Portrait of a Killer Who Has Asked to Die

William Kirkpatrick Jr. was bent on robbery and revenge the night he barged into a Taco Bell restaurant in Burbank 12 years ago, his hand gripping a stolen revolver.

A former employee of the fast-food outlet, Kirkpatrick was incensed at his ex-boss, 27-year-old Wayne Hunter, for ordering him transferred to a different Taco Bell, according to court testimony.

So Kirkpatrick forced Hunter and another worker, Jimmy Falconio, 16, into the rear of the restaurant and onto their knees. Then he shot both victims once in the back of the head execution-style, according to court records. He scooped about $625 from a cash register and fled. The next day, he used some of the money to see a movie.

Today Kirkpatrick, 35, a onetime transient who as a child liked to paint pictures and wanted to be a writer, sits on death row at San Quentin prison, awaiting his scheduled execution Jan. 26.

If his sentence for the murders is carried out then, he will become the first person executed by lethal injection in California, and the third to die at state hands since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978.

“This guy passes the monster test,” said Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Loren Naiman, who helped convict Kirkpatrick in 1984. “Most of us believe that at the time he went in [the restaurant], he knew he’d have to execute the people inside. There was no other way for him to get away. He went in full-face, no mask, through the front door.”

“He takes these people, who he knows, makes them kneel down . . . and executes them,” Naiman said.

Although he maintained his innocence during his trial, Kirkpatrick told the U.S. Supreme Court in an angry, profanity-laden letter last July that he was guilty, felt no remorse for the murders and demanded that the court “give me my execution date and kill me!!!”

Nonetheless, state officials are braced for possible eleventh-hour appeals on Kirkpatrick’s behalf like those that repeatedly delayed the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris, who killed two San Diego teenagers so he could use their car in a bank robbery.

“Anyone can file a lawsuit,” said Steve Telliano, a spokesman for state Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren. Telliano said, however, that the state will vigorously oppose any further appeals.

Kirkpatrick’s court-appointed lawyer, Edward J. Horowitz, declined to comment on whether he will try to delay or block Kirkpatrick’s execution. However, the attorney recently won a two-month postponement of an earlier execution date.

Since 1988, attorneys have filed five state and U.S. Supreme Court appeals on behalf of Kirkpatrick. Last month, the state Supreme Court denied a request by Horowitz for a second stay of execution.

A prominent death penalty opponent, actor Mike Farrell, said he was unaware if any anti-capital punishment groups are planning to appeal Kirkpatrick’s execution. But he added that such actions, as well as public protests, could materialize later.

A spokeswoman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which has frequently sought to halt executions, said the organization would make no such effort for Kirkpatrick because its resources are stretched so thin on other court cases.

Kirkpatrick faces lethal injection because the state Legislature in 1992 amended California’s death penalty law after the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the use of the state’s gas chamber as unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. In 1994, a federal district judge in San Francisco agreed. State officials have appealed that decision.

In preparation for this month’s execution, San Quentin officials have removed the chairs in the gas chamber to make room for a table where they will strap Kirkpatrick down and inject deadly chemicals into him.

Kirkpatrick was raised in a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., and dropped out of school in the 11th grade. His father deserted the family when Kirkpatrick was a child, according to lawyer Horowitz. As a boy he became caught up in the violence and drug activity of the neighborhood, even though his mother later married a New York City police detective, court records said.

His mother, Guadalupe Kirkpatrick, described him in a court declaration as an intelligent child who “painted beautiful pictures,” had an avid interest in writing and hoped one day to become a published author. He also helped around the house and contributed to the household income from odd jobs he picked up around the neighborhood, she said.

While Kirkpatrick had no felony convictions before he committed the murders, prosecutors during the penalty phase of his trial were allowed to introduce evidence that he assaulted two teenage boys and poisoned a woman’s dogs not long before the Sept. 17, 1983 slayings.

At Kirkpatrick’s sentencing hearing in 1984, Falconio’s mother, Rose, testified that “the pain and heartache will stay with me as long as I live.”

Added John Hess, Hunter’s best friend: “This man probably has no idea of the type of grief . . . he has given all of us that are the remaining victims. He’s a cheat. He’s a liar. And he’s a murderer. He deserves to be put to death.”

At the end of the hearing, Pasadena Superior Court Judge Coleman Swart described Kirkpatrick as “amoral and coldhearted.” He noted that Falconio had lain in a coma at a local hospital for 11 days before dying, and quoted Kirkpatrick as telling an acquaintance during that time: “I hope the damn kid dies.”

In a telephone interview Friday, Hunter’s father, Willis, said he had no interest in traveling from his Houstonia, Mo., home to witness Kirkpatrick’s execution.

“Why should I give him the extra time of day? He should be alone when he dies,” said Hunter, 62.

Since his trial, Kirkpatrick has expressed a venomous hatred for his attorneys, labeling them in letters to the U.S. Supreme Court as “cockroaches” and “hollow parasites” and repeatedly demanding that he be allowed to represent himself in court.

During his sentencing hearing, Kirkpatrick told the judge he disavowed his attorneys, threw a punch at someone and had to be wrestled to the floor and handcuffed by courtroom bailiffs, according to court records.

At San Quentin in 1990, Kirkpatrick became so enraged at a state public defender, George L. Mertens, that he stabbed him 22 times in the neck and ear with a sharpened toothbrush, according to Mertens. Kirkpatrick admitted the attack in one of his U.S. Supreme Court letters.

In a letter to that court last January, Kirkpatrick vehemently criticized his present lawyer, Horowitz, calling him a “clown” and a “scumbag” and saying he won’t accept mail from him. Kirkpatrick also made anti-Semitic remarks about the attorney.

Capital punishment foe Farrell, who heads Death Penalty Focus of California, said he isn’t surprised Kirkpatrick now says he wants to die despite years of appeals and insisting he is innocent.

“The enormous psychic pressures on people [in prison] creates a reaction to their circumstances that . . . shouldn’t be taken at face value,” said Farrell, a star of the “MASH” television series. “You grind the humanity out of them to the point that they believe that there’s no hopeful conclusion and the only thing that’s available to them is an end.”

Prosecutor Naiman offered a different interpretation.

“I think basically he’s saying, ‘Why go through with this charade, this excess activity for me when I’m guilty?’ I think he’s just resigned himself.”