When a defendant says a film made him do it, the claim arrives in court with a short life expectancy. The cases here run across more than eighty years and three countries, and the claim came from many different mouths: a defendant, a prosecutor, a police detective, a sister, a psychiatrist, a film director, and in one case a letter writer nobody has ever identified. Sometimes the film was never tested by anyone. Once it was put in front of a jury as proof that a defendant was inventing a second self. In none of these cases did a verdict turn on a film, and in several the title of the case is the only thing a film contributed to the file.
That is the first thing to say plainly, because the phrase "inspired by a horror film" suggests a single kind of event. It covers at least four. A defendant may offer a film to explain himself. A prosecutor may name a film to take an excuse apart. A detective may mention a disc in a truck because it fits a pattern. A relative may say that a killer’s stories were borrowed from television. Each of those is a claim about the claim, and each deserves its own label.
In late August 1990 five young people were killed in Gainesville, Florida, over about four days: Sonja Larson, Christina Powell, Christa Hoyt, Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada. The university closed its classes for a week. The man later convicted of the deaths, Danny Rolling, a drifter from Shreveport, Louisiana, was arrested in September 1990 in Ocala after a supermarket robbery, before anyone had linked him to Gainesville. He was indicted for the murders on November 15, 1991.
He did not go to trial on guilt. Rolling pleaded guilty to all counts on February 15, 1994, and the proceeding that followed was a penalty trial, in which a jury had to decide whether he should die. The jury heard a tape of a confession he had recorded on January 31, 1993, and songs from tapes left at his campsite. His mother testified that his father had been abusive and unloving. And Rolling said he had "dealt with different personalities all my life," naming two darker ones: "Ynnad," Danny spelled backward, whom he described as a bad person but not evil, and "Gemini," the darker, whom he blamed for his deadliest acts.
Prosecutors went after the claim directly. State Attorney Rod Smith said that the Gemini idea was based purely on a character in the film The Exorcist III, which Rolling had admitted watching the week he killed in Gainesville. "He just stole that and used that [as] part of his story," Smith said. The film itself is a 1990 production from Morgan Creek, written by William Peter Blatty from his 1983 novel Legion. Smith’s point was not that the film caused the killings. It was that a man who needed a second personality had found a ready-made one.
The forensic psychologist Harry Krop agreed. "I didn’t buy it," he said. Krop said Rolling was looking for something that would make the events more dramatic and cut his own responsibility, a way of saying, in Krop’s paraphrase, that the devil made him do it. Smith gave his own account of motive in a single sentence: Rolling committed the crimes "for one reason only," he said, "he loved it."
The jury needed only seven votes to recommend death. On March 24, 1994, it voted 12 to 0 on each of the five murder counts. Circuit Judge Stan R. Morris imposed five death sentences, with life terms on the other counts, on April 20, 1994. The Supreme Court of Florida affirmed in 1997, and later challenges in state and federal courts failed. Rolling was executed on October 25, 2006. On the day he died he told the Associated Press, "I do deserve to die, but do I want to die? No. I want to live." Shortly before the execution he gave his former pastor a written note admitting to three killings of members of one family in Shreveport on November 4, 1989. He was never tried for them.
The case has a second film in its orbit, and this one runs the other way. The screenwriter Kevin Williamson has said he was drawn to write the 1996 horror film Scream after watching a March 1994 episode of ABC’s Turning Point about the Gainesville killings, Smithsonian magazine reported in 2021. Scream is fiction, and none of its characters stands for the victims. The film borrowed from the case; the case, by the account of the prosecutors, had borrowed from a film. Only the second borrowing was ever argued before a jury, and the jury was not persuaded.
Adam Leroy Lane drove long-haul trucks out of Jonesville, North Carolina. In July 2007, over a span of about two and a half weeks, he committed a string of violent crimes in three states. Two women died: Darlene Ewalt, in the Harrisburg area of Pennsylvania, on July 13, and Monica Massaro, in Bloomsbury, New Jersey, at the end of the month. A woman in York County, Pennsylvania, and a 15-year-old girl in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, survived. He was arrested in Chelmsford at the end of July 2007 and held without bail.
The film enters this case through a police officer, not through the defendant. Detective George Tyros of the Chelmsford police said that a DVD player in Lane’s truck held a disc of a horror film. Tyros described the film as a story about a serial killer who goes about killing at random. The detective’s comment, in other words, was an observation about the man’s tastes made in the light of what he had done, and it was offered as color rather than as a theory of cause.
Lane’s reply is the more revealing part. On an audio recording of his own interrogation, Lane complains that police had taken the movies he kept in the truck and made him seem like "the worst mass murderer that you ever seen in your life." Then he added the sentence that sums up the whole genre of argument: "Just because I like horror movies." He was not claiming inspiration. He was denying that his viewing habits said anything about him.
That left the courts with nothing to rule on. Lane pleaded guilty in each of the three states. A Massachusetts sentence of 25 to 30 years was reported for December 2007; in 2008 a judge in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, sentenced him to 50 years in state prison; and on June 28, 2010, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, he was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Darlene Ewalt and a consecutive term for the York County attempted murder, under a plea agreement in which prosecutors, who had first sought the death penalty, gave it up. No jury ever weighed the disc in the truck against anything. The film on the disc enters the record only as a detail of habit.
The oldest case is the one in which the horror was in the defendant’s own words, and in which no film can be tied to him. In May 1942 three women, Ivy Violet McLeod, Pauline Buchan Thompson and Gladys Lilian Hosking, were killed in Melbourne over about two weeks, on May 3, May 9 and May 18, while the city lived under a wartime brownout. Private Edward Joseph Leonski, a 24-year-old American soldier of the 52nd Signal Battalion based at Camp Pell, was arrested on May 22, 1942, and confessed.
His defense was mental illness, and the vocabulary he chose for it was the vocabulary of horror stories. A fellow American soldier, Private Anthony J. Gallo, testified at the court-martial on July 16, 1942, that in conversations after the first killings Leonski compared himself to a werewolf and to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and said he had two personalities. Time magazine gave his words in its report the next week: "Did you ever hear of a werewolf? Did you ever hear of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? I’m like him, two personalities." Another soldier, Private Mitchell Kappy, testified that Leonski talked about poltergeists, werewolves and demons. The soldier in whom Leonski had confided urged him to give himself up and plead temporary insanity. Leonski refused.
Which Jekyll and Hyde he meant, the Stevenson story, a stage version or a film, has never been established, which makes this the loosest of the film claims here. The court dealt with the horror vocabulary in full. Two Army physicians and an Australian psychiatrist examined him and judged him sane. The tribunal, a United States Army general court-martial sitting in Melbourne under a regulation the Curtin government had agreed to, convicted him of all three murders and sentenced him to death on July 17, 1942. After "some dispute," he was declared sane. The Board of Review of the Judge Advocate General’s office in Melbourne held the record legally sufficient on October 26, 1942, and he was executed at Pentridge prison, Coburg, on November 9, 1942, at the age of 24.
Not every expert agreed that the law had reached the right answer. A New York psychiatrist, Frederic Wertham, argued that the killings grew from a "catathymic crisis" tied to an unresolved attachment to Leonski’s mother, and that the three victims had stood in for her. That is a theory of psychology, not a finding, and no court ever tested it. The court’s answer was narrower and older: Leonski knew what he was doing, so he was sane in law. The werewolf, in the end, was a figure of speech that the judges did not accept as a defense.
The case did acquire a film of its own. Death of a Soldier (1986), directed by Philippe Mora, is a feature drama about the case. Its argument is that Leonski was mentally ill and was executed quickly to ease tension between the two armies. That is the filmmakers' view of the case. No court has revisited it.
Miranda Barbour was 18 when police in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, charged her in December 2013 with killing Troy LaFerrara, 42, of Port Trevorton, on November 11 of that year. Her husband of three weeks, Elytte Barbour, was charged with her. According to the police account, Elytte told investigators the couple had wanted to kill someone together. Prosecutors sought the death penalty.
While she waited for trial Miranda Barbour gave jailhouse interviews to a reporter for The Daily Item of Sunbury. She said she had killed at least 22 other people in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina and California, starting at about age 13, and that her victims were people who "did bad things and didn’t deserve to be here anymore." Investigators said they had no evidence to substantiate any of it.
The television connection did not come from her. It came from her family. Her sister, 22, told The Daily Item at the end of March 2014 that Miranda was making it up and called her a "master at lying." The sister said Miranda and Elytte both loved the series Dexter, about a forensic analyst who kills people he considers bad, and that Miranda was borrowing from it. "If you listen to what she is saying, she is using descriptions from the show," she said. The couple’s father told the paper that his daughter was a liar and a manipulator and that he did not believe she was a mass murderer.
Dexter is a crime drama, not a horror film, and nobody asked a court to rule on it. The claim was a family’s opinion about credibility, and the court never needed to reach it. On August 26, 2014, both Barbours pleaded guilty to second-degree murder under an agreement that ruled out a death sentence. On September 18, 2014, Judge Charles Saylor sentenced each to life without parole in Northumberland County, saying the couple’s "permanent removal" from society was appropriate. Elytte Barbour read a written apology and said he could not explain his actions. In November 2015 he withdrew a petition to take back his plea. Whether Miranda Barbour killed anyone else has never been tested in any court, and no charge has been brought on her word.
The same television series is attached to a very different man. In Brazil, Pedro Rodrigues Filho, known as Pedrinho Matador, was arrested on May 24, 1973, at 18, and convicted of dozens of homicides, most of them of other prisoners. Estado de Minas wrote that authorities linked him to 71 homicides through convictions or investigations, that his sentence was 128 years, of which he served 40, and that he claimed more than 100 killings, 47 of them inside prisons. Not all of those claims were confirmed, and in some cases police named other people as the killers. All That’s Interesting, a general-interest history site, calls him the "real-life Dexter" because he said his victims were drug dealers, rapists and murderers and that he had "not killed anyone who was truly innocent," and it adds that his notoriety reportedly helped inspire the series. That last claim is the site’s own. He was released in 2018 and was killed on March 5, 2023, in Mogi das Cruzes, São Paulo state. In November 2024 Brazilian police formally indicted a suspect, according to SBT News. The label here was the press’s, and his own claim that his victims were wrongdoers is not a legal defense that any court accepted.
Five people were killed and two more wounded in four incidents around the northern San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969. Police attribute all of them to one unidentified man who called himself the Zodiac. He telephoned police and mailed letters and ciphers to Bay Area newspapers, demanding that they be printed. No one has ever been charged, so this is the one case here with no defendant at all and the film claim could not be tested in any form.
The Exorcist reached the file in January 1974. The film, directed by William Friedkin and written for the screen by William Peter Blatty from his own novel, opened in New York and Los Angeles on December 26, 1973, according to the American Film Institute’s catalog. Within weeks the first letter to authorities in almost three years arrived. On January 31, 1974, San Francisco Police Lieutenant Charles Ellis told KPIX reporter Pat O’Brien that the writer said he had been prompted to write by the film. Ellis could offer only limited information about why the letter had come then. According to Cox Media Group’s 2018 summary of the case, the letter ended with a tally: "Me 37, SFPD 0." Police attribute five deaths to the Zodiac, and the figure of 37 is the writer’s own.
In July 1974 Ellis said that letters postmarked January 29, February 14 and May 8, 1974, the last signed "the Red Phantom," had been analyzed and were considered authentic, though the authorship of the 1974 letters has been debated since. The authentication was a police judgment. No court heard it and nothing in the file ties the film to any of the incidents, which came years before the film was made. What the letter shows is narrower and stranger: a person who had been writing for years chose a new film as the reason to start again, and the police treated the reason as worth reporting to the press.
San Francisco police declared the case inactive in 2004, and later reopened it. A cipher the writer mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1969 was solved in December 2020 by amateur codebreakers, 51 years later, and it did not give a name. As of October 2026 no charge or official identification had been reported.
Most of the claims above run from film to killer. Paul Bateson runs the other way: a killer appears in the film. Bateson, a hospital radiology technician in New York City in the early 1970s, played the technician in a hospital sequence of The Exorcist. Friedkin had watched him perform the procedure in 1972 and invited him to appear, Vice reported in October 2026, and it was his only film role, Collider noted.
Bateson was later convicted of the 1977 murder of Addison Verrill in New York City. Vice dates the conviction to 1979 and says he received a minimum of 20 years; the court and the date of the verdict have not been reported. Six other deaths in New York in the 1970s were linked to him in public discussion. Collider reports that prosecutors tried to tie him to them at his trial and that the judge ruled the evidence insufficient, and Vice says plainly that he was never convicted of any other killing.
The film connection of the second kind came through Friedkin. In a 2013 interview with Windy City Times, the director called Bateson a "confessed killer of some of these men" and said: "I went to see him in his cell at Rikers and I knew I had a really unique background for a murder mystery." The mystery in question was Cruising (1980), a police thriller Friedkin directed. Friedkin has also said, according to Vice, that Bateson privately admitted one of the killings during their conversation. Those are the director’s statements and not a court finding, and Bateson denied admitting to the other deaths, Collider reported. According to Vice, he was paroled in 2003 and died in 2012 at 72.
The case inverts the usual question. No court was asked whether a film had shaped a killer. A film director was asked, in effect, whether a killer had shaped a film, and the answer he gave was his own.
Set side by side, the verdicts say less about films than about the habits of courts. Rolling’s jury heard a prosecutor argue that a borrowed character was a performance, and returned 12 to 0. Leonski’s tribunal heard a soldier describe a werewolf and a double, listened to three medical men, and ruled him sane in law. Lane never offered a film to anyone, and a detective’s remark about a disc in a truck was never tested because he pleaded guilty three times. The Barbours' plea made a sister’s remark about a television series moot. The Zodiac writer cited a film to the newspapers and never appeared in court. Bateson, the one man here who was on screen, was tried for what he did in 1977 and for nothing else.
A film is a convenient shape for a claim. It gives a defendant a name for something he cannot explain, a prosecutor a target, a detective a detail and a headline writer a hook. What it has not given any of these courts is a reason to change an outcome. In every case above the same questions did the work: what the person did, whether he knew what he was doing, and what the law says follows from that.
• 1942, May 3, 9 and 18: three women are killed in Melbourne; Private Edward Leonski is arrested on May 22.
• 1942, July 16 to 17: at the court-martial a fellow soldier testifies to Leonski’s comparison of himself to a werewolf and to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; the tribunal convicts him of three murders and sentences him to death.
• 1942, November 9: Leonski is executed at Pentridge prison, Coburg.
• 1973, December 26: The Exorcist opens in New York and Los Angeles.
• 1974, January 31: Lieutenant Charles Ellis tells KPIX that the Zodiac letter writer said the film prompted him to write.
• 1977: Addison Verrill is killed in New York City; Paul Bateson is later convicted of the murder.
• 1990, late August: five students are killed in Gainesville, Florida.
• 1990, September: Danny Rolling is arrested in Ocala on a robbery charge.
• 1994, February 15: Rolling pleads guilty to all counts.
• 1994, March 24: the penalty jury recommends death on all five murder counts, 12 to 0; the prosecutor tells it the "Gemini" personality came from a film character.
• 1994, April 20: Rolling is sentenced to death.
• 2003: Bateson reported paroled.
• 2006, October 25: Rolling is executed.
• 2007, July: Adam Lane’s string of crimes in three states; he is caught in Chelmsford at the end of the month.
• 2010, June 28: Lane is sentenced to life in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania.
• 2013, November 11: Troy LaFerrara is killed in Sunbury, Pennsylvania.
• 2014, March 31 to April 1: Miranda Barbour’s sister tells The Daily Item that Miranda is borrowing from a television series.
• 2014, August 26 and September 18: the Barbours plead guilty; each is sentenced to life without parole.
• 2023, March 5: Pedro Rodrigues Filho is killed in Mogi das Cruzes.