Rodney James Alcala (born August 23, 1943) is a convicted rapist and serial killer. He was sentenced to death in California in 2010 for five murders committed in that state between 1977 and 1979, and is currently under indictment for two additional homicides in New York. He is thought to be responsible for other violent crimes as well. Alcala is also notable for exceptional demonstrations of cruelty: Prosecutors say he "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 American television show The Dating Game in the very midst of his murder spree.
Police have found a collection of more than one thousand 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. One police detective called him "a killing machine", and criminalists have compared him to Ted Bundy. A homicide investigator familiar with the evidence speculated that Alcala could have murdered as many as 50 women, while other estimates have run as high as 130.
Early life
Alcala was born Rodrigo Jacques Alcala-Buquor in San Antonio, Texas to Raoul Alcala Buquor and Anna Maria Gutierrez. He and his sisters were raised by his mother in suburban Los Angeles. His father abandoned the family.
He joined the United States Army in 1960, where he served as a clerk. In 1964, after what was described as a "nervous breakdown", 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 and borderline personality disorder).
Education
Alcala, who claims to have a "genius-level" IQ, graduated from the UCLA School of Fine Arts after his medical discharge from the Army, and later attended New York University using the alias "John Berger", where he studied film under Roman Polanski.
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 Tali Shapiro into his Hollywood apartment and called police. The girl was found in the apartment raped and beaten with a steel bar, but Alcala escaped. 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."
In June 1971, Cornelia Michel Crilley, a 23-year-old Trans World Airlines flight attendant, was found raped and strangled in her Manhattan apartment, a case that would remain unsolved for the next 40 years.
Later that summer, two kids 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, however, Tali Shapiro's parents had relocated her 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 assault. 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 he forced himself (and marijuana) on 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."
In 1977, after his second release from prison, Alcala's Los Angeles parole officer permitted him to travel back to New York City to visit relatives. NYPD cold-case investigators now believe that one week after arriving in Manhattan, Alcala killed Ciro’s Nightclub heiress Ellen Jane Hover, 23, and buried her on the grounds of the Rockefeller Estate in Westchester County.
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.
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." Most of the photos are sexually explicit, and remain largely unidentified, and police fear that some of the subjects may be additional cold-case victims.
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 foothills of Los Angeles. Police subsequently found her earrings in a Seattle locker rented by Alcala.
In 1980, Alcala was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for Samsoe's murder, but his conviction was overturned by the California Supreme Court because jurors had been improperly informed of his prior sex crimes. 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. However, a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel overthrew 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."
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. 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, killed in 1977 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.
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.” 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. 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"), and then answering them. 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. As "proof" that the earrings found in his Seattle locker were not Samsoe's, but his, he showed the jury a portion of his 1978 appearance on The Dating Game (see below), during which his earrings — if he wore any — were obscured by his shoulder-length hair. He made no significant effort to dispute the other four charges. 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."
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. In March 2010, he was sentenced to death for a third time.
Dating Game appearance
In 1978, Alcala — who had by then already killed at least two women in California, and probably two others in New York — was accepted as a contestant on The Dating Game, despite his status as a convicted rapist and registered sex offender. 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." He won a date with "bachelorette" Cheryl Bradshaw, who subsequently refused to go out with him, according to published reports, because she found him "creepy." Jed Mills, an actor who sat next to Alcala onstage as "Bachelor #2", later described him as a "very strange guy" with "bizarre opinions." (The third contestant, Armand Chiami, has not publicly commented.)
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.'
Current status
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.
Alcala remains on death row at San Quentin State Prison, as a long series of appeals slowly wends its way through the California court system.
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. 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. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance indicated that he intends to extradite Alcala and prosecute him for the two homicides in New York. New York's death penalty statute was ruled unconstitutional by the state's supreme court in 2004.
San Francisco
In March 2011, investigators in Marin County, north of San Francisco, announced that they are "confident" that Alcala is 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 will not be filed, but police claim there is sufficient evidence to convince them that Alcala committed the crime.
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. 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 6 families" said they believed they recognized loved ones who "disappeared years ago and were never found." 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.
As of March 2011, the original 120 photos remain posted on-line, and police continue to solicit the public's help with further identifications.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_James_Alcala
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