Rodney Alcala committed his first known crime in 1968: An eyewitness in Los Angeles called police after watching him lure an eight-year-old girl named Tali Shapiro into his Hollywood apartment. When police arrived, the girl was found alive, having been raped and beaten with a steel bar, but Alcala had fled. To evade the resulting arrest warrant, Alcala left the state and enrolled in the NYU film school, using the name “John Berger”. In 1971, he obtained a counselling 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 TWA flight attendant, was found raped and strangled in her Manhattan apartment. Her murder remained unsolved until 2011.
The FBI added Alcala to its list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives in early 1971. A few months later, two children attending the arts camp noticed his photo on an FBI poster at the post office. Alcala was arrested and extradited to California. By then, 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 assault.
Alcala was paroled after seventeen 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 after his release, he was re-arrested for assaulting a 13-year-old girl identified 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 Alcala’s second release, 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.
During this period, Alcala 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.”
“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 [naked] 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. In 1979, according to later trial testimony, Alcala knocked unconscious and raped 15-year-old Monique Hoyt while she was posing for photographs.
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.”
A fellow “bachelor” contestant later described Alcala as a “very strange guy” with “bizarre opinions”. Alcala 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.'
Robin Samsoe, a 12-year-old girl from Huntington Beach, 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. 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. During a search of Alcala’s mother’s house in Monterey Park, police found a rental receipt for a storage locker in Seattle; in the locker, they found Samsoe’s earrings. Alcala was arrested in July 1979 and held without bail. In 1980 he 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. In 1986, after a second trial virtually identical to the first except for omission of the prior criminal record testimony, he was again convicted and 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”.
While preparing their third prosecution in 2003, Orange County, California 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. 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, 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, strangled, and left in the laundry room of an El Segundo apartment complex in 1978; and Jill Parenteau, 21, killed in her Burbank apartment in 1979.
All of the bodies were found “posed…in carefully chosen positions”. Another pair of earrings found in Alcala’s Seattle storage locker had residue that matched Lamb’s DNA. 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. He remains in California State Prison, Corcoran.