Rodrigo Jacques Alcala Buquor was born in San Antonio on August 23, 1943, and grew up in Los Angeles. He served briefly in the Army, was discharged after a psychiatric assessment, and took a fine arts degree at UCLA. He was clever, presentable and photographically talented, and those things are the whole method of the case.
In September 1968 a motorist saw him lead an eight-year-old girl, Tali Shapiro, into his Hollywood apartment and called police. Officers found her raped and beaten with an iron bar and left for dead. She survived. Alcala had gone out the back.
He surfaced on the east coast under the name John Berger, enrolled at NYU film school, and spent two summers as a counsellor at an arts camp for children in New Hampshire. Two campers recognised him from an FBI wanted poster in 1971.
The Shapiro family had moved abroad and would not put their daughter through testimony, so the charge was reduced and he served thirty-four months for child molestation. He was arrested again in 1974 for giving marijuana to a thirteen-year-old girl and served two more years.
In 1978, a registered sex offender on parole, he was cast as Bachelor Number One on The Dating Game and won the episode. The contestant who picked him declined to go on the date, having found him unpleasant off camera. He had killed at least twice before the taping and killed again after it.
He was convicted in the end of the murders of Jill Barcomb and Georgia Wixted in 1977, Charlotte Lamb in 1978, and Jill Parenteau and twelve-year-old Robin Samsoe in 1979. Samsoe was taken from a Huntington Beach street on her way to a ballet lesson.
Her case was tried three times. Convictions in 1980 and 1986 were overturned on appeal, and it was only when cold-case DNA linked the four other killings that all five were tried together. He acted as his own lawyer at the 2010 trial, questioning himself in two voices.
He was convicted in February 2010 and sentenced to death. In 2012 he pleaded guilty in New York to the 1971 murder of Cornelia Crilley and the 1977 murder of Ellen Hover, and was given twenty-five years to life. In 2016 he was charged in Wyoming with the 1977 murder of Christine Thornton and was too ill to be extradited.
In 2010, investigators released more than a hundred photographs found in a Seattle storage locker he had rented, most of them of young women and some of children, hoping someone would recognise a missing relative. A number of the people in them have never been identified, and several police forces regard the true figure as far higher than seven. He died on July 24, 2021, aged seventy-seven, at a hospital near Corcoran state prison.