killed, suggesting that Kearney’s rage was especially out of control during that time.
Another family faces horror
Stephen Demchik always held out hope that his 13-year-old son John, had gone to San Francisco – the birthplace of bands such as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and one of the most gay-friendly cities in the United States - when he disappeared on June 26, 1975.
He had been standing on a corner in Inglewood when Kearney offered to give him a ride home.
But instead of taking the teen home, Kearney shot Demchik in the head as soon as the boy got into his truck, then drove 15 miles southeast of Calexico along the California-Mexico border, a secluded area where he was able to drag his unconscious victim from the truck, undress him, rape him and leave him to die. No one knows how long Demchik was lying in the dirt, bloody, naked and in pain.
Not knowing any of this, Stephen Demchik told his wife, Norma, and John’s four siblings that he had found a better job in San Francisco, and would be moving there for a while. In reality, he was desperately searching for his son.
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 10
