By Kristy Stevens
The passage below is written in the killer's voice and is invented. It is not a quotation. See the editor's note at the end of this article.
Little did I know, when I began my murder spree in 1977, that I would become one of the most famous serial killers of all time. But it wasn’t necessarily the murders that gave me fame, for it all started with The Dating Game.
If there was a serial killer Hall of Fame, Rodney Alcala would definitely have a place in it somewhere. He’s another one on the long list of serial killers that should’ve quit while they were ahead, but alas, he did not.
Rodney Alcala was born as Rodrigo Jacques Alcala Buquor on August 23, 1943 in San Antonio, Texas. His parents, Raoul and Anna Maria Gutierrez, moved the family to Mexico in 1951. However, just three years later, when Rodney was ten years old, his father abandoned the family, and this is seems to be where things started to go down hill for Rodney. He was uprooted again when he was eleven, and his mother moved him and his siblings out to Los Angeles.
By the time he was seventeen, Alcala had enlisted in the United States army, and he held the position of a clerk. By 1964, things started to go very wrong for Alcala. He went AWOL from the army and managed to hitchhike all the way to his mother’s house. During this time a military psychiatrist was called in to assess Alcala. This resulted in him being diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, and he was medically discharged from the Army.
After being discharged from the military, Alcala attended and graduated from the School of Fine Arts at UCLA. This would be last thing he would ever do worth being proud of. After he graduated, his life took its final turn for the worst, and Alcala would go down in history as a brutal rapist and murderer, with many of his victims being young children.
Rodney first became a person of interest following the rape of an eight-year-old girl in 1968. He was seen luring the child to his apartment, but left her beaten and raped, as he made his escape just before police arrived on scene. Shortly after this took place, Alcala managed to enroll in NYU Film School, to study under Roman Polanski. He began using the alias of John Berger to throw police off his trail. Crazy right? Well hold on to your horses cause it’s about to be a bumpy ride y’all.
Over the next several years, Alcala was arrested numerous times for a number of different crimes. Again, you’d think the police would’ve learned their lesson the first time they locked him up right? But no. The story goes on sadly. Some of these crimes Alcala was arrested for include, assaulting a young girl, drug possession, and his open admission to posing as a photographer and knocking out a 15-year-old girl and raping her. This is where things really start heating up and get interesting.
Even though he was a convicted rapist and a registered sex offender, Alcala somehow managed to gain a spot as a contestant on the TV show The Dating Game, and it is believed that he had already murdered two women by this time. This is where Alcala would acquire the nickname The Dating Game Killer. However, the host of the show described Rodney as a photographer that enjoyed motorcycling and skydiving. As if it wasn’t bad enough that this maniac managed to get on the show in the first place, but he also WON. He was chosen as the winner by the bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw and was to go on an all expense paid date with her. However, once backstage, Cheryl decided against the date, stating that there was just something about Rodney that she found creepy and it rubbed her the wrong way. Thank God for that right, or Lord knows she would’ve been the main story on the 6 o’clock news.
Anyway, after the stardom of the Dating Game wore off, that’s when Rodney finally hit rock bottom and full transitioned from rapist to killer. The first known murder victim of Alcala’s was a runaway from New York by the name of Jill Barcomb. She disappeared in 1977 and her body was found in a Los Angeles ravine, “rolled up like a ball”. Originally, she was thought to be a victim of the Hillside Strangler who was also active during this time. However, DNA evidence would reveal Alcala as her killer. Georgia Wixted was also murdered by Alcala in 1977, was found bludgeoned to death inside her Malibu, California apartment. Charlotte Lamb was found raped and strangled in the laundry room of her building, and Jill Parenteau was also found in her apartment in Burbank. Each of these murders were able to connect Alcala to the crime through the use of DNA evidence.
A fifth murder committed in 1977, was that of Pamela Jean Lambson. She went missing after traveling to Fisherman’s Wharf, after arranging to meet a photographer there. Her body was found naked and beaten near a hiking trail in Marin County. Christine Ruth Thornton also disappeared in Wyoming during 1977, however her body wasn’t found until years later in 1982. Her identity had to be confirmed through DNA testing of samples from her relatives. The saddest fact discovered during the investigation of this particular murder came from the results of the autopsy. The results showed that Thornton had been six months pregnant at the time of her murder. Alcala was found to have photographs of Christine, but of course, he denied ever murdering her. Like that was even an option. What a monster right? You’d think he’d have enough sense to stop there right? Still no. The story goes on.
Robin Samsoe was only twelve at the time of her disappearance on June 20, 1979. She was abducted somewhere between her ballet studio, where she attended classes, and the beach. Her body was found in the foothills of LA several days later.
A timeline of Alcala’s known murders is as follows:
Cornelia Crilley-1971
Ellen Hover-1977
Antoinette Wittaker-1977
Jill Barcomb-1977
Georgia Wixted-1977
Pamela Jean Lambson-1977
Christine Ruth Thornton-1977
Joyce Gaunt-1978
Charlotte Lamb-1978
Jill Parenteau-1979
Robin Samsoe- 1979
Antoinette Wittaker was only 13 years old, and Robin Samsoe was seventeen. Their young lives over before they even got to live them.
Alcala was finally caught when police detectives began circulating a composite sketch of the man believed to be the killer of Robin Samsoe. Rodney’s luck ran out when his own parole officer identified him from the sketch and turned him over to police custody for questioning. During a search of Alcala’s mother’s home, they found a receipt for a storage locker in Seattle under Alcala’s name. Hundreds of photographs of young girls that were nude, a pair of earrings belonging to Samsoe, and another pair of earrings belonging to Charlotte Lamb, was found when investigators opened the locker.
Alcala was arrested on July 27, 1979, formally being charged with the murder of Robin Samsoe. During his trial, he was found guilty, and received the death penalty in 1980. However, in 1984, the sentence was overturned due to the jury being aware of his previous crimes, leading them to be biased in making their decision. His sentence was again, overturned in 1986, due to claims of a witness being hypnotized! Can you believe that? They literally did everything they could to keep this man out of prison! And people wonder why most of us have no faith in our justice system.
FINALLY, in 2003, Alcala was linked to two other murders through DNA evidence. By 2010, Alcala had been on trial for the murders of Robin Samsoe, Georgia Wixted, Jill Barcomb, Charlotte Lamb, and Jill Parenteau. Thankfully, he was found guilty of all 5 murders and remained on death row. In 2011, he was indicted for the murders of Ellen Hover and Cornelia Crilley that occurred in New York and pled guilty to both in December of 2012. Even though there were numerous other crimes that Rodney was suspected of, many couldn’t be prosecuted due to the fact that he had already received the maximum penalty possible, DEATH.
With Alcala’s MO being to pose as a photographer to his victims, police found hundreds of photographs in his possession, with 120 of them being released to the public in hopes of identifying the women in the photographs. The point behind this was to see if any others had been murder victims.
Within the first couple weeks of releasing the photos to the public, 21 women came forward and identified themselves. Later on, in 2013, Christine Ruth Thornton was identified by a family member, and Alcala was formally charged with her murder, however due to his health, he was unable to attend the trial in Wyoming. Even though many of the photographs in Alcala’s collection had been released, there was still another 900 more that were too sexually explicit to be released.
This concludes the sick and twisted story of Rodney Alcala, however for all you wonderful people that enjoy serial killer trivia, here’s a bonus for ya:
Rodney Alcala represented himself at trial, and while questioning himself, he became two different people. Not only did he interrogate himself, for five hours on the stand, he also switched between two different voices. He used a deep voice and called himself Mr. Alcala when questioning himself, and then switched to answering in his normal tone.
Alcala was sentenced to another 25-year sentence in New York for killing two women, after being sentenced to death in California.
Rodney filed two lawsuits while in prison, one against California for slipping and falling during incarceration, and the other, also against California, for not providing him a low-fat diet while incarcerated.
It is also alleged that he has an IQ of 160
Editor's note: this piece is one of five in the Murder and Madness series, which ran in Serial Killer Magazine. Each article opens with a passage written in the killer's own voice. Those passages are invented. They are the author's dramatisation, not a quotation, not a confession and not drawn from any letter, interview or statement, and nothing in them should be read as something the man actually said.
The article contradicts itself on one victim and the roster settles it. Robin Samsoe was twelve. She is given correctly as twelve when her disappearance is described and then as seventeen a few paragraphs later, in the line about Antoinette Wittaker. She was taken from a Huntington Beach street on June 20, 1979 on her way to a ballet lesson.
On the counts, Alcala was convicted of seven murders in total and this archive records seven: Jill Barcomb and Georgia Wixted in 1977, Charlotte Lamb in 1978, Jill Parenteau and Robin Samsoe in 1979, all five tried together in February 2010, and then Cornelia Crilley, killed in 1971, and Ellen Hover, killed in 1977, to which he pleaded guilty in New York in December 2012. The timeline in this article also lists Antoinette Wittaker, Joyce Gaunt, Pamela Jean Lambson and Christine Ruth Thornton. Those are attributed rather than convicted. He was charged in Wyoming in 2016 with Thornton's murder and was too ill to be extradited. Several police forces regard the true figure as far higher than seven, and a number of the people in the photographs from the Seattle locker have never been identified.
The eight-year-old girl attacked in 1968 has a name and survived: Tali Shapiro. A motorist saw him lead her into his Hollywood apartment and called police, who found her raped and beaten with an iron bar. Her family had moved abroad and would not put her through testimony, which is why the charge was reduced and he served thirty-four months.
The article leaves him on death row. Rodney Alcala died on July 24, 2021, aged seventy-seven, at a hospital near Corcoran state prison, of natural causes.