Between 1975 and 1977, the dismembered bodies of six men were discovered stuffed into garbage bags and floating in the Hudson River in New York City. From an examination of the clothing on the remains, it was established that all six victims had purchased leather items from shops in Greenwich Village that were known to be frequented by members of the gay community. Therefore, authorities surmised, the men must have been picked up from the gay bars in the same area.
Not long after the sixth bag had been recovered, a man named Paul Bateson, who lived in Greenwich Village, was arrested for a separate murder, that of Variety film reporter Addison Verrill, who had been beaten and stabbed to death in his Horatio Street apartment on September 14th, 1977.
At Bateson’s trial, a witness named Richard Ryan told the court that Bateson had confessed to him that he had murdered three other men after picking them up at gay bars: twenty-nine-year-old Ronald Cabeau, forty-year-old Donald McNiven, and fifty-three-year-old John Beardsley. All three of these victims, like Addison Verrill, had been stabbed to death in their apartments.
More pressingly, though, Ryan also stated that Bateson admitted to killing six more gay men and tossing their remains into the Hudson River. But because there was no evidence tying Bateson directly to the Bag Murders, he was never charged, though he was convicted of the Addison Verrill murder, which netted him twenty years to life. He was released from prison in 2003, after serving more than twenty-four years. His whereabouts are unknown after 2008; if he is still alive in 2023, he would be eighty-three years old.
Director William Friedkin visited Paul Bateson while he was in prison, as Bateson, a radiographer, had made a brief appearance in his 1973 film adaptation of The Exorcist. The story behind Bateson’s murders ultimately served as the catalyst for Friedkin adapting Gerald Walker’s 1970 novel Cruising into a film in 1980. Both book and film dealt with a serial killer targeting the gay community in New York City.
Whether Paul Bateson was responsible for the Bag Murders remains a mystery, though interest in the case was rekindled in 2019 when the killings and Paul Bateson’s possible involvement were briefly touched upon in the second season of the crime thriller series Mindhunter.
Crime Immemorial 