NY NY - Hudson River, 6 Males found dismembered in garbage bags “Bag Murders”, 1970s

[MadMcGoo]

Bag murders - Wikipedia

How the Bag Murders and the Last Call Killer Put in Focus the Dangers the New York LGBTQ+ Community Faces

The Village Voice - Google News Archive Search

The bag murders were a series of murders of six men from 1975 to 1977 in New York City. The nickname originated from the fact that each victim had been dismembered, his remains stuffed in a garbage bag and thrown into the Hudson River. The identities of the victims, as well as their killer, has never been established. The case and the subsequent events surrounding it had a significant impact on the LGBT community.

 

[MadMcGoo]

Thank you @JovanSrna for bring this to my attention via the Othram thread!!

@madamx here we go.

 

[victoriarobinson642]

Bag murders - Wikipedia

How the Bag Murders and the Last Call Killer Put in Focus the Dangers the New York LGBTQ+ Community Faces

The Village Voice - Google News Archive Search

The bag murders were a series of murders of six men from 1975 to 1977 in New York City. The nickname originated from the fact that each victim had been dismembered, his remains stuffed in a garbage bag and thrown into the Hudson River. The identities of the victims, as well as their killer, has never been established. The case and the subsequent events surrounding it had a significant impact on the LGBT community.

While examining the clothing left on the body parts, it was determined that all of them had been bought from leather stores in Greenwich Village, on the west side of Lower Manhattan, a popular gathering place for homosexuals due to the abundance of gay bars and similar institutions.[2
Via Wikipedia
(Bag murders - Wikipedia)

 

[victoriarobinson642]

Young men missing from NYC in that time period:
Michael James DeMaria – The Charley Project
Michael James DeMaria
DeMaria was last seen leaving his apartment building in New York City, New York on October 14, 1976. He has never been heard from again. Few details are available in his case.

The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs)
Leonard Edward Johnson Jr
Leonard walked away from his home in Manhattan after being discharged from the Army. He is originally from Michigan. He was a member of the US Coast Guard at the time, he has since missed the funerals for both his parents and does not have any activity on his social security number.

Frank S. Passafiume – The Charley Project
Passafiume was last seen in the New York City borough of Brooklyn on April 14, 1976. He has never been heard from again. Few details are available in his case.

 

[JovanSrna]

Can someone contact the journalist Matt Miller about this? He has a Twitter profile and writes for the Esquire (the most recent article was published two days ago). My understanding is that this guy writes about culture but he's written about this topic twice at least and some public servants were polite enough to oblige his requests. New York sees a big number of crimes and this case is quite old but is it a problem of the case files being hard to locate under mountains of other case files or did they destroy the case files after some time? Is there a cold case unit in New York's police department? Would they accept help from outsiders? San Francisco's police has been actively looking for a gay serial killer from roughly the same period and they feel like they've never been this close to catching him.

I also feel like the name of this case is really bad, bland and generic. Many criminals dispose of their victims in bags, dismembered or not, so when I try to look up this case it's hard to find it. You have to type more specific information to find it, it's a really obscure case. I found it by looking up movies about serial killers and it was mentioned on the page for the movie Cruiser. If anything, this story has never been properly covered while San Francisco's Doodler (and his victims) have received greater attention in recent years. It would be a worthwhile effort to check if anything has been preserved and locate important people before they die.

 

[DS2021]

These men don't appear to be in NamUs either

 

[madamx]

I have looked and look

Thank you @JovanSrna for bring this to my attention via the Othram thread!!

@madamx here we go.

this is so crazy! Thank you MadMcGoo for bringing this up . I have Never heard of these guys at all.
There are no info on these guys either, except they all seemed to have shopped at the same store. There are no stats on them or even reports on the clothing they wore nothing. It’s sad and frustrating.

iam adding this on Paul Bateson since he was the suspect
The film The Exorcist's actual murderer Paul Bateson - was he a serial killer as well?

 

[DS2021]

Unfortunately some of them may have been disowned by their family because of their sexuality.

 

[Melt71]

Unfortunately some of them may have been disowned by their family because of their sexuality.

And like MacArthur in Toronto, this SK may have chosen migrants or refugees with few, if any, family members in the country who could make an MP report

 

[madamx]

And like MacArthur in Toronto, this SK may have chosen migrants or refugees with few, if any, family members in the country who could make an MP report

Yes both true, disowned by family especially in those times. People w no family ti report them missing also another good point, but still we have no info on the part of LE on what the stats of these guys are to be even able to try and identify any of them. It’s sad.

All we know is they were men in plastic bags thrown in Hudson and East River. They all had items from the same store. We don’t even know the clothing they had. It’s so frustrating.

 

[JSolt1210]

I feel like the connection in this case will be found in the leather subculture of the LGBTQ community of the time.

According to the description, the clothes were purchased from "leather stores" plural, not the same store, so I doubt it was an employee who was befriending customers.

Maybe someone in the leather scene (or pretending to be) would pick up men at these stores, or even at gay bars hosting leather-themed events. Was this even a thing back then? This was a little before my time.

I'm kinda leaning towards the "store" theory. A gay bar attracts people from all over. How likely is it that this perp happened to pick up men who all purchased their gear from stores in Lower Manhattan and not, say, nearby Brooklyn? (Unless leather stores weren't as common back then.) But if he was picking them up in the stores, then that explains why the victims all had that in common, because the perp was targeting stores in one area.

 

[MadMcGoo]

Can someone contact the journalist Matt Miller about this? He has a Twitter profile and writes for the Esquire (the most recent article was published two days ago). My understanding is that this guy writes about culture but he's written about this topic twice at least and some public servants were polite enough to oblige his requests. New York sees a big number of crimes and this case is quite old but is it a problem of the case files being hard to locate under mountains of other case files or did they destroy the case files after some time? Is there a cold case unit in New York's police department? Would they accept help from outsiders? San Francisco's police has been actively looking for a gay serial killer from roughly the same period and they feel like they've never been this close to catching him.

I also feel like the name of this case is really bad, bland and generic. Many criminals dispose of their victims in bags, dismembered or not, so when I try to look up this case it's hard to find it. You have to type more specific information to find it, it's a really obscure case. I found it by looking up movies about serial killers and it was mentioned on the page for the movie Cruiser. If anything, this story has never been properly covered while San Francisco's Doodler (and his victims) have received greater attention in recent years. It would be a worthwhile effort to check if anything has been preserved and locate important people before they die.

I’d be willing to reach out. I don’t have a Twitter and wouldn’t know what to say, but if you guide me I’ll do it.

 

[MadMcGoo]

I feel like the connection in this case will be found in the leather subculture of the LGBTQ community of the time.

According to the description, the clothes were purchased from "leather stores" plural, not the same store, so I doubt it was an employee who was befriending customers.

Maybe someone in the leather scene (or pretending to be) would pick up men at these stores, or even at gay bars hosting leather-themed events. Was this even a thing back then? This was a little before my time.

I'm kinda leaning towards the "store" theory. A gay bar attracts people from all over. How likely is it that this perp happened to pick up men who all purchased their gear from stores in Lower Manhattan and not, say, nearby Brooklyn? (Unless leather stores weren't as common back then.) But if he was picking them up in the stores, then that explains why the victims all had that in common, because the perp was targeting stores in one area.

It seems like such a targeted, small scene. Down to a specific area and only over a 2 year period. The killer(s) and victims must have been known to the same (small-ish) group of people. Right? This seems solvable.

 

[carbuff]

New York was one of the big magnets for gay men all over the northeast. It would be quite likely that the victims had come from New England or the midwest. Quite a lot of them would have been thrown out by intolerant parents. Also people made weekend or vacation trips.

I had a friend who was into that scene in the 70s and 80s but I don't remember him ever mentioning these specific murders. He did say there was a lot of targeted violence and whenever he went down to the city for a weekend, he was worried he wouldn't come back. Unfortunately he's not alive now so I can't ask him...

 

[madamx]

In 1977 and '78, New York homosexuals were terrorized by a series of "bag murders," in which six male victims were mutilated and dismembered, their remains wrapped in black plastic bags and dumped in the Hudson River. Some of the grisly fragments washed up on the New Jersey shore, others coming to ground near the World Trade Center.

Police traced items of recovered clothing to a shop in Greenwich Village, catering to gays, and distinctive tattoos identified one of the victims as a known homosexual. Lacking identities and confirmed cause of death in several cases, the crimes were not officially classified as homicides, but were listed as CUPPI's -- circumstances undetermined pending police investigation.

Paul Bateson | Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers

 

[madamx]

The bodies were dismembered and stuffed in trash bags and spent between two and six weeks in the Hudson River. None of the six victims were never identified, cause of death never determined. Police were able to trace the clothing to a fetish shop on Christopher Street that catered to the Leather community. Paul Bateson frequented the gay bars in the meatpacking district. The police could never connect him to the bodies. He was only convicted of one murder because he called a journalist and confessed to it. The final victim Addison Verrill—


“I would also point out to the Court that 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 continued, while arguing for his sentencing. “In all six cases … examiners have said that the person who cut up those bodies was a person who was either a butcher or a person with medical knowledge because of the way the cuts were done.”

Mindhunter Season 2 Episode 6 Paul Bateson True Story - The Full Story of The Bag Murders in New York

 

[madamx]

For two years, mutilated and dismembered body parts had been washing up along the Hudson River wrapped in black plastic bags. Police traced some of their recovered clothing to a shop in Greenwich Village that catered to gay men in the leather subculture. Other than that, the bodies could never be identified, nor was a murderer pinpointed.


These murders, coined the “bag murders,” began in 1975 and ended in 1977.

While in custody, Paul Bateson reportedly bragged to a friend that he had killed and dismembered multiple men. As prosecutor William Hoyt told the judge at Bateson’s sentencing, “He told Mr. Ryan that killing is easy, that getting rid of the bodies is the hard part. He said that he cut up his victims and put the parts in plastic garbage bags to dispose of them.”

But there was no direct evidenceconnecting Bateson to the murders. The judge concluded that these six additional crimes were “too ephemeral to have any connection to this case.”
The six “bag murders” remain unsolved to this day.


When director William Friedkin heard about Paul Bateson’s trial, he went to visit him in jail. According to Friedkin, Bateson said that he had been thinking about confessing to these six murders in exchange for a reduced penalty.

“He said, ‘I remember killing this one guy…I cut him up and I put his body parts in a plastic bag and threw it in the East River,'”
Friedkin recalled Bateson saying, albeit decades after the fact, on The Hollywood Reporter podcast. “Well, this is how they got him. At the bottom of the bag, in very small print that you can’t even read, it said, ‘PROPERTY OF NYU MEDICAL CENTER NEUROPSYCHIATRIC CENTER.’ He said, ‘That’s the only one I remember but they want me to confess to another five or six.'”

This conversation inspired Friedkin’s next film, Cruising, starring Al Pacino. Loosely based on Gerald Walker’s novel of the same name, it’s about a police officer who goes deeply undercover to solve a string of murders of gay men in the West Village in the 1970s.

After Appearing In 'The Exorcist,' He Committed A Brutal Murder — And Perhaps Many Others

 

[madamx]

At the time, police was investigating a series of murders of homosexual men occurred between 1975 and 1976, dubbed the "Bag Murders", the "CUPPI Murders" (an acronym which stands for "Circumstances Unknown Pending Police Investigation", the official NYPD designation for the cases, due to the unknown cause of death) <modsnip>.

The six victims were killed by unknown means, and disposed with the same Modus Operandi: post-mortem dismemberment, the remains placed in plastic bags that were later dropped in the Hudson River (body parts were recovered on the New Jersey shore and near the World Trade Center). Thus, the authorities were convinced that the same individual was behind all of the killings. None of the men were ever identified, though clothes found on them were traced to a Greenwich Village shop which served the leather subculture. Also, tattoos found on the victims linked them to the SM world.

Since the bags were purportedly linked, by wording on them, to the NYUMC's neuropsychiatric unit (though a contemporary research showed no trace of such a linkage), and the killer was speculated to have some kind of medical expertise, investigators began to publicly suggest Bateson to be a suspect in the case.

Just like Arthur Bell, William Friedkin, who remembered Bateson from The Exorcist, payed a visit to Bateson before his trial. Bateson, on Friedkin's own account, admitted to killing Verrill, and said he was thinking about confessing the "Bag Murders" in exchange for a reduced penalty (a contemporary research found no trace of such a deal). His conversation with Bateson inspired Friedkin to make a movie based on a 1970 novel of the same name by Gerald Walker, Cruising, featuring a policeman (played by Al Pacino) who goes undercover in the SM gay community in order to catch a serial killer targeting homosexual men. The movie aired in 1980.

Paul Bateson | Criminal Minds Wiki | Fandom

 

[madamx]

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/...r-shop-not-for-the-uptight-stands-strong.html
The Leather Man

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/fashion/fifty-years-on-a-pioneering-leather-shop-not-for-the-uptight-stands-strong.html

 

[JSolt1210]

Thanks for the articles you posted, @madamx ! Interesting that all of them say the clothes were tied to "a shop in Greenwich Village" or "a fetish shop on Christopher Street."

So if it was one shop, and not many, then I guess we can't rule out a store employee. But I agree that Bateson is a likely suspect, especially with the NYU bag!