Jamison Bachman, an Elkins Park native, will be featured in an upcoming (and so far untitled) movie based on the Netflix series “Worst Roommate Ever”.
The backstory: In 2017, Alex Miller of Chestnut Hill sublet a room to Bachman, who told Miller his name was Jed Creek and claimed to be a New York City lawyer. Bachman “knew just enough about tenancy laws to take advantage of roommates by not paying rent, refusing to leave, and, eventually, forcing them to move out of their own houses,” the Inquirer reported in 2022.
After becoming violent with previous roommates, he was arrested on November 4, 2017 for killing his older brother, Harry, in his Elkins Park home (400 block of North Sterling Road). Bachman hanged himself in his cell at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility before a preliminary hearing that December.
Described as a “serial squatter,” he made national headlines in 2018 via a New York Magazine article titled “Worst Roommate Ever” (from which the Netflix series got its name). An excerpt:
Bachman’s roommates described him as a man whose life had gone awry — and, in fact, it had. As a kid, Bachman had been groomed for greatness. His parents raised him in Elkins Park, an old, elegant neighborhood of close-clustered homes on the northern border of Philadelphia. His father owned a construction company, and his mother stayed at home; his brother, Harry, four years Jamison’s senior, was handsome and multitalented, juggling the varsity soccer team and the school productions of Camelot and Brigadoon. Where Harry was outgoing and humble, Jamison was ostentatiously self-confident. “He was the cockiest kid you ever met,” said Bob Friedman, one of Jamison’s closest childhood friends. Jamison harbored no doubts about his own abilities: He earned high marks, excelled at tennis, and spent his free time devouring books on the history of Western civilization. Unlike other students’, his high-school yearbook entry records just a two-line quote, attributed to Bismarck, that appears in retrospect like a mission statement: “Fools say that they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others’ experiences.”
“‘Worst Roommate Ever’ resonates so much because as the internet has connected so many of us, it also makes it easier than ever to lie about who you are,” Blumhouse CEO and founder Jason Blum told Variety. “But then the story is jaw-dropping and keeps you on the edge of your seat. Paul is the perfect director for this because his work always manages to strike a balance between the dark and the light, and I’m very excited to see everything he will bring to this story.”
No announcement has been made of the film’s production details or release, according to the Inquirer.
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Photos: Netflix, Montgomery County District Attorney