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Rodney Alcala Charged in Wyoming With the 1977 Murder of Christine Thornton

A relative recognized her in a photo Alcala kept. Detectives found it was taken close to where her remains turned up in 1982.

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Rodney Alcala in a 1997 San Quentin condemned-row booking photograph, holding a prison name board

The photograph had been in Rodney Alcala's possession since 1979. It showed a young woman, and for decades nobody outside the police knew who she was. On Tuesday, September 20, 2016, the Sweetwater County Sheriff's Office in Wyoming announced that it knew. She was Christine Ruth Thornton, 28, of San Antonio, Texas, and Alcala, 73, already on California's death row, had been charged with her first-degree murder.

Investigators believed he killed her in the summer of 1977 and left her body in a remote stretch of country northeast of Granger, a small community in the western part of the county. Her remains were not found until April 1982. For thirty-three years she had no name.

Her way back began with Alcala's own collection. After his 2010 conviction in Orange County, California, for five murders, among them that of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe, the Huntington Beach police released to the public a series of photographs found among his belongings in 1979, hoping someone would recognize the people in them. In 2013 one of Thornton's relatives did. That same year Sweetwater County detectives, working the cold case, sent a tissue sample from the remains to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification for mitochondrial DNA analysis and entered the case in the national missing and unidentified persons system. Her family contacted the Huntington Beach police, and in 2014 her brothers and sisters gave DNA samples of their own. In July 2015 the system told the detectives they had a possible match.

Then came the detail that turned an identification into a charge. "Detectives were able to determine that the photograph of Thornton in Alcala's possessions was taken a short distance from where her remains were found," the sheriff's office said. "Other evidence discovered during the investigation linked Alcala to Thornton's homicide." If convicted in Wyoming, he could face death or life in prison. The office asked anyone who had been in contact with Thornton or Alcala in 1977 to come forward.

Alcala, known as the Dating Game Killer for his 1978 appearance on the television show, had been sent to death row three times over the Samsoe murder, the first two judgments overturned on appeal. He had also pleaded guilty in New York to two murders from the 1970s. The Wyoming charge never came to trial. Alcala died of natural causes on California's death row on July 24, 2021, at 77. According to the California Department of Corrections, Christine Thornton had been six months pregnant.

What this story covers. The charge, the details of the Thornton case, the photographs, the DNA work and the sheriff's office's words come from FOX 13 Salt Lake City's report of September 20, 2016, which quotes the sheriff's office release. Alcala's earlier death sentences, the New York plea, his death, and the fact that Thornton was pregnant come from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's release of July 24, 2021. The two sources differ on when she died: the sheriff's office believed it was the summer of 1977, while the corrections department says she disappeared in 1978. The charge was never tried, and the murder remains an accusation.

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