The Disturbing True Story of ‘The Exorcist’ Actor Who Became a Convicted Murderer

William Friedkin’s The Exorcist hides a secret far more horrifying than any of the fictional behavior its characters show onscreen. For many viewers, the most disturbing scene in the movie was the one in which Regan (Linda Blair) has a bloody procedure known as a cerebral angiography performed on her. You may also recall the technician from this sequence being the only person who annoyingly pronounces Regan’s name “REE-gun”:

Interestingly, the actor who played that part wasn’t an actor at all, but a legitimate radiology technician named Paul Bateson. Friedkin had watched Bateson perform the actual procedure in 1972 and invited him to be an extra in the film. However, when The Exorcist was released the following year, Bateson’s appearance likely wasn’t the subject of any water-cooler discussions, especially given all the head-spinning and green vomit people had to talk about.

‘The Exorcist’ Has a Real-Life Murder Connection You Might Not Know About

That won’t be the case by the end of the decade, though. After Variety reporter Addison Verrill was found stabbed to death in 1977, a man believed to have been Bateson confessed to the crime over the phone. Evidently, the two met at a gay bar and had sex late one morning, but Bateson was upset that Verrill wasn’t interested in pursuing the relationship further. Bateson was convicted of murdering Verrill in 1979 and sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison.

But the story doesn’t end there. Bateson was long suspected of being a serial killer who carried out the so-called “bag murders” in New York City—a series of unsolved slayings from around the same time in which six gay men were dismembered and disposed of in garbage bags. Friedkin even claimed that Bateson privately admitted to one of the killings during a conversation that inspired the director to make the movie Cruising.

Bateson was paroled in 2003, but was never found guilty of any other murders. He died in 2012 at age 72. 

The post The Disturbing True Story of ‘The Exorcist’ Actor Who Became a Convicted Murderer appeared first on VICE.

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