Patrick Kearney
American serial killer
Patrick Wayne Kearney (born September 24, 1939), also called the Trash Bag Killer and the Freeway Killer, is an American serial killer who sexually assaulted and murdered a minimum of twenty-eight young men and boys in southern California between 1962 and 1977. Kearney often engaged in necrophilia with his victims' bodies before disemboweling and dismembering them. He frequently wrapped his victims' severed limbs in trash bags and scattered them in various locations, mainly along state highways.
In 1978, Kearney pleaded guilty to twenty-one counts of murder and was sentenced to twenty-one consecutive life sentences. Kearney was the first of three known serial killers who preyed on young men in southern California in the 1970s and 1980s to be identified; the others were William Bonin and Randy Kraft.
Early life
Patrick Wayne Kearney was born on September 24, 1939, in East Los Angeles, California, as the oldest of three sons and was raised in a reasonably stable family on the east side of Los Angeles that was of middle-class background. Kearney's mother was a homemaker, while his father was an officer for the Los Angeles Police Department.
In 1950, Kearney's family moved to Reseda and settled on Runnymede Street. Kearney started school at Reseda Elementary. Kearney, being a thin and sickly child, was often a target of bullies, who beat him up frequently and berated him as a "queer" despite his supposed interest in girls.
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This entry incorporates text from “Patrick Kearney” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.