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Rodney Alcala, Condemned in California, Pleads Guilty in Manhattan to Two 1970s Murders of Young Women

Alcala said he wanted to return to California to work on his death-penalty appeal. The plea carried 25 years to life, to run concurrently.

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Rodney Alcala, with long gray hair and glasses, seated in a courtroom

Rodney Alcala, already condemned in California, had been indicted in two 1970s killings of young women in New York. On December 14, 2012, he pleaded guilty to both in a Manhattan court.

Alcala, 69, withdrew the not-guilty plea he had entered earlier in the year and admitted murdering Cornelia Crilley, a Trans World Airlines flight attendant found dead in her Manhattan apartment in 1971, and Ellen Jane Hover, who vanished from Manhattan in 1977 and whose remains were found the next year in woods on a suburban estate. He told the judge he wanted to plead guilty so he could return to California and pursue the appeal of his death sentence; he had complained in letters that his New York jailers would not give him access to a laptop and legal records. The plea carried an automatic term of 25 years to life, to run concurrently with his other sentences.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., whose cold-case unit had reopened the New York investigation, said in a statement, "Rodney Alcala's victims were never forgotten. Tragically, neither of them lived past the age of 23." Alcala, a former photographer who appeared on "The Dating Game" in 1978, had been extradited from California in 2012 after his indictment. He had been sentenced to death in California for killing four women and a 12-year-old girl in the 1970s, and he was formally sentenced in New York in January 2013.

The Associated Press reported at the plea that Alcala was convicted in California in 2010, while its report on his New York sentencing a month later put that conviction in 2011.

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