When you put together a cast, you always run the risk that someone’s going to end up doing something inappropriate, or will be exposed as having already done something inappropriate. It’ll bring shame upon you all. For example, maybe one actor will post something telling everyone to vote, but they’ll remain vague on whom to vote for, and the public will get angry with them. Boy would that be embarrassing.
Or maybe they’ll take a knife out and kill someone. Like the actors in such productions as…
Felon
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Val Kilmer died this month, so maybe you’ll find yourself digging though some of his lesser-known movies, such as 2008’s Felon. Kilmer plays the cellmate of our main character, played by Stephen Dorff, who goes to prison for killing a burglar. During the first prison scene, you’ll see the unnamed character on the left of the shot below, played by Clifton Bloomfield. A couple years before they shot this movie, Bloomfield strangled some guy in his apartment and then strangled an 81-year-old woman in her home.
Sony
“Oh,” you might think. “So, they featured actual prisoners in this prison movie. That’s kind of interesting.” But that’s not what happened. Bloomfield wasn’t a prisoner. He was an actor, like all the actors in the movie. He landed the part of an extra by falsely claiming he’d been an extra on Breaking Bad, and no one involved with the movie realized he was a murderer.
When he was done filming, Bloomfield broke into another home and killed two people there, which officially earned him the title of serial killer. Then he broke into yet another home, this time with a specific victim in mind, and he killed the guy he found in there, shooting him in the neck. This victim actually wasn’t the planned target, but Bloomfield did manage to kill someone, so it wasn’t a total waste of a visit.
This final murder got Bloomfield caught, and he wound up with five life sentences.
The Exorcist
This next movie presented the situation we teased with the last story: A production filmed someone with no acting experience in their natural environment, and that’s why it unwittingly captured a murderer. But for The Exorcist, the location in question wasn’t a prison, where you might expect someone spotted at random to be a killer. It was a hospital.
Director William Friedkin first scouted NYU’s Tisch Hospital in hopes of filming his movie’s angiogram there, and he ended up casting the facility’s actual medical personnel. Performing the fake angiogram on Linda Blair is real radiographer Paul Bateson, who gets a bunch of lines in the scene.
In 1977, four years after the film came out, Bateson left a gay bar one night with a man named Addison Verrill. He went home with him, hit him on the head with a frying pan and stabbed him to death. Someone (possibly Bateson himself) now called a reporter investigating the crime, and later, with police now monitoring the line, someone else called and identified Bateson as the killer.
He went to prison for 24 years for the murder. Prosecutors also tried to link him to five other murders of gay men in the area, but as creepy as it would to say he was a serial killer in addition to simply being a murderer, there was no evidence of that. So, instead, know that there were merely a large number of murders at the time, with police lacking even the slightest lead about who was responsible. There — that’s much less creepy.
Jeopardy!
Given the number of contestants on Jeopardy! over the years, one of them had to end up being a murderer. Frankly, we’d be surprised unless at least two future murderers appeared on the show just last week.
But you might think that winners of the show are marginally less likely than the average person to ever kill someone and have money as the motive, because they have marginally more money than the average person. In 1989, Paul Curry won Jeopardy! twice, taking home $24,000, and he met his wife Linda that same year. He still went on to murder her for her $1 million life insurance policy. He needed a bit of extra money because he was supporting two secret additional families that he had thanks to previous marriages.
NBC
He killed Linda in 1994 by injecting nicotine into an IV bag during a hospital stay. It took another 20 years to convict him for the crime, because that’s how long it took authorities to really answer, “Who is Paul Curry?”
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
The 40-Year Old Virgin contained one actor who creeped people out, to the point that studio execs previewing the footage thought he looked like a serial killer. Thanks to everything that followed this movie, we’re sure you’ll recognize this man’s name. It was Steve Carell.
The movie also featured a man named Shelley Malil.
Universal Pictures
In August 2008, Malil stabbed his girlfriend 23 times. Relationship experts say that even one stabbing is a red flag, and 23 of them definitely qualifies as attempted murder. He stabbed her with both a knife and a broken wine bottle and then tried to smother her with a pillow.
In his defense, he was drunk. It’s not much of a defense, but he did put that forward as one when arguing for parole a decade later.
Canal Livre
You might not all have heard of the Brazilian show Canal Livre before. But those of you who lived in the state of Amazonas anytime between 1996 and 2008 surely caught a few episodes of this very popular news program. Canal Livre described itself as investigative journalism, and while other such shows contented themselves with recapping crime stories that had wrapped up, Canal Livre had a knack for showing up right at the scene immediately after the crime took place.
Maybe they’d pop up in a forest with a human corpse burning in the background. Or maybe they’d arrive at the house of a murder victim even before the police did. If any show was going to just happen to catch a murderer on-camera, it would probably be this one. It was a surprise, though, that when the accusations of murder came down on someone who’d appeared on the show, it wasn’t against some minor figure in one episode but against the show’s host.
TV Rio Negro
Wallace Souza had been arranging the very murders he’d been reporting on, said police, which really is the most reasonable explanation for how the crew found these crime scenes so quickly. They were linking him to at least five murders, and they raided the guy’s home and found some illegal weapons. They didn’t arrest him, however. Because in addition to being a TV host, Souza was a state legislator (he had parlayed his TV fame into a career in politics), and this granted him immunity.
At least, it granted him immunity until the assembly expelled him. At this point, police did arrest him. But Souza never made it to trial. He first died, in the hospital, of liver failure. We’re confident that this was a natural death and was definitely not carried out by the network executives who had secretly orchestrated every murder in Brazil since 1987.
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