Man Sentenced in “Trash Bag Murders” tells Details – Described to Psychiatrists Without Emotion How He Shot Victims in Head With .22-Caliber Pistol

by Dave Martin

Patrick Kearney, sentenced to life in prison Wednesday in Riverside for three of the “trash bag murders,” has described calmly and without emotion to psychiatrists how he shot his victims in the head with a .22-caliber pistol. Kearney, 38, who has now admitted to 32 murders, calls himself a bisexual and admitted to doctors and investigators that he had a morbid curiosity about the bodies of his victims and sometimes “committed sex acts on them after they were killed.”

The judge in the case lifted the gag order Wednesday which was ordered six weeks ago after Kearney pleaded guilty to three counts of murder. For the first time, many of the details of the killings have been revealed.

The killings were termed trash bag murders because many of the victims were found dumped along the highways in large plastic bags. Reporters were allowed to interview Kearney in the courtroom after Wednesday’s sentencing, but Kearney declined comment on the slayings, saying, “I can’t allow myself to think about it much.

It’s too painful.” But in documents released after his sentencing he told prosecutors how he killed “coolly” but had some tense moments transporting the bodies. After he was arrested in July, Kearney told investigators he had been influenced by the 1974 homosexual multiple murders in Texas, said Deputy District Attorney Daniel Bacalski. “He in fact got ideas from reading about the Houston murders,” Bacalski said. 

Kearney told investigators that “when he knew police were getting close to him, he removed those items of literature about the case from his house,” Bacalski said. In previously confidential doctors’ reports quoted Thursday by the Riverside Press Enterprise, Kearney explained that the killings vented his frustrations and gave him a feeling of power. Kearney told one doctor, the newspaper account said, that “he does not see himself as mentally ill.”

Kearney originally had told authorities he had killed 28 persons in 10 Southern California counties. But Bacalski said Kearney sent a letter late last week to Los Angeles County Sheriff Peter Pitchess admitting that he had killed five persons in Los Angeles County. Four of the murders Kearney admitted to in the letter had never been mentioned before, thus increasing the number of admitted murders to 32.