Jack Rosewood - Patrick Kearney: The True Story of The Freeway Killer

Patrick Wayne Kearney was eight years old when he began having fantasies of murder.

And you know how it can be with fantasies. Sometimes, the imagination satisfies, and other times, it only accentuates the hunger.

Kearney was hungry, and that need of his was eventually going to be sated.

The oldest of three boys, Kearney was born on September 24, 1939, in Los Angeles, to parents George and Eunice Kearney. George was a member of the Los Angeles Police Department, while Eunice stayed home to care for the children, Patrick and his younger brothers, Michael and Chester.

The City of Angels was a lucky place for a kid to grow up, or would have been, had the future serial killer not been sickly as a child, which made him an easy target for school bullies.

Despite having an IQ of 180 which makes him, psychologists say, a genius he was unable to find ways to win over his peers, even after his parents moved to Arizona, where he switched schools and had access to a new group of classmates. But everythings hotter in Arizona, and so was the bullying Kearney faced at his new school. The bullies were the same, and Kearney was still an easy target.

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 Jerseys 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 couldnt really shake that troubled childhood of his, no matter what good fortune later came his way.

While he didnt 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 Kearneys childhood bullies and they would be the ones forced to pay for the others torment, as Kearneys fantasies festered and finally burst open in a bloody torrent of gunshots, necrophilia and dismemberment.

This guys got a masters degree in murder, said Los Angeles County detective Louis Danoff.