“Trash Bag Killer” Sets L.A. Record

 by Los Angeles (AP)

Seventeen counts of murder, the most ever brought against one person in Los Angeles County, were filed here Wednesday against Patrick Wayne Kearney, the former aerospace worker who has already pleaded guilty of the “trash bag” slayings of three other young men. Kearney, 38, will be arraigned Tuesday. Last December he was sentenced to life in prison after admitting the homosexual murders of the three victims in Riverside, California.

His prosecutor there said Kearney got ideas for the mass murders from the sensational 1974 case in Houston where 27 boys were found in graves where they had been buried by their sex-and-torture killers. In Wednesday’s complaint, Deputy District Attorney Johji Breault accused Kearney of killing and dismembering 17 boys and young men whose bodies were found between Feb. 9, 1973, and July 7, 1977, in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego and Riverside counties. They ranged in age from five to 28, and four were found in the large plastic bags which gave the killer his nickname.