25. The Bag Murders

In Episode 25, Matt takes you back to the gritty, neon-lit streets of 1970s New York City to investigate one of the most chilling and frustrating unsolved mysteries in true crime history: The Bag Murders.

​Between 1975 and 1977, the dark waters of the Hudson River surrendered a terrifying secret. Six unidentified victims were discovered along the Greenwich Village waterfront. But how does a serial killer dismantle six victims in the heart of Manhattan without leaving a trace? And why did the authorities completely look the other way?

​Today, we are stripping away the Hollywood urban legends to examine the cold, historical facts, the dangerous geography of the underground club scene, and the institutional apathy that allowed a monster to hunt in the shadows.

​Episode Highlights:

• ​The Geography of Risk: Exploring the underground nightlife of 1970s Greenwich Village and the dangerous isolation of the abandoned Hudson River piers.
• ​Institutional Apathy: How the NYPD's hostility toward the LGBTQ+ community created a massive blind spot that serial killers exploited.
• ​The M.O. and The Clues: Breaking down the terrifying forensic profile of the killer and the custom leather clothing that served as the investigation's only lead.
• ​Theories and Suspects: Was it an organized Mafia hit? A hunting ground for multiple predators? Or the early, undiscovered work of the infamous "Last Call Killer," Richard Rogers?
• ​The Paul Bateson Connection: Unpacking the arrest of the X-ray technician, the unverified jailhouse confession, and the Hollywood trivia connecting the case to The Exorcist and Cruising.

​Housekeeping & Announcements:

This episode marks the Homocidal Tendency midseason finale! The show will be taking a short 1-2 week break to recharge and research for the second half of the season. Keep an eye on your feed, because a special bonus mini-episode will drop during the hiatus.

​If you are a new listener, there are 24 other binge-worthy episodes of the season waiting for you right now!

​Support the Show:

• ​Rate & Review: Please take a second to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. It is the best way to help other true crime fans find the show!
• ​Visual Aids: Follow us on social media to see all the archival photography for this case, including the rotting piers, the Village clubs, and Arthur Bell's original Village Voice reporting.

https://linktr.ee/HomocidalTendency

​Stay safe, keep your doors locked, and thank you for riding out the first half of the season. From Matt, Benson, and Toulouse thanks for listening!

Transcript

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In the mid-1970s, the decaying Hudson River Piers on Manhattan West Side were a world unto themselves. When the sun went down, these abandoned cavernous warehouses transformed. But the city's gay men, they were a sanctuary, a place to find community, connection, and a fleeting sense of freedom in a society that still forced them into the shadows. But that absolute isolation came with a terrible, terrifying vulnerability. Between 1975 and 1977, the dark water of the Hudson began to surrender a gruesome secret. Six sets of dismembered human remains washed upon the shoreline. Each victim had been brutally discarded, stuffed into heavy black plastic garbage bags. They were completely unidentifiable. The only reason the police even connected the bodies to the gay community was because the fragments of clothing found with them in the black bags. They traced them back to a specific set of leather shops in the Grimwich Village. Who were these men? Why was a predator hunting in the shadows of the piers? And how did the city's apathy and a police department's prejudice fail them so completely that even a half century later we still don't know the names? Today, we're stepping away from the Hollywood urban legends to take a look at the cold, hard reality of the streets. We're headed back to the grimy neon lit nights of the 1970s Grimwich Village, okay, to investigate the unsolved tragedy of the Bag Martyrs? It's actually been an amazing run of cases and deep dive so far. And this one actually marks our mid-season finale. I'm gonna be taking a break uh a week or two off just to step away from the mic, to recharge the batteries, and maybe get a head start on researching the second half of the season. But don't worry, I'm not leaving your feet completely dead. I've got a special bonus mini episode on my sleeve that will drop while I'm on break. So keep an eye out for that. Before we dive into dark waters of the Hudson River today, let's go through the usual housekeeping. If you haven't already, please take a second to raid, review, and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. It really is the best way to help the show grow, and also make sure you're following along on our social media. I'll be posting all the visual aids, crime scene maps, um, our couple photos from today's case, and you're definitely going to see that to get a full grasp of the isolation of the Westside Piers and the village in the 1970s. Alright, that's enough of the business end of things. Make sure your doors are locked, settle in, and let's get into it. When we think of New York City in the mid-1970s, you have to picture a city on the opposite brink. In 1975, New York was effectively bankrupt. Garbage was piling up in the streets, crime was skyrocketing, and whole blocks of the city felt abandoned. But within that decay, there was also an incredible, undeniable energy. And nowhere was that energy more concentrated than in the Grimbich Village. Following the Stonewall riots in 1969, the village and specifically Christopher Street became the undisputed epicenter of the gay liberation movement. Gay men from all over the country were fleeing oppressive conservative hometowns and flocking to Lower Manhattan. They were looking for a place where they could finally breathe, where they could walk down the street holding the hand of another man, and they could find a community. And they did find it. The village was packed with underground clubs, bathhouses, and leather bars. It was a vibrant, sexually liberated haven. But it was a haven with a very dark, very dangerous underbelly. Because of the severe mainstream stigma against homosexuality, the scene was forced to operate in the shadows. For years, it was practically illegal to serve alcohol to gay patrons, which meant that the Mafia accepted. Organized crime almost ran the entire underground scene, including Saltball. They paid off the police to look the other way and happily exploited their marginless clientele. So you have this paradox. The village was a sanctuary, but it was heavily populated by men who were estranged from their families, living off the grid or deeply in the closet because of their professional lives. They were isolated. To really understand how a killer could operate here, you have to look at the literal geography of the village in the mid-70s. It wasn't just a neighborhood, it was an ecosystem, and it was structured almost like a funnel. The main artery of it all was Christopher Street. Christopher on a Friday night, it was a wall of noise and neon. You had places like Julius's or the Ninth Circle, which were these packed, smoky pubs and piano bars. But as you walked further west towards the water and up into the meat packing district, the geography physically changed. The pavement turned into uneven cobblestones, the streetlights got further apart, and the bars stopped looking like bars. Out here, the nightlife moved into old industrial spaces, where you were talking about literal warehouses and abandoned meat lockers that had been painted pitch black and turned into massive multi-lever after hours clubs. Right on 14th Street and the West Side Highway, you had the anvil. It was a cave-like club, and it really didn't get going until four in the morning, and just a few blocks away was the most infamous club of the era, the mine shaft. The mineshaft was notoriously exclusive. It had a strict dress code, no cologne, no suits, just leather, denim, and uniforms. Once you got past the bouncer, you were walking into a labyrinth of dark rooms, stairwells, and strict anonymity. Because it used to be a literal working warehouse, there were still meat hooks hanging from the ceilings. It was an environment designed entirely around sensory deparation, transgression, and strangers operating in total darkness. Now imagine, the sun is coming up, you have hundreds of men pouring out of these heavy, anonymous, windowless clubs at five or six in the morning. They step out onto the cobblestones, and right across the west side highway, looming in the morning fog, are the abandoned Hudson River. A lot of guys weren't ready to go home yet, or they couldn't go home to the straight lives they were hiding. So the geography naturally funneled them out of the clubs, across the highway, and straight into the decaying warehouses on the water to keep the night going. Now I'm not gonna spend too much time breaking down the specific culture of the piers today. If you want to deep dive into that incredibly fascinating, highly dangerous underground scene, go back and listen to episode 19 of this podcast. It was an episode dedicated entirely to what was happening out on the waterfront. But for today's case, what you need to understand about the piers is the isolation. After dark, it was a desolate, cavernous labyrinth of shadows and decaying wood right on the edge of the water. It was the perfect place to disappear for a few hours. But if the wrong person was watching, it was also the place to make sure someone disappeared forever. So we have the physical space set. We know where these men were, but to understand how six human beings could be murdered, dismembered, and thrown away in garbage bags without a single family member stepping forward to claim them, you have to understand the psychological reality of being a gay man in the mid-70s. Inside the borders of the village, it felt like a revolution. Like we said, this is right in the middle of the 1970s sexual revolution, and the gay community was pushing boundaries faster and harder than anybody else. There was this intense, intoxicating rush of liberation. For the first time in modern history, men were living openly, loudly, and it felt invincible. But that invincibility only existed within that very specific zip code. But because the second you stepped on the subway train back into Queens or Brooklyn or New Jersey, you were stepping back into a society that openly despised you. In 1976, there were no working protections. If your boss found out you were gay, you were fired, period. If your landlord found out, you were evicted. For the vast majority of men participating in the village nightlife, their survival depended on living a strict double life. You had guys who were accountants or bankers by day, wearing sharp suits and commuting in from the suburbs, who would change into a different person on Friday night, change into their leather, and become totally different. Because of that intense societal homophobia, a massive portion of the village's population was entirely estranged from their blood relatives. Thousands of young men had been kicked out of their homes and moved to New York with nothing but the clothes on their back. They severed the ties from the past. And within the scene itself, anonymity wasn't just common, it was the rule. You didn't ask for a guy's last name. You didn't ask where he worked. You knew people by their nickname, or by what bar they frequented. This created a devastating vulnerability. If a guy you only knew as Tony from the mineshaft didn't show up to the club on a Saturday night, you didn't think he was dead. You just assumed that he met someone, or he moved to San Francisco, or the pressure got too much and he moved back to Ohio to marry a woman and just play it straight. You had no way to check on him, and you didn't know what his real name was to report him missing, even if you wanted to. A predator operating in this climate didn't just have physical darkness to hide in, they were hunting a population of ghosts, men who had already been erased by their families and society long had forgot about before they even set foot in the village. So you have a population of isolated men, cut off from their families, operating in the shadows. That alone makes them vulnerable. But what made them prey, what allowed a serial killer to operate within absolute impunity, was the institution that was supposed to protect him. We need to talk about the New York City Police Department in the 70s. To call the NYPD's attitude towards the gay community apathetic is actually letting them off easy. It was active institutional hostility. You have to remember, this is a police force that had spent the last two decades training gay men as criminals. They were the ones raiding the bars, dragging men into the paddy wagons, and purposely adding them to the local newspapers to run their lives. So, the relationship between the village and the police was practically a war zone. And we said it way too many times on this show. If a gay man was mugged or beaten or sexually assaulted on his way home from a club, he doesn't call the cops, because if he did, the police were just as likely to arrest them for lewd behavior. The detectives at the time even had a slang for violence in the gay community. They called it rough trade. The assumption was that if a gay man was murdered, it was his own fault. The police narrative was always the same. He picked up a dangerous hustler, or he brought home a violent stranger for sex, and things got out of hand. Case closed. They viewed these murders as misdemeanor homicides. They were treated as inevitable hazards of a degenerate lifestyle, not as crimes that needed to be solved, which we know is some bullshit. And this hostility created a massive black hole for missing people. If you went to the precinct to report your roommate or your partner missing, the death sergeant would laugh you out of the room. They would tell you he probably just moved to San Francisco, or he found a new boyfriend and took off. There was a zero follow-up. Which brings us to the black plastic bags in Hudson River. Between 1975 and 1977, six dismembered bodies washed ashore. Now even the NYPD can't completely ignore human torsos rolling into the tide. They have to open files. They have to do the absolute bare minimum of police work. They trace a few scraps of clothing found with the remains. A specific brand of leather pants, a particular style of boots. The trail leads directly to a handful of specialty leather shops in the village. The police realize immediately that the victims are gay men who were part of the underground leather scene. And at the moment that that connection is made, the investigation practically flatlines. There's no massive citywide manhunt, the mayor doesn't go on television, the police don't put up warnings around the piers or tell the community that a predator's hunting them. Instead, the files are shoved in the back of a filing cabinet. The bodies are buried in Pottersfield. The only people keeping track of the body count are the gay activists and the journalists of the village voice, specifically a writer named Arthur Bell, who was screaming from the rooftops that a serial killer was operating in the village. But the police didn't listen. They didn't care, and because of that apathy, the killer was free to keep hunting. The Hudson River in the 1970s was not the scenic paved greenway you see today. It was an industrial graveyard. The water was heavily polluted and choked with debris, and because of that, heavy black plastic garbage bags bobbing in the tide wouldn't necessarily catch anyone's eye. It was just part of the city's grim scenery. Until they started pulling them out of the water. The timeline begins in 1975. The first discovery happens exactly the way you would expect in a city this massive and indifferent. It wasn't found by a specialized dive team or police patrol looking for a missing person. It was found by people just doing their grim daily routines. Sanitation workers on a garbage barge. They see a heavy sealed black bag caught in the rotting pylons of the village piers. They pull it out of the water with a boat hook, assuming it's just heavy industrial trash. But the weight is wrong, and the smell of the river isn't enough to mask what is inside. When they tear the plastic open, they are not looking at trash. They're looking at human remains. If it had just been one bag, the city might have chalked it up to a mafia hit or a drug deal gone wrong. But the river wasn't done. Over the next two years, from 1975 to 77, the tide keeps bringing them in. The discoveries are agonizingly spaced out, creating the slow drip of war along the waterfront. A bag gets snagged on some bereaving Chelsea. Another washes up further down in the village. Six times over two years, someone makes that same exact horrific discovery. Picture what this actually looks like. Just yards away on the other side of the West Side Highway, we have thousands of men dancing under the strobe lights in packed clubs, completely unaware that out in the dark, cold water just behind them, pieces of the men they might have danced with last week are floating at the tide. Six sets of remains pulled from the dark water. And as the medical examiners lay these bags out on the Atazi tables, they realize they aren't dealing with just random acts of violence. They're looking at the terrifying methodical work of a single predator. Because when they finally look closely at how these men were discarded, a very specific and very gruesome pattern begins to emerge. When a body is pulled from the water, the first thing a medical examiner looks for is the cause of death. But when the remains from the Hudson River were brought into the morgue, the Emmy was faced with a completely different kind of thing. Because the killer didn't just murder these men, he dismantled them. The MO was identical across all six discoveries. Each victim had been heavily dismembered before being shoved into this thick black industrial garbage bag and thrown into the river. Now in true crime we hear the word dismemberment a lot. We get desensitized to it. But if you want to really think about what the act entails, remember, dismembering a human being is not something that happens in a sudden blind rage. It's not a crime of passion. It's incredibly difficult and it's incredibly exhausting. It takes heavy, specific tools, it takes hours of time, and then creates an astronomical amount of blood. What this emo told the detectives, or at least what it should have told them, was a massive amount of information about the psychological profile and the physical reality of the killer. First, it meant the killer had a completely private, secure location. He cannot do this in an alleyway or a backseat of the car. He had an apartment or a workspace where he felt entirely safe from interruption, and where he wasn't worried about the neighbors hearing anything. Second, it suggested a terrifying level of comfort with the human anatomy. The cuts weren't described as chaotic or frenzied, they were methodical. This led to an immediate speculation that the killer had some kind of medical background or perhaps was a butcher. And that sounds really, really familiar to the case that we did on the torso murders. Almost the exact same profile. But finally, the MO revealed the cold calculated logic behind the murders. The dismember served two very practical purposes for the killer. The first was transportation. A dead weight of 180 pounds is nearly impossible for one man to carry unnoticed through the streets of Manhattan. But separated into heavy duty plastic bags, you could load these into the trunk of the car, or even carry them down the block to the piers under the cover of darkness, and anyone watching would just think you were taking out the trash. And then the second purpose was erasure. By removing the heads and hands, which were missing from several of the bags, the killer was intentionally stripping away the victim's identity. In 1976, there was no DNA testing. Without a face for a photograph and without fingerprints to run through the system, a body was essentially just a biological puzzle piece with no matching box. The killer's MO was a literal masterclass in making sure these men remained nameless. He didn't just take their lives, he took their identities, and he threw them into the black water to run. But no killer is perfect. No matter how methodical you are, you'll always leave something behind. And in this case, the killer made one crucial mistake in his back. And it was the only thing that gave the dead men any kind of voice at all. When the medical examiners opened those heavy black bags, they found that the killer had made a critical oversight. He had thrown the victim's clothing into the bags along with the rock. And in 1976, what you wore in the village wasn't just clothing, it was a uniform. It was a coded language. The detectives had shredded fragments of very specific garments, heavy leather pants, studded belts, distinct style of boots, and pieces of dinner. These weren't clothes you bought off the rack in a midtown garment store. They were highly specialized custom leather pieces. Investigators were able to trace the tags and craftsmanship directly to a handful of niche leather shops located right in the heart of the village. The clothing narrowed the victim pool down to a microscopic fraction of the city's population. The police knew exactly what neighborhood these men frequented. They knew exactly what bars they drank in, they knew exactly what subculture they belonged to. In any other neighborhood with any other demographic, this is where the case breaks wide open. You take the description of the clothes, you walk into the local bars, and you ask the bartenders, who hasn't been here for a few weeks? But you already know what happens. Because of the extreme anonymity of the leather scene, even if a bartender recognized the clothing, they don't know the man's legal name. And because of the NYPD's absolute contempt for the gay community, detectives weren't exactly kicking down doors to find out. They hit a wall and they just stopped looking. Which brings us to the most heartbreaking reality of this case. We're sitting here a half a century later. Technology has evolved, we have forensic genealogy, massive missing persons' databases, and coal case units dedicated to giving names back to the nameless. But for the six victims of the bag murders, there's nothing. Because the community was forced into the shadows, and because at least deemed their lives disposable, the trail went completely coal before it was even locked. These men pulled from the Hudson River were buried in unmarked trenches in a Potter's Field on Hard Island. There were sons, they were brothers, they had passions and fears, and lives they fought desperately to live authentically. But today, fifty years later, we don't even know their names. There are just six anonymous victims of a city that looked the other way. So, you have six dead men, six bags, and zero identities. How do you solve a murder when you don't even know who you're avenging? The shorter answer is you don't. By 1977, the official NYPD investigation into the bag murders had essentially ground to a permanent halt. They had no witnesses, no crime scene, and because the bodies were found in water, whatever trace physical evidence might have existed had been completely washed away. But out on the streets, the community was terrified, and in the vacuum of police answers, theories started to spread like wildfire through the village. The first and honestly one of the most plausible theories was that this wasn't the work of a serial killer at all, but it was ormatched crime. We touched on this earlier, but you have to understand the grip the mafia had on gay life in New York. Families like the Ginovese crime family practically held a monopoly on the village nylon. They owned the buildings, they watered down the overpriced liquor, they controlled the jukeboxes, and they paid off the cops. It was a massively lucrative racket, and the mafia did not tolerate anything or anyone who threatened their bottom line. If a patron ran up a massive gambling debt, or if someone threatened to expose a closeted mobster, or if a hustler saw something he wasn't supposed to see in the back room of a club, the mob handled it. And if you look at the history of the New York Mafia, Remembering a body, shoving it into a heavy plastic bag and tossing it into the river wasn't a new concept. This was classic mob housekeeping. It was a standard disposal. Many people in the scene just believed the bag murders were just the mafia cleaning house, getting rid of problems in the way they knew the police wouldn't look too closely at. But there was another theory, a much darker theory. While the mainstream press was completely ignoring these crimes, there was one journalist sounding the alarm. Like we said, his name was Arthur Bell, and he was an investigative reporter and a gay rights activist writing for the Village Voice. Bell was doing the work the police refused to do. He was keeping track of the bodies, and he pointed out the terrifying system of reality. The six bag murders weren't the only unsolved homicides in the gay community. There were dozens of them. Men were being strangled in their apartments, beaten to death in the parks, and vanishing without a trace. Bell theorized that the bag murders might not be the work of a single mastermind. Instead, he suggested that the village had simply become a haunting ground. Because the vulnerability of these men was so high, and the police apathy was so absolute, it was the perfect environment from multiple predators that operated simultaneously. Maybe the Hudson River wasn't the signature of one specific killer. Maybe it was the most convenient garbage disposal for anyone looking to get away with murder in Manhattan. The theory swirled, the paranoia grew, and yet the killer or killers remained completely invincible. But then, in September 1977, the pattern breaks. A murder happened. It wasn't a nameless victim pulled out of the freezing water of the Hudson. It was a well-known journalist. He isn't dismembered, he's killed in his own apartment. And for the first time in two years, the killer doesn't just hide in the shadows. He picks up the phone. Before we get to that phone call in 1977, I need to fast forward the timeline, because years after the trail went cold in the village, a new theory emerged. And it's one that ties the bag murders to one of the most infamous, terrifying sewer killers in human history. In the late 80s and early 90s, the New York gay life was terrorized by a predator the media dubbed the last call killer. His real name was Richard Rogers, and if you look at his profile, the parallels to the 1970s bag murders are so precise that it'll make your blood run cold. Rogers targeted a slightly different demographic, middle-aged, often closeted men drinking at upscale Manhattan bars, so not the leather scene. He would wait until the last call target the most intoxicated, vulnerable man in the room and take him home. But it's the MO that makes the investigators look twice. When Rogers killed his victims, he dismembered them. He was incredibly precise with the cuts because Rogers was a highly trained surgical nurse working at Mount Sinai Hospital. He had the exact medical background and anatomical knowledge that the 1970s police hypothesized that the bag murderer had. And how did Rogers dispose of victims? He stuffed their dismembered remains into heavy plastic garbage bags and dumped them into desolate areas. Now, like we said, the obvious counter to the argument is the timeline. These sex crimes happen in different decades. The last call killers from New York murders happened between 1993, but the bag murders happened between 1975 and 1977. That's a massive gap. Zero killers don't typically take a 15-year-diatus. But there is a terrifying catch. Richard Rogers didn't start killing in the 1990s. His very first known murder happened in 1973 when he killed his housemate at Nang. He bludgeoned the man with a hammer and suffocated him with a plastic bag before dumping the body in the woods. Rogers actually went to trial for that murder, but was acquitted by claiming self-defense. Shortly after that acquittal in the mid-70s, Rogers relocated. Where did he move? To New York City. So, you have a highly intelligent psychopathic killer who has a known history of violence, moving into New York right around the same time the bag murders began. He has surgical stills to dismember the bodies. He uses black trash bags to dispose of his victims. And he exclusively hunts vulnerable games. Was Richard Rogers the bag murderer? Did he spend the 70s honing his epic craft on the Hudson River before transitioning to the upscale piano bars in the 1990s? Because the bag murder victims were never identified, there's no DNA to test against Rogers, who is currently serving two consecutive licenses. It remains a theory, but for a lot of true crime historians, it's the most chillingly perfect fit. But back to 1977, the police weren't looking at Rogers. In fact, they weren't looking at anyone at all, until Arthur Barrel's reporting in the Village Voice inadvertently provoked a completely different monster to step out of the shadows. In September of 1977, the narrative of the village murder suddenly shifted from the dark waters of the Hudson to a fourth floor apartment on Horatio Street. On September 14th, a 36-year-old firm reporter for Variety Magazine named Addison Veryl was found dead in his apartment. This wasn't a nameless victim of the bag. This was a well-known, well-liked journalist. Veryl had been brutally beaten with a frying pan and stabbed in the chest. Arthur Bell, the village voice reporter who had been desperately trying to get the police to care about the bag burners, immediately wrote a massive expose on Veryl's death. He highlighted Veryl's presence in the village club scene and warned the community that a killer was walking among them. Eight days after the murder, Arthur Bell's phone rang. The man on the other end of the line was calm, articulate, and claimed to be the Addison Beryl killer. To prove it, he gave Bell details about the crime scene that had not been released to the press. He told Bell that he had met Beryl at a bar called Badlands. They drank, they went back to Beryl's apartment, they drank some more, and they had sex. The caller claimed that afterwards he realized that Beryl just viewed him as immediately took up. He said he flew into a rage. He bludgeoned him, stabbed him, stole his credit cards, and walked out the door. The caller ended the conversation by saying, I like your writing, Arthur. Bell immediately contacted the NYPD. Through a combination of the phone call, witnesses from the Badland Bar, and eventually a direct confession to police. They arrested a 37-year-old man named Paul Bateson. When investigators looked at Paul Bateson's background, all the alarm bells regarding the bag murder started to ring at once. Bateson was a heavy drinker who frequented the exact same other bars of the village where the bag murder victims were believed to have been hunted. But most importantly, Bateson's profession made the detectives freeze. Paul Bateson was a trained, highly experienced neurological x-ray technician. Remember the metal examiner's profile. The bag murder had to be someone with a sophisticated understanding of human anatomy and joint structure to be able to dismantle the body so cleanly. Bateson had exactly that medical background. Suddenly, the NYPD had a suspect in their custody for the gay village murders, perfectly fit the profile of the Venom they hadn't bothered to hunt for two years. While Bateson was locked up at Rikers awaiting the trial for Addison Beryl's murder, the NYPD needed a way to officially tie him to the six bags on the river. They couldn't find any physical evidence. None of the clothes matched Bateson. They didn't find a blood soaked works box, they had absolutely nothing. So, they relied on one of the most notoriously unreliable tools in the justice system, a jailhouse niche. Another inmate at Rikers, a man named Richard Ryan, came forward with a highly convenient story. Ryan claimed that while he and Bateson were waiting to use the jailhouse phones, Bateson started cracking. Ryan testified that Bateson said killing Beryl was easy, and that he had killed before. According to Ryan, Bateson confessed that chopping up men, putting them in plastic bags, and dropping into the Hudson River, it was fun. And here's where the historical reality of this kid gets incredibly frustrating. When Paul Bateson went to trial, was convicted of the murder of Addison Beryl. He confessed to it, but he vehemently denied having anything to do with the bag murders. Prosecutor William Hoyt knew that he didn't have enough actual evidence to charge Bateson with the six River murders, so instead, he used the jailhouse ninja's unverified story during the sentencing phase of the barrel trial. Hoyt stood up in front of the judge and argued that Bateson was a serial killer, using the bag murder censure Bateson received a maximum sentence of 20 years of life. It was a masterclass and judicial sleight of hand. By heavily implying that Bateson was the bag murder in open court, the NYP got to unofficially close the books on the six undetunfied men at the river. The media got off their backs, they gave the terrified village community a boogeyman in handcuffs. But legally, not factually, police never proved a thing. While Basin was never charged with bag curves, to this day, there's exactly zero physical evidence linking up to those six bodies. So, did an X-ray technician with a drinking problem escalate to dismembering six men, or did a homophobic police department using a convenient killer sweep six unsolved atrocities under the rug? Because the New York Police Department stopped looking the day Paul Bateson was convicted, we'll actually find out. Now before we wrap up this mid-season finale, I need to address the footnote soon of the story. If you Google Paul Bateson today, the first thing you will see isn't Arthur Bell or the Victims or the Hudson River. You'll see Hollywood. Years before he killed Addison Barrell, Bateson was working as a radiographer at a New York medical center. In 1973, director William Freakin was filming a movie there, and he actually cast Bateson as an extra. If you watch the famous andrography scene and the actresses, the medical technician in the background speaking to the doctor is Paul Bateson. And then years later, Paul Freakin visited Bateson in prison and used the conversations to inspire the highly controversial 1980s serial killer film Cruising. It's a chilling piece of trivia, but that is all. It's trivia. For decades, the media has focused on the Crush of the Exorcist, or the Hollywood true crime angle, but when you do that, you lose the real story. The real story isn't about a movie extra. It's about six nameless men who were haunted in the shadows, thrown away like garbage, and entirely forgotten by a city that we're supposed to protect. The true horror of the backwards isn't found on a 1970s movie set, and it isn't found in a jailhouse confession that was never backed up by a single piece of physical evidence. The true horror is that six men walked into the darkness looking for protection, and they met a monster instead. Because of the era they lived in and the uniform they wore, people sworn to protect them if somebody let them catch away. And that's gonna do it for today's case. As a reminder, this is episode 25, which means we've officially hit the mid-season finale of homicidal tenancy. I'm gonna be taking a break for the next week or two to recharge. Dive back into the research archives and map out the cases for the second half of the season. But don't unsubscribe, and keep a close eye on you, since I have a special bonus mini episode already in the chamber that will drop while I'm on break. Also make sure you're following the podcast on social media. I'll be uploading all the visual aids for this case, including archival photographs of the village, the clubs, and some of Arthur Bell's original Village Bush columns. If you want to support the show while I'm on a hiatus, the best way to do so is to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you're listening right now. It helps put us a show out to other True Crime fans and keeps our momentum going. Thank you so much for writing out the first half of the season with me. For myself, my little kitties, Benson and Toulouse. Thanks for listening. Stay safe. Keep your doors locked, and I'll see you on the other side of the break.