With shows like The Bachelor and Love is Blind, reality TV dating has never been more popular. Shows like these all date back to the very first dating show, The Dating Game, which premiered in 1965. After 13 years on the air, The Dating Game had their most controversial contestant ever – Rodney Alcala. A contestant who was later convicted of sex crimes as well as murder.
Rodrigo Jacques Alcala Buquor (Rodney James Alcala ) was born on August 23, 1943 in San Antonio, Texas. At the age of 8, he and his family packed up, left Texas, and moved to Mexico.
Just three years later, his father abandoned them, leaving the family with nothing. His mother made the decision to move back to the United States, and they settled in Los Angeles, California.
Alcala joined the US Army when he was 17, and worked as a clerk. By the time he was 21, he was showing signs of mental health problems. He was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder – a mental health disorder characterized by a blatant disregard for others. Generally speaking, someone who develops this disorder, has grown up with difficult family circumstances – often abuse or neglect.
Someone with ASPD is generally impulsive, irresponsible, and often partakes in criminal behavior. They are often described as being manipulative, deceitful, and reckless. Combine this with their disregard for others and you have a rather dangerous person. In fact, psychopaths are considered to have a severe form of ASPD.
After a nervous breakdown, Alcala was discharged from the military. It was then he decided to go to college, in fact, he had a near genius level IQ, scoring 135 (genius is considered 140+). He attended California State University, then transferred to UCLA. In 1968, he graduated with a fine arts degree.
His first known crime was committed on September 25, 1968. He was spotted luring 8-year-old Tali Shapiro into his Hollywood apartment. By the time police arrived, Tali had been raped and beaten with a steel bar. Alcala was nowhere to be found.
He fled to New York and enrolled in the New York University film school under the alias “John Berger.” Interesting fact – he took a class with Roman Polanski, a very well known film director. Alcala got a counseling job at an arts camp for children in New Hampshire, using a slightly different alias, “John Burger.”
He couldn’t bury his criminal tendencies, and in June, 1971, he found himself in the Manhattan apartment of 23-year-old, TWA flight attendant, Cornelia Michel Crilley. Cornelia was raped and strangled to death. Her murder went unsolved until 2011.
Unfortunately for Alcala, that same year he found himself on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. A poster with his face was on display in a New Hampshire post office when two children who attended the arts camp recognized him. He was arrested and extradited to California.
In order to charge him with rape and attempted murder, authorities needed Tali to testify against him in court. However, her family had relocated to Mexico and refused to allow her to testify. This left them with no choice but to charge him with child molestation. He was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison.
After 34 months, in 1974, Alcala was released on parole. But he had not reformed, and in less than 2 months, he was once again arrested. Alcala offered a 13-year-old girl known as Julie J, a ride to school. He assaulted her and found himself facing another prison sentence – this time serving only two years.
Despite being a registered sex offender, in 1977 he landed a job at the Los Angeles Times as a typesetter. During this same timeframe, a serial killer was prowling the streets of Los Angeles. This killer, known as the Hillside Strangler, killed 10 women and girls between the ages of 12 and 28. Alcala was questioned as a potential suspect, but was cleared.
In an unusual and unexpected move, Alcala’s parole officer permitted him to travel to New York City on the premise of “visiting relatives.” It is believed that within a week of arriving in Manhattan, he found a new victim. 23-year-old Ellen Jane Hover was the daughter of Herman Hover, the owner of the popular Hollywood nightclub, Ciro’s, and goddaughter of Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin.
After she was reported missing, investigators found a calendar among her things. The calendar noted that she had a meeting with “John Berger.” Her remains were found in 1978 on a hillside overlooking the Hudson River beneath heavy rocks.
Back in Los Angeles, Alcala turned to luring women by offering to take their photo. He claimed to be a professional fashion photographer, and needed photos for his “portfolio.” Later, one of his former co-workers at the Los Angeles Times recalled how he shared his photos with them. “I thought it was weird, but I was young; I didn’t know anything,” she said. “When I asked why he took the photos, he said their moms asked him to. I remember the girls were naked.”
While many of the women posed for photos and returned to their lives, some did not. One who allowed him to photograph her in 1979, said, “He said he was a professional, so in my mind I was being a model for him.” She reported that his portfolio also included “… spread after spread of [naked] teenage boys.”
Most of the photos were sexually explicit, and many of the models remain unidentified. One model was 15-year-old Monique Hoyt, who Alcala knocked unconscious and raped during their “photo session.”
Of the unidentified photos, some are suspected to be victims of cold-cases.
In September 1978, Rodney Alcala found himself in, what many would consider, an unusual position. He was a contestant, Bachelor No. 1, on The Dating Game, a TV show that had men and women interview prospective dates, without seeing them. Although he was a convicted child molester, the producers of the show did not run a background check.
On the show, Alcala was introduced as “a successful photographer, who got his start when his father found him in the darkroom at the age of 13, fully developed. Between takes you might find him skydiving or motorcycling.” He charmed his way into a date with Cheryl Bradshaw, answering “I’m called ‘The Banana’ and I look really good… Peel me,” after she asked him to describe what kind of meal he’d be.
Other contestants described him as a “very strange guy” with “bizarre opinions.” After officially meeting Alcala, Cheryl refused to go on their date. He was “acting really creepy.”
On June 20, 1979, 12-year-old Robin Samsoe disappeared somewhere between the beach and her ballet class where she was headed. What was left of her body was found 12 days later in the Los Angeles foothills. She had been feasted on by local wildlife. Her friends told police that a stranger had approached them on the beach, asking to take their pictures.
The girls were able to give detectives a description of the man, and a police sketch was created and circulated. Alcala’s parole officer recognized him, and police began their search. They went to his mother’s home where they found a receipt for a storage locker in Seattle. A search of the locker turned up Robin’s earrings.
Rodney Alcala was arrested in July and held without bail. In 1980, he was tried, convicted, and given the death sentence. Four years later, his sentence was overturned by the California Supreme court after it was determined that the jury was prejudiced. They had been informed of his prior sex crimes. He would have to be tried again.
A second trial, in 1986, Alcala was once again found guilty and sentenced to death. Once again, the ruling was overturned in 2001, this time by a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. According to LA Weekly, the ruling was overturned “in part because the second trial judge did not allow a witness to back up the defense’s claim that the park ranger who found Robin Samsoe’s animal-ravaged body in the mountains had been hypnotized by police investigators.”
During his time in custody, Rodney Alcala wrote and self-published a book, You, the Jury, in which he argued he was innocent. He went so far as to suggest a different suspect. The book is not currently listed for sale.
Alcala expressed his dissatisfaction with the California penal system in another way as well. He filed two lawsuits against them, one for a slip-and-fall incident, the other for refusing to provide him with a low-fat diet.
As time wore on, the world of science was constantly changing and improving. This meant advances in DNA and other types of crime scene analysis. Since he had been forced to provide a DNA sample, investigators were able to use that to tie him to other cases. One of those ties came from a pair of earrings found in his Seattle storage locker. Earrings that did not belong to Robin Samsoe.
This DNA evidence led to Alcala being indicted on four more murders. 18-year-old Jill Barcomb was killed in 1977, and was originally thought to be a victim of the Hillside Strangler. 27-year-old Georgia Wixted had been bludgeoned to death in her Malibu apartment in 1977. 31-year-old Charlotte Lamb had been strangled to death in El Segundo in 1978. The earrings found in Alcala’s storage locker had her DNA on them. Last, 21-year-old Jill Parenteau, who was killed in her apartment in Burbank in 1979.
Prior to Alcala’s third trial for the murder of Robin Samsoe, prosecutors filed a motion to join that case with his additional murder charges. His defense contested it, saying, “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.”
In 2006, the California Supreme Court ruled in the prosecution’s favor, and the next trial began in 2009.
For trial number three, Rodney Alcala made the unorthodox decision to act as his own attorney. As his own attorney, he found himself asking himself questions, going so far as to refer to himself as “Mr. Alcala.” He asked himself in a deep voice, then answered with his usual voice.
This round of questioning went on for five hours during which time he told the jury that he was at Knott’s Berry Farm at the time of Robin Samsoe’s murder, applying for a job as a photographer. He played dumb in regards to the other four charges. He even showed the jury a portion of his appearance on The Dating Game, pointing out that the earrings found in his Seattle locker were his.
However, Jed Mills, the actor who competed against Alcala on The Dating Game pointed out that earrings weren’t socially acceptable for men at that time. “I had never seen a man with an earring in his ear,” he said. “I would have noticed them on him.”
Richard Rappaport, a psychiatrist paid by Alcala, testified that Alcala’s diagnosis of borderline personality disorder could explain his claims of no memory of committing the murders. The prosecutor argued that Alcala was a “sexual predator” who “knew what he was doing was wrong and didn’t care.”
Then, as part of his closing argument, he played “Alice’s Restaurant,” a song by Alro Guthrie. In this song, the protagonist tells a psychiatrist that he wants to kill.
The jury took less than two days to deliberate, and came out with a conviction of guilty on all five counts of first-degree murder. He was once again sentenced to death.
Convicted of five murders and one count of child molestation, investigators knew there had to be more. In March 2010, the Huntington Beach, California and New York City Police Departments released 120 of Alcala’s photographs to the public. They needed help identifying the women and children photographed. Though there were approximately 900 more photos, they could not be released due to their sexually explicit nature.
They were hoping to find any additional victims. Within the first few weeks, 21 women came forward to identify themselves. “At least six families” said they believed they recognized loved ones who had “disappeared years ago and were never found.”
It wasn’t until 2013 that one of the photos was successfully connected to a missing person case/unsolved murder. The family of 28-year-old Christine Thornton was identified by her family. Her body had been found in Wyoming in 1982.
As of 2022, 110 photos remain posted online, as police continue to identify further victims.
After all this, while Alcala sat on death row, his troubles were not over. In January 2011, a Manhattan grand jury indicted him for the murders of Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Hover. In June 2012 he was extradited to New York, where he initially pleaded not guilty.
By December, he had a change of heart, and pleaded guilty, citing a desire to return to California and pursue appeals of his death penalty conviction. On January 7, 2013, a Manhattan judge sentenced him to an additional 25 years to life, as the death penalty was not an option in New York.
In 2010, Seattle police named Alcala as a “person of interest” in the unsolved murders of 13-year-old Antoinette Wittaker, who had been murdered in July 1977, and 17-year-old Joyce Gaunt, who had been murdered in February 1978. He was a “person of interest” in the unsolved disappearance of 20-year-old Cherry Ann Greenman, who disappeared on September 14, 1976.
Other cold cases from California, New York, New Hampshire, and Arizona were marked for reinvestigation as well.
In March 2011, investigators in California announced that they were “confident” that Alcala was responsible for the 1977 murder of 19-year-old Pamela Lee Lambson, who had disappeared after making a trip to Fisherman’s Wharf to meet a photographer. Her battered, naked body was discovered in Marin County near a hiking trail.
Police had no fingerprints or usable DNA, so they could never file charges, despite their claim that they had sufficient evidence to convince them that Alcala was her murderer.
The bodies kept adding up. In September 2016, he was charged with the murder of 28-year-old Christine Ruth Thornton. She was six months pregnant, and had disappeared in 1977. For years her family never knew what happened to her. It wasn’t until 2013, when a relative recognized her from one of Alcala’s photos, that they went to police.
Turns out, her body had been found in Sweetwater County, Wyoming in 1982, but was not identified until 2015 when her relatives were able to supply DNA.
Rodney Alcala admitted that he had taken the photo, but maintained his innocence when it came to her murder. By this time, Alcala was 73, and in poor health, unable to travel from California to Wyoming to stand trial.
Rodney Alcala died on July 24, 2021, of unspecified natural causes. He was 77
One police detective described Alcala as “a killing machine”, others have compared him to Ted Bundy.
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