Rodney Alcala
Alcala at San Quentin State Prison in 1997
Background information
Birth name	Rodrigo Jacques Alcala-Buquor[1]
Also known as	Dating Game Killer John Berger John Burger Rod Alcala
Born	August 23, 1943 (age 69) San Antonio, Texas, U.S.
Conviction	Battery, kidnapping,murder, probation violation, providingcannabis to a minor, rape
Sentence	Death
Killings
Number of victims	8–130[2][3][4]
Country	United States
State(s)	California, possibly New York, possibly Washington
Date apprehended	July 24, 1979 [5]

Rodney James Alcala (born Rodrigo Jacques Alcala Buquor; August 23, 1943) is a convicted rapist and serial killer. He was sentenced to death inCalifornia in 2010 for five murders committed in that state between 1977 and 1979.[2] In 2013 he received an additional sentence of 25 years to life after pleading guilty to two homicides in New York in 1971 and 1977.[6] His true victim total remains unknown, and could be much higher.[7][8][9] Prosecutors say that Alcala "toyed" with his victims, strangling them until they lost consciousness, then waiting until they revived, sometimes repeating this process several times before finally killing them.

He is sometimes labeled the "Dating Game Killer" because of his 1978 appearance on the television show The Dating Game in the midst of his murder spree.[12] Police discovered a collection of more than 1,000 photographs taken by Alcala, mostly of women and teenaged boys, most of them in sexually explicit poses. They speculate that some of his photographic subjects could be additional victims.[10]

One police detective called Alcala "a killing machine"[13] and others have compared him to Ted Bundy.[14] A homicide investigator familiar with the evidence speculates that he could have murdered as many as 50 women,[8] while other estimates have run as high as 130.[4]

Early life and education
Alcala was born Rodrigo Jacques Alcala Buquor in San Antonio, Texas to Raoul Alcala Buquor and Anna Maria Gutierrez.[1] His father abandoned the family and his mother moved Rodney and his sisters to suburban Los Angeles when he was about 12.[15]

He joined the Army in 1960, at age 17, where he served as a clerk. In 1964, after what was described as a "nervous breakdown", he was diagnosed withantisocial personality disorder[16] by a military psychiatrist and discharged on medical grounds.[17] Other diagnoses later proposed by various psychiatric experts at his trials included narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder,[18] and (from homicide expert Vernon Geberth) "malignant narcissistic personality disorder with the following co-morbidities: psychopathy and sexual sadism".[19]

After leaving the Army, Alcala—who claims to have a "genius-level" IQ—graduated from the UCLA School of Fine Arts and later studied film under Roman Polanski at New York University.[10]

Early criminal history
Alcala committed his first known crime in 1968: A motorist in Los Angeles witnessed him luring an eight-year-old girl named TaliShapiro[20] into his Hollywood apartment and called police. The girl was found in the apartment raped and beaten with a steel bar, but Alcala escaped.[21] He fled to the east coast and enrolled in the NYU film school using the name "John Berger". During the summer months he also obtained a counseling job at a New Hampshire arts camp for children using a slightly different alias, "John Burger."[10]

In June 1971 Cornelia Michel Crilley, a 23-year-old Trans World Airlines flight attendant, was found raped and strangled in her Manhattan apartment. Her murder would remain unsolved for the next 40 years.[22]

Later that summer two children at the New Hampshire arts camp noticed Alcala's FBI wanted poster at the post office and notified camp directors. He was arrested and extradited back to California. By then Tali Shapiro's parents had relocated their entire family to Mexico and refused to allow her to testify at Alcala's trial.[20] Unable to convict him of rape and attempted murder without their primary witness, prosecutors were forced to permit Alcala to plead guilty to a lesser charge of assault.[23] He was paroled after 34 months, in 1974, under the "indeterminate sentencing" program popular at the time, which allowed parole boards to release offenders as soon as they demonstrated evidence of "rehabilitation." Less than two months later he was arrested after assaulting a 13-year-old girl known in court records as "Julie J.", who had accepted what she thought would be a ride to school. Once again he was paroled after serving two years of an "indeterminate sentence."[24]

In 1977, after his second release from prison, Alcala's Los Angeles parole officer permitted him to travel to New York City. NYPD cold-case investigators now believe that one week after arriving in Manhattan, Alcala killed Ellen Jane Hover, 23, daughter of the owner of Ciro’s, a popular Hollywood nightclub and goddaughter of Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr.[25] Her remains were found buried on the grounds of the Rockefeller Estate in Westchester County.[22]

In 1978 Alcala worked for a short time at the Los Angeles Times as a typesetter, and was interviewed by members of the Hillside Strangler task force as part of their investigation of known sex offenders. Although Alcala was ruled out as the Hillside Strangler, he was arrested and served a brief sentence for marijuana possession.[26]

During this period Alcala also convinced hundreds of young men and women that he was a professional fashion photographer, and photographed them for his "portfolio." A Times co-worker later recalled that Alcala shared his photos with workmates. "I thought it was weird, but I was young, I didn’t know anything," she said. "When I asked why he took the photos, he said their moms asked him to. I remember the girls were naked.”[27] "He said he was a professional, so in my mind I was being a model for him," said one of the women, who permitted Alcala to photograph her in 1979. The portfolio also included "spread after spread of [naked] teenage boys" she said.[10] Most of the photos are sexually explicit,[28] and most remain unidentified. Police fear that some of the subjects may be additional cold-case victims.[10]

Samsoe murder and first two trials
Robin Samsoe, a 12-year-old girl from Huntington Beach, California, disappeared somewhere between the beach and her ballet class on June 20, 1979. Her decomposing body was found 12 days later in the Los Angeles foothills.[29] Police subsequently found Samsoe's earrings in a Seattle locker rented by Alcala.[10]

In 1980 Alcala was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for Samsoe's murder, but the verdict was overturned by the California Supreme Court because jurors had been improperly informed of his prior sex crimes.[20] In 1986, after a second trial virtually identical to the first except for omission of the prior criminal record testimony, he was convicted once again and again sentenced to death. A Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel nullified the second conviction, in part because a witness was not allowed to support Alcala's contention that the park ranger who found Samsoe's body had been "hypnotized by police investigators".[17][30]

Additional victims discovered
While preparing their third prosecution in 2003, Orange County investigators learned that Alcala's DNA, sampled under a new state law (over his objections), matched semen left at the rape-murder scenes of two women in Los Angeles. Another pair of earrings found in Alcala's storage locker matched the DNA of one of the two victims.[20] Additional evidence, including another cold-case DNA match in 2004, led to Alcala's indictment for the murders of four additional women: Jill Barcomb, 18, a New York runaway found "rolled up like a ball" in a Los Angeles ravine in 1977,[31] and originally thought to have been a victim of the Hillside Strangler; Georgia Wixted, 27, bludgeoned in her Malibu apartment in 1977; Charlotte Lamb, 31, raped and strangled in the laundry room of her El Segundo apartment complex in 1978; and Jill Parenteau, 21, killed in her Burbank apartment in 1979.[10] All of the bodies were found "posed...in carefully chosen positions."[31]

Third (joined) trial
In 2003, prosecutors entered a motion to join the Samsoe charges with those of the four newly discovered victims. Alcala's attorneys contested it; as one of them explained, "If you’re a juror and you hear one murder case, you may be able to have reasonable doubt. But it’s very hard to say you have reasonable doubt on all five, especially when four of the five aren’t alleged by eyewitnesses but are proven by DNA matches."[32] In 2006, the California Supreme Court ruled in the prosecution's favor,[20] and in February 2010 Alcala stood trial on the five joined charges.

For the third trial Alcala elected to act as his own attorney. He took the stand in his own defense, and for five hours played the roles of both interrogator and witness, asking himself questions (addressing himself as "Mr. Alcala" in a deeper-than-normal voice), and then answering them.[32] During this bizarre self-questioning and answering session he told jurors, often in a rambling monotone, that he was at Knott's Berry Farm when Samsoe was kidnapped.[29] He also claimed that the earrings found in his Seattle locker were his, not Samsoe's.[33] As "proof" he showed the jury a portion of his 1978 appearance on The Dating Game, during which his earrings — if he wore any — were obscured by his shoulder-length hair.[34] He made no significant effort to dispute the other four charges.[12] As part of his closing argument, he played the portion of Arlo Guthrie's song "Alice's Restaurant" in which the protagonist tells a psychiatrist he wants to "kill."[35]

After less than two days' deliberation the jury convicted Alcala on all five counts of first-degree murder. A surprise witness during the penalty phase of the trial was Tali Shapiro, Alcala's first known victim.[20][23] In March 2010, he was sentenced to death for a third time.

Dating Game appearance
In 1978 Alcala, despite his status as a convicted rapist and registered sex offender, was accepted as a contestant on The Dating Game. By then he had already killed at least two women in California and two others in New York.[36] Host Jim Lange introduced him as "...a successful photographer who got his start when his father found him in the darkroom at the age of 13, fully developed. Between takes you might find him skydiving or motorcycling."

Actor Jed Mills, who competed against Alcala as "Bachelor #2", later described him as a "very strange guy" with "bizarre opinions".[12] He added that Alcala did not wear earrings on the show, as he claimed during his 2010 trial; earrings were not yet a socially acceptable accoutrement for men in 1978. "I had never seen a man with an earring in his ear," he said. "I would have noticed them on him."[31] The third contestant, Armand Chiami, has not made any public comments.

Alcala won a date with "bachelorette" Cheryl Bradshaw, who subsequently refused to go out with him, according to published reports, because she found him "creepy".[10][12] Criminal profiler Pat Brown, noting that Alcala killed Robin Samsoe and at least two other women after his Dating Game appearance, speculated that Bradshaw's rejection might have been an exacerbating factor. "One wonders what that did in his mind," Brown said. "That is something he would not take too well. [Serial killers] don't understand the rejection. They think that something is wrong with that girl: 'She played me. She played hard to get.'"[12]

Appeal status and additional charges


 

San Quentin State Prison, where Alcala was incarcerated from 1979 until his extradition to New York in 2012

Alcala has been incarcerated since his 1979 arrest for Samsoe's murder. In the period between his second and third trial he wrote You, the Jury, a self-published 1994 book in which he asserted his innocence in the Samsoe case and suggested a different suspect. He also filed two lawsuits against the California penal system for a slip-and-fall claim, and for failing to provide him a low-fat diet.[17][37]

New York
After his 2010 conviction New York authorities announced that they would no longer pursue Alcala because of his status as a prisoner awaiting execution.[32]Nevertheless, in January 2011 a Manhattan grand jury indicted him for the murders of Ellen Hover, the Ciro's heiress, and Cornelia Crilley, the TWA flight attendant.[8][36] In June 2012 Alcala was extradited to New York where he initially pled not guilty to the Hover and Crilley homicides.[38] On December 14 he changed his plea to guilty on both counts, citing a desire to return to California to pursue appeals of his death penalty conviction,[39] and on January 7, 2013 received an additional 25-years-to-life sentence.

San Francisco
In March 2011, investigators in Marin County, north of San Francisco, announced that they were "confident" that Alcala was responsible for the 1977 murder of 19-year-old Pamela Jean Lambson, who disappeared after making a trip to Fisherman's Wharf to meet a man who had offered to photograph her. Her battered, naked body was subsequently found in Marin County near a hiking trail. With no fingerprints or usable DNA, charges are unlikely to be filed, but police claimed that there is sufficient evidence to convince them that Alcala committed the crime.[9]

Washington
An investigation is underway in Seattle regarding Alcala's possible connection with the murders of Antoinette Wittaker, 13, in July 1977 and Joyce Gaunt, 17, in February 1978. In 1979 Alcala rented the Seattle-area locker where investigators eventually found jewelry belonging to two of his California victims.[40][41]

Unidentified photographs
In March 2010, the Huntington Beach and New York City Police Departments released 120 of Alcala's photographs and sought the public's help in identifying them, in the hope of determining if any of the women and children he photographed were additional victims.

[10][42] Approximately 900 additional photos could not be made public, police said, because they were too sexually explicit.[28]In the first few weeks, police reported that approximately 21 women had come forward to identify themselves,[43] and "at least 6 families" said they believed they recognized loved ones who "disappeared years ago and were never found."[44] However, according to one published account, as of November 2010 none of the photos had been unequivocally connected to a missing person’s case or an unsolved murder.[32]

As of January 2013 the original 120 photos remain posted online, and police continue to solicit the public's help with further identifications.