Judge Recalls Killer Facing Execution as Smart, Ruthless

Of the hundreds of thieves, murderers and other sinners to stand before Judge Coleman Swart, William Kirkpatrick Jr. stands out even today 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 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. Friday.

Swart, a Pasadena Superior Court judge and former prosecutor, said in an interview that it’s about time. To Swart, execution is the law and if there was 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 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 if administration of the death penalty had been swift and sure. 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 decide whether to recommend the death penalty--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.”

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In some ways, Swart said, that makes Kirkpatrick’s coldblooded murder of two people 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 moved assistant manager Wayne Hunter and 16-year-old employee James Falconio into the back of the restaurant and shot each once in the head with a stolen .22-caliber pistol.

“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 that cool decision by Kirkpatrick, and his boasts to friends after the killings, that Swart said he found most disturbing. In other cases he has tried or heard, Swart said, criminal defendants often are less intelligent and turn to crime only because they feel they have no other options.

During the penalty phase of his trial, Kirkpatrick, now 35, 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 came across as this amoral person.”

“He put himself in the gas chamber.”