Killer Admits Burbank Slayings, Calls High Court ‘Sorry White Trash’

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---!” said 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 to die by lethal injection. The state’s gas chamber was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge in 1992.

The Pasadena man 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 Kirkpatrick’s letter, released by the Supreme Court on Thursday, he addressed the high court judges as “sorry white trash” and demanded that they let him be executed, protesting against several appeals filed on his behalf in recent years by attorneys he disavows.

In an earlier letter to the court, he admitted stabbing one of his lawyers 17 times at San Quentin, adding: “Unfortunately the piece of s--- lives.” Prison officials confirmed that Kirkpatrick did stab an unidentified lawyer multiple times with a pencil.

That letter, dated Jan. 17, 1995, and laced with anti-Semitic remarks, angrily demanded that Kirkpatrick be allowed to represent himself without the aid of attorneys.

“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 misstating the facts in the case in a 1994 Supreme Court appeal. Horowitz denied the allegation. The attorney, who has represented Kirkpatrick for three years, said he was not the lawyer who was stabbed.

Horowitz declined to comment on whether he will try to block Kirkpatrick’s execution. He recently won postponement of a 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.”