Rodney Alcala - The Dating Game Killer

In today’s world people are obsessed with shows like the Bachelor and the Bachelorette or Temptation Island.  I personally feel that these shows are a bit cringy and honestly, I am not sure if love is ever discovered during the filming of these type of shows.  But these shows are nothing compared to the creepiest episode of The Dating Game in 1978, which featured a real-life serial killer.  I’m John Dodson and today on The Secret Sits, we are going to discuss Rodney Alcala, AKA the Dating Game Killer.

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Transcript

In today’s world people are obsessed with shows like the Bachelor and the Bachelorette or Temptation Island.  I personally feel that these shows are a bit cringy and honestly, I am not sure if love is ever discovered during the filming of these type of shows.  But these shows are nothing compared to the creepiest episode of The Dating Game in 1978, which featured a real-life serial killer.  I’m John Dodson and today on The Secret Sits, we are going to discuss Rodney Alcala, AKA the Dating Game Killer.

Rodney James Alcala was born on August 23, 1943 and was named Rodrigo Jacques Alcala Buquor.  1943 was the year of the Zoot Suit Riots, The fall of Benito Mussolini and Jazz Legend Duke Ellington plays at Carnegie Hall in New York City for the first time. 

Alcala was born in San Antonio, Texas, to a Mexican-American parents, Raoul Alcala Buquor and Anna Maria Gutierrez. In 1951, Alcala's father moved the family to Mexico, then abandoned them three years later. In 1954, when Alcala was about 11 years old, his mother moved him and his two sisters to suburban Los Angeles. 

In 1961, at the age of 17, Alcala joined the United States Army and served as a clerk. In 1964, after what was described as a nervous breakdown—during which he went AWOL, military speak for absent without leave, and hitchhiked from Fort Bragg to his mother's house—he was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder by a military psychiatrist and discharged on medical grounds. Other diagnoses later proposed by various psychiatric experts at his trials included narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and malignant narcissism with psychopathy and sexual sadism comorbidities.  This put simply means that he had multiple disorders occurring in his brain at the same time.

After leaving the army, Alcala graduated from the UCLA School of Fine Arts and later 

Alcala committed his first known crime on September 25th 1968: 8-year-old Tali Shapiro, who lives with her parents in Los Angeles, California is walking to school when a man pulls over in a beige car and offers her a ride to school.  But Tali is a smart girl and knows not to take rides from strangers and she tells his this, but Alcala says that he knows Tali’s parents and that they said that it is ok.  This puts the girl at ease, why would the man lie, he must know her parents, so she gets into the car.

Unbeknownst to Tali or Alcala, another driver had watched this entire interaction and they felt in their gut that this situation did not seem right, so he begins to follow the beige car.  And he continues to follow the car, all the way through Los Angeles to an apartment building.  Now knowing where the man had taken the girl, the man drives away and goes to call the police.  Remember, this is 1968 and cell phones had not even been thought of yet. 

Police dispatch officers to the apartment right away, and the first detective to arrive on scene is a Detective named Chris and he simply wants to find this little girl.  He knocks on the apartment door and announces himself as police and orders whoever is inside to open the door immediately. A moment later, a man cracks open the door to the apartment and says that he was just in the shower and asks Detective Chris to give him a moment.  The Detective gives him a little leeway and says that he would give him 10 seconds to open the door.  After the 10 seconds were up, Detective Chris kicked the door open and he enters into the stuff of nightmares.  In the kitchen, laying in a pool of her own blood is the girl he was looking for.  He could immediately tell that she had been beaten badly and the metal pipe used in the beating was still laying across the small girl’s neck.  As backup arrived, everyone’s attention was on Tali.  Her small white shoes were set to the side and it was clear that she had been brutally raped and it also appeared that she was not breathing. One of the officers is searching the apartment for the man who had opened the door, but Alcala had fled through the back door to the apartment.  Just then the officers in the apartment hear a wet gurgling noise and they realize that Tali is still alive and struggling to breath.  The policemen rush to her side to try and help and at this time they also call for an ambulance.  

While searching Alcala’s apartment the police officers discover a treasure trove of professional camara equipment.  And also found amongst his things, police find photos, lots of photos and most of them are of young girls.  Police discover his identity when they locate his student ID card from UCLA.

When using his photo and name from his student ID, they learn that his name is Rodney Alcala and he has been studying theatre and that he was 25 years old.  When the police interview his classmates and professors, they discover that he is well liked and none of them have anything bad to say about him.

To evade the resulting arrest warrant, Alcala left the state and enrolled in the NYU film school, using the name "John Berger".  During his time at NYU, Alcala actually studied film under convicted sex offender, Roman Polanski. 

 In 1971, he had obtained a job as a camp counselor at a New Hampshire arts camp for young girls using a slightly different alias, "John Burger".  

The FBI added Alcala to its list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives in early 1971. A few months later, two of the girls attending the arts camp noticed his photo on an FBI poster at the post office.

Alcala was arrested and extradited to California. However, by this time, Tali Shapiro's parents had relocated their entire family to Mexico and refused to allow her to testify at Alcala's trial. 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 simple child molestation.  

California, at the time used the "indeterminate sentencing" program, so the way that this works is that a person would be given a sentence of 1 to 99 years for their crime or crimes and then the “indeterminate sentencing” program allowed parole boards to release offenders as soon as they demonstrated evidence of rehabilitation, Alcala was paroled in 1974 after only seventeen months.  And we know from the way his classmates and college professors spoke about him, that Rodney Alcala was a great actor.  I mean none of these people who were around him all of the time had any idea what kind of monster he actually was.

Less than two months after his release, in October of 1974 he was re-arrested for assaulting a 13-year-old girl identified in court records as "Julie J.", and Rodney apparently learned nothing from his first crime and its consequences, he even uses the same MO as he had with Tali.  He pulled over on the side of the road and offered 13-year-old Julie a ride to school. He drives Julie out to an isolated area close to the ocean and forces her to smoke marijuana and then proceeds to kiss her, but suddenly and seemingly out of the blue, a police car pulls up and Julie is saved.  

 Every one of these things, having the girl in the car, smoking marijuana, these are all parole violations.  So, Rodney Alcala is once again sent back to prison.  And, once again, he was paroled after serving only two years of an "indeterminate sentence".

After Alcala's second release in 1977, his Los Angeles parole officer took the unusual step of permitting a repeat offender—and known flight risk—to travel to New York City. 

NYPD cold-case investigators now believe that a week after arriving in Manhattan, Alcala killed Ellen Jane Hover, 23, daughter of the owner of the popular Hollywood nightclub Ciro's and goddaughter of Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. Her remains were found buried on the grounds of the Rockefeller Estate in Westchester County. 

In 1978, Alcala worked briefly at the Los Angeles Times as a typesetter, during this time the city of Los Angeles was being actively terrorized by another serial killer known in the media as The Hillside Strangler, this turned out to be a pair of serial killers named Bianchi and Buono. Rodney Alcala was interviewed by members of the Hillside Strangler task force as part of their investigation of known sex offenders and although Alcala was ruled out as the Hillside Strangler, he was arrested and served a brief county jail sentence for marijuana possession. 

During this time Alcala spent in Las Angeles, he was able to convince 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." 

"He said he was a professional, so in my mind I was being a model for him," said a woman who allowed Alcala to photograph her in 1979. The portfolio also included "... spread after spread of nude teenage boys," she said. Most of the photos are sexually explicit, and most remain unidentified. Police fear that some of the subjects may be additional cold-case victims. 

Now here is where this story takes a strange turn.

In 1978, Alcala was a contestant on the popular game show The Dating Game. 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."

Audio Clip

A fellow "bachelor" contestant on this same episode named Jed Mills, who you may know for his acting work on TV’s Seinfeld, Quantum Leap and many other credits, later described Alcala as a "very strange guy" with "bizarre opinions". Alcala actually won the competition and a date with bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw, who subsequently refused to go out with him because she found him "creepy". Criminal profiler Pat Brown, noting that Alcala killed at least three women after his Dating Game appearance, speculated that this 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.'"

On June 14th 1979 a 21-year-old woman named Jill Parenteau, was killed in her Burbank apartment.  She had been raped and strangled, almost immediately Alcala was known to the be perpetrator of this crime, however; because the evidence that could prove this atrocity was committed by Alcala was too weak and circumstantial, they were unable to pursue a case against him. 

On July 2nd 1979 a California fire crew are working up in the Los Angeles foothills, just doing some routine maintenance. Just by happenstance, the fire crew comes across a severely decomposing body, which had also been dismembered.  The head had been removed from the body as had the hands, and there was also evidence of strangulation.  They could also see that the victim’s front teeth had been crack, like she was manically beaten.  The body is just too small to be a full grown adult woman and through dental records, it is discovered that this is the body of a 12-year-old girl from Huntington Beach named Robin Samsoe.  Robin had disappeared somewhere between the beach and her ballet class on June 20, 1979. Now this was just 6 days after police had found Jill’s body and they had also let Rodney Alcala go because of lack of evidence.  Samsoe's friends told police that a stranger had approached them on the beach, asking to take their pictures. Detectives circulated a sketch of the photographer, and Alcala's parole officer recognized him. Rodney, they discover is living with his mother during this time in the Monterey Park neighborhood in Los Angeles. Alcala denies having had been at the beach and even says that he has not even been to Huntington Beach in years.  But when police ask him where he had been the day of Robin’s disappearance, he cannot provide an alibi. He had also gone through the trouble of attempting to change his physical appearance, he had gotten his hair cut shorter and also had it chemically straightened, and this happened just after the police sketch, which looks exactly like him, was released to the public.  

During this time Rodney Alcala also has a steady girlfriend, named Beth.  And just like all of his classmates and professors from NYU, Beth had a hard time believing that he could do anything wrong, she just though he was a sweet, caring boyfriend.  But she also did not provide an alibi for Rodney for the day in question.  And she tells the police that Rodney had just removed all the carpet from his car, telling her that he had spilled gasoline on the carpet.

Based on this, police are able to get a search warrant for is home, and the police are holding Rodney in the jail during this time as well.  But the search is fruitless and police find nothing.  While Rodney is in the jail, he receives a visit from his sister and during this visit, Rodney leans into his sister and quietly whispers to her that he needs her to do him a favor.  He tells her that he has a storage locker in Seattle and that he needs her to get to it and empty it, before police find out about it.  Now everyone knows that police are listening in on every jail house conversation, unless it is covered by attorney client privilege. And this conversation reminds police about something they had found during their search of Alcala's mother's house in Monterey Park, police had found a rental receipt for a storage locker in Seattle, Washington. So, police race to get to this storage locker before Rodney’s sister can have a chance of getting to it herself.  In this locker, they found hundreds of photos, just stacks and stacks of photos, and most of these photos are explicit.  They also found a bag of earrings.  In this bag of earrings, they find two small gold studs that looked like the ones Robin had supposedly been wearing the day she went missing.  So, they bring the earrings to Robin’s mother for her to identify them and she does.  And the reason that she is so certain that these are Robin Samsoe's earrings was because, they use to belong to her and around the time that Robin went missing she use to barrow them all of the time.

While combing through all of these photos found in Alcala’s storage locker, they find one of a young girl roller-skating on the boardwalk at Sunset beach.  This is significant because this beach is just south of Los Angeles and right next to Huntington Beach, the beach Rodney Alcala said he hadn’t been to in years.

Police release this photo out to the media and someone comes forward.  They learn that the girl in the photo is named Laurie and she is 15 years old and she had, had an encounter with Rodney, but had escaped with her life. 

She said that a man approached her and a friend saying that he worked for a magazine and he wanted to take their photos for a contest.

So now with the photos, the earrings and the witness testimony, the DA’s office is finally able to start building a case against Alcala.

After his arrest in July of 1979, he was held without bail while the DA put its case together. In 1980 Alcala was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for Samsoe's murder. However, in 1984 the verdict was overturned by the California Supreme Court because jurors had been improperly informed of his prior sex crimes convictions.

 In 1986, after a second trial virtually identical to the first except for the omission of the prior criminal record testimony, he was again convicted and sentenced to death. But Rodney is not done yet, he files another appeal, I do want to point out that he is kept in prison the entire time he is making these appeals.  In 2001, Rodney Alcala gets his ruling on this second appeal and the 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".

While the DA’s office is preparing for their third prosecution in 2003, Orange County, California investigators learned that Alcala's DNA, sampled under a new state law and taken over his objections, matched semen left at the rape-murder scenes of two women in Los Angeles. 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, was a New York runaway found "rolled up like a ball" in a Los Angeles ravine in 1977, and originally thought to have been a victim of the Hillside Strangler

Georgia Wixted, 27, was bludgeoned in her Malibu apartment in 1977

Charlotte Lamb, 31, was raped, strangled, and left in the laundry room of an El Segundo apartment complex in 1978.  Charlotte was connected to Alcala through DNA found on one of the earrings from the bag in his Seattle storage locker.

 Jill Parenteau, 21, was killed in her Burbank apartment in 1979.

During his incarceration between the second and third trials, Alcala wrote and self-published a book, You, the Jury, in which he claimed 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 incident and for refusing to provide him a low-fat diet. 

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." In 2006, the California Supreme Court ruled in the prosecution's favor, and in February 2010, Alcala stood trial on the five joined charges.

For the third trial, Alcala elected to act as his own attorney. Never a good idea. He took the stand in his own defense, bad idea number 2, 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. During this self-questioning and answering session, he told jurors, often in a rambling monotone, that he was at Knott's Berry Farm applying for a job as a photographer at the time Samsoe was kidnapped. He also called Robin’s mother to the stand and this woman, who’s child was murdered had to sit on the witness stand and be questioned by the man that she knew had killed her child.  He showed the jury a portion of his 1978 appearance on The Dating Game in an attempt to prove that the earrings found in his Seattle locker were his, not Samsoe's. Jed Mills, the actor who competed against Alcala on the show, told a reporter that 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." 

Alcala made no significant attempt to dispute the four added charges, other than to assert that he could not remember killing any of the women. As part of his closing argument, he played the Arlo Guthrie song "Alice's Restaurant", which was originally named “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” a satirical talking blues song about 18 minutes in length in which the protagonist tells a psychiatrist that he wants to “I want to see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth, eat dead, burned bodies, I mean kill, kill, kill, kill”. Funny enough the meaning behind this song, or at least what it was used for, was to try and proved that a person was mentally unfit for duty in the US military in the time of the draft. After less than two days' deliberation the jury convicted him on all five counts of first-degree murder. A surprise witness during the penalty phase of the trial was a now grown adult Tali Shapiro, Alcala's first known victim. 

Richard Rappaport, a psychiatrist paid by Alcala and the only defense witness, testified that borderline personality disorder could explain Alcala's claims that he had no memory of committing the murders. The prosecutor argued that Alcala was a "sexual predator" who "knew what he was doing was wrong and didn't care". In March 2010, Alcala was sentenced to death for a third time. 

In March 2010, the Huntington Beach, California 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. Approximately 900 additional photos could not be made public, police said, because they were too sexually explicit. In the first few weeks, police reported that approximately 21 women had come forward to identify themselves, and "at least six families" said they believed they recognized loved ones who "disappeared years ago and were never found".

None of the photos were unequivocally connected to a missing person case or unsolved murder until 2013, when a family member recognized the photo of Christine Thornton, 28, whose body was found in Wyoming in 1982. 

As of July 2021, 110 of the original photos remain posted online, and police continue to solicit the public's help with further identifications. 

After his 2010 conviction, New York authorities announced that they would no longer pursue Alcala because of his status as a convict awaiting execution. Nevertheless, in January 2011, a Manhattan grand jury indicted him for the 1971 murder of Cornelia Crilley, the TWA flight attendant, and the 1977 murder of Ellen Hover, the Ciro's heiress. In Ellen’s case the police found the name John Burger in her date book, on the day she went missing.  And if you remember, this is Alcala’s alias he was using while he was in New York.  In June 2012, he was extradited to New York, where he initially entered not guilty pleas on both counts. 

In December 2012, he changed both pleas to guilty, citing a desire to return to California to pursue appeals of his death penalty conviction. On January 7, 2013, a Manhattan judge sentenced Alcala to an additional 25 years to life. The death penalty has not been an option in New York State since 2007. 

In 2010, Seattle police named Alcala as a "person of interest" in the unsolved murders of Antoinette Wittaker, 13, in July 1977, and Joyce Gaunt, 17, in February 1978. Alcala rented the Seattle-area storage locker in which investigators later found jewelry belonging to two of his California victims in 1979. Other cold cases were reportedly targeted for reinvestigation in California, New York, New Hampshire, and Arizona. 

In March 2011, investigators in Marin County, California, 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 were never filed, but police claimed that there was sufficient evidence to convince them that Alcala committed the crime. 

In September 2016, Alcala was charged with the murder of 28-year-old Christine Ruth Thornton, who disappeared in 1977. In 2013, a relative recognized her as the subject of one of Alcala's photos made public by Huntington Beach PD and NYPD. Her body was found in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, in 1982, but was not identified until 2015 when DNA supplied by Thornton's relatives matched tissue samples from her remains. 

Alcala admitted taking the photo, but not to killing the woman, who was approximately six months pregnant at the time of her death. Thornton is the first alleged murder victim linked to the Alcala photos made public in 2010. The 73-year-old Alcala was reportedly too ill to make the journey from California to Wyoming to stand trial on the new charges. 

Alcala died of unspecified "natural causes" in a hospital near Corcoran State Prison in Central California on July 24, 2021 at 01:43 am at the age of 77. 

I am sure Rodney Alcala’s death brought some measures of relief and possibly joy to those outraged by this predatory monster who not only sexually assaulted and killed women but also derived a sick pleasure out of watching them suffer.  What other Secrets were there behind his duplicitous façade?  We may never know, but we can continue to look at the Alcala photos, and try to bring closure to more families of his victims.  I’m John Dodson and this has been The Secret Sits.  Audio Engineering by Gabriel Dodson.  Original Artwork provided by Tony Ley.