Rodney Alcala

• 1. Introduction

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  Rodney Alcala walked onto the set of the television game show The Dating Game in 1978, and host Jim Lange introduced him as a successful photographer. Lange promised that between takes he might be found skydiving or motorcycling. The studio audience had no way to know that Alcala was in the middle of a killing spree. Investigators have conclusively linked him to nine murders. The true number of his victims is unknown and could be as high as 130. This documentary follows him through decades of false names, paroles and courtrooms. How did a man with a record of attacking girls keep returning to freedom? What did his camera really record? And why are police still asking the public to study his pictures?

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• 2. A Gifted Student

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  Rodney Alcala was born Rodrigo Jacques Alcala in San Antonio, Texas, on the 23rd of August 1943. He was the third of four children of Raul Alcala Buquor and Anna Maria Gutierrez, a Mexican American couple. In 1951 his father moved the family to Mexico. Three years later he abandoned them.

  In 1954, when Alcala was 11, his mother took him and his two sisters to suburban Los Angeles. By most accounts the boy did well there. He was academically gifted, reasonably popular with classmates and supported by his family. He attended several private schools and graduated from Cantwell-Sacred Heart of Mary High School, where he sat on the yearbook planning committee and ran track and cross-country.

  At 17, in 1961, Alcala joined the United States Army, trained as a paratrooper and served as a clerk. Superiors noted that he was manipulative, vindictive and insubordinate. He was disciplined several times for assaulting young women. In 1964 he suffered what was described as a nervous breakdown, went AWOL and hitchhiked from Fort Bragg in North Carolina to his mother's house in California. A military psychiatrist diagnosed antisocial personality disorder and estimated his IQ at 135. The Army discharged him on medical grounds.

  Psychiatric experts at his later trials offered other diagnoses. They included narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and malignant narcissism accompanied by psychopathy and sexual sadism.

  After the Army, Alcala graduated from the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. A story later circulated that he studied film under the director Roman Polanski at New York University. He never met Polanski there. His time at that university did happen, but under a name that was not his own.

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• 3. Hiding Behind Names

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  On the 25th of September 1968, a passing motorist named Donald Haines saw a man lure an eight-year-old girl into a Hollywood apartment and called the police. The girl was Tali Shapiro, who lived with her family at the Chateau Marmont. She was walking to school when Alcala pulled up beside her and offered a ride. She refused at first. She climbed in only after he said he knew her parents. At his apartment he told her he wanted to show her a picture.

  When officers arrived, Alcala had fled. They found Shapiro alive but gravely injured, having been raped and beaten with a steel bar. She lay in a coma for 32 days and needed months to recover.

  A warrant now hung over Alcala, so he left California and enrolled at New York University as John Berger. On the 12th of June 1971, Cornelia Crilley, a 23-year-old flight attendant for Trans World Airlines, was found raped and murdered in her Manhattan apartment at 427 East 83rd Street. She had been strangled with her own nylon stockings. Investigators believe she met Alcala while moving in and accepted his help carrying furniture. Her murder stayed unsolved until 2011.

  That same year Alcala took a job as a children's counselor at Camp New Beginnings, an arts camp in the village of Georges Mills on Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire. This time he used the alias John Burger. The FBI had placed him on its list of Most Wanted Fugitives in early 1971. A few months later, two campers noticed his face on an FBI poster at the post office. He was arrested that August and extradited to California.

  By then, Shapiro's parents had moved the whole family to Mexico, and they refused to let her testify. Without their main witness, prosecutors would not charge rape and attempted murder. Alcala was convicted of child molestation, which was then a lesser charge, and sentenced to three years.

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• 4. Second Chances

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  Alcala served thirty-four months and was paroled in 1974. Less than two months after his release, he was arrested again for assaulting a 13-year-old girl identified in court records as Julie J. She had accepted what she thought was a ride to school. He was convicted, served two years in prison and was paroled once more. In 1977 he walked out as a registered sex offender.

  His Los Angeles parole officer then made an unusual decision. Alcala was a repeat offender and a known flight risk, yet the officer let him travel to New York City. New York Police Department investigators now believe that within a week of his return to Manhattan he killed Ellen Jane Hover. She was 23, the daughter of nightclub owner Herman Hover and a goddaughter of Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.

  Hover was last seen at her New York apartment on the 15th of July 1977. Her datebook held an appointment that day with a man named John Berger.

  Later in 1977 the FBI received a tip about Alcala's 1971 arrest in New Hampshire and its link to the Shapiro case. Under questioning, Alcala admitted that he knew Hover. Without a body, investigators could not arrest him. Her remains turned up in 1978, buried under heavy rocks on a hillside above the Hudson River. The spot lay near a part of the John D. Rockefeller Estate where an aspiring model would later say that Berger had photographed her.

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• 5. The Portfolio

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  In 1977 Alcala worked briefly as a typesetter at the Los Angeles Times. There he was interviewed by the Hillside Strangler task force, which was questioning known sex offenders. Alcala was ruled out as the Strangler, but he was arrested and served a short sentence for marijuana possession.

  During this period he persuaded hundreds of young men and women that he was a professional fashion photographer and photographed them for his portfolio. In total he built a collection of more than 1,000 photographs of women, teenage girls and boys, many in sexually explicit poses. A Times co-worker later said he showed the pictures around the office. She recalled: "I thought it was weird, but I was young; I didn't know anything. When I asked why he took the photos, he said their moms asked him to. I remember the girls were naked."

  Liane Leedom was 17 when Alcala photographed her in 1979. She said: "He said he was a professional, so in my mind I was being a model for him." She also recalled that his portfolio held "spread after spread of naked teenage boys."

  The man who won over these subjects did not charm everyone. On The Dating Game, fellow bachelor Jed Mills later called Alcala "very obnoxious and creepy" and "a standout creepy guy in my life." Alcala still won the contest and a date with the bachelorette, Cheryl Bradshaw. She refused to go out with him because she found him "creepy" too. Decades later, a courtroom would hear from Mills again, on a question that mattered far more than a date.

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• 6. Murders in California

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  On the 9th of November 1977, Alcala killed 18-year-old Jill Barcomb, a runaway from Oneida, New York. Her body was left on a dirt path near Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. She had been beaten and strangled with blue rope ties. Police first took her for a Hillside Strangler victim. After Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono were arrested, authorities decided her case was unrelated.

  On the 16th of December 1977, co-workers reported nurse Georgia Wixted missing after she failed to show up for work. She was 27 and had last been seen driving a fellow nurse, Barbara Gale, home from a bar. Police found signs of forced entry at her Malibu apartment and found Wixted dead on her bedroom floor, strangled with her nylons. Prosecutors later used DNA evidence and a handprint from the scene against Alcala.

  On the 24th of June 1978, legal secretary Charlotte Lamb, from Santa Monica, was found dead in the laundry room of her El Segundo apartment complex. She had been assaulted and strangled with a shoelace. DNA at the scene matched Alcala. After a later murder, investigators found a pair of earrings in his storage locker, and DNA on them matched Lamb.

  On the 14th of February 1979, Alcala picked up a 15-year-old hitchhiker, Monique Hoyt, in Riverside County. He assaulted her, drove her to a remote area of Joshua Tree, photographed her there and struck her in the head with a rock. She escaped when he stopped at a gas station and went into the bathroom. Hoyt reported the attack, and Alcala was arrested, but his mother posted his bail.

  On the 13th of June 1979, Jill Parenteau, a 21-year-old keypunch operator, left work early for a baseball game. Police found her dead at her Burbank apartment, where the killer had left signs of forced entry. He had cut himself crawling through a window, and the blood later identified Alcala. Her friend Katharine Bryant testified that the two women had met Alcala at a club several times.

  Seven days later, on the 20th of June 1979-12-year-old Robin Samsoe rode a borrowed bicycle from her Huntington Beach home toward her ballet class and vanished. Her body was found 12 days later in the Los Angeles foothills, off Santa Anita Canyon Road. Her friends told police that a stranger on the beach had asked to take their pictures. Detectives circulated a sketch of the photographer, and Alcala's parole officer recognized him.

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• 7. Three Trials

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  Alcala was arrested in July 1979 and held without bail. A jury found him guilty of Samsoe's murder in May 1980, and he was sentenced to death that June. In 1984 the California Supreme Court overturned the verdict because jurors had been improperly told of his earlier sex crimes. A second trial in May 1986 left out that testimony, and it ended in another conviction and, in August, another death sentence.

  The California Supreme Court upheld that verdict in 1992. Alcala then filed a federal habeas corpus petition, and in 2001 a federal district judge granted it. A Ninth Circuit panel upheld the ruling in 2003, partly because a defense witness had been barred from supporting his claim that the park ranger who found Samsoe's body was hypnotized by police investigators.

  While Orange County investigators prepared a third prosecution in 2003, they learned that Alcala's DNA matched semen from the scenes of two women's murders in Los Angeles. The sample had been taken under a new state law over his objections. Another cold case match followed in 2004. Alcala was indicted for four more murders: Barcomb, Wixted, Lamb and Parenteau.

  Between his second and third trials, Alcala wrote and self-published a book, You, the Jury, which claimed he was innocent of the Samsoe murder and pointed to a different suspect. He also sued the California penal system twice, once over a slip-and-fall accident and once over a refused low-fat diet.

  Prosecutors moved in 2003 to join all five cases in one trial, and Alcala's lawyers fought it. One explained the danger plainly: "If you're a juror and you hear one murder case, you may be able to have reasonable doubt but it's very hard to say you have reasonable doubt on all five, especially when four of the five aren't alleged by eyewitnesses but are proven by DNA matches." The California Supreme Court sided with the prosecution in 2006, and the joint trial began in February 2010.

  Alcala acted as his own attorney. For five hours on the stand he played both interrogator and witness, asking himself questions, addressing himself as "Mr. Alcala" in a deeper voice and then answering. He told jurors he had been at Knott's Berry Farm applying for a photography job when Samsoe was taken. He also played a clip of his Dating Game appearance, hoping to show that the earrings in his Seattle locker were his rather than Samsoe's. Jed Mills, the rival bachelor, told a reporter that men did not wear earrings in 1978. "I had never seen a man with an earring in his ear," he said. "I would have noticed them on him."

  Alcala made no serious attempt to dispute the four added charges, saying only that he could not remember killing any of the women. For his closing argument he played Arlo Guthrie's song "Alice's Restaurant," in which the narrator tells a psychiatrist that he wants to "kill." The jury needed less than two days to convict him of five counts of first-degree murder. Shapiro appeared as a surprise witness in the penalty phase. Psychiatrist Richard Rappaport, the only defense witness and paid by Alcala, testified that borderline personality disorder could explain his claimed lack of memory. The prosecutor called Alcala a "sexual predator" who "knew what he was doing was wrong and didn't care." In March 2010 he was sentenced to death for the third time.

  New York authorities said they would stop pursuing him, since he was a convict awaiting execution. Yet in January 2011 a Manhattan grand jury indicted him for the murders of Crilley and Hover. He was extradited in June 2012 and first pleaded not guilty. In December 2012 he changed both pleas to guilty, saying he wanted to return to California to pursue his death sentence appeals. On the 7th of January 2013, a Manhattan judge added 25 years to life.

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• 8. Unidentified Faces

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  In March 2010, the Huntington Beach and New York City police departments released 120 of Alcala's photographs and asked the public for help identifying the people in them. Roughly 900 more pictures were withheld because they were too sexually explicit. Within a few weeks, about 21 women had come forward to identify themselves. At least six families said they thought they recognized relatives who had disappeared years earlier and never been found. No photo was firmly tied to a missing person or an unsolved murder until 2013. Most subjects remain unidentified, and 110 of the original photos are still online.

  The 2013 link involved Christine Thornton, a 28-year-old who had moved to San Antonio, Texas, with her lover. They split up in Biloxi, Mississippi, in June 1977, and she was last seen hitchhiking. In 2013, her sister recognized a published image of a dark-haired woman in a yellow shirt riding a motorcycle. Thornton's body had been found in 1982 near Granger, Wyoming, about 6 miles from Interstate 80. It was not identified until 2015, when DNA from her relatives matched tissue samples from the remains. She was about six months pregnant. Alcala admitted taking the photo but denied killing her. He was charged in September 2016, yet at 73 he was reportedly too ill to travel to Wyoming for trial.

  In Marin County, California, investigators said in March 2011 that they were confident Alcala killed 19-year-old Pamela Lambson on the 9th of October 1977. She had gone to Fisherman's Wharf to meet a man who offered to photograph her. Her body was later found near a hiking trail. With no fingerprints or usable DNA, charges were never filed.

  Seattle police named Alcala a person of interest in several Washington state cold cases in 2010. In 1979, investigators had found jewelry belonging to two of his California victims in his Seattle-area storage locker. They considered the killings of 13-year-old Antoinette Whitaker and 17-year-old Joyce Gaunt, both found in Seattle in 1977 and 1978. A photograph from the locker was shown to the family of Cherry Ann Greenman, who vanished in Waterville, Washington, in 1976, and they confirmed it was not her. Cold cases in California, New York, New Hampshire and Arizona were also reportedly reopened.

  Alcala died of a heart attack at a hospital in Kings County on the 24th of July 2021, at age 77, while still on California's death row. After his death, 68-year-old Morgan Rowan contacted Steve Hodel, an original investigator on the Shapiro case. She described being attacked by Alcala in July 1968, when she was 16. He had met her at a teen nightclub on the Sunset Strip and driven her to his apartment, saying there was a party. Friends who broke in through a window pulled her out.

  Television has revisited the case repeatedly. The series 48 Hours Mystery aired "Rodney Alcala: The Killing Game" in 2010. In 2017 Murder Made Me Famous broadcast "The Dating Game Killer," and Peter Medak directed a film of the same title for Investigation Discovery. ABC's 20/20 covered the case in 2021, and Sky Crime released the three-part documentary Dating Death in 2022. In 2024 Netflix released Woman of the Hour, a drama directed by and starring Anna Kendrick that depicts several murders alongside the Dating Game episode.

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