6 Dismembered Men Were Found in NYC in the 1970s. Why Are the Bag Murders Still Unsolved?

During the mid-1970s, the dismembered remains of six men began turning up in plastic garbage bags in and around the Hudson River. None of the men could be identified, and clothing recovered with the remains was traced to the Greenwich Village leather community, a prominent queer subculture in New York City, fueling—along with other circumstances—a belief that the victims were gay men.

The gruesome discoveries became known as the Bag Murders. However, nearly 50 years later, the victims still have no names, and the case remains unsolved. Even the theory that all six deaths were the work of one serial killer remains difficult to prove.

“All we do know is that they happened around the same time, they were all similarly gruesome, they were all disposed of in the same way, and they're all unsolved,” journalist Matt Miller, who has investigated the case for years, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Besides that, the Bag Murders label has kind of taken on a myth of its own, thanks to the same lack of facts and the spreading of misinformation.”

That mythology has largely centered on Paul Bateson, a former radiology technician who appeared in the cerebral angiography scene in William Friedkin's 1973 film The Exorcist. Bateson was arrested in 1977 for the murder of Addison Verrill, a film industry journalist who was found stabbed in his Greenwich Village apartment.

Verrill's death drew the attention of Village Voice journalist and gay rights activist Arthur Bell, who wrote about the killing. A man claiming to be the killer later called Bell, and information from that call and a subsequent tip helped lead police to Bateson. Bateson was convicted of Verrill's murder in 1979 and sentenced to 20 years to life.

At sentencing, however, a prosecutor alleged that Bateson had boasted to an acquaintance, Richard Ryan, about killing other men, including the six unidentified Bag Murders victims. Bateson denied responsibility. Prosecutors acknowledged there was no direct proof, and the judge called the alleged connection “too ephemeral” to consider in Bateson's sentence. He was never charged in any of the six deaths.

The accusation nevertheless stuck. Friedkin incorporated elements of the case and New York's leather subculture into Cruising, his controversial 1980 film about an undercover officer hunting a killer targeting gay men. Decades later,Netflix's Mindhunter portrayed FBI agents interviewing Bateson, although Miller says he has found no indication such an interview occurred.

“With William Friedkin's Cruising, Netflix's Mindhunter and the various blogs and podcasts dedicated to Bateson, many of the facts have blurred with fiction and entertainment,” Miller says. 

The case unfolded several years after the Stonewall uprising, but at a time when police raids, exposure and harassment remained part of life for gay New Yorkers. Richard Berkowitz, an author and longtime gay activist who moved to Chelsea in the late 1970s, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that “danger was almost everywhere we went to meet other gay men.”

“There was the danger of police always on the prowl wherever we congregated, the danger of being ‘gay bashed,’ the danger of going off with someone alone who might hurt or rob you,” Berkowitz says. “Pleasure and danger felt inextricably linked.”

Gay men shared warnings in bars and cruising areas, traveled in groups and relied on neighbors for protection, Berkowitz adds. Those informal safety networks could not erase a deeper problem: People who feared being outed, losing their jobs or being mistreated by police had powerful reasons not to become witnesses.

Former New York Police Department Detective Randy Jurgensen encountered that fear firsthand while working undercover in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. He helped investigate men who kidnapped and extorted gay victims by threatening to expose them. In a separate case, a man told Jurgensen that he had witnessed a killing but would not speak directly to detectives. Jurgensen relayed the information, and the case was solved.

“Even the people who are gay and possibly are a witness or can help, they won't come forward,” Jurgensen says. “They [were then] exposed and they're truly putting, I don't want to exaggerate, but certainly they're putting their jobs on the line.”

The distrust could be palpable even to an officer working undercover. Jurgensen remembers walking with gay friends on 14th Street and feeling their anxiety whenever a police car passed. “They were scared of the cops,” he says. “I'm a cop, and maybe I was undercover too long. I was afraid of the cops in the car.”

Jurgensen stresses that he did not work on the Bag Murders case and is not saying detectives ignored killings of gay people entirely. But resources reflected a clear hierarchy—a high-profile case might draw dozens of investigators, he says, while killings involving gay victims rarely received comparable manpower.

“You had an individual killing two girls, you had 15 detectives, and before it was over, 40 detectives were working on that case,” Jurgensen says. “You're never going to see 40 or 15 detectives working on these [other] killings.”

A spokesperson for NYPD told A&E Crime + Investigation they could not provide the status of the case due to its age and the lack of victims' names or birthdates.

Fragmentation posed another obstacle. Jurgensen says homicides were generally assigned according to the precinct where a person was killed or found. With remains recovered from multiple locations in and near a moving river, recognizing a pattern could require detectives and agencies to share information across boundaries, without the benefit of modern digital databases. Without names, investigators also could not readily reconstruct the victims' final movements, find their families or match them to missing-person reports.

Time has only deepened those problems. Miller says many investigators, officials and journalists connected to the case have died, while records from the era have been lost, damaged or inconsistently preserved.

The surviving coverage presents its own challenge. 

“Arthur Bell and many other LGBTQ journalists of the time wrote extensively how mainstream media outlets seldom reported on LGBTQ crime,” Miller says. “And if they did report on these crimes it was often greatly sensationalized.” 

The result is a case reconstructed largely through old newspaper accounts, disputed recollections and allegations raised in a different murder prosecution. It is enough to keep Bateson's name attached to the Bag Murders, but not enough to establish that he killed the men, or even that one person killed all six.

For Miller, any renewed investigation should begin with the question that decades of sensational coverage pushed aside: Who were the victims?

“With their names we could potentially see what kind of investigation the NYPD did into the murders,” he says. “We could also see if there were any missing persons reports and if those possibly dig up any connection. And maybe it could all lead to finally learning who the Bag Murderer really was.”