Ignorance Is No Excuse : Judge Says Killer Has Wealth of Brains, Poverty of Morals

Of the hundreds of thieves, murderers and other sinners to stand before Judge Coleman Swart, William Kirkpatrick stands out as a particularly ruthless and intelligent killer.

“If I had to use one word to describe him, it would be amoral,” Swart said of Kirkpatrick, the drifter he sentenced to death for the 1983 murders of two young men during the robbery of a Burbank Taco Bell.

Kirkpatrick, 35, is scheduled to die by lethal injection a week from today in the old San Quentin gas chamber. Unless he succeeds in a last-minute appeal filed Thursday, he will be strapped to the execution gurney at 12:01 a.m. Jan. 26.

Swart, a Pasadena Superior Court judge and former prosecutor, said in an interview that it’s about time. Execution is the law, Swart emphasized, and if there were a situation in which the punishment fit the crime, Kirkpatrick’s case is it.

“I don’t have any feelings about [the execution] one way or the other,” Swart said. But, he added, “it’s crazy that it’s taken 12 years to get this process done. The whole purpose of a death penalty is to be a deterrent. But it’s really not a deterrent if it takes this long.”

Swart said he believes Kirkpatrick is smart enough to have thought twice before committing the crimes had administration of the death penalty been swift and sure in most cases. In fact, Kirkpatrick’s intelligence is one of the things Swart remembers most clearly about the case.

In court papers, Kirkpatrick was described by his mother as a creative young man who loved to paint and write and harbored dreams of someday publishing his work. During the penalty phase of his trial--in which jurors decided whether to recommend execution--Kirkpatrick insisted on representing himself over the objections of his lawyers.

“This is not a dumb guy,” Swart said. “This is a smart person. He could have gone to college. He was an intelligent person, but without any sense of morality.”

In some ways, Swart said, that makes Kirkpatrick’s coldblooded murders all the more chilling. Kirkpatrick once worked at the Taco Bell he robbed on Sept. 17, 1983. His intent, according to witnesses at the trial, was to “get back” at managers for transferring him to a different restaurant.

After stealing about $625 from the cash register and safe, Kirkpatrick herded assistant manager Wayne Hunter and 16-year-old employee Jim Falconio into the back of the restaurant and shot each once in the head with a stolen .22-caliber pistol.

Customers later found Hunter dead in a closet. Falconio was in a coma for 11 days before dying. Kirkpatrick, the stepson of a New York Police Department detective, was arrested Sept. 22.

“He killed those people because he did not want any witnesses,” Swart said. “It was a choice he made. He didn’t want any eyewitnesses.”

It was Kirkpatrick’s cool decision-making, and his boasts to friends after the deed, that Swart found most disturbing. In other cases he has either tried or heard, Swart said, defendants often are less intelligent and turn to crime because they feel they have no other options.

Not Kirkpatrick. “In other cases, people often act irrationally,” Swart said. “But he was just totally without conscience. He was totally without regard for anyone but himself. And all of this came out during trial. He wanted what he wanted and there were no compromises.”

During the penalty phase of his trial, Kirkpatrick refused to allow his mother or other family members to testify on his behalf, and his statements to the jury were more like challenges, Swart said.

“He was arrogant, very arrogant,” Swart said. “His true personality came out.

“He put himself in the gas chamber.”

For months, Kirkpatrick refused to talk to the court-appointed lawyers trying to delay or cancel his execution. In a letter to the U.S. Supreme Court last January, Kirkpatrick admitted his guilt and called his attorney a “clown” and a “scumbag.”

In the end, Swart said, the strangest moment of Kirkpatrick’s trial, the one that Swart remembers most clearly, occurred during the formal sentencing. Kirkpatrick opened the session with a profanity and Swart ordered him to remain silent. Swart threatened to tape his mouth shut for the duration of the sentencing.

Afterward, as he was led away by bailiffs, Kirkpatrick started a fight. As he struggled vigorously on the ground with a swarm of bailiffs, Kirkpatrick was strangely silent.

“The whole time, he’s not uttering a sound,” Swart said. “It was a silent fight. Somehow, to him, something clicked. He knew he was not supposed to talk. He was just a weird guy.”

* APPEAL FILED: Convicted murderer William Kirkpatrick claims innocence, seeks delay. A1