In 1978, a game show contestant named Rodney Alcala sat across a partition from bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw on The Dating Game, describing himself through host Jim Lange as a "successful photographer" who, between takes, might be found skydiving or on his motorcycle. He won the date. Bradshaw took one look at him afterward and refused to go, telling friends there was something about him that felt off. Fellow contestant Jed Mills would later describe Alcala more bluntly as "a standout creepy guy in my life."

Bradshaw's instinct was right in a way no one watching that night could have known. At the time the episode aired, Rodney Alcala had already raped and nearly killed an 8-year-old girl, strangled a flight attendant in her Manhattan apartment, and murdered at least two young women in Los Angeles. He would go on to kill at least four more people before his final arrest, and investigators who spent decades on his case still do not know exactly how many victims he left behind. Estimates from the detectives who worked it range as high as 130.

Evidence Log · Trial record, appellate history & investigative reporting
A — 8 murders conclusively linked; investigators estimate up to 130 possible victims
B — Appeared on The Dating Game in 1978, mid-spree, and won
C — First 2 convictions (1980, 1986) both overturned on appeal; convicted a 3rd time in 2010
D — Over 1,000 photographs recovered; most subjects never identified

A childhood interrupted, a monster underneath

Rodney James Alcala was born August 23, 1943, in San Antonio, Texas, the third of four children. His father moved the family to Mexico when Alcala was 8 and abandoned them three years later; his mother brought the children to suburban Los Angeles when he was 11. By most outward measures he integrated well: he attended private school, ran track and cross-country, and worked on his high school yearbook.

At 17, Alcala enlisted in the Army as a paratrooper. His service record documented a pattern of manipulative and vindictive behavior, including multiple disciplinary incidents involving assaults on young women. In 1964 he went AWOL, hitchhiking from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, back to California in what was later described as a nervous breakdown. A military psychiatrist diagnosed him with antisocial personality disorder and measured his IQ at 135. He was discharged on medical grounds. Later evaluations, conducted across decades of litigation, would add narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and sexual sadism to the list. After his discharge, Alcala earned a degree from UCLA's School of the Arts and Architecture. A claim that he had studied film under Roman Polanski at NYU was later shown to be false, though he did in fact attend NYU's film school under a stolen name.

Tali Shapiro

On September 25, 1968, a motorist named Donald Haines watched a man lure an 8-year-old girl, Tali Shapiro, off the street and into a Hollywood apartment. Shapiro was staying with her family at the Chateau Marmont; the man had approached her claiming to know her parents. Haines called police. Officer Chris Camacho, who responded, later described what he found: "I said, 'Police officer. Open the door. I need to talk to you.' This male appeared at the door. I will always remember that face at that door, very evil face." Camacho kicked the door in. Alcala had raped Shapiro and beaten her with a steel bar; Camacho found her in a pool of her own blood, gagging. "I thought, one for the good guys," he recalled. "She's going to make it." Shapiro spent 32 days in a coma and required months to recover. Alcala fled out the back.

Because Shapiro's family relocated to Mexico afterward and would not allow her to testify, prosecutors could not pursue rape or attempted murder charges. Alcala eventually pleaded guilty to child molestation and was sentenced to one year to life. He was paroled after 34 months, in 1974. Less than two months later he was arrested again, for assaulting a 13-year-old girl who had accepted what she thought was a ride to school. He served two more years and was paroled again in 1977, now a registered sex offender.

In between, to evade the original arrest warrant, Alcala had already left California for New York, enrolling at NYU under the alias "John Berger." Two campers at an arts camp in New Hampshire, where he was working under the same alias, spotted his photo on an FBI Most Wanted poster at the local post office. He was arrested and extradited back to California that August.

Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Hover

While living under the Berger alias in New York, Alcala killed at least twice, though neither murder would be solved for decades. On June 12, 1971, TWA flight attendant Cornelia Crilley, 23, was found raped and strangled with her own stockings in her Manhattan apartment. The case went cold.

In 1977, Ellen Jane Hover, 23, the daughter of nightclub owner Herman Hover and the goddaughter of Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., disappeared from her New York apartment. Her datebook noted an appointment with "John Berger" for the day she vanished. Her remains were found the following year, buried under heavy rocks on a hillside above the Hudson River. Both murders would not be tied to Alcala until 2011, more than three decades later, after investigators matched a fingerprint on an envelope found beneath Crilley's body and bite-mark analysis on her breast to Alcala's dental impressions.

A trail of posed bodies

By the late 1970s, Alcala had built a cover as a freelance photographer, working briefly as a typesetter at the Los Angeles Times and telling hundreds of young men and women he needed to photograph them for his portfolio. A former coworker recalled asking why so many of his subjects were nude: "He said their moms asked him to. I remember the girls were naked." He was even interviewed as part of the Hillside Strangler task force and ruled out.

What followed was a run of murders across Los Angeles County that investigators would not connect to him for years. Jill Barcomb, 18, was found near Mulholland Drive on November 9, 1977, strangled with rope, beaten, and bitten. Georgia Wixted, a 27-year-old nurse, was found dead in her Malibu apartment in December 1977, sexually assaulted and strangled with her own nylons, her skull crushed. Charlotte Lamb, 32, a legal secretary, was found strangled with a shoelace in the laundry room of her El Segundo apartment complex in June 1978. Each body had been deliberately posed. DNA evidence, not yet in police use at the time of the murders, would eventually connect Alcala to all three.

In February 1979, a 15-year-old hitchhiker named Monique Hoyt survived him. Alcala drove her to Joshua Tree, photographed her, raped her, and beat her with a rock before she managed to escape while he was in a gas station bathroom. He was arrested but released on bail posted by his mother. Four months later, in June 1979, Jill Parenteau, 21, was found dead and posed in her Burbank apartment; her killer had cut himself climbing through a window, leaving blood evidence that would later be matched to Alcala.

Robin Samsoe

On June 20, 1979, 12-year-old Robin Samsoe was riding a borrowed bicycle to ballet class in Huntington Beach when a man approached her and a friend on the beach, asking to photograph them. Her friend, Bridget Wilvurt, would later describe him as honing in on them "like a shark in the water." A neighbor intervened and the man left. Samsoe told Bridget she was heading home. No one saw her alive again.

Twelve days later, a fire crew found her remains dumped more than 40 miles away in the foothills above Los Angeles. She had been beaten, raped, and stabbed; decomposition was severe enough that dental records were needed to confirm it was her. Her mother, Marianne Connelly, later said it took three days just to be sure. Bridget's description became a composite sketch circulated across Southern California, and Alcala's own parole officer recognized it. He was arrested on July 24, 1979. In a Seattle storage locker rented in his name, investigators found gold ball stud earrings Connelly identified as ones her daughter often borrowed, alongside hundreds of photographs of young women and girls.

Three trials, three death sentences

Alcala's case took more than three decades to resolve, largely because his first two convictions did not survive appeal. He was convicted of Samsoe's murder in May 1980 and sentenced to death that June. In 1984, the California Supreme Court overturned the verdict, ruling that jurors had improperly been told about his prior sex offenses. A second trial in 1986, nearly identical but without that testimony, convicted him again; he was sentenced to death a second time. The state Supreme Court upheld that verdict in 1992, but a federal district judge granted habeas relief in 2001, and the Ninth Circuit upheld that reversal in 2003 on the grounds that a defense witness had been improperly excluded.

By the time prosecutors prepared for a third trial, DNA testing, mandated over Alcala's objection under a new state law, had matched him to the Barcomb, Wixted, Lamb, and Parenteau murders. All five cases, Samsoe's and the four cold ones, were tried together beginning in February 2010, over defense objections that jurors would find it far easier to convict on all five once four were proven by DNA rather than eyewitness testimony.

Alcala chose to represent himself. He took the stand for roughly five hours, alternating between questioner and witness, addressing himself in the third person as "Mr. Alcala" and answering in a lower, deepened voice. He argued he had been applying for a photography job at Knott's Berry Farm when Samsoe disappeared, and played a clip from his 1978 Dating Game appearance to argue that earrings found in his storage locker were his own rather than Samsoe's. Actor Jed Mills, called by the prosecution, testified that men simply did not wear that kind of earring in 1978: "I would have noticed them on him." During closing argument, Alcala played the Arlo Guthrie song "Alice's Restaurant," which includes a line about wanting to "kill." Marianne Connelly, Samsoe's mother, later testified that she had once brought a gun to an earlier trial: "I was going to shoot him right between the eyes if I could've gotten a shot at him."

"From all outward appearances Rodney Alcala was a handsome, charming, smart young man, that wouldn't hurt a fly."

— Matt Murphy, Orange County Deputy District Attorney

The jury convicted Alcala on all five counts of first-degree murder in under two days. During the penalty phase, Tali Shapiro, the girl he had nearly killed in 1968, testified as a surprise witness. In March 2010, Alcala was sentenced to death for a third time.

New York, at last

After the 2010 conviction, New York prosecutors initially said they would not pursue charges given his death row status. A Manhattan grand jury indicted him anyway in January 2011 for the murders of Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Hover. Alcala was extradited in June 2012 and pleaded not guilty, then reversed course that December, pleading guilty to both killings so he could return to California to continue appealing his death sentence there. He was sentenced to two concurrent terms of 25 years to life on January 7, 2013. Assistant District Attorney Melissa Mourges, who tried the case alongside Martha Bashford, said afterward that the judge had cried during sentencing: "Martha and I have been in this business for 35 years each. I've never seen a judge cry during a sentencing."

The photographs

Investigators recovered more than 1,000 photographs from Alcala's storage lockers and belongings, most of women and teenage girls, some of teenage boys, many sexually explicit. In March 2010, Huntington Beach police and the NYPD jointly released 120 of the images to the public, hoping viewers could identify the subjects; roughly 900 more were deemed too explicit to publish. Within weeks, around 21 women had come forward to identify themselves as former subjects, alive and unharmed. At least six families told police they believed they recognized loved ones who had vanished years earlier and were never found.

Christine Ruth Thornton's family broke the case in the most unlikely way. Thornton had disappeared in 1977 while hitchhiking after leaving Biloxi, Mississippi; her remains were found near Granger, Wyoming, in 1982 but were not identified for more than 30 years. In 2013, her nephew spotted one of the released photographs online: a dark-haired woman posed on a motorcycle in a yellow shirt. Thornton's sister, Kathy, recognized her instantly, and for an oddly specific reason. "I said, 'That sure looks like Chris,'" she recalled. "Then I saw her little toe, her baby toe. That's one thing I always remembered about Chris was her little baby toe was different, it hooked. I just saw that toe and I said, 'Oh yeah, that's Chris.'" A DNA sample confirmed the match. Thornton had been roughly six months pregnant when she died. When Wyoming investigators showed Alcala photographs of her remains, he admitted he had been present but denied killing her. Detective Jeff Sheaman, who interviewed him, described his reaction: "He took the photograph, set it on his lap and he used his index finger and just started tracing her body. Tracing her body for probably five minutes." Asked directly whether Thornton was alive when he left her, Alcala answered: "She was alive when I left." He was charged with her murder in 2016 but, in his seventies and in poor health on death row, was never extradited to face trial.

Most of the roughly 900 unpublished and even many of the released photographs remain unmatched to any name. Investigators have said for years that they fear some of Alcala's photographic subjects are victims whose disappearances were never connected to him at all.

How many more

Beyond his confirmed convictions, investigators in multiple states have connected Alcala to killings that never reached trial. Marin County authorities announced in 2011 they were confident he had murdered 19-year-old Pamela Lambson in October 1977, after she went to meet a photographer at Fisherman's Wharf and was later found beaten and naked near a hiking trail; without usable DNA or fingerprints, no charges were ever filed. Jewelry recovered from his Seattle storage locker led detectives there to name him a person of interest in the unsolved deaths of at least three young women and girls in Washington state between 1976 and 1978, including 13-year-old Antoinette Whitaker and 17-year-old Joyce Gaunt, both found posed and killed in ways consistent with his pattern elsewhere. Former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole described him bluntly: "He was constantly in predatory mode. That is behavior that involves hunting human beings, and that's part of a serial sexual killer." Wyoming detective Jeff Sheaman put a rough number on what he suspected: "I wouldn't doubt if there's 100, 150, maybe even 200 victims out there."

Death

Rodney Alcala died of a heart attack at a hospital in Kings County, California, on July 24, 2021, at age 77, having spent more than a decade on death row under a sentence that California's execution moratorium ensured would never be carried out. Kathy Thornton, whose sister's murder he was never tried for, said she hoped renewed attention to the case might jog someone else's memory the same way it had jogged hers: "I'm hoping that with this being back in the news, someone might recognize someone in one of those photos like we did."

A face at the door

What makes Alcala's case difficult to sit with is not just the killing but how long it took anyone to see him clearly. A UCLA professor once told a detective investigating him that Alcala "wouldn't hurt anybody," calling him "a great guy." A television audience watched him win a date on national TV while he was, by his own later admission and by DNA that would not exist as evidence for another two decades, in the middle of murdering people. The one person who saw through him in real time, on camera, in 1978, was a bachelorette who simply declined to go on the date.

Sources

Trial, appellate, and sentencing proceedings referenced above are matters of public record in Orange County, California (People v. Rodney Alcala) and New York County, New York. Alcala was convicted at trial in California in 2010, following two earlier convictions that were overturned on appeal, and pleaded guilty to two additional murders in New York in 2012. He died in custody in 2021.