Original subtitles

Orange County investigators are

dealing with a possible mass murderer and a list of victims

that continues to get longer.

People start finding bodies along the highway.

These young men are just disappearing.

What in the name of God is going on out there?

The California of the 1960s was the freewheeling summer

of love in San Francisco.

All these people all over the United States

were drawn to Los Angeles, Hollywood.

There are predatory people who can take

advantage of people like that.

Investigators are still going over the records

of eight murder cases.

The papers were just flooded with these murders.

His killings were so horrific that even

the seasoned detectives had a hard time listening to it

and looking at the evidence.

He had sex with these men sometimes before, oftentimes

after he killed them.

There were beheadings.

There were victims that had tree branches that were rammed

up inside of the victims.

As soon as you get one of those,

this isn't something random.

This guy is going to do more.

This is the 33rd killing of the same

type in the last few months.

This is just one of 41 murders

of teenage boys in five Southern California counties

over the past eight years.

We're not just dealing with one serial killer here.

Some other psychopath is out there.

It's like a trilogy of terror with these guys.

I couldn't believe anybody that

could do something so evil.

He very much enjoyed torturing

and killing these young boys.

He loved the sound and he loved the terror in their face.

He spent a lot of time cruising

around Hollywood Boulevard for hitchhikers.

A lot of times, it was the drive to their death.

In the '60s and '70s, Los Angeles County was actually

agricultural and middle class.

You know, a lot of citrus growing is still going on.

Industries coming in, aircraft industries, for example,

and that's where a lot of the workers would live.

I grew up in El Segundo, California, so right here

in the LA area, just south of the LAX big airport and

the beach cities.

Nice place.

Like, when I was growing up, you'd go out in the morning,

and you didn't have to come home

until the streetlights went on, you know, and

your parents just-- you know, you know you're out,

but just be home by dinner.

You know, it was kind of a very safe place to grow up.

You know, kids played on the block.

It was just a very, very sweet town.

The California of the 1960s was the freewheeling,

beads and music, the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967.

The sense that we were in the age of Aquarius,

that everything was going to be beautiful and

wonderful and peaceful.

Well, the phrase about peace and love

didn't necessarily apply to gay people.

Most of the gay scene in LA was centered around downtown.

The gay culture that existed was not meant to be

noticed by straight society.

Gay bars were like speakeasies.

They did not advertise themselves.

You usually needed a special knock or

some kind of a password to get into them.

They were owned by mafias and criminal syndicates.

Any kind of gay socializing had to be

done very carefully, because there were laws against it.

That looks innocent enough, doesn't it?

Lots of young people hitchhike, but

sometimes there are dangers involved

that never meet the eye.

Let's take the case of Jimmy Barnes.

Jimmy played baseball all afternoon,

and he didn't feel like walking home,

so he decided to thumb a ride.

There's this fascinating film that

came out called "Boys Beware".

It's kind of a classic old movie from the '60s warning

kids not to get in cars with older men, because they

might be homosexuals.

What Jimmy didn't know was that Ralph was sick,

a sickness that was not visible like smallpox,

but no less dangerous and contagious,

A sickness of the mind.

You see, Ralph was a homosexual.

The film completely conflates being a pedophile

and being a homosexual together as if they're

one and the same thing.

And we kind of watch it now and think,

oh, God, the language they're using is terrible

and it's very anti-gay.

But one of the most remarkable things about it

is just this hitchhiking culture,

of-- of just hitching a ride home with whoever picks you up,

and the vulnerabilities with that.

If you're going from Kentucky, you

might be able to exist in a small town as a queer person,

but you wouldn't have any real sense of community there.

And so LA or New York, but especially LA,

there's this big, giant community

that is just coming out of the shadows,

and things you only imagined happening to yourself

are just a bus ticket away.

And that is very alluring at that time.

If all you have is your bus ticket and

a little change in your pocket, then

you have to figure out how to live and how to survive.

Because of the public attitude towards gay people,

a lot of young men that came out to their families

would get thrown out of the house,

and so they'd be living on the streets.

They were young, they were in their teens,

so they couldn't get a job.

They couldn't find work, so a lot of them

would resort to prostitution, hustling,

which made them vulnerable to a lot of dangers.

By the early 1970s, we're seeing a rash of what looked

like random murders, opportunity murders,

young men picked up along the highway or in bars

or just on the street, murdered,

and then their bodies dumped.

It was really a disturbing trend.

As the body count started to increase,

these corpses found along freeways,

in trash bags, industrial trash bags, are these connected?

Is there one person responsible for all

of these dead bodies around the Southern California freeways?

Well, it began for me when I was out in Riverside

in Banning, which was an outlying area halfway

between LA and Palm Springs.

The sheriff's department came in with some evidence

they wanted to look at.

They were suspicious that they had some connected homicides--

all men, all nude, most, if not all, shot in the head

with a .22 caliber bullet.

It is the desert.

And some of these bodies were dismembered and found

in heavy duty, thick plastic bags

with drawstrings, not the kind you buy at the grocery store.

The media started dubbing him the trash bag killer.

So often, you find multiple murder victims who

do have something in common.

They may know one another.

They may live in the same neighborhood.

That was not the case here.

These are young men who lived all across Southern California.

And, gradually, investigators began

to put together characteristics that they did have in common.

Many of them were teens, early 20s.

They were perceived to be gay, if not gay.

Los Angeles has never had a good metropolitan

transportation area.

You can't get on a subway here and

be somewhere in 20 minutes like you

can in any other major city.

You know, the bus system, you know, it's just not conducive.

So back in those days, carefree, you thumbed a ride.

And people would hop in pickup trucks, cars, whatever.

It didn't matter.

I am the youngest of seven.

I had older brothers and sisters

that I could see as I looked back as I got older, yeah,

they were part of that hippie era.

John is number five out of the seven.

He's eight years older than me.

He was into the party scene, smoking pot and

doing your drinking and going out with your buddies

to do that.

Again, that was, like, the influence of the time.

John and my brothers and sisters

all did the hitchhiking thing.

There are a lot of things that can go wrong,

the worst of which would be that you

thumbed a ride, got into a van with a serial killer.

The bodies are found.

They're sometimes along highways.

But there's nothing found around them, just the body.

There's no evidence.

And then we realized, they weren't killed there.

They were killed at some other location,

and their body is just dumped somewhere.

That causes a real problem for the police department,

because who investigates a homicide?

It's where the crime occurred, where the killing occurred.

Where the bodies were found is not where they were killed.

Some of the bodies were up in Malibu.

They were in Ventura, some places in San Bernardino.

We say Southern California as if it's one place,

and it is in the sense of expanse,

but it's not in terms of police and how they regard this.

In the county of Los Angeles alone,

back then, you would have had at least five dozen cities

in different jurisdictions, different police,

sheriffs' departments, investigators, all of them

divided up according to their political boundaries,

their city limits, and not necessarily

talking to one another or comparing

notes about these bodies that were

turning up all over the place.

By the mid-1970s, law enforcement

knew they had to get together and compare

notes on these victims.

The detectives came together in Orange County

and started discussing the commonality

between these cases.

There were definite patterns.

They were all shot.

They were shot above the temple in the back of the head.

He just used a little .22 derringer

to shoot them on the left side of their head

with a .22 derringer that had a right hand twist.

The twist on the caliber is just another piece of evidence

that they're all the same.

The left side of the head was important, because it indicates

a right-handed person.

Derringers hold two shots, and

it may sound like it's small and,

oh, what damage can that do?

But they take these long range ...22 caliber rifle rounds,

really, and if you get the hollow point version,

it causes a tremendous amount of damage at close range.

This is why derringers would be so

effective if you're trying to surprise someone and kill them.

Detectives deal with rotten people all the time,

but not of this magnitude.

I mean, how guys like this exist, I don't know.

He had sex with these men, sometimes before, oftentimes

after he killed them.

He would cut orifices in their body and have sex with them.

He would remove their pubic hair on occasion,

experiment with them.

There was no evidence of physical torture.

They were all postmortem wounds.

He would hit these bodies after they were dead--

wouldn't hit them beforehand.

He somehow was able to dismember,

and as the autopsy surgeon said, disarticulate, because it

was-- it was expertly done.

Most people would not be able to do that very neatly.

He did it like a surgeon, like a butcher.

He knew exactly where the joints were, how to cut

and take apart these bodies.

The pattern started to emerge,

and detectives started thinking, uh-oh,

we have a serial killer.

Investigators in Riverside County

are still going over the records of eight murder cases,

which may be the start of a bloody trail of 40

or more homosexual killings.

Mutilated remains of five young men

have been found in three other counties since 1975.

John was, I would say, a bit different.

He was artsy, very internal, introspective.

I have a brother that's six years older than me,

and then John's two years older than him.

I did share a room with John and Joe, which, trust me,

that wasn't great at times.

Trying to scare me at night, you know.

I remember the flashlight on the ceiling and the, ah,

you know.

He had the most problems.

I think my parents, I would say,

seemed like they had the most trouble with him,

because he was always threatening to run away.

There was a lot of tension, I remember

that, between my mom and dad and John as a teenager.

You know, because I was sharing a room,

I remember him being in the room

and just threatening to leave.

I do remember the last time I saw him.

My parents were gone.

He was kind of in charge of me, along with my other brother.

John fed me a hot dog.

I knew that he was supposed to get me dinner

before he goes anywhere.

And then Joe was there, remembers

my brother getting picked up, and

I-- that's a memory I have pretty distinctly.

I remember being at home, sitting in the living room,

and I could see Mom and Dad were

upset because John did not come home the night before,

because that's unusual.

Even with his partying, he'd always come home at night.

And so they woke up to him not being there.

And, of course, I'm seeing this, and they're panicked.

The next thing I know, my dad's on the phone

with the police department and reporting him missing.

You know, we have a missing 17-year-old son.

I remember that scared me.

I remember, this is not right, even though I knew there was

tension in the relationship.

Part of my thought maybe back then was maybe he finally,

actually did run away, because I remember

him always threatening that.

For the detectives, the list was just

getting longer and longer, and by this time,

the body count was alarming.

Somebody's doing this.

He's loose.

He's doing a lot of them.

It's dangerous.

This became such a matter of concern that a local newspaper

offered a reward of $2,000, which doesn't sound like much

now, but a considerable amount then,

$2,000 for the arrest and conviction of whoever

had picked up, murdered, mutilated,

dismembered these young men.

There was Ronald Dean Smith Jr. He was just five years old.

They found his body in October 1974.

The medical examiner ruled that he had been suffocated.

Larry Gene Walters, 20, killed October 31st, 1975.

Found less than two weeks later.

Again, shot, dismembered in a trash bag.

Michael Craig McGhee, just 13, in June 1976,

shot in the back of the head, sodomized, dismembered.

Wilfred Lawrence Faherty, 20 years old,

killed in August of '76, shot in the back of the head.

Detectives were tearing their hair out at this point,

and then, all of a sudden, a break.

18th of March, 1977, another body is found,

this near Corona, California.

That is in Riverside County.

It's missing its head.

It's missing its hands.

It's been sodomized post mortem.

His body was found in a large trash bag in a barrel,

and it was at a rest stop.

And they started asking around.

The next day, it was pretty quick.

It wasn't a long time in between.

And I remember my dad got a call

back from probably the police department at that point.

I'm only hearing-- I'm only seeing my dad on the phone

and hearing him, and I just hear him repeat back what they

said, that he might be dead.

That's kind of what I remember hearing.

Like, what do you mean dead?

Like just something like that, just the way he responded.

By then, maybe looking back, they actually

maybe found somebody and--

but they didn't want to say for sure this was him

until they did some investigative work,

you know, which was having my parents, you know,

basically go down to the police department in Corona,

give blood tests, and identify a birthmark

that my brother did have, which was

found when they found a body.

My family overnight changed.

There was safety, there was freedom, there was fun.

We're loving.

We're hanging out.

And then John's murderer made victims of us all.

And I can imagine, as I got older,

and what guilt they might have felt

in not having better tabs on their son at-- you know,

he's 17, it was a different time.

But again, you're in El Segundo and everything.

Everything should be free and fine.

But, you know, I thought about that later and

the guilt that was probably going on as well, that they

didn't watch out for him.

As a kid, I'm not being told anything,

which I think was a bad thing, because I never got sat down.

This is what's going on.

And I get it.

My parents were in a frenzy.

I know, okay, John was murdered, and John knew him.

I knew that pretty early on, that it

wasn't just some stranger that picked up John.

This person actually built a kind

of a relationship with John before this even happened.

Once they have a name, police can

start working backwards to his friends,

to Lamay's friends, his family, who he met,

when he may have met them.

They said he told them he was going to Redondo Beach, which

is just to the west of Corona, to meet

two people named Pat and Dave.

This is when they started looking

closer at Patrick Kearney.

They go to interview Patrick Kearney and his roommate

and lover, Dave Hill.

Well, we're now in northern Redondo Beach,

one of the nicest areas of the Los Angeles area.

And this is Robinson Street.

Patrick Kearney lived here.

He bought the house in 1969.

He never did much.

He was very quiet.

And we had people who worked here.

There was a little store here.

He would come across here and he would

ask the man about knives.

He wanted to buy knives and he wanted

to know what was good steel.

And he would come to the market,

but he never bought the knives.

But the owner of the store always wondered, why

was he interested in knives?

Well, now we know that he had to cut up a lot of bodies

and chop a lot of bones, and he needed

a strong knife that would be able to dissect people.

We went to his house.

It wasn't a gaily lit, bright, open, sunny house.

It was dark, a little bit showing its age

in terms of cleanliness.

And maybe this is just my imagination,

but when I went in there, it felt oppressive.

The police interviewed him.

Do you know John Lamay? Where has he been?

Who else has he been seen with?

Have you seen him lately?

Kearney denies knowing Lamay.

Doesn't admit to any connection with the teenager.

Police officers notice that the carpet is green,

and they know there's green fibers

found on some of these bags.

One of the officers scuffs his feet on the carpet.

Another officer pets a dog and take some hair.

Those things match.

So now they're focused on Patrick Kearney.

On that team is Faye Springer, a criminalist, myself,

two police officers, and some uniformed officers,

and they gather up lots of different evidence.

Faye Springer goes to the vacuum cleaner,

immediately empties its contents.

She finds a hacksaw.

She sprays luminol in the bathroom,

sees evidence of blood.

There's a deteriorating faucet with chrome plating

being flaked off.

She recalls that one of the bags containing

a body, not John Lamay, had similar shiny little pieces

of metal.

She's thinking maybe there's a connection.

They find a stash of micro plastic bags

with drawstrings at the house.

These aren't useful for anything other

than heavy industrial type work.

And we did a search warrant for Kearney's house.

So we go to the house to execute the search warrant,

and Patrick Kearney is gone.

He's disappeared.

And that's when the warrants were issued for the arrest

of both of them.

Pat Kearney was born in East Los Angeles in 1939,

just as the war in Europe was beginning.

He wasn't the most robust kid.

When he grew up, kids picked on him, bullied him.

A few called him queer, and supposedly he had fantasies

about skinning people--

sick, distorted fantasies.

His dad, he claimed, was kind of an absent dad.

Wasn't really participating much in his life.

Mom was good, but Mom was more paying attention to dad.

But he had two siblings that were normal

and had good careers.

One was an Army officer.

Allegedly, his father taught him how to shoot.

He was very, very proficient at killing.

Because as a child, he had learned the best way

to kill a pig instantly is to shoot them right in the head,

near the ear.

And he had learned, if you do that, the person

would-- there would not be any resistance from that point on.

He ended up moving to Texas for a while,

and came back and started work at Hughes Aircraft.

By then, Los Angeles was an immense powerhouse

of the defense industry and the aircraft industry,

and so he found a job pretty quickly.

Which to me means that he had some intelligence

and some work ethic about him.

Hughes Aircraft was an early manufacturer.

It had lots of different divisions,

so I think he had to have somewhat himself on the ball

to get a job and hold a job like that.

In the process, he would meet various people,

and he had a gay partner, David Hill,

he met when he was in Texas.

And they both came back to Redondo Beach area,

lived in the beach area as a couple.

And as time went by, they had, you know,

differences, and sometimes David Hill would leave,

and then Kearney would be on his own.

At that time, he would start trolling, driving around.

He had a VW.

Having grown up in East Los Angeles, he also spoke Spanish,

and this and his knowledge of Latino culture

he supposedly used to his advantage

when he was cruising around in gay neighborhoods from Tijuana

up to Southern California.

He would pick up hitchhikers, anybody he could find,

young male, and entice them into his car, his little VW,

drive them around.

And then he would reach into the back

and pull out a .22 caliber derringer,

and when the person had turned his head to the right,

he would shoot him right in the side of the head

at the temple, which made it kind of strange.

You shoot a person in your car.

Now what are you going to do with them?

He would drive to an isolated area,

pull over, and then have sexual relations,

necrophilia, which is kind of strange.

Why would a person do that?

What is the satisfaction they're gaining out of that?

Is it because he has killed the person who he thinks

could have been a bully to him?

Is there a sexual reason why he does commit these crimes?

That was his MO, and he would do it time and time again,

pick up either a hitchhiker or somebody near a gay community,

have them sit in the car.

And then, when they weren't looking,

he would shoot him in the head.

Patrick Kearney opened his house to these young men,

so it was known in the gay community that Patrick was--

and David Hill, his roommate-- were gay and would welcome

people over, and so it was not unusual for him to be

entertaining young men in his house, not all

of which he killed, of course.

He was not strong enough to overpower some of his victims,

which is why he shot them.

But afterwards, he would beat their bodies,

mutilate their bodies, violate their bodies

in a necrophilic fashion as a kind of punishment

after death for the things that he had suffered growing up.

Pat Kearney was a pre-war generation

and was very closeted, and also lived in a time when to be gay

was in itself regarded as a sick-- a criminal offense.

A lot of gay people grow up with a lot

of internalized self-loathing.

And even if you come to accept yourself,

you have this internal struggle that you've been picked on,

you've been bullied, you've been afraid of yourself

because of your own feelings.

I mean, up until 1973, being gay was

considered a mental illness.

So if you're growing up before that time

and look it up in a book, you think, God,

this means I'm sick.

This means I should go to a doctor.

And you internalize this.

And he might have this sense that by killing other men, and

other gay men in particular, he might be killing

the gayness in himself.

The thing that strikes me about Patrick Wayne Kearney

is how careful, at least in the early years of killing,

that he was.

He would remove the bullet from his victim in order

not to allow it to be traced to his gun,

and he would take other measures.

You know, clean things off so that fingerprints

would not be apparent and it wouldn't be tracked to him.

So he seemed to be smarter than maybe

the average serial killer, at least at first.

But as his pace increased in killing,

things happen and you get sloppy

and you leave more clues.

He was an electrical engineer, and

he paid attention to details and

tried not to leave clues that would

make it easy for detectives to find him.

That's a cold-hearted, dispassionate, dangerous,

obviously, personality.

There's no way to tell.

He's not an enraged person.

He's not attacking and violently doing--

he's sneaky.

He sneaks up behind his victims.

They don't know what's coming.

He doesn't torture them.

He doesn't beat them until they're dead.

And that kind of fit with his personality,

kind of quiet and unassuming.

Nobody at Hughes Aircraft had any idea

that he was this monster.

It was the next day that Patrick Kearney

went over to Hughes Aircraft and he resigned.

He-- he left.

And he got his paycheck, his last paycheck.

He and David Hill headed to Texas,

and they ended up in El Paso, Texas.

The reason they left was because they

knew at the interview the police were getting close.

There's nationwide bulletins, the FBI's most wanted list.

Every law enforcement agency in the country

has got the paperwork on them.

And then they were contacted by their relatives and said,

hey, you can work this out.

It can be worked out.

It just-- come back, talk to the police, you know,

explain what happened.

And they did.

They came back.

And what was interesting about that,

they came back to the Riverside headquarters

of the sheriff's department.

They went in there to the reception area.

They said to the desk officer, we're here to turn ourselves

in to talk to the police.

And they pointed to a poster on the wall and said, that's us.

To be honest with you, I was quite surprised.

It's a hot afternoon.

I get a call, hey, we've got Patrick Kearney and David Hill.

Okay, well, how did that happen?

I mean, if you were on to them you were chasing them down,

how come I wasn't informed?

What the-- what's going on here?

And, obviously, no one knew what was happening.

They just walked in and turned themselves in.

The interview takes place within 15 or 20 minutes.

We start-- we record it.

He's advised of his rights.

I was able to interview him for hours.

Two men, Patrick Kearney and David Hill,

wanted for questioning in two murders,

surrendered here last Friday.

Officers also wanted to talk to them about five

other similar killings.

Mutilated remains of five young men

have been found in three other counties since 1975.

But Sheriff Ben Clark says the two led his investigators

to believe the suspects may be responsible for 30

to 40 killings.

The sheriff isn't sure the final toll will be that high.

I didn't know what to expect.

He presents himself as mild mannered.

He's just quiet, reserved, polite,

and it's a little bit frightening.

He has nothing about his facade that

would give you any inkling at all that

he invites young men over to his house,

puts a derringer to their head, kills

them, unbeknownst to them, catching them by surprise.

According to him, almost a monthly basis

during the last couple of years.

The agreement was, and these are tough decisions,

Kearney said, okay, you take the death penalty off the table

and I'll tell you where all the bodies are.

So the prosecutor had a tough decision

for the families of all those victims,

and we're talking a lot, 20, 30, 40.

Is it beneficial to get the remains of all of those victims

so they can be buried properly, how

the family would like it to be done,

or should you go for the death penalty?

The decision was made by the district attorney

of San Bernardino and the other locations, okay,

it would be fine to take the death penalty off the table,

allow him to plead guilty.

Patrick Kearney started to sing.

He sang about the whole thing from the beginning.

The purpose of my being at the interview

was mostly an expected but not forthcoming insanity defense.

So I wanted to find out if that was-- that was really

a viable issue with him.

My doubt was erased immediately during the interview

when I asked him about the first one he did.

When he described the first body that he had disposed of,

the first one he killed, he said,

the guy's name was George, and I dumped him off

in Van Nuys Avenue and buried him

under a garage 15 years ago.

He drew us a map of where the body supposedly was.

Well, obviously, the interview is being recorded.

The LAPD is on their way to dig this thing up within minutes,

unbeknownst to him.

And they went to this garage, they looked, they had the map,

and they found a box of bones with a skull that

had hacksaw blade marks in it.

Kearney described the fact that he'd

taken the bullet out of the man's skull with a hacksaw.

That gave him some credibility in terms of him claiming

to have killed so many people.

And when you ask him, well, Patrick, why would you have

sex with the body afterwards?

He says, well, there's no reasonable explanation

for that.

You know, I understand it's kind of bizarre.

And he gives a perfectly rational answer.

The fact that he's so nonchalant about it is scary.

We had the M'Naghten test back then for insanity,

and it basically is knowing right from wrong.

He absolutely knew right from wrong.

He-- he was embarrassed by it.

He was a little bit reluctant to talk

about the details of his sexual behavior because of that.

And he says, sometimes I did it, didn't do it.

Sometimes I got mad and did it, and sometimes I didn't do it.

So he could control his actions.

Legally defining somebody insane

is different than what you and I say.

There's something wrong with that guy.

Everybody would agree there's something wrong with that.

It's so out of touch with normal human behavior.

But to meet the legal definition

of insanity, pretty tough.

He kept his word.

He showed where all the bodies were.

Now, not all the bodies were found, because some of them

were not necessarily put in trash bags.

Some were buried.

John Lamay was found without a head, hands, or feet,

and those were never found.

Patrick Kearney later told us that we would never find those,

because he put them in commercial trash bins

at McDonald's and Wendy's.

And once they're gone off to the trash,

as Patrick Kearney said, they spend millions of dollars

getting rid of that.

You'll never find them.

I knew that he was dumped on the side of a highway.

I knew John was murdered.

I didn't realize who he was really murdered by,

and the scope of this man was 15 years of doing

this and getting away with it.

And do it so methodically, to cut the hands off

and the head off so that they couldn't actually identify him

with fingerprints, I couldn't believe anybody that

could do something so evil.

At the same time that these trash bag murders were being

committed, Kearney was in a long-term relationship,

not necessarily monogamous, but a long term relationship,

cohabiting, and this was for a period of almost 10 years.

And Hill evidently had no part and no knowledge of anything

that was going on that Kearney was doing

as this violent serial killer.

We know that he shot Mr. Lamay in his own house,

but what happened after that, how he concealed

this life from his lover, the man he was living with for so

many years, is a mystery.

Patrick confessed to everything

and had a credible confession, pointing

out somebody that he had killed 15 years ago and buried.

No one knew anything about it.

And Hill denied anything, and Kearney

said that Hill had nothing to do with it

and didn't know, was gone sometimes for weeks at a time.

Maybe he suspected, but he didn't know.

Sounds pretty incredible to me that you wouldn't know,

but having knowledge of it and participating in it

and having to prove it are two different things.

I mean, the grand jury didn't indict him.

There wasn't sufficient evidence connecting him.

Patrick Kearney's charged with first degree

murder in Riverside.

He and his attorney have an argument over how to proceed,

and he had him examined.

Wants to put forth a mental defense.

But Patrick wouldn't do it, and he did not want to--

to claim that he was insane or that he had diminished capacity

or he couldn't control his actions.

I don't think he would have won on that anyway.

We brought him back to court.

He pled guilty and then went to each county

and pled guilty to all the ones that law

enforcement could document and make sure that he was the one.

It wasn't just random, willy nilly, there's 50 bodies

and let's just tag him with everything.

You've got to be careful about it.

It was a difficult thing to do.

A lot of them were not absolutely

identified by forensic means.

Some of them, I mean, they were so old,

there's nothing but bones.

We have missing persons reports.

We know Patrick Kearney said, these are the people I killed,

and he confessed.

That's why we ended up--

he says, quite credibly, 30 to 40 men he

killed, and pled guilty to 21.

He's sentenced to consecutive sentences.

He went to San Quentin.

There he sat quietly.

He never appealed anything.

He just served his time.

I received one letter from him.

He hinted at wanting to play chess.

I remember my mom saying that the one thing she's thankful

for in all of this that came out

was that John's death caught this monster.

You can imagine the task force

opened the champagne, said, thank goodness that's over.

We have taken care of this monster who

has been dumping bodies along the freeways

after murdering them.

There was such a relief.

It was over.

The community is safe.

However, more bodies are showing up.

And then more bodies turn up, and yet more bodies.

And you can imagine what they were thinking.

Could we have two people like this out there?

This is the 33rd killing of the same

type in the last few months.

If they thought that it was over,

well, they were wrong, because the madness was just beginning.

The bodies just kept piling up at a very disturbing frequency.

This killer was relentless.

Young hitchhiking kids are being picked up, raped,

strangled, and dumped naked.

There's no evidence left behind.

Today, the nude body of a teenage boy

was found propped up against a back alley door.

He had been choked to death.

A witness said she saw a hitchhiker

gassed and pulled into a van.

They showed us a board, and there were probably

45 names at least on this chart,

and it was titled Southern California homosexual murders.

They hadn't solved solve the freeway murders.