On September 13, 1978, the host of The Dating Game introduced Bachelor Number One as a photographer. The young woman choosing among three unseen men picked him, and Rodney Alcala won the episode. She later backed out of the date, calling him too creepy. In 2010, on trial in Orange County for murder and acting as his own lawyer, he played the clip for the jury.
A game show is an unlikely place to find a man with two prison terms behind him. So is a suicide crisis line, a cop bar, a church council or a letter written to help a victims' advocate. Yet each turns up in the record of a man convicted of killing more than once, set down by television producers, court clerks, detectives and a newspaper’s classified page.
Alcala had already served two prison sentences and was a registered sex offender when the show booked him, CBS News reported after his death. Host Jim Lange’s introduction played up the camera: a successful photographer, he said, who had got his start when his father found him in the darkroom at thirteen.
The broadcast fell inside the span of years covered by his convictions, which run from a killing in Manhattan in 1971 to the abduction of Robin Samsoe, 12, from Huntington Beach in June 1979. A composite sketch from that last case was recognized by a former probation officer of his, and he was arrested in July 1979. Two convictions for Robin’s murder were reversed on appeal. In February 2010 an Orange County jury convicted him of five counts of first-degree murder: the murder, with other charges, of Robin Samsoe, and the murders of Jill Barcomb, Georgia Wixted, Charlotte Lamb and Jill Parenteau, four women killed in Los Angeles County. He was sentenced to death.
In December 2012 he pleaded guilty in Manhattan to the murders of Cornelia Crilley, a flight attendant, and Ellen Hover, and in January 2013 Judge Bonnie Wittner sentenced him to 25 years to life, saying the case was the most brutal she had seen in thirty years on the bench. He died of natural causes on July 24, 2021, at 77, still under sentence of death. The Associated Press reported that authorities believed he might have been responsible for as many as 130 killings, a figure no court has examined.
In 1971 the writer Ann Rule began volunteering two nights a week at the Seattle Crisis Clinic. Her partner on the phones was a younger University of Washington psychology student named Ted Bundy. "For a year, we answered the crisis lines together," she later wrote, alone in a Victorian house on Capitol Hill. He also worked as a campaign volunteer for the Republican Party.
In May 1975, Rule signed a contract to write a book about a run of unsolved disappearances of young women in Washington. The contract barred her from publishing until the killer was caught and convicted. That August, Bundy was arrested in Utah and became the prime suspect. "Then it turned out to be someone I knew so well," Rule said. The Stranger Beside Me was published in 1980.
By then Bundy was on death row in Florida. In 1979 a Miami jury had convicted him of murdering two women in a Tallahassee sorority house, and in 1980 an Orlando jury convicted him of the murder, with other charges, of Kimberly Leach, 12. During the penalty phase of the Orlando trial he called Carole Boone as a witness and, with a notary she had arranged to be present, married her in open court. He was sentenced to death a second time.
Then he made an offer no one had asked for. In 1984 he wrote from death row to a Pierce County judge in Washington, offering to serve as a "consultant" on the Green River murders, a series of killings of young women around Seattle that police had been unable to solve. The letter reached Robert Keppel, who had worked the Washington disappearances as a young King County detective. Keppel was stunned and intrigued, and he met Bundy on death row three times, in 1984, 1988 and 1989. Bundy claimed a point of view no one else had. When King County police arrested Gary Ridgway in 2001 and he confessed to some of the murders, Keppel concluded that Bundy had pointed investigators largely in the right direction. Keppel told the story in his book Riverman, which became a television film in 2004.
The last of those meetings came days before Bundy’s execution in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989. In his final days he confessed to 11 murders in Washington, though he could name only eight of the victims.
In Santa Cruz County, the policemen who drank at a bar called the Jury Room liked Edmund Kemper. SF Weekly, in a 2016 history of the case, said they did not know that at 15 he had shot his paternal grandparents, a case that went through juvenile court and ended in a commitment to Atascadero State Hospital. He stood six feet nine. He joked with the officers that he would have joined the force himself if he had not been over the height limit.
Between May 1972 and April 1973 he killed six young women and girls who were hitchhiking around Santa Cruz and the Bay Area. Over the Easter weekend of 1973 he killed his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, and her friend Sally Hallett in Aptos. Then he drove east. From a phone booth in Pueblo, Colorado, he called the Santa Cruz police to confess. He had to call three times before an officer believed him. KPIX-TV reported on April 24, 1973, that he had admitted killing the two women and said he had also killed several college students.
Kemper led officers to the places where he had left remains. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity; court-appointed psychiatrists found him sane, and on November 8, 1973, a Santa Cruz County jury found him guilty of eight counts of first-degree murder. In July 2024, at 75, using a wheelchair and held at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, he refused to attend his parole hearing. The board denied parole for seven years.
Kemper’s arrest came two months after another man had been caught in the same county. On February 13, 1973, Fred Perez, a retired fisherman, was shot in his yard in Santa Cruz. A neighbor saw a station wagon pull away, and minutes later a patrol officer stopped it. The driver was Herbert Mullin, 25, of Felton, who later said voices had told him that killing would spare California from earthquakes. He confessed to 13 killings between October 1972 and February 1973. The ten in Santa Cruz County took victims from 4 to 73 years old.
Mullin and Kemper, the Cox Media Group national desk reported in 2022, had been operating at the same time and completely independently of each other. In October 1970, John Linley Frazier had killed Dr. Victor Ohta, his wife Virginia, their sons Derrick and Taggart, and the medical secretary Dorothy Cadwallader at the Ohta home. That was a single mass killing, not a series. But it meant that District Attorney Peter Chang, who prosecuted all three men, had three multiple-murder cases from one county of redwoods and beach towns. Picking up a question from a San Francisco reporter, Chang called Santa Cruz "the Murder Capital of the World." The phrase reached Time magazine, the Santa Cruz historian Geoffrey Dunn wrote in 2022, and the county lived with it for years.
The two cases moved through the same courthouse in the same year. Jury selection in Mullin’s trial began in July 1973; his lawyer told jurors he was insane, and prosecutors answered that his illness had not left him unable to understand what he was doing. He was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and eight of second-degree murder and was admitted to state prison in September 1973. Later that year he pleaded guilty in Santa Clara County to the second-degree murder of the Rev. Henri Tomei, a Los Gatos priest. Kemper’s jury was chosen that October. Once both were behind bars, Kemper was housed in the cell next to Mullin’s. Mullin was refused parole many times and died of natural causes at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton on August 18, 2022, at 75.
In the summer of 2002 Baton Rouge was looking for one man. A multi-agency task force had been formed after DNA linked the killings of several women in and around the city, and the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit had prepared a profile. The version the task force published in December 2002 described a physically strong man who could not take rejection, who followed and watched women, and who might have a history of trespassing, burglary and peeping. It did not state a race. But Newsweek reported in May 2003 that for months the authorities had relied on a profile that assumed the killer was white, and that it was amended in March 2003 to cover all races. Sightings of a white pickup truck shaped much of the public search.
The answer came from outside the task force. Detectives in Zachary, a small city north of Baton Rouge, had a suspect in two older cases of their own, Derrick Todd Lee of St. Francisville, a laborer with a record of peeping, stalking and burglary. A Zachary officer later told WAFB that in July 2002 his department had told Baton Rouge’s police chief and other investigators that Lee was its prime suspect in two murders. In the spring of 2003, with no probable cause for a search warrant, Zachary police and the state Attorney General’s Office obtained a court order to produce evidence, and on May 5 officers took swabs from Lee’s cheek. The State Police crime lab matched them to the profile from the series. Lee was arrested on May 27, 2003, at a tire shop in Atlanta. A St. Francisville store clerk who had served him almost daily for two years told WAFB, "He was so nice. He talked to everybody."
In 2004 Lee was convicted of the second degree murder of Geralyn Barr DeSoto, 21, and sentenced to life, and of the first degree murder of Charlotte Murray Pace, 22, and sentenced to death. DNA had also linked him to the deaths of Gina Wilson Green, Pam Kinamore, Trineisha Dené Colomb and Carrie Lynn Yoder; he was never tried for those killings. He died of heart disease on January 21, 2016, after being taken from death row at Angola to a hospital.
The city’s second surprise was that Lee was not the only one. Weeks before its next arrest, the same task force had quietly linked the deaths of three other women, Katherine Hall, Johnnie Mae Williams and Donna Bennett Johnston, to a single unknown man through DNA, and had kept the link to itself. The lead came from the ground near where Johnston’s body was found in February 2004: tire tracks. The State Police crime lab identified a tire made for only three years, of which about 90 had been sold in the Baton Rouge area. Detectives found a man who drove on those tires. "That tire track was the first little crack," said Lt. Col. Greg Phares of the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office. A voluntary DNA swab from Sean Vincent Gillis, 41, matched evidence from all three women. He was arrested at the end of April 2004 and within days had confessed to killing eight women between 1994 and 2004.
Gillis pleaded guilty in 2007 to the second degree murder of Joyce Williams and was sentenced to life without parole. In July 2008 a jury convicted him of the first degree murder of Donna Bennett Johnston, then deadlocked on a death sentence, and he received life. The killings he confessed to beyond those two were never tried. In a 2026 retrospective, the prosecutor Dana Cummings told WAFB that the fear of those years reached into homes across Baton Rouge; she had found herself watching for a white man in a white truck.
For a year, beginning in July 1976, a gunman with a .44 caliber revolver shot young women and couples in parked cars in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. He called himself Son of Sam in letters to police and to the columnist Jimmy Breslin. By the summer of 1977, Time reported, 75 detectives and 225 uniformed officers were assigned to the case full time, and the task force had received at least 5,000 names to check.
The case turned on a parking ticket. In the early hours of July 31, 1977, Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante were shot in a parked car in Brooklyn; she died and he survived. A woman who lived nearby was walking her dog at about 2:30 that morning. She had noticed a police officer ticketing a car parked beside a fire hydrant, and minutes before the shots a young man passed her, walking stiffly with something in his hand. She went to the police about four days later. Detectives began checking every ticket written in the area that night. One was for a 1970 Ford Galaxie registered to David Berkowitz of Yonkers.
Yonkers police had a file of their own. Two of Berkowitz’s neighbors had received threatening letters, and Yonkers detectives already suspected that the man who wrote them might be the gunman. When Detective Edward Zigo traced the ticket to Yonkers and took a wrong turn onto a street named in one of the Son of Sam letters, he told his partner, "John, we got him," the Associated Press reported in 2011. Berkowitz was arrested outside his building on August 10, 1977. Police Commissioner Michael Codd said the ticket and the Yonkers tip were the keys, and that the result came from day-to-day work, not inspiration.
On May 8, 1978, against his lawyers' advice, Berkowitz pleaded guilty to six murders, and he received 25 years to life for each. The surprises did not end there. In March 2002, before his first parole hearing, he wrote to Governor George Pataki that he had "no interest" in parole. "In all honesty I believe that I deserve to be in prison for the rest of my life," he wrote. In October 2000 a Houston victims' advocate, Andy Kahan, had sent form letters to 20 serial killers about the sale of their belongings online. Berkowitz answered that he was willing to help in any way he could, sent a notarized statement disavowing any part in the trade, and wrote, "I did horrible things that I regret with all my heart and I want to do the right thing." The two exchanged dozens of letters over nine years, and Kahan credited him with helping persuade eBay to ban the sale of such items. In May 2024 Berkowitz was refused parole after his twelfth appearance before the board.
Dennis Rader was a compliance officer for the city of Park City, Kansas, a former Cub Scout leader and the president of the congregation council at Christ Lutheran Church. Between 1974 and 1991 he killed ten people in and around Wichita and wrote to police and the press under the name BTK. Then came years of silence, and in 2004 he began writing again.
In January 2005 he asked police whether he could communicate with them by floppy disk without being traced to a particular computer. They answered with a classified advertisement in the newspaper: "Rex, it will be OK." Rader had already given a disk to his pastor in January, saying he needed copies of a document printed, and the pastor obliged. In February a disk arrived at a Wichita television station. Its file had last been saved by someone named Dennis, and the disk had been used at Christ Lutheran Church and the Park City library. The church’s website listed Dennis Rader as president of the congregation. DNA testing confirmed the link.
He was arrested on February 25, 2005, in a traffic stop near his home. In Park City his fellow church members were stunned; days earlier he had brought spaghetti sauce and salad to a church supper he could not attend. On June 27, 2005, he pleaded guilty to ten counts of first-degree murder, and on August 18 he was sentenced to ten consecutive life terms.
None of these turns could have been written into a profile. The man who answered crisis calls beside a future true-crime writer later wrote from death row to offer his help to another killer’s pursuers. The killer the police liked was the one who called them. The parking ticket was issued by an officer doing a routine job, and noticed by a woman out with her dog. And the church council president asked his pursuers, in writing, whether a disk could be traced, then mailed one.
• 1964: Edmund Kemper, 15, shoots his paternal grandparents; the case goes through juvenile court.
• October 1970: John Linley Frazier kills five people at the Ohta home in Santa Cruz County.
• 1971: Ted Bundy and Ann Rule begin a year of night shifts together at the Seattle Crisis Clinic.
• February 13, 1973: Herbert Mullin is arrested minutes after the shooting of Fred Perez in Santa Cruz.
• April 1973: Kemper telephones Santa Cruz police from Pueblo, Colorado, to confess.
• July to November 1973: Mullin and Kemper are tried in Santa Cruz County; Kemper is found guilty on November 8.
• May 1975: Ann Rule signs a contract to write about the unsolved Washington disappearances.
• August 1975: Bundy is arrested in Utah.
• July 31, 1977: Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante are shot in Brooklyn; a parking ticket written nearby leads to David Berkowitz.
• August 10, 1977: Berkowitz is arrested in Yonkers.
• May 8, 1978: Berkowitz pleads guilty to six murders.
• September 13, 1978: Rodney Alcala appears on The Dating Game and wins.
• July 1979: Alcala is arrested.
• 1979 and 1980: Bundy is convicted in Miami and Orlando and sentenced to death; he marries Carole Boone during the Orlando penalty phase.
• 1984: Bundy writes from death row offering to consult on the Green River murders; Robert Keppel meets him.
• January 24, 1989: Bundy is executed.
• October 2000: Andy Kahan writes to 20 serial killers; Berkowitz answers and offers help.
• March 2002: Berkowitz writes to Governor Pataki that he has no interest in parole.
• July 2002: Zachary police tell Baton Rouge investigators that Derrick Todd Lee is their prime suspect in two murders.
• May 5, 2003: Lee’s cheek is swabbed; he is arrested in Atlanta on May 27.
• February 2004: tire tracks are found near where Donna Bennett Johnston’s body lay.
• April 2004: Sean Vincent Gillis is arrested and confesses to eight killings.
• 2004: Lee is convicted of murdering Geralyn Barr DeSoto and Charlotte Murray Pace.
• January 2005: Dennis Rader asks police whether a floppy disk can be traced; they answer, "Rex, it will be OK."
• February 25, 2005: Rader is arrested; he pleads guilty to ten murders on June 27.
• 2007 and 2008: Gillis pleads guilty to one murder and is convicted by a jury of another.
• February 2010: an Orange County jury convicts Alcala of five murders.
• December 2012: Alcala pleads guilty to two murders in Manhattan.
• January 21, 2016: Lee dies on death row.
• July 24, 2021: Alcala dies under sentence of death.
• August 18, 2022: Mullin dies in state custody.
• May 2024: Berkowitz is refused parole after his twelfth board appearance.
• July 2024: Kemper is denied parole for seven years.