Rodney Alcala was a photographer who used his camera to start conversations with women and girls. In 2010, after three trials spread over thirty years, an Orange County jury convicted him of five murders committed in Southern California between 1977 and 1979. The youngest of the five was Robin Samsoe, 12, who disappeared in Huntington Beach on June 20, 1979, while riding a borrowed bicycle to a ballet class. The other four were women in Los Angeles County: Jill Barcomb, 18; Georgia Wixted, 27; Charlotte Lamb, 32; and Jill Parenteau, 21. DNA and other forensic evidence linked him to their deaths decades after the killings.
He had been convicted of Robin Samsoe's murder twice before. The California Supreme Court reversed the first conviction in 1984, and federal courts set aside the second in 2001 and 2003. In 2012 he pleaded guilty in New York to the murders of Cornelia Crilley, a flight attendant killed in 1971, and Ellen Hover, who disappeared in 1977. In 2016 a Wyoming prosecutor charged him with the 1977 murder of Christine Ruth Thornton, a 28-year-old woman from Texas. He was never tried there. He died of natural causes on July 24, 2021, at the age of 77, while under sentence of death.
He is best known for something that had nothing to do with his crimes. In September 1978, already convicted of a sexual attack on a child, he appeared on the ABC television show The Dating Game and won. The woman who picked him decided not to go on the date.
Alcala was born in 1943, according to his mother's testimony at his 1986 trial as summarized by the California Supreme Court. The radio station KFYO reported at his death that he was born in San Antonio, Texas, and was raised by a single mother, who moved the family to Los Angeles. At the 1986 penalty hearing his mother described him as a quiet, studious boy who had joined the Army and had always been kind to her. He studied fine arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, and graduated; the CBS program 48 Hours described him in September 1968 as a 25-year-old UCLA graduate and photographer. Prosecutors at his 2010 trial said he had a genius-level IQ, and the OC Weekly reported that he claimed an IQ of 135.
On September 25, 1968, Alcala stopped an 8-year-old girl who was walking to school along Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and offered her a ride. He took her to his home nearby, where police found the girl unconscious with a severe head wound. Alcala escaped. The girl survived. The California Supreme Court described these events in its 1984 opinion, and Los Angeles police officer Chris Camacho, who answered the call, later spoke about the case to 48 Hours.
Alcala remained a fugitive for about three years. The FBI placed him on its most wanted list, and he was found working as a counselor at a camp in New Hampshire under an assumed name, according to 48 Hours. When he testified at his 1986 trial, he admitted under cross-examination that he had evaded the police after the 1968 attack, changed his name to Jon Berger, worked at a girls' camp in New England and lied to the FBI. Steve Hodel, then a Los Angeles police detective, told the OC Weekly in 2010 that he had believed the 1968 attack was a first offense and had no idea what Alcala would go on to do.
He was returned to California in 1972 and convicted of child molestation. He served 34 months under California's indeterminate sentencing system and was paroled in August 1974.
Within weeks of his release, on October 13, 1974, Alcala approached a 13-year-old girl who was waiting for a bus in Huntington Beach. He drove her to cliffs overlooking the beach and made her smoke marijuana. A ranger arrested them both. He pleaded guilty to marijuana possession, his parole was revoked, and he was returned to prison until 1977. The California Supreme Court set out these facts in 1984 and again in 1992.
After his second release he lived with his mother in Monterey Park, in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles, and worked as a typist or typesetter for the Los Angeles Times, according to the Orange County District Attorney's Office. CBS News noted that by the time he appeared on The Dating Game he had served two prison terms and was a registered sex offender.
Cornelia Crilley was 23 and a flight attendant for Trans World Airlines. On June 12, 1971, she was raped and strangled in her apartment on 83rd Street in Manhattan, CBS News reported in 2010. Leon Borstein, who was her boyfriend at the time and later a Brooklyn prosecutor, told the OC Weekly in 2010 that her death had stayed with him for decades. The case went unsolved for more than thirty years.
In 2003 New York police detectives went to California with a warrant to interview Alcala and take an impression of his teeth. He first denied ever having visited New York. Then, according to NYPD spokesman Paul Browne, he asked, "What took you so long?" A forensic dentist later found a bite mark on Crilley's body that was consistent with his impression, an unnamed law enforcement official told reporters in 2012, and authorities said his DNA matched genetic material found at the scene. At her killer's sentencing in 2013, Crilley's sister asked that she be remembered as more than a name on paper.
Ellen Hover was 23 and lived in Manhattan. She was the daughter of Herman Hover, a former Hollywood nightclub owner whose club was Ciro's on the Sunset Strip. She had a biology degree and was looking for work as a researcher, the Associated Press reported. She vanished in Manhattan in 1977. A calendar entry showed that she had planned to have lunch with a photographer she had recently met. A private detective working for her family said at the time that the man's name was similar to John Berger, and New York cold case investigators later found that Alcala had used the alias John Berger while living in the city. Her remains were found in 1978 in woods on the Rockefeller estate in Westchester County, north of New York City.
Alcala was a suspect in Hover's death from at least 1979, according to newspaper reports of that year cited by the Associated Press. California prosecutors tried, without success, to tell the jury at his first Samsoe trial in 1980 about her killing. Her college roommate, Anita Sobel-Feinberg, attended his New York sentencing in 2013 and said she wished Hover could have seen the people who had worked to close the case.
In 1977 Alcala traveled outside California. Christine Ruth Thornton, 28, of San Antonio, Texas, was killed that year in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, prosecutors there said; she was about six months pregnant, the Associated Press reported. (Some 2021 wire reports say she disappeared in 1978; the Wyoming prosecutor and local papers give 1977.) A rancher found her remains in 1982 in a remote area northeast of Granger, in southwest Wyoming. The evidence had deteriorated over five years, but investigators ruled the death a homicide. The woman could not be identified.
Her name was restored more than thirty years later, after Alcala's photographs were made public. In 2013 a relative who had been looking for Thornton recognized her in one of the pictures released by Huntington Beach police. Her siblings gave DNA samples. Sweetwater County Sheriff's Office Detective Jeff Sheaman, who had taken over the case, sent a sample from the remains to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, and in 2015 the DNA matched. Detectives found that the photograph of Thornton in Alcala's collection had been taken a short distance from where her remains lay, and they said other evidence also linked him to her death.
Jill Barcomb was 18, a New York native who had recently moved to California. She was found on November 10, 1977, on a remote dirt road in the Hollywood Hills near Mulholland Drive, according to the Orange County District Attorney's Office and the OC Weekly. Biological evidence was collected at the scene, but DNA testing did not exist, and the case went cold. Her brother, Bruce Barcomb, told the OC Weekly that he learned in 2005 that her killer had been identified, when Los Angeles police detective Cliff Shepard told him, "We believe we found your sister's killer."
Georgia Wixted was 27 and a registered nurse who lived in Malibu. She was found dead in her apartment on December 16, 1977, according to the District Attorney's Office. Investigators said her killer left a palm print and DNA at the scene. (Some 2010 news captions give the year of her death as 1978; the prosecutors' releases and the trial coverage in the OC Weekly and on ABC7 give 1977.)
Charlotte Lamb was 32 and a legal secretary from Santa Monica. In June 1978 she was found strangled with a shoelace in the laundry room of an apartment complex in El Segundo, where she did not live. Prosecutors later said her DNA was found on a pair of rose-shaped earrings that police had taken from Alcala's storage locker in 1979, and that he gave changing accounts of where those earrings came from, first saying they were his sister's and then his mother's.
Jill Parenteau was 21 and worked as a keypunch operator. She was killed in her apartment in Burbank on June 14, 1979. Police said her killer cut himself climbing in through a window and that blood left at the scene was of a rare type that matched Alcala's. Her sister, Dedee Parenteau, described her to ABC7 in 2010 as kind and gentle, with a wonderful sense of humor.
In the same months, Alcala appeared on television. On The Dating Game episode of September 13, 1978, the host, Jim Lange, introduced him as a photographer, and he sat as Bachelor No. 1. The bachelorette, Cheryl Bradshaw, chose him over the other two men. She then declined to go on the date after meeting him, later describing him as creepy, according to CBS New York. Jed Mills, another contestant on the episode, also later called him creepy, CNN reported. None of his known victims had any connection to the show.
Robin Samsoe was 12 and lived in Huntington Beach. She took ballet. On the afternoon of June 20, 1979, she and her friend Bridget Wilvert were on the cliffs above the beach when a man with a camera approached them. He said he was taking pictures for a contest and photographed them. A neighbor, Jackelyn Young, walked over, and the man left quickly, looking back over his shoulder. Bridget later said he "honed in on us, like a shark in the water, honing in on a seal."
The girls went back to Bridget's apartment. At about 3:10 p.m. Robin left to ride to a ballet lesson that started at 4 p.m. on a yellow 24-inch Schwinn bicycle with turned-up handlebars, borrowed from Bridget. She never arrived. The bicycle was never recovered. A thrift store manager in El Monte later testified that he had sold a similar bicycle in July. These details come from the California Supreme Court's opinions of 1984 and 1992.
The man had been seen elsewhere. The day before, June 19, two young women at the Huntington Beach pier were approached by a man who said he was entering a "bikini of the month" contest. He photographed them, offered them marijuana and a ride, and asked for their telephone numbers; they walked away. On June 20, at Sunset Beach, he photographed another young woman in a new bikini, and her friend refused to pose. A survey party chief who was also an amateur photographer noticed a man with a 35mm camera and a telephoto lens on the beach that afternoon. Several of them later identified Alcala in court or at photo lineups.
Bridget gave police a detailed description, and a composite sketch was circulated across Southern California. A former probation officer of Alcala's recognized it, according to the 1984 opinion; 48 Hours and the Associated Press described the man who recognized it as his parole officer or parole agent. Alcala had been arrested in February 1979 in Riverside County for picking up a 15-year-old hitchhiker, taking her into the mountains and raping her. His mother paid his bail of $10,000, the OC Weekly reported, and he was free awaiting trial in that case when Robin disappeared. He was convicted of rape and assault in it in 1980.
His girlfriend at the time, Elizabeth Kelleher, testified that before June 20 she had urged him to change his hairstyle. He did nothing about it until June 23, after the composite sketches were published, and he had his hair cut on June 26. On July 11 he rented a storage locker in Seattle and told no one where he had been, the California Supreme Court later wrote.
On July 2, 1979, William Poepke, a member of a Forest Service spraying crew, found Robin's scattered remains in a remote ravine in the mountains above Sierra Madre, more than 40 miles from where she was last seen. A kitchen knife with a trace of human blood lay nearby. Animals had disturbed the remains so badly that no forensic evidence tied to the killing could be recovered, and prosecutors said in 2010 that the case rested entirely on witnesses.
Another member of the crew, Dana Crappa, became the most disputed witness in the case. She was uncooperative and evasive with investigators at first. At the 1980 trial she testified that between 5 and 5:30 p.m. on June 20 she had seen a man in jeans and a T-shirt "sort of forcefully steering" a small blonde girl up a ravine less than 300 feet from where the remains were found, and that she later nearly collided with a Datsun at a nearby turnout. She also testified that on June 25 she had gone back alone, found a body and left without telling anyone. She said she was almost, but not completely, certain that the man she saw was Alcala. The defense attacked her credibility, calling a co-worker and experts on the risk that police questioning had shaped her memory.
Police arrested Alcala on July 24, 1979, in his bedroom at his home in Monterey Park, and searched the house. They found a receipt for a storage locker in Seattle dated after Robin's death. The house also held a set of Kane Kut kitchen knives, the same brand as the knife found near the remains, though none was missing from the set. According to 48 Hours, Alcala himself mentioned the locker during a recorded jail visit with his sister.
Searched under a warrant, the locker held cold-weather clothing, kitchenware, film and photographs, and a small pouch of earrings. Robin's mother, Marianne Connelly, said a pair of gold ball earrings in the pouch looked like a pair that Robin sometimes borrowed from her. She said she had trimmed them with her nail clippers. At the first trial, laboratory tests on the blemish were inconclusive; at the second trial a prosecution expert testified that striations on the earrings matched her clippers, while a defense expert said there was a "strong probability" that the marks came from a different clipper.
The locker also held the photographs that later made the case known well beyond California. Reports differ on how many there were: more than 1,000 images from the locker and his home, according to the Associated Press, or more than 2,000, according to CBS News. They showed dozens of people, most of them women and young girls.
At the first trial, in 1980, the prosecution relied on the beach witnesses, Dana Crappa, the earrings, the photographs, two jail inmates who said Alcala had made incriminating statements, and the El Monte thrift store manager. The jury also heard about the 1968 attack, the 1974 incident and the 1979 Riverside County rape. It convicted him of first-degree murder with a kidnapping special circumstance, and he was sentenced to death. Robin's mother later admitted, under questioning by Alcala at his third trial, that she had brought a loaded handgun to court in 1980; she did not use it.
On August 23, 1984, the California Supreme Court reversed the conviction. In an opinion by Justice Joseph Grodin, the court held that the earlier offenses should not have been admitted, because they showed only his character and not that he had taken Robin, and that the error was not harmless. The court found the evidence otherwise sufficient for a retrial. Justice Stanley Mosk dissented; he would have affirmed, finding the earlier offenses similar enough to bear on identity.
Alcala was tried again in 1986 before Orange County Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin. Dana Crappa now testified that she had no memory of the events. A psychiatrist had diagnosed her in 1985 with chronic delayed post-traumatic stress disorder, and the trial court found her unavailable, so her testimony from the first trial was read to the jury. The court found that she had not been hypnotized, though two other witnesses, Bridget Wilvert and the young woman photographed at Sunset Beach, had been, and their testimony was limited to what they had remembered before hypnosis. The court refused to let the defense call Ray London, a psychologist who would have testified about how Crappa's account had been shaped by the way she was questioned.
A new jail informant, Frederick Williams, testified that Alcala described Robin and spoke of putting her bicycle into his car. Another, David Vogel, first said Alcala had admitted the killing and then said he had made the story up, describing himself as a selfish drug user at the time. For the defense, Alcala's sisters gave accounts of his whereabouts that afternoon, and employees of Knott's Berry Farm, the amusement park in Buena Park, recalled seeing him there around that time looking for photography work, though none could say it was June 20.
The jury convicted him of murder, kidnapping, false imprisonment and use of a knife, found the kidnapping special circumstance true and again fixed the penalty at death. Alcala testified only at the penalty phase. He said he had driven past the Huntington Beach area on June 20, gone to a photo store, visited a friend in Seal Beach and gone on to Knott's Berry Farm. He said he had bought the gold ball earrings himself and altered them with fingernail clippers, and that he had rented the Seattle locker to flee the Riverside County charges. He asked for life without parole. "In prison," he said, "I'm not a threat to children.... I am absolutely harmless."
On December 31, 1992, the California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in full, in an opinion by Justice Ronald George. Justice Joyce Kennard wrote separately, and Justice Mosk dissented.
Alcala then petitioned the federal courts. In 2001 Judge Stephen V. Wilson of the U.S. District Court conditionally granted the petition, ordering California to retry or release him. On June 27, 2003, a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in an opinion by Senior Judge Dorothy W. Nelson, joined by Judges Kim Wardlaw and Raymond Fisher, affirmed.
The panel's main finding concerned the alibi. A Knott's Berry Farm employee, Tina Dodwell, had told police that Alcala arrived at her office around 2:30 or 3 p.m. on the day of a managers' tour, and another employee's business records showed that the tour took place on June 20, 1979, after 2:10 p.m. Alcala's trial lawyers called neither the employee nor the records. The court found no reasonable strategy behind the omission and held that it was prejudicial, because the alibi could have undercut Jackelyn Young's identification of Alcala with Robin at about 3 p.m. The panel also held that excluding Dr. London's testimony about Crappa violated due process, since Crappa was the key witness placing Alcala near the ravine. It concluded that the trial had "suffered from multiple constitutional errors that had a substantial and injurious effect on the jury's determination of guilt." The Samsoe judgment was set aside, and Orange County prepared to try him a third time.
The new trial came to include much more than Robin Samsoe's death. In 2003, the OC Weekly reported, DNA from swabs Alcala had been required to give in prison was matched to evidence from Los Angeles County murders. In 2006 prosecutors refiled the Samsoe charge and added four murder counts for Jill Barcomb, Georgia Wixted, Charlotte Lamb and Jill Parenteau, the Associated Press reported, based on DNA and other forensic evidence.
Alcala fought to have the cases tried separately. A state court of appeal directed that two of the four Los Angeles County prosecutions be severed. On June 12, 2008, the California Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Ronald George, reversed that ruling and held that Penal Code section 790(b) permitted the four Los Angeles County murders to be joined with the Orange County case. "A single trial on all five murder charges may proceed in Orange County," the court said.
The third trial began in Santa Ana in January 2010 before Orange County Superior Court Judge Francisco Briseño. Alcala, then 66, represented himself. Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy of Orange County prosecuted the case with Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Gina Satriano, working with Los Angeles police detective Cliff Shepard. Alcala had first entered pleas of not guilty by reason of insanity to the four Los Angeles County charges, then pleaded not guilty to them, and he continued to deny killing Robin Samsoe.
In his opening statement he spoke for about an hour and did not mention the four Los Angeles County women. He focused on Robin, telling the jury that the police had found nothing at his house connecting him to her, admitting that he had photographed girls at the beach and saying he had been at Knott's Berry Farm when she was taken. He showed a video of the route she might have ridden to argue that there was too little time for a kidnapping. He cross-examined Robin's mother. He showed jurors the clip of his 1978 Dating Game appearance, arguing that it showed him wearing gold ball earrings and that the pair in the locker was his; Murphy told the jury that no one could tell from the video what earrings he was wearing. Alcala took the stand and questioned himself, which allowed prosecutors to tell the jury about his 1968 and 1979 convictions. The woman who had been attacked as an 8-year-old in 1968 testified, and Alcala apologized to her, CBS News reported.
Murphy called the four Los Angeles County cases a "slam-dunk." Alcala offered almost no challenge to the evidence in them, which included DNA and fingerprint matches and Charlotte Lamb's DNA on the rose earrings from the Seattle pouch, the same pouch that held the gold ball earrings. On the Samsoe case Murphy pointed to the changes in Alcala's hair, to the witnesses who said he had told girls on the beach he was taking pictures for a contest, and to the marks on the earrings. "So where are Rodney Alcala's clippers?" he asked the jury. He said two witnesses placed Alcala at Knott's Berry Farm around noon, not at 3 p.m. Alcala argued that another man had killed Robin; Murphy said that man's employer had shown investigators his time card for that day.
On February 25, 2010, after six weeks of testimony and less than two days of deliberation, the jury found Alcala guilty of five counts of first-degree murder and one count of kidnapping. It found true special circumstances of multiple murder, torture, and murder committed during rape, kidnapping, burglary of an inhabited dwelling and robbery. At the penalty phase Alcala played the jury part of Arlo Guthrie's 1967 song "Alice's Restaurant," and Robin's brother, Robert Samsoe, left the courtroom. Alcala told the jurors that a death sentence would put the families through more grief while he pursued every appeal. On March 9 the jury, after about an hour, returned a verdict of death.
On March 30, 2010, Judge Briseño imposed the death sentence, saying the photographs Alcala had taken of the women showed sadistic sexual motives. Family members spoke first. Bruce Barcomb urged Alcala to admit what he had done so the families could heal: "Own your truth." Marianne Connelly said losing her daughter was the worst tragedy of her life and that, after 31 years, she was giving her hatred to God so it would no longer control her. Robert Samsoe told Alcala he hoped he would never sleep at night. Earlier in March, Connelly had told CBS News: "If I live one day longer than Rodney Alcala, I will die a happy woman."
Police had held back the locker photographs for three decades because of the investigation and the trials. On March 10, 2010, after the guilty verdict, Huntington Beach police and the Orange County District Attorney's Office released more than 100 of them, cropped where needed, and asked the public to help identify the people in them; about 900 others were withheld as too sexually explicit. Within about a week police had received more than 400 calls, including one from Denmark, and by the end of March more than 500 tips. Nine women had come forward by early March to say they were in the pictures and were alive. One of them, Liane Leedom, a psychology professor, recognized herself at 17; she told the Associated Press that Alcala, who lived on her street in 1979, befriended her and asked to photograph her, and that her parents ordered her to stop seeing him after a neighbor saw her getting out of his car. Three families came forward believing their missing relatives appeared in the photographs, and Huntington Beach detective Patrick Ellis said each identification had to be checked. Some families' hopes could not be right: one mother believed she saw her daughter, who had vanished in 1982, when Alcala was already in jail.
In April 2010 the New York Police Department, after first declining, released more than 200 additional photographs that Huntington Beach police had sent because their backgrounds suggested they had been taken in New York. The photographs led to Christine Thornton's identification in Wyoming.
The Manhattan District Attorney's Office set up a cold case unit in 2010. Building on the California evidence, it reopened the Crilley and Hover cases, interviewed more than 100 witnesses and obtained an indictment of Alcala for both murders, announced on January 27, 2011. "Cold cases are never, ever forgotten cases," District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said. Alcala fought extradition, arguing he needed to stay in California to work on his appeal. The California Supreme Court refused to block it in May 2012, and on June 20, 2012, he was flown to New York by the U.S. Marshals Service.
On December 14, 2012, Alcala, 69, withdrew his not guilty pleas and pleaded guilty in a Manhattan court to the murders of Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Hover. He said he wanted to resolve the New York case so he could return to California and pursue the appeal of his death sentence; he had complained in letters that New York jailers would not give him a laptop or his legal papers, which he said he needed "to do the work I need to do on my death penalty case." On January 7, 2013, Justice Bonnie Wittner of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan sentenced him to 25 years to life. She wept as she pronounced the sentence and said that in 30 years on the bench she had not had a case like it. "I hope the families find some peace and solace," she said. He was returned to California's death row.
On September 20, 2016, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, announced a murder charge against Alcala, then 73, in the death of Christine Ruth Thornton. If convicted there he faced life in prison or death. In late October 2016 County Attorney Daniel Erramouspe said Alcala would not be brought to Wyoming, because he was in the hospital wing of the prison at Corcoran and could not leave without medical support. Erramouspe said the decision did nothing to change his certainty that Alcala had killed Thornton, and he credited Detective Sheaman, Sergeant Joe Tomich, Lieutenant John Grossnickle and the persistence of Thornton's family. He kept the charge on file. It was never tried.
Alcala spent his later years on death row at San Quentin and then at Corcoran, more than 200 miles away, where he could receive round-the-clock medical care, the Associated Press reported. In prison he wrote a book, You, the Jury (1994), arguing his innocence and naming another suspect, and filed lawsuits over his treatment in custody. Governor Gavin Newsom halted executions in California by executive order in 2019.
He died of natural causes at 1:43 a.m. on July 24, 2021, at a hospital in Kings County, near Corcoran State Prison, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced. He was 77. The department said there were then about 700 people on California's death row. In August 2021 Sweetwater County Attorney Dan Erramouspe said he would dismiss the Wyoming charge. He said prison officials had told him Alcala was not ambulatory, which was why he had not been extradited, and that the absence of a trial did not change his belief that Alcala murdered Thornton.
Alcala died on July 24, 2021 (checked against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's release of that date). His New York convictions rest on his own guilty pleas, and no appeal from them was reported. The 2010 Orange County judgment came to the California Supreme Court on automatic appeal, as every death judgment in the state does. In December 2012 and January 2013 reports, he was still pursuing that appeal, and no decision on it was reported before his death. What became of the appeal after he died has not been reported. The record therefore reads: convicted of five murders in Orange County (appeal pending as of January 2013); convicted on guilty pleas of two murders in New York; charged with one murder in Wyoming and never tried, with the charge dropped after his death.
The number of people Alcala killed is not known. After his death, the Associated Press and CNN reported that authorities estimated he might have killed as many as 130 people, and the Orange County Register put the figure at about 100, as reported by WSB-TV. These are estimates. He was convicted of seven murders, five of them with the appeal still pending as far as the record shows, and charged with an eighth.
In March 2011 Marin County investigators said they believed Alcala was responsible for the death of Pamela Jean Lambson, 19, a computer assistant who hoped to act and sing. She disappeared from Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco on October 8, 1977, after going to pose for a freelance photographer, and her body was found the next day on a trail on Mount Tamalpais. Investigators said the DNA evidence had deteriorated too far to test, and he was never charged. Lambson was not among the released photographs; detectives compared the case with Alcala's after seeing a television program about the collection.
Police and prosecutors at various times looked at possible links to cases in Seattle, Phoenix, San Francisco, New Hampshire, Arizona and upstate New York, and in December 2012 the OC Weekly noted a Marin County murder case that he still faced. No charge has been reported in any of them. Families who believed relatives appeared in the photographs were told each identification had to be checked, and no such identification was reported to have led to a charge other than Thornton's.
In the Samsoe case itself, two courts found serious flaws in the first two trials: the admission of his earlier offenses in 1980, and in 1986 the failure to present the Knott's Berry Farm alibi evidence and the exclusion of expert evidence about Dana Crappa's account. The 2010 jury heard the case again with the alibi evidence and with the four Los Angeles County murders tried alongside it. Alcala denied killing Robin Samsoe until his death, according to the reports read.
Marianne Connelly testified at all three trials about her daughter's earrings. Robert Samsoe told the OC Weekly before the 2010 trial that he had no faith in the justice system and saw the trial as the last chance to see Alcala held to account. Prosecutor Matt Murphy blamed the lenient sentencing of the 1970s for Alcala's freedom in those years and said California's Three Strikes law had helped reduce such crimes. In 2010 the DA's office and Huntington Beach police published the photographs online, and the Associated Press reported that dozens of police departments across the United States reviewed cold cases.
In October 2024 Netflix released Woman of the Hour, a film directed by Anna Kendrick, who also stars as a character based on Cheryl Bradshaw; the film tells the story from the bachelorette's point of view.
1943: Born (his mother's testimony); raised in Los Angeles.
1968: A UCLA graduate. September 25: attacks an 8-year-old girl in Los Angeles and flees.
1971: June 12: Cornelia Crilley killed in Manhattan.
1972: Found earlier working at a New Hampshire camp under an alias; returned to California. Convicted of child molestation; serves 34 months.
1974: August: paroled. October 13: incident with a 13-year-old girl at Huntington Beach; parole revoked.
1977: Released. Ellen Hover disappears in Manhattan. Christine Thornton killed in Wyoming (Wyoming prosecutor). November 10: Jill Barcomb found in the Hollywood Hills. December 16: Georgia Wixted found in Malibu.
1978: June: Charlotte Lamb found in El Segundo. September 13: The Dating Game episode. Ellen Hover's remains found in Westchester County.
1979: February: Riverside County rape of a 15-year-old; free on bail. June 14: Jill Parenteau killed in Burbank. June 20: Robin Samsoe disappears. July 2: her remains found above Sierra Madre. July 11: rents the Seattle locker. July 24: arrested in Monterey Park.
1980: Convicted of Robin Samsoe's murder and sentenced to death; convicted of rape and assault in the Riverside County case.
1982: Thornton's remains found near Granger, Wyoming.
1984: August 23: California Supreme Court reverses the Samsoe conviction.
1986: Convicted again and sentenced to death.
1992: December 31: California Supreme Court affirms.
2001: Federal district court grants habeas corpus.
2003: June 27: Ninth Circuit affirms. DNA links to Los Angeles County cases reported; New York detectives take a dental impression.
2006: Charges refiled with four Los Angeles County murders added.
2008: June 12: California Supreme Court allows all five murders to be tried together in Orange County.
2010: February 25: convicted of five murders. March 9: death verdict. March 10: photographs released. March 30: sentenced to death.
2011: January 27: Manhattan indictment announced. March: named by Marin County investigators as their suspect in Pamela Lambson's death; not charged.
2012: June 20: extradited to New York. December 14: pleads guilty to the Crilley and Hover murders.
2013: January 7: sentenced to 25 years to life in New York.
2015: Thornton's remains identified by DNA.
2016: September 20: charged in Wyoming; later declared too ill to be moved.
2021: July 24: dies at a hospital in Kings County, California, aged 77. August: the Wyoming charge is dropped.