Rodney Alcala was on parole as a registered sex offender when ABC introduced him to a national audience as Bachelor Number One, a successful photographer who had started out at thirteen with his father's camera and who might be found between shoots skydiving or motorcycling. The episode of The Dating Game was taped on September 13, 1978, and he won it. The woman who chose him, Cheryl Bradshaw, telephoned the show's contestant coordinator the next day to say she could not go through with the date because of the way he had behaved backstage. By then he had raped and murdered five women in New York and Los Angeles. Within a year he would kill two more, one of them a twelve-year-old girl on her way to ballet class, and it was her case that put him on death row three separate times.
He was born Rodrigo Jacques Alcala Buquor in San Antonio on August 23, 1943, was taken to Mexico by his father at eight and then abandoned there, and was brought back to Los Angeles by his mother at twelve. He joined the Army as a clerk at seventeen, went absent without leave in 1964, walked into a breakdown that got him a diagnosis of antisocial personality and a medical discharge, and enrolled at UCLA, where he took a fine arts degree in 1968. His intelligence tested at the top of the range. He was good-looking, well-spoken and fluent with a camera, and every one of his known crimes began with a conversation about photographs.
On September 25, 1968, a motorist on Sunset Boulevard watched a man talk an eight-year-old girl into his car and followed them to an apartment on De Longpre Avenue, then called the police. Officers who forced the door found Tali Shapiro on the kitchen floor, raped, beaten with a steel bar and not breathing; she lived. Alcala had gone out the back. He surfaced in New York as John Berger, a film student at NYU under Roman Polanski, and spent the summers of 1970 and 1971 as a counselor at a girls' arts camp in New Hampshire, where two campers saw his face on an FBI wanted poster at the post office. In June 1971, between those two summers, Cornelia Crilley, twenty-three, a TWA flight attendant who had just moved into an apartment on East 83rd Street, was raped and strangled with her own pantyhose; the killer bit her breast. Nobody connected the case to the camp counselor for forty years. Tali Shapiro's family had moved to Mexico and would not bring her back to testify, so the Los Angeles charge was bargained down to child molestation, and he served thirty-four months of an indeterminate sentence and was paroled in 1974. Eight weeks later he offered a thirteen-year-old in Huntington Beach a ride to school and was arrested with her at a Riverside County campsite; that was two more years. In 1977 his parole officer let him go to New York to see relatives.
Ellen Hover was twenty-three, a Columbia graduate and pianist whose father, Herman Hover, had owned Ciro's on the Sunset Strip; Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. were her godfathers. On July 15, 1977, she wrote in her appointment book that she was meeting a photographer named John Berger, and she left her apartment on East 53rd Street and did not come back. Her skeleton was found on the Rockefeller estate at Pocantico Hills in Westchester eleven months later. Detectives found the name Berger, found that it belonged to Alcala, questioned him in Los Angeles that December and let him go for lack of evidence. That summer, on a drive through Wyoming with a camera, he had also stopped near Granger and photographed a twenty-eight-year-old woman from San Antonio named Christine Thornton, six months pregnant, whose remains a rancher found there in 1982. She lay unidentified for more than thirty years, until a relative who had been searching for her since 1977 recognized her in 2013 among the pictures police had released from his storage locker; her siblings gave DNA, and in 2015 it matched the remains.
Jill Barcomb was eighteen and had arrived in Los Angeles from Oneida, New York, a few weeks earlier hoping to act. On November 10, 1977, her body was found rolled into a ball on a dirt road off Mulholland Drive near the Hollywood sign, her face smashed with a rock and a belt and a trouser leg knotted around her neck. For a quarter of a century she was counted as a victim of the Hillside Stranglers. Georgia Wixted was twenty-seven, a nurse at Centinela Hospital, and was found on December 16, 1977, in her Malibu apartment, beaten with the claw of a hammer and strangled with a nylon stocking. Charlotte Lamb was thirty-two, a legal secretary from Santa Monica, and on June 24, 1978, was found raped and strangled with a shoelace in the laundry room of an apartment complex in El Segundo where nobody knew her; he had probably met her in a bar the night before. In 2003 Orange County detectives found one of her rose-shaped earrings, with her DNA on it, in a red satin pouch in the Seattle locker. Jill Parenteau was twenty-one, a keypunch operator at a Burbank insurance company, and was raped and strangled with a cord in her apartment on June 14, 1979; the killer cut himself climbing through the louvered window and left blood of a type shared by a small fraction of the population. Alcala was charged with her murder in 1980 and the case was dismissed when the jailhouse informant who was to testify fell apart.
Robin Samsoe was twelve, the youngest of four, a girl who loved the beach and dancing and was, her family said, doted on by all of them. On the afternoon of June 20, 1979, she and a friend, Bridget Wilvert, were at the bluffs in Huntington Beach when a man with long hair and a camera asked to photograph them; a neighbor chased him off. Robin borrowed Bridget's yellow bicycle to get to her ballet class on time and never arrived. A forest ranger found her remains on July 2 in the foothills of the Sierra Madre, forty miles inland, scattered by animals. The composite drawing from the beach was recognized by Alcala's parole officer, and he was arrested within weeks at his mother's house in Monterey Park, where he was working as a typesetter at the Los Angeles Times. A receipt led detectives to a storage locker in Seattle. In it, among hundreds of photographs of young women and children, was a pouch of earrings, and Robin's mother, Marianne Connelly, identified a pair of small gold balls as her daughter's.
He was convicted of Robin Samsoe's murder and sentenced to death in 1980. The California Supreme Court reversed in 1984, ruling that the jury should not have heard about his record. He was convicted and sentenced to death again in 1986, and the Ninth Circuit reversed in 2001, holding that the defense had been prevented from developing evidence about the earrings and about a witness. While he waited for a third trial, DNA taken from him in 2003 was run against the county's cold cases and matched Barcomb, Wixted and Lamb, and the blood at Parenteau's window was matched too. The state joined all five murders in a single indictment, and the California Supreme Court allowed the joinder. Alcala fought that ruling for years and lost.
The third trial opened in Orange County in January 2010 before Judge Francisco Briseño, with Alcala, at sixty-six, acting as his own lawyer. He wore his hair long and questioned himself on the stand in a lowered voice, addressing himself as Mr. Alcala and answering in the first person, for five hours, to argue that he had been at Knott's Berry Farm applying for a job the afternoon Robin disappeared. He did not contest the four adult murders in any way that a juror could follow. Tali Shapiro, now in her fifties, testified about the apartment on De Longpre. In his closing he played the jury part of Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant, the verse about wanting to kill. The jury took under two days to convict him of all five murders on February 25, 2010, and returned a death verdict on March 9; Briseño imposed it on March 30, calling the crimes among the worst he had seen. Prosecutor Matt Murphy said afterward that the man was as evil as anyone he had ever prosecuted and considerably more intelligent than most.
Two weeks after the verdict Huntington Beach police released about a hundred and twenty of the photographs from the Seattle locker, holding back some nine hundred that were sexually explicit, and asked the public to identify the people in them. Christine Thornton's family came forward. So did women who recognized themselves and were alive, and so did families whose daughters had gone missing in the 1970s and who could not be sure. Investigators in several states still regard the count as far higher than the seven he was convicted of. In New York, a mold of his teeth was matched to the bite on Cornelia Crilley's body and his DNA to saliva on it; he was extradited in 2012, pleaded guilty in December to the Crilley and Hover murders, and on January 7, 2013, was given twenty-five years to life. Wyoming charged him with Christine Thornton's murder in September 2016, after investigators established that his photograph of her had been taken a short distance from where her remains lay. He was never extradited; prison officials said he could no longer walk.
He died of natural causes on July 24, 2021, at a hospital near California State Prison, Corcoran, aged seventy-seven, and the Sweetwater County attorney dismissed the Wyoming charge, saying that the case not being proven in court did nothing to change his view that Alcala had killed her. He had been one of more than seven hundred men on a death row where nobody had been executed since 2006. Cheryl Bradshaw's account of the man backstage, and the tape of the episode with his answers in it, are what most people know of him. The people who knew him better were Tali Shapiro, who lived; Marianne Connelly, who identified the earrings; and the women in the locker, some of whom have still not been named.