The very best American stories are a window into the American soul, telling the American story at its most inspiring, heart-wrenching, and even terrifying. First in short stories and novels and then in television and film, Americans have told incredible tales…but none have been as inspiring, as heart-wrenching, or as terrifying as the American story itself, especially when the horror of truth blends with—and becomes far stranger than—fiction.
This is the Forgotten History of the Killer in the Background.
It was a cultural phenomenon unlike any that had come before it; a film so haunting, so horrifying that audiences could barely stomach it.
When “The Exorcist” premiered in theaters in late 1973, reports of audience members fainting, vomiting, and even in one instance allegedly suffering a miscarriage in the theater only enticed more to wait for hours in lines that stretched entire blocks to see what most considered the scariest film ever made.
It was such a bone-chilling hit that a few months after its premiere, “The Exorcist” was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and became the first horror film ever nominated for Best Picture. It continued setting box office record after box office record until it became the highest-grossing horror movie of all time. Its reputation for terrifying only grew with rumors that its filming was plagued with supernatural frights, but as more and more moviegoers flocked to theaters, they remained blind to its true horror.
It was right there, in the film’s most stomach-turning scene. But it wasn’t a jump scare or a bloody reveal, it was just kind of there; in the background, unassuming and largely forgettable. As Reagan, the film’s young lead, receives a cerebral arteriogram after showing signs of demonic possession, an average-looking bearded man tends to her.
He was a real-life radiographer who in the film played the radiographer’s assistant, and he wasn’t even given an official credit. But he was there, in the background, and he was the real-life terror in the scariest film of all time.
Less than four years after “The Exorcist’s” premiere, New York City Police found the body of Addison Verrill, a reporter for Variety, in his apartment in Greenwich Village. He had been beaten and stabbed, and investigators initially thought he was the victim of a botched robbery.
But then a reporter for The Village Voice, who had reported on the murder, received a phone call from a man who claimed to be Verrill’s killer. He said the two had met at a gay bar the night of his death and drank and did drugs together until returning to Verrill’s apartment. There, the caller said, they had sex but the caller said he felt a strange vibe from Verrill; that Verrill wasn’t as into him as he was into Verrill.
Something came over him, he told the reporter. He snapped. He was an alcoholic, he explained, and because of that his thinking was off. He grabbed a frying pan from the kitchen and attacked Verrill with it, then grabbed a knife and plunged it into his chest.
The reporter went to the police, who confirmed that the man who had called him knew details only the killer would and told him to wait for another call.
That night, it came. The same caller, who sounded drunk, said the name of the killer was Paul Bateson. Officers went to his apartment, arrested him, and secured a drunken confession: he had killed Addison Verrill.
Bateson was tried for Verrill’s murder and convicted, largely on the strength of his confession to police. But he argued that he was innocent and that he was coerced into confessing while he was drunk and simply repeated details of the murder that he had read in the Village Voice. Still, he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.
Paul Bateson’s story, however, may not end there. Addison Verrill was one of more than a dozen gay men who were murdered in and around Greenwich Village in the mid-1970s. Six of their bodies were found dismembered, placed in plastic bags, and dumped in the Hudson River.
The media dubbed them the “bag murders,” and police began to openly suspect that they were the work of a single serial killer—someone who was skilled with a knife. Someone like a radiographer who played a radiographer’s assistant in “The Exorcist.” Someone like Paul Bateson.
Just as in the film, he was lurking in the background as a suspect in the bag murders, but prosecutors never had enough evidence to bring charges. Still, during Bateson’s sentencing hearing in the murder of Addison Verrill, prosecutor William Hoyt openly told the court:
“The police have evidence, though there is not direct proof, connecting them to this defendant that there were six bodies, torsos of which were found floating in the Hudson River wrapped up in plastic garbage bags.”
Hoyt even claimed that one of Bateson’s friends had been willing to testify that Bateson told him that “killing is easy, [but] getting rid of the bodies is the hard part” and that “that he cut up his victims and put the parts in plastic garbage bags to dispose of them.”
Ultimately, the friend never testified, Paul Bateson was never charged with any additional killings, and the bag murders sill remain officially unsolved.
Bateson served 24 years in prison before being released on parole in 2003. To this day, no one is quite sure what happened to him. Some think he died in 2012. William Friedkin, the director of “The Exorcist,” believes he is living in upstate New York.
This uncertainty is perhaps a fittingly unsettling end to the story of the scariest part of the scariest film of all time; as it’s possible that Paul Bateson is still out there somewhere—quietly, unassumingly lurking in the background.