EXORCIST BOY IDENTIFIED

THE ‘HAUNTED BOY’ UNMASKED

t has long been known that William Friedkin’s 1973 film was based on an actual case, and that the child at the centre of it was not a girl, as portrayed by Linda Blair in the film, but a boy, although his identity had always been disguised under the pseudonym “Roland Doe”. Now, following his death of a stroke at 85, magazine has named the boy as Ronald Edwin Hunkeler. In 1949 at the age of 14, Hunkeler was exorcised in Cottage City, Maryland, and St Louis,