Paul Bateson

Paul F. Bateson (August 24, 1940 – September 15, 2012) known as The Bag Murderer was an American convicted murderer and radiographer. He appeared as a radiologic technologist in a scene from the horror film The Exorcist (1973), which was inspired when the film's director, William Friedkin, watched him perform a cerebral angiography the previous year. The scene, with a considerable amount of blood onscreen, was, for many viewers, the film's most disturbing scene; medical professionals have praised it for its realism. In 1979, Bateson was convicted of the murder of film industry journalist Addison Verrill and sentenced to a minimum of twenty years in prison; in 2003 he was released on parole, which ended after five years. Prior to his trial, police and prosecutors implicated Bateson in a series of unsolved slayings of gay men in Manhattan known as the "bag murders," killings he had reportedly boasted about while in jail, with prosecutors bringing it up at his sentencing. However, no additional charges were ever brought against Bateson in the killings. The experience inspired Friedkin to make the film Cruising (1980) which, while based on a novel written a decade earlier, incorporated in its storyline the city's leather subculture, with which Bateson had identified. In 2012, Friedkin recalled having visited the jailed Bateson prior to his trial and having a conversation which suggested that either Bateson had committed the additional "bag murders" or merely that he was considering confessing to them in exchange for a lighter sentence. However, other than the alleged comments made during the Friedkin interview and the assertions by police and prosecutors immediately prior to and during Bateson's trial that he had admitted to the serial murders while in jail, there is no other record of definitive incriminating evidence that he committed the "bag murders," though...