Killer Sends Letter of Rage to Supreme Court

In a profanity-ridden letter to the U.S. Supreme Court, convicted murderer William Kirkpatrick Jr. admitted killing two young Taco Bell employees in Burbank, said he felt no remorse for the crimes and demanded to be executed.

“I’m guilty as s---!” read the letter, signed by Kirkpatrick and dated July 6, 1995. “I feel no remorse! Give me my execution date and kill me!!!”

Kirkpatrick, 35, is scheduled to be executed Jan. 26 at San Quentin prison. If the sentence is carried out, he will be the third person executed in California since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978, and the first in the state to die by lethal injection.

The state Legislature amended California’s capital-punishment law in 1992 to permit lethal injection after a federal district judge in San Francisco ruled that the state’s gas chamber was unconstitutionally cruel.

Kirkpatrick, a transient who once lived in Pasadena, was convicted of fatally shooting a 27-year-old Taco Bell manager and a 16-year-old employee during a 1983 robbery that netted him about $650. An accomplice who acted as a lookout outside the restaurant, Eddie Ramon Salazar, was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

In his letter, released Thursday by the Supreme Court, Kirkpatrick addressed the justices as “sorry white trash” and said he wanted to be executed, despite appeals filed on his behalf in recent years by attorneys he disavows.

In an earlier letter, also made public Thursday, he named one attorney who formerly worked for the San Francisco-based California Appellate Project, which opposes the death penalty.

Kirkpatrick admitted in that letter, dated Jan. 17, 1995, that he stabbed one of his lawyers 17 times at San Quentin, adding: “Unfortunately the piece of s--- lives.” Prison officials confirmed that Kirkpatrick stabbed an unidentified lawyer multiple times with a pencil.

Kirkpatrick also angrily demanded that he be allowed to represent himself without the aid of attorneys, making several anti-Semitic references to them.

“I have written literally hundreds of letters to these people ordering them off my back,” he wrote. “I have called them, I have threatened them, I have even stabbed one of them 17 times!”

Kirkpatrick accused his current court-appointed lawyer, Edward J. Horowitz of Brentwood, of “polishing” the facts of his case in a 1994 appeal to the Supreme Court to make them “seem more plausible than they are.”

Horowitz, who has represented Kirkpatrick for three years, denied the allegation. He added that he is not the lawyer who was stabbed.

Horowitz declined to comment on whether he will try to block Kirkpatrick’s execution. The Jan. 26 date was set after Horowitz recently won a postponement of a scheduled Dec. 1 execution date.

Asked if he was tired of trying to help Kirkpatrick, he said: “If the court asks you to take an appointment to a case, and if you take the case, you take the case. . . . It’s public record that Willie hasn’t been happy with any of his attorneys, so I don’t feel singled out.”

Prosecutors said Kirkpatrick had worked for a time at the Taco Bell and been fired prior to his entering the fast-food restaurant near midnight on Sept. 17, 1983, armed with a .22-caliber pistol.

He forced the manager who fired him, Lindell W. Hunter, and a 16-year-old employee, James Falconio, into the rear of the restaurant and shot both of them in the back of the head, execution-style. Hunter died immediately; Falconio was rushed to St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, where he died about 11 days later.

Prosecutors said Kirkpatrick wanted to get even with Hunter and Taco Bell, then killed Falconio to eliminate a witness. Police arrested Kirkpatrick five days after the slayings as he slept in his car in North Hollywood.

According to San Quentin officials, Kirkpatrick burglarized a North Hollywood gas station where he had previously worked, stealing $225 and the murder weapon, three days before the slayings. He was fired from the gas station for his inability to get along with fellow employees.

Burbank police linked Kirkpatrick to three additional burglaries and an arson, prison officials said.

Since his 1984 arrival at San Quentin, Kirkpatrick has violated prison rules 20 times, officials said. The violations included threatening prison staff and fighting with other inmates.