Dating Game Killer, Rodney Alcala - The Fine Art of Killing/Alcala possibly linked to seven Seattle cases/ UPDATE: Sentenced to DEATH on 3-30/Update: accused of 2 NYC deaths/Alcala Guilty in NY cases, sentenced 25 to life

Rodney Alcala is a man stuck in a time warp, his flowing silver hair, granny glasses, beige blazer and jeans reminiscent of a creative-writing professor circa 1980, the year he began life behind bars. As he walked into an Orange County Superior Court room one recent day, news photographers snapped his lean, no-longer-handsome face. His handcuffs were removed, he picked up a pen with his left hand and waited for Orange County Superior Court Judge F.P. Briseno to bring in the 12 jurors who will decide if he should die or spend the rest of his life in prison — or, though exceedingly unlikely, go free.

The once-dashing ladies' man, UCLA fine-arts grad, former Los Angeles Times typesetter, amateur photographer and film student of Roman Polanski's is believed to have used his smooth-talking charm and access to the creative communities in L.A. and Greenwich Village during the 1970s to entrap and murder seven women and girls, and to rape several others. So smooth was Alcala that he was selected to compete on the ABC prime-time show The Dating Game in 1978, where "bachelorette" Cheryl Bradshaw picked him as her date. Later, police say, she reportedly refused to go on the winning date, sensing that there was something creepy about Bachelor Number One.

Now 66, Alcala has twice stood trial in Orange County for the murder of 12-year-old ballet student Robin Samsoe of Huntington Beach. The sensational crime rocked the sleepy beachside city 31 years ago. He was twice convicted of slaying the small girl, who disappeared on her way to ballet class riding a yellow Schwinn bicycle. Two different juries said Alcala should die. But twice his convictions were reversed on different technicalities — once by the California Supreme Court in 1984 and a second time by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2001.

With a near-genius IQ of 135, Alcala has spent his time behind bars penning You, the Jury, a 1994 book in which he claims his innocence and points to a different suspect; suing the California prisons for a slip-and-fall claim and for failing to provide him a low-fat diet; and, according to prosecutors, complaining about a law that required he and other death-row inmates to submit DNA mouth swabs for comparison by police against unsolved crimes.

Alcala is still as cocky as ever — bold enough to represent himself in the trial for his life, now unfolding in Orange County. And why not? He has a talent for mining legal technicalities and has repeatedly enjoyed success with appellate judges. And, in the past at least, he had the support of women in his Monterey Park–based family. His mother provided Alcala $10,000 in bail after he was arrested for the rape of a teenager decades ago, and Huntington Beach detectives suspect another female family member of trying to hide a receipt to Alcala's secret locker in Seattle, where detectives found "trophy" earrings they say were taken from his alleged murder victims.

Using evidence such as those earrings and multiple DNA and blood matches, an unusual, dual-jurisdiction team of Los Angeles and Orange County prosecutors hopes to prove that Alcala not only murdered Samsoe but also killed four young Los Angeles–area women in the 1970s: Georgia Wixted, Jill Parenteau, Charlotte Lamb and Jill Barcomb. Their bodies were found in carefully arranged poses, and in a least one instance a lamp shade had been removed, increasing brightness. LAPD homicide Detective Cliff Shepard says the consensus among investigators is that fine-arts graduate Alcala, who preyed on attractive females ranging from stunningly beautiful career women to young and pretty teens, took their photos "to defile the victims as best he can in death."

Although the trial now under way gives Alcala one more chance to argue he did not kill the tiny ballerina Samsoe and dump her in the foothills above Sierra Madre, police contend that he has long been a vicious predator. His first known attack was in 1968, when he abducted a second-grade girl walking to school in Hollywood, using a pipe to badly bash her head and then raping her — only to be caught red-handed because a Good Samaritan spotted him luring the child and called police. When LAPD officers demanded he open the door of his Hollywood apartment on De Longpre Avenue, Alcala fled out the back. Inside, police found the barely-alive, raped little girl on Alcala's floor. It took LAPD three years to catch the fugitive Alcala, living under the name John Berger in New Hampshire — where the glib and charming child rapist had been hired, disturbingly, as a counselor at an arts-and-drama camp for teenagers.

When Alcala was caught hiding out under the assumed name Berger on the East Coast, a conviction for brutally raping a child in California was not a guarantee of a long prison sentence. California's state government of that era had embraced a philosophy that the state could successfully treat rapists and murderers through education and psychotherapy.

The hallmark of the philosophy was "indeterminate sentencing," under which judges left open the number of prison years to be served by a violent felon, and parole boards later determined when the offender had been reformed. Rapists and murderers — including Alcala — went free after very short stints. He served a scant 34 months for viciously raping the 8-year-old, who is known in official documents only as "Tali."

Deeply controversial, "indeterminate sentencing" was ended by then-governor Jerry Brown. But by that time, Alcala was free. It was years before police realized that, when they caught up with him in New Hampshire, Alcala had already begun his alleged murderous romp through the party-and-artsy society of Greenwich Village, which ultimately ended in California's beach communities.

Retired LAPD Detective Steve Hodel, who investigated Alcala's rape of Tali, recalls, "My impression was that it was his first sex crime, and we got him early — and society is relatively safe now. I had no idea in two years [he would be out] and continue his reign of terror and horror. I expected he was put away and society was safe. ... It is such a tragedy that so much more came after that."

In 1974, two months after he got out of state prison, Alcala was found at Bolsa Chica State Beach with a 13-year-old girl who claimed he'd kidnapped her. He was convicted only of violating parole and giving pot to a minor, however, and two years later, upon his second release from prison, the law went easy on Alcala again. His parole officer in Los Angeles permitted Alcala, though a registered child rapist and known flight risk, to jaunt off to New York City to visit relatives. NYPD cold-case investigators now believe that one week after arriving in Manhattan, Alcala killed the Ciro's nightclub heiress Ellen Hover, burying her on the vast Rockefeller Estate in ritzy Westchester County.

Orange County Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy, who hopes during the current trial to put Alcala permanently on death row for Samsoe's 1979 murder and the slayings of four women in the Los Angeles area, says: "The '70s in California was insane as far as treatment of sexual predators. Rodney Alcala is a poster boy for this. It is a total comedy of outrageous stupidity."

Alcala was convicted in 1980 of murdering Samsoe, and the saga might have ended with him on death row. But his conviction was overturned by the California Supreme Court because the Orange County Superior Court trial judge had allowed the jury to hear about Alcala's child-rape and kidnapping incidents. Prosecutors went back to court, and in 1986 Alcala was convicted for the second time of Samsoe's murder. For the second time, a jury awarded the death penalty. But a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel in 2001 overthrew his conviction once again, in part because the second trial judge did not allow a witness to back up the defense's claim that the park ranger who found Robin Samsoe's animal-ravaged body in the mountains had been hypnotized by police investigators.

Alcala, in many ways, has long seemed the victor. Robert Samsoe, who was 13 when his little sister was slain, tells L.A. Weekly, "I don't have any faith in the system. Some people, they are just afforded all the chances in the world. Alcala has cost the state of California more than any other person because of his lawsuits. And they treat him like a king. Everybody is walking on pins and needles around him. He has had 30 years to study the law on death row. He is afforded that right."

But everything changed one day in 2003, as Orange County's Senior Deputy D.A. Murphy was working on a new strategy for reprosecuting the twice-overturned Alcala murder conviction. Murphy got a call from his boss, who'd just heard from the office of Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley. DNA swabs taken from Alcala's mouth in prison — tests that Alcala opposed — had unexpectedly matched the DNA in semen left at the rape-murders of two Westside career women in Los Angeles, whose bodies were left in eerie, artfully posed positions. The semen left on Wixted, a 27-year-old nurse who was found in 1977 in her Malibu bedroom, and the semen left on Lamb, 32, a Santa Monica legal secretary who was found in 1978 in a laundry room in El Segundo, matched Alcala's.

"My reaction was, how many more would we get?" recalls Murphy. As the prosecutors in Orange and Los Angeles counties began to work closely together on the growing case, another DNA match came through in 2004 when LAPD Detective Shepard learned that Alcala's semen was left on the carefully posed body of Barcomb, a small and delicate 18-year-old runaway found on a dirt road snaking through tangled ravines near Marlon Brando's Mulholland Drive home back in 1977.

Stunned by the revelation of a long-undetected serial killer, detectives from the LAPD, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and Huntington Beach began scouring cold murder cases involving attractive young women who moved in the singles circuit of the 1970s.

"I wasn't surprised at all," said retired Huntington Beach Detective Steve Mack, when he heard that Alcala's DNA was being tied to several unsolved murders. "I am convinced there are others we don't know about."

Last fall Alcala insisted he was not guilty by reason of insanity in the murders of Malibu resident Wixted, Santa Monica resident Lamb, Burbank resident Parenteau and Barcomb, the petite teen runaway police say he picked up on Sunset Boulevard. Alcala has since changed his tune, pleading not guilty to all of those slayings, and continues to deny that he killed ballet student Samsoe.

But police in several California and East Coast cities are certain that this well-spoken sexual predator was far more than a child rapist; he is a slippery, brilliant, persuasive serial murderer in the mold of Ted Bundy, the handsome killer who was executed in Florida in 1989. And this time, as they face Rodney Alcala in court, cops and prosecutors believe they have extensive DNA evidence to prove it.

For Robert Samsoe, who says the slaying of his little sister destroyed his loving Huntington Beach family and turned him into a deeply troubled young man, the trial under way in Santa Ana, expected to last until February or March, is the final comeuppance. "It takes me everything I have to not jump over the chairs and grab him by the head and smash his head into the table," Samsoe says. "That is what I think about. The worst part of it is that you have to tell your kids, 'I can protect you,' but in your heart you know that there are monsters out there — and you really can't."

For retired Detective Steve Hodel, this tale began on a clear afternoon in the fall of 1968. As a newbie detective working juvenile crimes out of the Hollywood station, he was given the case of fugitive Rodney Alcala, a 25-year-old UCLA fine-arts student, accused of the brutal rape of 8-year-old Tali in his Hollywood apartment.

On the day of the attack, officers were alerted by a motorist who saw Alcala, a former U.S. Army clerk, lure into his car a tiny schoolgirl walking on Sunset Boulevard. Turning around to follow, the worried motorist tracked Alcala to an apartment on De Longpre Avenue and called police. LAPD officers soon knocked on the door and were greeted at a window by a shirtless Alcala, who told them he'd be right with them. Instead, he escaped through a backdoor. When the officers broke in, they found the child, Tali, near death on the floor, raped and beaten with a steel bar.

Hodel, who penned the New York Times best-selling book Black Dahlia Avenger, which claims his father, Dr. George Hodel, is the infamous Black Dahlia murderer, remembers how completely Alcala had fooled people. As Hodel interviewed Alcala's L.A. acquaintances in an effort to find the escaped rapist, one of Alcala's UCLA arts professors insisted, "You have the wrong guy. He would never hurt a fly."

Alcala easily fit into his new haunts in New York in the late '60s and early '70s, when he masqueraded under an assumed name and, for a time, with his appealing style and Sam Elliott good looks, was a popular figure in the West Village scene. He used his fake name, John Berger, to enroll in New York University, and, NYPD detectives now say, brutally raped and strangled TWA flight attendant Cornelia "Michael" Crilley in 1971. But police at the time suspected Crilley's boyfriend, Leon Borstein, then an assistant district attorney for Brooklyn, and her murder was never solved. "I am now almost 71, and this occurred 40 years ago, and I am still affected by it," Borstein says today. "I was crazy about her at the time. ... I was devastated by her death. She was beautiful, charming, with a great sense of humor. She had the Irish eyes and the Irish hair."

Borstein, who later became chief special prosecutor for New York City, suspected Crilley may have met her killer while moving into her new apartment. "I can easily see Michael invite someone up to help her move the furniture," Borstein says. "She was a very secure child of the '60s. She wouldn't think anything like this would happen to her."

It would be many years, however, before police would link Alcala to the Crilley murder.

The same year Crilley was slain, Detective Hodel got his big break in finding the fugitive child rapist Alcala. Hodel convinced the FBI to put Alcala on its Ten Most Wanted list, and the FBI poster was spotted by two New Hampshire teenage girls hanging out in a local post office waiting out a rainstorm. The teens recognized Alcala as John Berger, or Burger, their counselor at New Beginnings, an arts summer camp geared toward young actors and actresses in Georges Mills, New Hampshire. The girls notified the camp's dean.

"I go back and find out that he had reinvented himself," Hodel says. "He had new I.D. He went back to college in New York. He just repeated out there. ... He was a class-A con man and I recognized how dangerous he was. He was able to con people as an intelligent, refined person — and that is a dangerous combination."

Alcala was arrested on August 12, 1971, and brought back to L.A. by Hodel to face attempted-murder charges in the rape of 8-year-old Tali. Investigation documents show that Alcala told Hodel at the time, "I have been trying to forget what happened. ... I have forgotten all about Rod Alcala and what he did."

He was convicted, but within a few years, a California state prison psychiatrist deemed him "considerably improved," and soon after his release from prison his parole agent allowed him to visit New York. That year, 1977, young socialite and piano virtuoso Ellen Jane Hover, daughter of famed Ciro's nightclub owner Herman Hover, vanished in New York, and the NYPD began focusing on "John Berger" — a name found scrawled on Ellen Hover's calendar the day she vanished.

The Hover disappearance, which unfolded during the terrible summer of the Son of Sam serial killings in New York, drew in the FBI and frightened the L.A. and New York jet set, among whom Hover's impresario father counted Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin as close friends. Ellen Hover "was this little, enchanted cousin of mine," remembers Sheila Weller, Vanity Fair writer and author of Dancing at Ciro's: A Family's Love, Loss, and Scandal on the Sunset Strip. "She was naive. She was sheltered. She was very trusting. When you are young and out of college you trust the wrong people. I did so many things like that, and this happened to her the first time out. I felt guilty."

After Hover vanished, her stepfather hired a private detective, who placed ads in The New York Times seeking information about a man last seen with her — a ponytailed photographer named John Burger. Berger, or Burger, couldn't be found. But a year later, as New York police continued their search, Hover's skeletal remains were discovered on the wooded Rockefeller Estate.

Hover "was [found] wearing my T-shirt," recalls Hover's younger sister Victoria, who didn't want her last name used. "My parents had a weekend house 10 minutes away. ... She was my role model. I wanted to be just like her. ... I am devastated, and to this day it is very hard. It ripped our family apart."

While NYPD detectives scoured the region for "John Berger" in 1977, back in Los Angeles, Alcala's conviction in the 1968 rape of young Tali did not seem to hinder his career or compromise his false front as a charming lothario. In September 1977, he got a job at the Los Angeles Times as a typesetter. "They hired him, with his name, having kidnapped and raped an 8-year-old," says prosecutor Murphy. "How did he get a job there? He was using his name. It wasn't like he was using an alias. He was a convicted child molester and registered sex offender."

That fall, Southern Californians were terrified by a string of murders covered by the L.A. Times, attributed to the Hillside Strangler, dubbed so because the killer left bodies in ravines and hilly areas. Police suspected that the murder of 18-year-old Jill Barcomb was a Strangler case because her slight, half-nude body was discovered November 10, 1977, on a service road between Mulholland Highway and Beverly Drive near Brando's home. Her body was posed in a knee-chest position, curled up like a ball.

"Jill was a kind of runaway," says her 49-year-old brother Bruce Barcomb, of North Hollywood. "We were a Catholic family. She was number five and I was number six of 11 kids. Her death put a tremendous hole in my life. My life changed dramatically. She took me to my first freshman dance. She played trumpet in the high school band. She was a candy striper. She was not a throwaway kid."

The discovery of her body halted filming that day of a movie in a nearby reservoir, and LAPD Detective Philip Vannatter — later a lead detective in the O.J. Simpson murder investigation — and other cops started knocking on doors, interviewing Brando, whose hilltop hideaway directly overlooked the dirt road where Barcomb was found. But neither Brando nor his neighbors had seen anything.

Just a month later, in December 1977, Alcala was questioned at LAPD's Parker Center at the request of the FBI. The FBI had linked him not to Barcomb's killing but to Hover's disappearance several months earlier in New York. They were acting on a tip from a New Directions drama-camp counselor in New Hampshire, who told detectives seeking a "John Burger" that in 1971, a New Directions camp counselor of that name had been arrested and taken away by police.

She was describing LAPD Detective Hodel's capture of fugitive Rodney Alcala in connection with the rape of Tali. The noose was tightening on Alcala. At Parker Center, Alcala admitted that he'd known Ellen Hover in New York. But because her body had not been found — it was unearthed on the Rockefeller Estate a few months later — LAPD Detective Shepard says, "There was nothing to hold him on, because there was no dead body. So he was released."

Police say it is a measure of Alcala's arrogance that just two days after he was questioned at Parker Center regarding the Hover disappearance, the body of 27-year-old nurse Georgia Wixted was discovered in her studio apartment in Malibu, the morning after she attended a birthday party at Brennan's Pub in Santa Monica. "I think he did that one to show that he could kill with impunity," Shepard says. "But unfortunately for him, he left evidence behind" — a clear half-print of his palm, and his DNA, Shepard alleges.

Even as his employer, the Times, covered the sensational Hillside Strangler case, Alcala came under suspicion by the Hillside Strangler Task Force, which was questioning known sex offenders as possible Strangler suspects. According to Shepard, Alcala, a registered child rapist, was followed by police and interviewed at his mother's home on March 22, 1978. He was ruled out as the Hillside Strangler but went to jail for a very short stint because the cops found marijuana in his possession.

Soon after his release from jail, on June 24, 1978, the body of Santa Monica legal secretary Lamb was discovered in El Segundo. Her nude corpse was posed, with her arms arranged behind her back. Investigators say the Lamb murder tripped up Alcala, who had begun taking trophies from his victims — mostly earrings, which play a key role in the current murder trial. Says Mack, the retired Huntington Beach detective, "I believe all the jewelry had significant meaning to him as a remembrance of a particular attack."

Incredibly, this registered sex offender, fresh out of jail in the summer of 1978, became a contestant on The Dating Game just weeks later. Female contestant Cheryl Bradshaw picked Alcala as her "date" after host Jim Lange described Bachelor Number One as a "successful photographer."

The exchanges between Bradshaw and Alcala can be clearly heard on old footage of The Dating Game, with Bradshaw asking Alcala to give his best impression of a dirty old man. Then she asks, "I am serving you for dinner. What would you be like?" Alcala answers, "I am called the Banana and I look pretty good." She asks him to be more descriptive and he responds, "Peel me." (Go to laweekly.com to view the game show footage.)

Alcala's alleged reign of terror might have been halted in early 1979, when a 15-year-old hitchhiker called police from a motel in Riverside County to report she had just escaped from a kidnapper and rapist. Although Riverside police quickly charged Alcala with kidnapping and rape, a judge set his bail at just $10,000, paid by his mother. While free, police say, Alcala killed 21-year-old computer keypunch operator Parenteau five months later in her Burbank apartment. The killer cut himself climbing through her window, and prosecutors now say Alcala's rare blood type has been matched to the blood remnants.

Six days after Parenteau's slaying, Robin Samsoe disappeared, a child-snatching that sent fear rippling through safe, quiet Southern California communities. Samsoe's friend Bridget told police the two swimsuit-clad girls were approached that day by a photographer who asked if he could take their pictures. The man was scared off by a suspicious neighbor, but shortly after that, Bridget lent Samsoe her yellow bicycle so that Samsoe could make it to ballet class. Samsoe was never seen again.

Detectives circulated a sketch of the mysterious photographer to the media, and a parole officer recognized his parolee Alcala. Twelve days after she vanished, on July 2, 1979, Samsoe's skeletal remains were found by U.S. Forestry Service rangers. Alcala was arrested on July 24 at his mother's house in Monterey Park.

Alcala claimed that at the time of Samsoe's disappearance he had been at Knott's Berry Farm applying for a job as a photographer for a disco contest.

But his story fell apart. Cops had already found, in a search of Alcala's house, a receipt for a locker in Seattle. Quickly traveling there, police found photos in which Alcala appears to have been stalking young girls and snapping photos of them. Also found was a picture of Lorraine Werts, a girl who posed for him in the Huntington Beach neighborhood where Samsoe and Bridget were approached. Police also found gold ball earrings allegedly worn by Samsoe, and tiny rose earrings verified much later through DNA as belonging to victim Lamb.

"There are lessons in this case that a lot of people forget," Senior Deputy D.A. Murphy said, shortly before this, Alcala's third trial, got under way. "How naive people were about these sexual predators. Notice how many serial killers we had in the '70s or '80s? We don't have that many active today. Do you know why we don't have them now? Because of the Three Strikes law. They are going down on their first time. ... They aren't given chance after chance after chance."

Jill Barcomb's brother Bruce remembers the day in 2005, when he learned that the semen of his sister's murderer was matched to a man named Rodney Alcala. "I got the call as my birthday present," he says darkly. "I was living in Costa Mesa as a senior financial analyst for a mortgage company. I got a postcard in the mail by the Los Angeles Police Department asking me to call. He didn't say what for." When Barcomb reached Detective Cliff Shepard, the veteran homicide cop told him, "We believe we found your sister's killer." Bruce Barcomb was so shocked, after more than 30 years, that he simply cried.

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Georgia Wixted
Robin Samsoe
Jill Barcomb
Charlotte Lamb
Jill Parenteau

Hundreds of photos of women and girls taken by a convicted Orange County serial killer were released Thursday. Now investigators want to find out if any are victims of Rodney Alcala.

There is concern Thursday night there may be more victims of convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala. Investigators uncovered more than 100 photographs he took. They are mostly of women and girls.

Photos of young faces -- most are of pretty women or children, some unaware they're being photographed. Others pose for the camera. Still others appear unconscious.

More than 100 people so far unidentified, captured on film by Alcala before his arrest in 1979 for the kidnapping and murder of Robin Samsoe, the 12-year-old Huntington Beach girl who disappeared on her way to ballet class.

"He was seen taking photos of her minutes before she disappeared," said Orange County District Attorney Spokesperson Farrah Emami.

Prosecutors say Alcala, a freelance photographer, approached some of his victims and asked to them to pose for photos to get them to lower their guard.

Alcala, 66, listened to applause as jurors recommended he receive a death sentence for what he did to Samsoe and four other women from Los Angeles County in the 19700s.

Alcala tortured, sexually assaulted and murdered 18-year-old Jill Barcomb, 27-year-old Georgia Wixted, 32-year-old Charlotte Lamb and 21-year-old Jill Parenteau.

Alcala also posed Parenteau's body.

"We now are concerned that there are other women out there who may have cold cases that are unsolved, that some of these people may have been sexually assaulted," said Farrah.

Authorities discovered the unidentified photos in Alcala's rented storage locker in Seattle. In some photos the women are nude. Some pictures were taken in remote settings.

"Just let us know who they are so that we can confirm that they're safe or we can give some closure to a victim's family who's been waiting for a really long time," said Farrah.

If you recognize anyone in any of the photos, you're asked to call the Huntington Beach Police Department at (714) 536-5947.

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The year is 1978, and the syndicated show "The Dating Game" is a household hit from coast to coast. A bachelor on one episode stands out for his looks and charm as he answers questions posed by a bachelorette in search of a date.

A former "Dating Game" contestant could be one of history's worst serial killers

"Bachelor No. 1, what's your best time?" she asks.

"The best time is at night, nighttime," says the bachelor, whose name is Rodney Alcala.

"Why do you say that?" she asks.

"Because that's the only time there is."

What's wrong with morning or afternoon?"

"Well, they're OK, but nighttime is when it really gets good. Then you're really ready."

The bachelorette seems intrigued by 35-year-old Alcala. The audience also seems to think he's handsome and charming. In the end, Alcala wins the date.

But what the bachelorette doesn't know is that the man she just picked may turn out to be one of the most brutal and terrifying serial killers in history.

"This could easily be another Ted Bundy," said Steve Hodel, a retired detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. "It could be 20, 30 victims." Now, 66-year-old Rodney Alcala is charged with murdering four California women and one girl in the late 1970s. Arguments in his multiple murder trial, in which he is representing himself, closed today. The case, at Orange County Criminal Courthouse in Santa Ana, Calif., is now in the hands of the jury.

Some investigators believe the five killings are just the tip of the iceberg.

"He's right up somewhere just below Hitler and right around Ted Bundy," said Det. Cliff Shepard, an LAPD cold case investigator. "There is no rhyme or reason for what he is doing. I mean it is not humane, whatever he does to these victims. It is a torturous, terrible murder."

By many accounts, Alcala was a man with a bright future. He had a Fine Arts degree from the University of California-Los Angeles, studied film at New York University and had worked for director Roman Polanski.

"I talked to his professor at UCLA and his professor came out and said this guy is a top honor student," said Hodel. "He is really a nice guy. He wouldn't hurt a fly. You've got the wrong man. ... I got this very smart, very polished guy and ... the acts he committed, you've got this monster inside of him."

Investigators said the slayings happened between late 1977 and mid-1979.

One of the alleged victims, Jill Barcomb, was a free spirit. In 1977, when she was just 18, she traveled from her home in Oneida, N.Y., out to California with friends. She was in Hollywood for only a few weeks when she met Alcala.

'He Gets Off on the Infliction of Pain'

Shepard took ABC News to the site where Barcomb's body was found.


convicted rapist who could face the death penalty in five alleged serial killings from the 1970s
Rodney James Alcala, right, was twice previously convicted of the 1979 killing of a 12-year-old...
Huntington Beach girl, Robin Samsoe, left, but the convictions were overturned on procedural grounds. He has been convicted once again of the killing and four others. Collapse
(newscom.com/AP Photo)

"Jill's found right here," said Shepard, "around Franklin Canyon Drive, Nov. 10, 1977."

It isn't clear how Alcala allegedly picked up Barcomb, but police say the ending is certain.

"What he was doing was choking her out unconscious, bare-handed, and allowing her to regain consciousness because he enjoys that," said prosecutor Matt Murphy at Alcala's trial. "He gets off on the infliction of pain on other people."

Only one month later, prosecutors said, Alcala spotted beautiful 27-year-old Georgia Wixted, who had just recently moved into her first apartment.

"He followed her home. He crawled in her window and he absolutely brutalized her," said Murphy.

Wixted was found dead Dec. 16, 1977.

"He committed unspeakable acts of horror upon that beautiful young woman," said Murphy.

Police say Alcala likely spotted beautiful Charlotte Lamb in a local bar and tried to approach her.

"Before Rodney Alcala, just like the others, a beautiful young woman," said Murphy. "After Rodney Alcala she's a brutalized, ripped-up corpse."

Lamb was discovered in the laundry room of her building.

"He posed her dead body," said Murphy. "He propped her arms up under her back, probably to arch her up so that her breasts would be better exposed."

One year later, Alcala was spotted dancing at a bar with an attractive 21-year-old named Jill Parenteau. Just a few days later, Parenteau was found dead, her tortured body posed in almost the exact same fashion as Wixted and Lamb.

"Living alone, another independent person," said Shepard. "That was just another brutal, brutal murder."

Just six days after Parenteau's body was found, Alcala met his youngest victim, 12-year-old Robin Samsoe. The girl was riding her bicycle to her very first ballet class when Alcala allegedly convinced her to get in his car. Her body was found 12 days later.

"Robin was in the innocent child stage of 12," said Murphy. "All she cared about was ballet. ... He turned this beautiful young girl into a rotting corpse, eaten by animals."

Alcala has been twice convicted for the murder of Robin Samsoe, but both times the verdicts were overturned.

"I wish I had a gun again today," the girl's mother, Marianne Connely, told ABC News.

Connely was in court, once again facing her daughter's accused killer. During the first trial, in the days before metal detectors, she says she carried a pistol in her pocketbook when she took the stand, with the intent of making her own justice.

"He was blowing kisses at me across the courtroom, and I thought I was going to lose my mind," Connely said. "And I thought I was going to go crazy, you know. And I reached into my purse and I was going to grab it, you know, and I thought, 'I can't do this.'"

Police say Alcala has spent more than 30 years obsessing about the murder of Robin. He has even written a book proclaiming his innocence.

Robin's brother Tim Samsoe, 44, said the worst thing is watching Alcala perk up in court every time he get the chance to see old photographs of his alleged victims.

"You see the gleam in his eye," said Samsoe. "He's enjoying this again."

'More Out There'

Alcala is accused of using his skills as a photographer to lure his victims. Four different women still recall Alcala trying to get them to pose for him in their bikinis on the beach for a "photo contest" on the day Robin disappeared.

More than 1,000 photos taken by Alcala were found in a storage locker in Seattle, including bikini photos shot the day Samsoe disappeared.

"You walk up, camera in hand, polished demeanor," said Hodel. "You say, 'You want to be in pictures?' Basically, he was a skilled photographer."

There may be clues to countless other victims among photographs obtained exclusively by "Nightline."

"We know he's been cross-country a couple of times," said Shepard. "We know we have victims on the East Coast and the West Coast. We believe there's more out there. ... It wouldn't surprise me if we ended up with 10 to 15 more."

In New York City, authorities say there is evidence of at least two other murders committed by Alcala. But he has never been charged in those killings.

In early 1977, before returning to California, Alcala was studying at NYU and using the alias "John Berger," spelled like the English novelist.

Vanity Fair writer Sheila Weller's cousin, Ellen Jayne Hover, met a man calling himself John Berger at the time.

"He was a photographer," Weller recalled. "She wrote the name 'John Berger' in her address book and she disappeared." Hover was just 23 years old. She was a New York socialite whose father owned the nightclub Ciros and she was friends with Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin. Hover's disappearance and murder was front page news.

"It was heartbreaking to everybody in her family," said Weller. "People don't forget these things, even years later. They don't forget the loveliness of a young woman and the absolute awfulness of this kind of a murder."

What may be most shocking about Alcala is his apparent ability to manipulate the legal system and nearly every person he has ever contacted.

In 1968, Hodel brought Alcala, then 25, to justice for his first known crime: the vicious rape and attempted murder of an 8-year-old girl.

"It was horrific," said Hodel. "What had happened was that he'd picked her up off the street, taken her into his apartment, his residence in Hollywood, and basically raped her -- again she was 8 years old -- raped her and then hit her over the head with a steel bar, leaving her for dead."

Alcala was convicted of the crime, but released after only three years in prison.

'The One That Took Him Down'

Alcala now faces five murder charges, but spent his entire closing argument rambling on about only one case: Robin Samsoe.

"Magical thinking, magical thinking is an irrational belief one can bring about a circumstance by thinking about it or wishing for it," said Alcala.

The victim's brother was there.

"It's the one that took him down," said Tim Samsoe. "He doesn't want to admit the one that took him down. It's a fluke now ... to him that the other ones came up. He thought he had it all beat."

Alcala said he couldn't have killed Robin. His proof was his appearance on "The Dating Game."

Investigators found an earring belonging to Robin in Alcala's Seattle storage locker. They said it linked him to the crime.

Alcala claimed he wore the earring on the show a year before Robin was murdered -- but in the clip from the show, it's not at all clear that Alcala was wearing an earring.

"I'm having to go through burying Robin four times now," said Tim Samsoe. "Nobody should have to bury their sister four times."

Rodney Alcala may have many more days in court, despite the pain and suffering the victims' family members endure. The state of California now has spent more money prosecuting him than any inmate in history.

"There's never an end to it, you know," said Connely, Robin's mother. "One minute it's over with, the next minute we're back in court. ... I still look at little blond girls when they walk past me to see if they'll turn around. ... I forget a lot of things, except the most important thing I can't forget, and that's her and how she died."

video of American Psycho here:

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California police say they are receiving calls from the public after releasing more than 100 photos apparently taken by convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala in the 1970s, but tip gathering has been hampered by phone problems at police headquarters.
Huntington Beach police Detective Sgt. Aaron Smith said Thursday a few people called to identify themselves in the photos, but so far no one has said that someone in the photos went missing.

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Incredibly, this registered sex offender, fresh out of jail in the summer of 1978, became a contestant on The Dating Game just weeks later.

I can't believe that there was no background check done on the contestants.

Rodney Alcala, 66, who in February was found guilty of the murders of four women and a child in the late 1970s, appeared on the lighthearted game show in 1978 -- and won.

"He was creepy. Definitely creepy," fellow contestant Jed Mills, who sat next to Alcala on the show, told CNN.

Alcala already had been convicted for the 1968 rape of an 8-year-old girl, according to CNN, but that didn't stop him from making an impression on the female participant, Cheryl Bradshaw.

"We're going to have a great time together, Cheryl," he says with a grin.

Host Jim Lange introduces Alcala 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 motor-cycling."

There was something immediately off-putting about Alcala, Mills told CNN. While he was all charm and smiles on stage, he showed a more sinister side while in the green room with the other male contestants.

"He was quiet, but at the same time he would interrupt and impose when he felt like it," Mills said. "And he was very obnoxious and creepy -- he became very unlikable and rude and imposing as though he was trying to intimidate.

"I wound up not only not liking this guy ... not wanting to be near him ... he got creepier and more negative. He was a standout creepy guy in my life."

Though Alcala won the date with Bradshaw, she ultimately refused to go out with him, according to reports.

"One wonders what that did in his mind," crime profiler Pat Brown said in an interview with CNN. "That is something he would not take too well. They don't understand the rejection. They think that something is wrong with that girl: 'She played me. She played hard to get.' "

Alcala became a killer just months after his appearance on the show, prosecutors said.

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BJ in OR wrote:

Incredibly, this registered sex offender, fresh out of jail in the summer of 1978, became a contestant on The Dating Game just weeks later.

I can't believe that there was no background check done on the contestants.

I can. No one thought much about things like that in the disco era.

I almost forgot what the Disco Era was about. You're right!

Pictures of this guy and the stories are going to give me nightmares.

Yep, it is this type of guy that gives me the total creeps. :shock:

There are pictures of laughing babies, of teenagers at parks and parties and a number of girls who appear naked. These pictures are some of the 100 photos found in a Seattle storage locker that once belonged to Rodney Alcala.

Persecutors say that more than 3 decades have passed since the 66-year old amateur photographer focused his lens on his victims. Among the last of his victims, Robin Samsoe. The 12-year old was kidnapped from Huntington Beach in 1979. Her gold earring was found in the same storage unit. Alcala was convicted of her murder for the third time; 2 other cases were turned over on appeal.

"Everywhere he's been, there's people missing," victims brother, Richard Samsoe said.

He has known about the photos for years and feared they might be the faces of more unnamed victims.

"The start of this trial, they were thinking that it was up to 50. Then during the trial, it was down to 175. They really have no idea. It could just keep going," Samsoe said.

Detectives say Alcala wrote names and addresses on the back of some of the prints. Many people say they have never met him. But they are others who are yet to be identified. Prosecutors say that they are releasing the photos now in hopes of finding ones in photos alive.

"We know that Mr. Alcala was a photographer. We know that he has many of these pictures taken. We don't know at this point if their victims of Mr. Alcala's, if they belong to a cold case.. We don't know anything else other than the fact that Mr. Alcala had them," District attorney, Susan Kang-Schroeder said.

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Do You Know This Girl? 100+ possible Alcala Victim Photos released
Authorities released over 100 photos of women and children found in a storage locker belonging to convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala in 1979.


Alcala was convicted of the rape and murder of four women and is suspected of having committed more murders.
Police found these photos in a storage locke belonging to Alcala and have been unable to identify the women and children located in them.

The Orange County District Attorney's Office has requested the public's help in identifying the subjects of the photos below.

Anyone with information regarding the identities of the women and children in the photographs is asked to contact Sergeant Smith at (714) 536-5947 or Detective Ellis at (714) 536-5947 with the Huntington Beach Police Department or Supervising District Attorney Investigator Ed Berakovich at (714) 347-8492.

“We balanced the privacy concerns of those depicted in the decision to release these pictures,” stated District Attorney Tony Rackauckas. “Although we hope that the people depicted are not victims, we believe the release may help solve some cold cases and bring closure to victims’ families.”

A spokesperson for the Orange County District Attorney's office said that Alcala may have killed women in New York State as well as California.

Authorities say that hundreds of tips have already come in based on the photos below and that two of the women have been identified and are alive and well.

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Thanks for the link BJ! I hope a lot more than two women can be identified as alive and well. Can you imagine how lucky those two women must feel that they were so close to a serial killer and he didn't harm them. I bet they get the chills just thinking about what could of happen to them.

Family and friends of four women who have been missing since the 1970s have told police they recognize their loved ones in photos found in a serial killer's locker.
Huntington Beach police released more than 100 photographs last week apparently taken by Rodney Alcala in the 1970s.
The 66-year-old Alcala was convicted last month of killing four women and a 12-year-old girl in the 1970s, and police believe he may have killed other women who posed for him.
Detective Sgt. Aaron Smith told the Orange County Register none of the connections have been confirmed yet.
Ten detectives are comparing family photos of the missing women to ones found in Alcala's Seattle storage locker and creating a timeline of Alcala's movements during that decade.

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A 48-year-old woman is shaken and unable to sleep after spotting her teenage photograph among a mountain of pictures found among the belongings of convicted serial killer Ronald Alcala.



Liane Leedom told ABC News that the photo was taken in June 1979 when she was 17 -- and in between Alcala's murders of a woman and a girl.

Leedom, who is now a psychiatrist in Trumbull, Conn., said her brush with the man accused of killing five females has left her rattled.

Leedom said she could pinpoint exactly when the photos were taken -- immediately after the murder of Charlotte Lamb and weeks before the murder of Robin Samsoe.

Leedom was only 17 years old and Alcala's neighbor in Monterey Park, Calif., when the serial killer asked her, "let me take some pictures of you".

"Then he invited me into his mother's home, and so I went in and we talked," she told Good Morning America. "He was very preoccupied with the idea that he was a member of Mensa."

The charming photographer, who had appeared the year before as a winning contestant on the "Dating Game," convinced Leedon to go back home for the photo shoot. Leedom said Alcala never made any sexual advances.

In addition to killing 12-year-old Samsoe and 32-year-old Lamb, he is charged with murdering Jill Barcomb, 18; Georgia Wixted, 27; and Jill Parenteau, 21.

Police are also hoping more families of loved ones come forward so they can link more killings to the serial killer.

And they may never know exactly how many woman Rodney Alcala may have killed. Police have nearly 2,000 photos of possible victims and a lengthy investigation ahead for investigators who say they will solve as many cases as they can.

"They want to go at 110 mph after every lead they get," said Huntington Beach Police Department Capt. Chuck Thomas. "That's what we're here for and we'll do everything we can for these potential victims."

Leedom said many of the photos in that collection were of naked women and nude children that Alcala showed her in the presence of his mother.

It wasn't until years later that she understood the look of disgust on his mother's face.

Woman's Brush With Serial Killer Alcala
Leedom said that if she had seen the collection today, she would have immediately called police. The only red flag she saw in Alcala was that he reached out to her and made conversation as a stranger as she was walking down the street.

Liane Leedon, who is now a psychiatrist from California, is one of hundreds who have come forward to identify photos taken by serial killer Rodney Alcala. She was just 17 in this shot.
Alcala was an older male who lived with his mother, which gave him access to a suburban neighborhood where he could prey on the children on his street, according to Leedom.

One of her friends saw Leedom get out of the car one day when he gave her a ride to the hospital where she worked with her father.

Knowing Alcala's brush with the law, the friend told her, "you better tell your daughter to stay away from him"

After that, she never saw him again, but just weeks later, according to Leedom, he was arrested.

Alcala has already been convicted in the 1970s murders of five women. But the recent release of the photos have caused a flurry of activity as the families of the women in the pictures, and in some cases the women themselves, flood police with phone calls.

"We've received hundreds, literally hundreds and hundreds, of calls from all over the United States as well as numerous calls from western Europe," Thomas said. "We've gotten a number of calls from families who are still despondent. Your heart really goes out to them."

Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said they already have six potential new cases they could pin on Alcala, who has been labeled the "Dating Game" killer because of his appearance on the 1970s game show.

Alcala was convicted Feb. 25 in the 1979 rape and murder of 12-year-old Huntington Beach ballet student Robin Samsoe, and the strangulation of four other women between 1970 and 1979.

The photos were found in 1979, in a Seattle storage locker that had been rented by Alcala, but not released until recently because of legal concerns.

Phone calls came flooding into authorities almost immediately.
"The calls are basically along two lines," Huntington Beach Police Detective Patrick Ellis told ABC's Seattle affiliate KOMO. "No. 1: 'Yes, that's my photograph. I am alive and well,' and giving us details of Mr. Alcala way back when, 30 years ago.

"Or, the calls saying, 'Hey, my sister, mother ... was reported missing back then, and I think her photograph is on the Web site,' and they're providing us with information as far as the person's name, where they were last seen alive," he said. "Some people aren't positive, but they're pretty sure.

"Until we talk to the victims' families, get other photographs for comparison purposes and more details on where their bodies were recovered -- if they were recovered at all -- we can't really say at this point," Ellis said. "We just don't know."

Rackauckas said each possible match to one of the photos is investigated first by looking at the whereabouts of the victims at the time and that of Alcala. In some cases, he said, DNA evidence is available for further confirmation.

Alcala, who had a fine arts degree from UCLA, took the photos before his first arrest in 1979.

Some show remote settings similar to the region where Samsoe's body was found. A few of the photos are of men.

Police say Alcala thought of himself as a skilled photographer and may have used the camera to lure his victims.

Alcala had traveled across the country several times when he was studying film at New York University in the 1970s, even working briefly with director Roman Polanski.

Steve Hodel, a retired detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, told ABC's Nightline that Alcala could have killed many more victims between the East and West Coasts.

But since his conviction, Alcala has more often been likened to the notorious serial killer Ted Bundy.

During the trial in the Orange County Criminal Courthouse in Santa Ana, Calif., four witnesses recalled Alcala trying to get them to pose for him in their bikinis on the beach the day Samsoe disappeared.

The young girl was kidnapped while riding her bicycle to ballet class in Huntington Beach. Her body was found 12 days later in the Angeles National Forest, where it had been mutilated by wild animals.

Prosecutors said that Alcala's method of killing was to choke his victims with his bare hands until they were unconscious and then to allow them to regain consciousness.

"He gets off on the infliction of pain on other people," said prosecutor Matt Murphy at Alcala's trial.

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Law enforcement officials recently released hundreds of photos of young women taken by serial killer Rodney Alcala. Alcala was convicted yet again and sentenced to death for the third time for the brutal kidnapping and murder of 12 year-old Robin Samsoe in 1980. Some of the photos showed his alleged victims in horrific poses in the nude and engaging in sex acts. Some of the women appeared to be unconscious. Some young men were also included in his macabre menagerie.

The photos were taken by Alcala over 30 years ago before he was arrested for the murder of four women and a little girl. Prior to his 1979 arrest, Alcala was convicted in 1972 for the brutal rape and beating of an 8 year-old girl. Obviously, he served little time for this horrific act and I guess officials must have felt he was 'Rehabilitated'. Alcala was so smooth, so suave and debonair, he even managed to appear as a contestant on The Dating Game and was chosen by the Bachelorette. Luckily, for her she had the good sense to decline the date claiming he was too creepy.

In addition to the photos, Alcala also kept earrings from his victims as trophies. Recently, relatives of four young women who have been missing since the 70's advised investigators that they recognized their loved ones from the photos.

Killers like to take trophies and souvenirs from their victims. Whether it's locks of hair, jewelry, clothing or to fulfill their dysfunctional sexual desires--killers enjoy preserving their victims. Trophies remind the killer of their success and how powerful they felt while killing.

Athletes often keep copies of their press clippings to reminiscence, hunters mount animal heads to signify a successful hunt and serial killers often return to the scene of the crime or even visit their victims grave. For serial killers it's a sense of pride and ownership.

Rodney Alcala certainly was not the only serial killer to keep trophies and unfortunately will not be the last. So let's take a look into this insidious practice of what some of our infamous killers have stolen form their victims.

* Florida Sex Killer Gerard Schaefer kept pins, an address book, a passport, a diary, driver's license, poetry book and two gold-filled teeth.
* Hadden Clark a cross-dressing transvestite killer (Luckily not too many of them) saved costume jewelry and even a blood soaked pillowcase of a college student he butchered.
* Joel Rifkin the Long Island Serial Killer of mostly prostitutes kept pictures, jewelry and bra's.
* Charles Ng and Leonard Lake California's notorious duo sadistically video-taped their victims for their viewing enjoyment.
* BTK secured his victims photos, driver's licenses and jewelry.
* The alleged Craiglist Killer was found to be in possession of his victim's underwear.
* Jerome Brudos Oregon's Foot-Fetish Killer kept a sliced off left foot of his victim in his freezer.
* Ed Kemper the Co-ed Killer kept grisly displays of his victims teeth, hair and patches of skin. He also at times ate portions of his victims.
* Robin Gecht part of the Chicago Ripper Team sliced off and saved his victims breasts.
* Gary Ridgeway (Green River Killer) would often return to the secluded areas he buried his victims and engaged in necrophilia.

From my perspective none of the above even remotely compare to the sadistic and repulsive-their in a world of their own category i.e. Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer.

Gein saved his victims body parts displaying them at his home, including preserved human heads hanging in his bedroom. He had human corpses mounted on his wall like deer heads. His 'collection' included bowls and lampshades made from human skin.

Dahmer however tops all in his quest to be number one compared to his 'Peers'. Police discovered in his apartment refrigerated heads, male genitalia in a cooking pot, body parts were frozen for future 'Meals' and he even sadistically performed live lobotomies on some unfortunate victims. Also discovered were victims hands and a penis in a cub bard. Hundreds of photos of his victims were readily available.

It's even more enlightening to know a heavy metal band called appropriately 'Macabre' dedicated an album to Dahmer and even titled it 'Dahmer. Songs include 'Do the Dahmer and The McDahmer Blues.

One serial killer stated "You own a piece of their soul, you become one with them". The sad reality is that killers enjoy living out their fantasies and keeping remnants of their victims simply prolongs their psychotic fulfillment.

On another note a 'Murderabilia' dealer is already peddling a letter penned by Alcala for a minimum bid of $100. The contents of the letter state Alcala is requesting 'Photos' of an unnamed celebrity.

The sad reality is of course the unnamed victims who met their demise at the hands of these sadistic creatures and end up in a serial killers collection. My sympathies to all the surviving family members who not only have to endure losing a loved one to an excruciating death but end up knowing that their killer kept them around to fulfill their insidious psychotic and sexual fantasies.

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Justice for murdered Oneida woman, 4 others in 33 year old murder case


Jill Barcomb was just 18-years-old when she left her Oneida home at 237 Park Ave., in October of 1977. She had been surrounding herself with an older group of friends that year, friends that her brother Bruce Barcomb believes caused her to act out at home. When it was decided by her family that she would live with an older married sibling rather than attend a traditional rehab, it was with these friends that Jill decided go to California. “She hadn’t been ready to deal with her core issues,” says Bruce, one of her ten siblings, younger by a year. “And she felt running away to a new area would give her new opportunities that were not present to her in Central New York.”

Jill was never reported missing. Oneida City Police Chief David Meeker said “there is no evidence of a missing persons report being filed at the time of Jill’s disappearance.” Chief Meeker went on to say that because she was “of age,” she wouldn’t have been considered a missing person. Jill didn’t attend high school that year, though she would have graduated. She was described by a former teacher as “a lovely girl, with a large family.”

Three weeks later on Nov. 10, 1977, Jill’s body was discovered by homicide detectives in Los Angeles. She had been tortured, beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled with a pair of blue pants. According to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, she had three bite marks on her right breast. Her brother, as well as the rest of her family were in shock, and traumatized by her loss. Bruce had spoken to her just three weeks before her death, and said that she was in no way in fear for her life.
At that time, many thought the murder may have been the work of the “Hillside Strangler,” who had been haunting the Los Angeles area in the 1970’s, and in fact, the task force assigned to Jill’s case was the former “Hillside Strangler Task Force.” Jill, it would turn out, was just one murder in a series of killings that haunted Southern California in the 1970’s.

Some 30 years later in Sept. of 2005, DNA testing that was not available until 1984, along with much persistence by detectives would lead to Rodney Alcala being named Jill Barcomb’s alleged killer. It was then that detectives on the case would use well preserved DNA run through the California Offender DNA Index system, (CODIS) to link Alcala to Barcomb.

Jill was a young woman who held promise, with dark hair and olive skin; a free spirit as described by her brother, who was just 17 at the time. It would be her free spirit that would take her away to California in a van with friends. She left with 3 friends, whose names remain unknown. One of the girls would have the van repossessed not long after they arrived in California, and returned with her boyfriend to Syracuse. Though she would call home frequently to check in with family, this was the last time she would be seen alive by those who knew her.
According to LAPD police records, including many people that had come to know Jill Barcomb, her run in with the infamous Alcala was nothing more than a chance encounter. Rodney Alcala met many young women in Hollywood night clubs while dancing. No one knows exactly how the two happened to cross paths, but the then charismatic Alcala had charmed many women into getting into his car, even for a ride.

On Dec. 16, 1977 the body of Georgia Wixted, 27, was found in her Malibu home. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled in much the same fashion as 18-year-old Jill.

In the years that followed, two other women and a 12-year-old girl would also succumb to the terror that was reigning over the L.A. community. In June of 1978, 32-year-old Charlotte Lamb would be found in a laundry room of her apartment complex, in Santa Monica, assaulted and strangled with a shoelace. A year later, Jill Parenteau, 21, was found on the floor of her apartment in Burbank. And twelve-year-old Robin Samsoe, would be the next victim in June 1979. She was reported missing after she failed to attend a ballet class. Her body was found in the Sierra Madre Foothills 12 days later. The four women and young girl all carried the mark of an unknown killer, strangled and sexually assaulted.

Rodney Alcala was arrested and charged in the murder of Robin Samsoe one month after her body was found. The evidence, a pair of gold ball earrings belonging to the girl found in a storage locker belonging to Alcala, then 35, in Seattle. Rodney Alcala was subsequently convicted and sentenced to death. The following month, the L.A. County District Attorney’s office filed charges of murder, burglary and assault against Alcala in the death of Jill Parenteau, but were unable to proceed due to an unreliable witness in the case.

As the facts begin to pile up, and the mystery of the L.A. County murders starts to unfold, Rodney Alcala’s murder conviction is overturned by the state Supreme Court, citing that the jury wasn’t properly informed of his prior sex crimes. Again, in June of 1986, Alcala is tried and convicted of the murder of Robin Samsoe, until his death sentence is once more overturned by an appellate court in 2001.

Additional murder charges were filed against Alcala in the deaths of two other women, Wixted and Lamb.
And as this 33 year old murder “cold case” began to unravel before a jury on Jan. 11, 2010, a strange twist would dumbfound all involved. Rodney Alcala would represent himself. Known to be a “genius,” with extensive “self-taught” knowledge of the law, Alcala, now in his late sixties, would enter the courtroom with an air of calm, wearing a suit and sneakers, and small plastic rimmed glasses resting on the bridge of his nose.
Alcala would attempt to use a worn VHS tape as evidence. On the tape, a much younger and more handsome Alcala appearing as a contestant on “The Dating Game,” in 1978. In a last ditch effort to prove his innocence in the case of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe, he attempted to show to the jury that he had been wearing the gold ball earrings during the taping of the show, one year before the death of Samsoe.

For the four women and little girl who were murdered by this man, justice prevailed as Rodney Alcala was found guilty and convicted of five counts of murder, including the murder of Jill Barcomb. Alcala was sentenced to death on March 9 in Orange County, California, after just one hour of deliberation. Her younger brother Bruce was there throughout the trial, and though he still deals with tremendous grief, he has found comfort in the support of the other victim’s families. “I loved Jill then, and now. The other legacy she has left to help alleviate the identification and pain from her personal tragedy that she experienced, were the bonds with the other victim’s family members in L.A. I was not alone at the trial. Nor was Jill.”

Bruce, as well as the rest of the Barcomb family, have fond memories of Jill, memories that will last beyond the past 33 years of sorrow. “To me, Jill was my older, small sister who was always there for me. She was giving of herself, friendly, outgoing and had an infectious smile. She liked music, dancing and played the trumpet.” Jill’s memory has been haunted for decades by the decision she made as a teen, and Bruce is forever haunted by the fact that his sister was denied her ability in life to ever transcend from the choices she made in 1977.
The night Jill’s body arrived in Oneida from Los Angeles, she came to her brother in a dream. Jill’s face was slightly disfigured from the abuse she had suffered at the hands of Alcala. She smiled and said, “I’m okay, don’t worry.”

Jill was laid to rest on Wednesday, Nov. 16, 1977 in Saint Patrick’s Cemetary, Oneida. Her mother Joyce Barcomb, and remaining siblings have remained silent in regards to her death.

There were no newspaper reports locally regarding her death in 1977, or in recent years. The disappearance and death of Jill Barcomb a continent away has stirred little interest in the Oneida community, and according to Chief Meeker, there has been no contact between California investigators and Oneida authorities.
Jill left her hometown in 1977 in search of a new life. She had dreams and aspirations; and she imagined the same things for her life that all teens hope for. She was like most, an embattled soul at the age of 18, trying to find her way.

The legacy that she left behind 33 years ago was that of a confident young woman, free spirited and caring. And in death, it still remains strong in the minds of her family and those who loved her. It was her ultimate sacrifice that would bring justice to not only Jill and her family, but the families of three other women and a little girl.
Through thousands of photos found during his 1979 arrest, and a search of Rodney Alcala’s home, prosecutors now believe that there are many other victims who have not been identified. They are currently asking for the public’s help in identifying the women, children and two men, most in sexually suggesting poses, in Alcala’s photographs. He is also a suspect in two other New York State deaths; Cornelia Crilley in 1971 and Ellen Jane Hover in 1977, both strangled. Alcala was the last to see Hover alive. Anyone with any information regarding the case may contact Huntington Beach, CA police at 714-375-5066. Police have released over one hundred photos to the public. The photos may be found at
ocregister.com/news/alcala-238591-women-murphy.html

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updated 6:04 p.m. CT, Fri., March. 19, 2010

HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. - Police have been overwhelmed with calls since they released more than 100 photos found in a serial killer's storage locker, more than 30-year-old pictures of unidentified girls and women in bell bottoms, bikinis and Farrah Fawcett hair.

They look like long-lost sisters, mothers and daughters to bereaved callers across the country and from as far away as Denmark. Police have gotten more than 400 phone calls in a little more than a week.

The photos had been in the possession of Rodney Alcala, who has been in custody since 1979 and was recently convicted of murdering four young women and a 12-year-old girl. Jurors recommended the death penalty this month.
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Prosecutors say Alcala used his camera to lure his victims, and he was seen taking pictures of the girl before she disappeared. They fear some of the unidentified people in the photos released last week may have fallen victim to Alcala as well.

"The first thing is, 'Oh, my God, I hope these girls are OK,' and the next thing is, 'I wonder if any of them are victims.' Everyone has that question," prosecutor Matt Murphy said. "I can't imagine for a million years that we've got him for the only murders he's done."

Alcala has been dubbed the "Dating Game killer" because he appeared on the television show “The Dating Game,” as Bachelor No. 1 in 1978.

Some images sexually explicit
Nine women have been identified through the photos so far, and all of them are alive. Huntington Beach police Capt. Chuck Thomas said one of them told authorities that Alcala molested her, but he added that the statute of limitations in that case has expired.

The photos, available on the Orange County District Attorney's Web site, are just a fraction of the more than 1,000 images investigators found in Alcala's storage locker when he was arrested for the 1979 murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe in Huntington Beach.

Prosecutors say Alcala used his camera to lure his victims.

They show leggy teenagers in bikinis and short-shorts on Southern California's sun-splashed beaches; young women in flowery blouses and hippie necklaces listening to music and smoking languidly; and girls wearing heavy makeup, apparently posing nude.

One photo shows a baby in a saggy diaper toddling near the shoreline, and another shows two young children in swimsuits washing off in an open-air shower on the beach.

Detectives have withheld about 900 pictures because they are too sexually explicit, while others have been cropped for release, said Huntington Beach police Capt. Chuck Thomas. He said he didn't know why his predecessors didn't release the photos years ago.

Releasing the pictures during Alcala's recent trial could have influenced the jury pool or could have jeopardized the verdict and death penalty recommendation on appeal.

Chasing leads
Alcala was previously convicted and sentenced to death twice for the murder of Samsoe, but both convictions were overturned on appeal. In 2006, investigators refiled the case and linked Alcala to four previously unsolved murders from Los Angeles County using DNA technology and other forensic evidence.

During the latest trial, prosecutors outlined Alcala's penchant for torturing his victims: One had been raped with a claw-toothed hammer, another had her skull smashed in with a 7-inch rock and one was strangled so fiercely the pressure broke bones. Several of the victims were posed nude in sexual positions after their deaths.

A jury convicted Alcala, a 66-year-old UCLA graduate, of five counts of first-degree murder last month and took just an hour to return a recommendation of death after the penalty phase earlier this month.

Alcala, who represented himself at trial, did not respond to a request for a jailhouse interview about the newly released photos.

Police are now chasing leads from Seattle to Phoenix to Orange County, Calif. Even before the photos were released, Alcala was a suspect in several cases in New York City, where he lived from 1968 to 1971, and in New Hampshire, Murphy said.

Dozens of police departments across the U.S. are also combing through cold cases, looking for similarities between their unsolved murders or missing persons reports and Alcala's victims.

'Absolutely horrible'
Detectives are fielding heart-wrenching calls from mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers of women who disappeared years ago, never to have their killer found.

One woman who called told police she thought one of the photos may have been her daughter, who went missing in 1982. Police had to tell her that it wasn't possible: By that point, Alcala had been behind bars for nearly three years.

"It's horrible, it's absolutely horrible, and our thoughts and prayers go out to these people," said Thomas, the police captain. "These people are grasping for straws, they want to hold onto anything they can hold onto to bring them closure."

But while some calls are full of anguish, others bring relief. Every so often, a woman will call to say she recognizes herself in one of the pictures.

Liane Leedom, a 48-year-old psychology professor and author, had insomnia earlier this week and was watching CNN at 2 a.m. when she saw herself at age 17 in Photo No. 123. In the picture, Leedom poses in a white, strapless summer dress with a gold cross around her neck, looking down and away from Alcala's camera with a faraway gaze.

Alcala lived down the street from Leedom with his mother and befriended her in June 1979 — the same month he killed Samsoe, who disappeared while riding a friend's bike to ballet class.

Leedom said Alcala gave her a ride to work once and invited her to his mother's home to look at dozens of pictures he'd taken of other teenagers before asking to photograph her at her parents' house.

"I was a 17-year-old girl and I said, 'Oh, a professional photographer wants to take my picture! Of course I'll do it,'" she recalled.

Grooming?
Alcala bragged about how he was a member of Mensa, the organization for people with a genius IQ, and always wore a medallion around his neck that he said signified his membership in the group, she said.

"I think he was grooming me. He showed me all these pictures he had taken. He showed me pictures of nude boys and some of them were so striking that they stick in my mind today," Leedom said.

A neighbor saw Leedom getting out of Alcala's car and told her parents, who ordered her not to see him again. The adults around the neighborhood knew he had already served prison time for an attack on an 8-year-old girl and was awaiting trial on charges of raping a 15-year-old.

"It was super lucky," Leedom said in a phone interview from her Connecticut home. "I'm determined to do good things with the life I've been blessed with."

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Being sentenced to death for committing murder has become old hat for 66-year-old convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala. Earlier this month, and for the third time in three decades, an Orange County jury convicted and sentenced Alcala to die for the kidnapping and rape of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe in 1979.

This time, prosecutors also tried and convicted Alcala for the rape, torture, and killing of four Los Angeles women murdered between 1977 and 1979. But the saga doesn't end there. Investigators are now trying to identify women in photos taken by the amateur photographer, and as more potential victims crop up, Alcala is gaining greater infamy and comparisons to Ted Bundy.

All the fuss doesn't seem to faze Alcala. In an administrative hearing Wednesday leading up to his upcoming sentencing on Tuesday, March 30, the defendant, who also acted as his own attorney at trial, seemed downright blase about the prospect of returning to death row.

Dressed in his courtroom casual uniform of denim jacket and plaid shirt - a tip-off that he hasn't seen the light of day since the late '70s - he laughed and talked jovially, every so often flipping the long wiry steel-gray curls that draped him from the courtroom gallery throughout the trial. Alcala even good-naturedly pointed out spelling errors in the court reporters' trial transcripts to help the judge perfect the court record.

To understand the serial killer's resignation, we don't have to look any further than his tacit warning to the jury right before they handed him his latest death sentence. In a move that drew the ire of Judge Francisco Briseno, who displayed the patience of an oak throughout the five-month proceedings, Alcala told the jury during his closing argument in essence that a vote for the death penalty would just force him to put his victim's families through more grief while he exercised every last right afforded to him in appealing a death penalty conviction.

Alcala has reason to be cocky. After both of his prior convictions he was thrown lifelines by the higher courts. The first verdict was overruled by the California State Supreme Court on grounds that Alcala's prior sexual crimes - namely the rape of an 8-yr-old girl - were allowed into the case in chief, and unduly prejudiced the jury.

The second conviction looked like it was going to stick. Samsoe's mother, Maryanne Connelly, says she even received a call asking how many in her family would be attending Alcala's execution. But it was soon after that the 9th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals overturned that conviction too, this time citing what were essentially technicalities.
Orange County prosecutor Matt Murphy likens Alcala to a video game villain that keeps coming to life and says that the appellate courts have hit restart on this real-life murderous villain's rampage through the system. The families of the victims as well as those close to the investigation criticize the decisions as misguided political statements by justices who opposed the death penalty and ignored the facts of the case. For Murphy, who tried the latest Samsoe case, each decision to overturn stripped away more evidence from his arsenal against Alcala. And for Robin Samsoe's family, the legal setbacks have altered the course of their lives, ripping through like aftershock upon aftershock following a devastating earthquake.

In an exclusive interview with 48 HOURS | MYSTERY, Correspondent Harold Dow, Samsoe's mother spoke eloquently about the hardships she has endured in the 31 years since her daughter's murder, waiting for justice that never came. She admits she succumbed to drugs and faced financial hardships.

Meanwhile, her daughter's killer has spent most of his life in prison, and has perfected the art of working the system to his advantage, filing lawsuit upon lawsuit when he felt his rights were violated while in custody - such as a civil suit against an investigator who did not respond to a request for discovery within 10 days. In fact, a contempt case against the Orange County Jail is still pending.

But what is telling is that at trial Alcala fixated on the Samsoe case to the exclusion of all the other charges.
As Robin's family says, that's the one that brought him down. It is also the one in which no DNA was recovered, because all that was found of the 12-year-old were her skeletal remains. Maryanne Connelly wonders where her rights were, while the man who killed her daughter became comfortably institutionalized. This inequity has become the rallying cry of all the victims' families, as well as victim's rights advocates, who say the system has coddled a vicious killer while failing victims' loved ones.
Since the latest verdict for the death penalty was handed down, Huntington Beach Police investigators have released photos taken by Alcala - who was an amateur photographer at the time of his crimes - of more than a hundred unidentified women. Some of the photos were presented by Alcala as part of his defense, contending he was an avid portrait photographer and not a sexual predator who used the lure of his lens to prey on young women.

Detectives investigating the Samsoe case found thousands of images - many pornographic -- in a storage facility Alcala rented in Seattle when Alcala was arrested in July 1979 for the 12-year-old's murder. She was listed as a missing person when she failed to show up to her ballet class on June 20, less than an hour after being approached by Alcala at the beach. Her remains were found 12 days later in the San Gabriel mountains more than 40 miles away. At trial, prosecutors placed Alcala at both the Huntington Beach location where Samsoe was last seen, as well as the area where her skeletal remains were recovered in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, just minutes from Alcala's Monterrey Park family residence.

The Samsoes, who have long felt alone in ongoing legal saga against Alcala, have found support in a new extended family - the surviving brothers and sisters of the four other Los Angeles victims.

PICTURES: Serial Killer's Secret Photos: New Victims?

The murders of 18-year-old Jill Barcomb, 27-year-old Georgia Wixted, 32-year-old Charlotte Lamb, and 21-year-old Jill Parenteau, which span between November 1977 and June 1979, remained cold for nearly thirty years, until science caught up with the killer. Alcala did not present a defense in these four murders, which were linked to him by DNA and blood evidence.
The cases were joined together in an unusual move that establishes new case law. Matt Murphy and his boss, Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckus, convinced Los Angeles DA Steve Cooley to allow Murphy to combine the LA cases with the Samsoe prosecution. Cooley agreed and sent one of his own, Deputy District Attorney Gina Satriano, to be Murphy's co-counsel in Orange County.

The cross-county prosecution establishes a precedent and forever links the five murders. Through witness testimony, Murphy and Satriano were able to show a pattern in the killings and a distinct M.O. Alcala used in the way he approached and lured his victims. But there's a more surprising link, one that sat on the evidence shelf for 27 years, as if it was waiting for DNA science to catch up. An earring containing L.A. victim Charlotte Lamb's DNA was found in a jewelry pouch that also contained a pair of gold ball earrings that Robin Samsoe's mother had identified as being hers, earrings she says were worn by Robin the day she disappeared. Huntington Beach detectives believe the jewelry pouch, stashed in the same storage facility in Seattle where they found the thousands of photos, is Alcala's trophy case, a trait he shares in common with other serial killers. And detectives are now learning that these five victims might only skim the surface of Alcala's depravity.

With the release of the latest photos, Huntington Beach investigators have received calls from as far away as Denmark and Paris, France.

While all the women identified so far are alive, the revelation suggests that Alcala operated across borders, and could very easily have left victims everywhere he went. Law enforcement officials are already looking at four other cold cases outside California they believe have strong ties to Alcala.
With each new victim, what becomes even more astounding and frustrating for the surviving families is that Alcala was caught red-handed during the brutal rape and attempted murder of an 8-year-old girl named Tali, whom Alcala abducted on her way to school back in 1968, before he had the chance to commit any of the other crimes for which he was convicted. He was prosecuted and convicted then, but served a scant 34-month sentence. The sentencing guidelines at the time allowed for indeterminate sentencing, which meant the parole board could decide to release him if they deemed him rehabilitated and no longer a threat to society. And, sadly for his future victims, they did. It begs the question: Wasn't one brutality against a helpless child enough to realize this man could never go unchecked in society? What's not in question is that the misdiagnosis sealed the fate of the five other innocent victims, and however many others remain to be found. Alcala apologized to Tali during her recent testimony, 42 years after he left her for dead.

For Robin Samsoe's mother Maryanne Connelly, imagining a reality in which her daughter hasn't been torn from her life is nearly impossible. She tells 48 HOURS MYSTERY her daughter died a hero and her purpose was to put an end to Rodney Alcala's killing spree. She has no doubt Alcala has other victims in farflung places, but says she wants him to be put to death right here in California, where he took her little girl. "If I live one day longer than Rodney Alcala," Connelly said, "I will die a happy woman."

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Investigators in Seattle are waiting for Huntington Beach police to send them a photograph confiscated from convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala in 1979 to see if it matches one of their missing-person cases, a sheriff’s spokesman there said today.

Alcala was convicted Feb. 25 of murdering five women in Southern California, and a jury has recommended he get a death sentence. Huntington Beach police have released dozens of photos of women that were seized from Alcala in Washington state, and suspect Alcala may have have killed some of them in the 1970s and ’80s.

Orange County prosecutors said the release of Alcala’s photos generated tips about seven potential victims in Seattle, two from New Hampshire, one from Phoenix and one from Orange County.

In Seattle, King County Sheriff’s Sgt. John Urquhart said today that his office has been told by a tipster that one of the photos taken away from Alcala looks like Cherry Greenman, who was last seen leaving a jail in 1976.

King County investigators are waiting for a better copy of the photo from Huntington Beach police so they can show it to Greenman’s family, Urquhart said.

Seattle investigators have two other cold cases from the time Alcala was in the Pacific Northwest, after killing 12-year-old Robin Samsoe of Huntington Beach, King County Detective Mark Jamieson said today. The two girls in Seattle who may have been Alcala’s victims are 13-year-old Tony Witaker and 17-year-old Joyce Gaunt, Jamieson said.

“By all means, we started going through our old cold cases as did the sheriff’s department (in King County), but at this point there’s nothing definitive,” Jamieson said. “Out of all the cold cases we have, these two fit
the profile.”

He stressed the investigations are very preliminary and characterized them as “thinking out loud.”

During the same time period that Alcala may have been in the Pacific Northwest, the “Green River Killer” was actively killing runaways and prostitutes. Some 48 murders were pinned on that suspect, Gary Ridgway.

Huntington Beach police released the photos of women, girls, boys and toddlers that were seized in 1979 from the storage locker Alcala rented in suburban Seattle before he was arrested for killing Samsoe.

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The man dubbed the "Dating Game" serial killer will be sentenced this morning in a Santa Ana, California courtroom.

An Orange County jury has recommended that the 66-year-old Rodney Alcala be put to death for the murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe and the rape and murder of four other Los Angeles County women in the 1970s.

Up to ten relatives of some of Alcala's victims will speak during the hearing, including Samsoe's mother.

In 1978, Alcala appeared as Bachelor Number One on "The Dating Game." Bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw chose Alcala, but then declined to go out with him.

Prosecutors say Alcala began his killing spree just months after his appearance on the show.

Although convicted for five murders, authorities believe he could be linked to as many as 30 other killings.

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A judge on Tuesday sentenced serial killer Rodney Alcala to death before hearing emotional testimony from the families of four women and a 12-year-old girl he strangled in the 1970s.

Alcala showed little emotion when his sentence was announced and kept his head down afterward as families took their turn condemning the 66-year-old amateur photographer.

"There is murder and rape and then there is the unequivocal carnage of a Rodney Alcala-style murder," said Bruce Barcomb, the brother of victim Jill Barcomb. "Give up your debt Rodney: all victims, all states, all occurrences. Own your truth."

The sentence was announced three weeks after a jury recommended death for Alcala, who was convicted on five counts of first-degree murder after a bizarre and sometimes surreal trial.

Alcala acted as his own attorney during the trial and unveiled a rambling defense that included questioning the mother of one of his victims, playing an Arlo Guthrie ballad and showing a clip from the 1970s TV show "The Dating Game."

After the verdict, authorities released more than 100 photos of young women and girls found in Alcala's possession in hopes of linking him to other unsolved murders around the country. Authorities from New Hampshire to Washington are now trying to determine if the UCLA graduate may have killed in their states.

Alcala has been sentenced to death twice before in the 1979 murder of young Robin Samsoe, but those verdicts were overturned on appeal. Prosecutors refiled charges in that case and added the four other murders in 2006 after investigators linked them to Alcala using DNA samples and other forensic evidence.

Those cases, which had gone unsolved for decades, went on trial for the first time this year.

The 12-year-old Samsoe disappeared on June 20, 1979, while riding a friend's bike to ballet class in Huntington Beach in Orange County. Her body was found 12 days later in Angeles National Forest, where it had been mutilated by wild animals.

Alcala was arrested a month after Samsoe's disappearance when his parole agent recognized him from a police sketch and called authorities. He has been in custody ever since.

He was first tried in Samsoe's murder in 1980. Prosecutors added the murders of the four women in 2006 after investigators discovered forensic evidence linking him to those crimes, including DNA found on three of the women, a bloody handprint and marker testing done on blood Alcala left on a towel in the fourth victim's home.

Alcala was convicted on Feb. 25, and also found true special-circumstance allegations of rape, torture and kidnapping, making him eligible for the death penalty.

During the guilt phase of trial, Alcala played a seconds-long clip of himself on a 1978 episode of "The Dating Game." He said the grainy clip proved that he was wearing a gold-ball earring almost a year before Samsoe was killed.

Prosecutors said the earring, found in a small pouch with other earrings in a storage locker Alcala had rented, belonged to Samsoe and that Alcala had taken it as a trophy. They also found the DNA of another victim of Alcala on a rose-shaped earring in the same pouch.

During the penalty phase, the trial took another bizarre twist when Alcala played Arlo Guthrie's 1967 song "Alice's Restaurant," in which the narrator tries to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War by trying to persuade a psychiatrist that he's unfit for the military because of his supposed extreme desire to kill.

"I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth," the song's narrator sings. "Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean: kill, kill, kill, kill."

The song prompted Samsoe's brother to stalk out of the courtroom when it was played.

In addition to Samsoe, Alcala is charged with killing Jill Barcomb, 18, who had just moved to Los Angeles from Oneida, N.Y.; Georgia Wixted, 27, of Malibu; Charlotte Lamb, 32, of Santa Monica; and Jill Parenteau, 21, of Burbank.

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A jury in Santa Ana, California had recommended the death sentence for Alcala in February, and it was approved by a judge today.
Alcala's request for a new trial was rejected.

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'Dating Game' serial killer indicted in two N.Y. murders

New York (CNN) -- The Manhattan district attorney announced Thursday new indictments against Rodney Alcala, the so-called "Dating Game Killer," in connection with the deaths of two women in New York during the 1970s.
Alcala, 67, is currently on death row in California for killing four women and a 12-year-old girl there. He was convicted of those crimes in February 2010 and sentenced the following month.
The California murders took place between November 1977 and June 1979 and covered a wide swath of suburban Los Angeles, from Burbank to El Segundo.
"Cold cases are not forgotten cases -- our prosecutors, investigators, and partners in the NYPD do not give up," said Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. "These cases were built one brick at a time, as each new lead brought us closer to where we are today."
Alcala is charged with murder in the deaths of Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Hover in New York.
Killer's game-show past
"Ms. Crilley, a 23-year-old TWA flight attendant, was found raped and strangled inside her Upper East Side apartment in June of 1971," Vance said in a news release. "Ms. Hover, who was also 23 and living in Manhattan, was found murdered in Westchester County in 1977.
In 1978, Alcala was a winning bachelor on the television show "The Dating Game." At the time, he had been convicted in the 1968 rape of an 8-year-old girl, authorities said. He served a 34-month sentence.
Police investigating Alcala found dozens of photographs of women and children in a storage locker he kept in Seattle. The locker also contained earrings belonging to Robin Samsoe, his 12-year-old victim, according to the Orange County, California, district attorney's office.
Authorities asked for the public's help in determining whether any of the people in the photographs were victims of Alcala.
A year before his appearance on "The Dating Game," according to prosecutors, Alcala raped, sodomized and killed 18-year-old Jill Barcomb and 27-year-old nurse Georgia Wixted in California.
He used a large rock to smash Barcomb's face in, prosecutors said, and strangled her to death by tying a belt and pants leg around her neck. Her body was discovered in a mountainous area in the foothills near Hollywood.
Wixted was beaten with the claw end of a hammer, authorities said, and strangled to death with a nylon stocking. Her body was left in her Malibu apartment.
On "The Dating Game," Alcala was introduced as a "successful photographer" who might also be found sky diving or motorcycling.
In June 1979, Alcala beat, raped and strangled Charlotte Lamb, a 33-year-old legal secretary, in the laundry room of her El Segundo apartment complex, authorities said. And the same month, he raped and murdered Jill Parenteau, 21, strangling her with a cord or a stocking in her Burbank apartment.
Alcala's blood was collected from the scene after he cut himself crawling out a window. "Based on a semi-rare blood match, Alcala was linked to the murder," the district attorney said.
He was charged with murdering Parenteau, but the case was dismissed after he was convicted of killing Samsoe in 1979. Alcala approached her at the beach in Huntington Beach and asked her to pose for pictures, authorities said. She did, they said, and Alcala then kidnapped and murdered her, dumping her body in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
Alcala was convicted of Samsoe's death in 1980 and sentenced to die, but the California Supreme Court overturned his conviction. A second trial in 1986 also resulted in a conviction and death sentence, but it was overturned by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
As he awaited a third trial, Alcala's DNA was linked to the crime scenes in the Barcomb, Wixted and Lamb cases, and he was charged with killing them and Parenteau.
Jed Mills, who played "Bachelor No. 2" on "The Dating Game" alongside Alcala's "Bachelor No. 1," recalled he had an almost immediate aversion to him.
"Something about him, I could not be near him," Mills said last year. "I am kind of bending toward the other guy to get away from him, and I don't know if I did that consciously. But thinking back on that, I probably did."
Alcala succeeded in charming bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw from the other side of the game show's wall. But she declined her date with him.

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Doing a happy dance that his request for a new trial was denied.

lindamarie wrote: Pictures of this guy and the stories are going to give me nightmares.

He is so gross. There is something about him that gives me the creeps. All of his poor victims.

Dumping their bodies in the hills above my house.
What a sorry excuse for a human.

I am a seasoned crime writer, but I just find these victims stories to be so especially sad, and in Miss Crilley's case, the way she was charmed by this monster into helping move furniture into her new apartment. He probably even dropped his Roman Polanski BS on her to wow her. Crilley's old boyfriend, Leon Borstein, suspects this is how he got inside and killed her, by being a nice guy, offering to help. He certainly did not look threatening and it was a secure apartment building, he didn't just walk in.

You see... back then, women were just getting out and being independent, some were maybe too trusting and naive...but charm and good looks was all it took for Alcala. Women back then thought a creep was some ugly guy in a trench coat in the alley..and the term "serial killer" had not yet been invented.

Being a fun-loving child of the 60's from a good Irish family, Miss Crilley would never have imagined the horror at her doorstep. To this day, I have girlfriends who are that way... trusting of the wrong people, just because of their looks and charm. This worries the crap outta me. Men like Alcala prey on their good nature and trust. He is pure evil incarnate.

BTW, the book on the Game Show Killer by Stella Sands is very good, with a decent sized chapter on Miss Crilley and her background...because not much is known about her and I was very curious. Hers was the coldest case, and that made me sad. I'm glad it is now solved. Pick the book up, or read parts of it at Google Books... it's well worth your time!

Posted: 05/12/2012 9:16 am Updated: 05/12/2012 11:35 am

Rodney Alcala can be extradited to New York to face charges in two killings, California's highest court has ruled.

The decision was handed down on Wednesday by the California Supreme Court. In making the decision, the justices rejected claims by the convicted serial killer that such a move would undermine his efforts to appeal his California conviction.

In August, California Gov. Jerry Brown and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed off on Alcala's transfer to New York to face charges of intentional murder, felony murder and murder in the second degree in connection with the killing of two New York women in 1970s. The women have been identified as Cornelia "Michel" Crilley and Ellen Hover.

Crilley, a TWA flight attendant, was raped and strangled in 1971. At the time, authorities initially suspected that the boyfriend of Crilley, then 23, was responsible. Authorities now claim to have forensic evidence that links Alcala to the scene.

Hover was a Manhattan socialite. In 1977, the body of the 23-year-old Hover was found on the Rockefeller estate in suburban Westchester County. Investigators found a datebook inside Hover's apartment that showed she had an appointment with a "John Berger" on the day she was killed. According to police, "John Berger" is an alias that Alcala has used before.

And Alcala's past includes a complex criminal record with incidents occurring decades ago, as early as the 1960s.

A 'DATING GAME' CONTESTANT

Now 68, Alcala is a former U.S. Army clerk, Los Angeles Times typesetter, amateur photographer and University of California, Los Angeles fine arts grad who reportedly has a near-genius IQ of 135. In 1978, Alcala appeared in an episode of the ABC prime-time show "The Dating Game."

On the show, Alcala beat out two other bachelors to win a date with "bachelorette" Cheryl Bradshaw. The couple appeared to get along well on the program, but police said Bradshaw later decided against going on the date.

Alcala's criminal past is believed to have begun in Hollywood, Calif., in 1968, when he abducted, raped and nearly beat to death with a steel pipe an 8-year-old girl. It took investigators nearly three years to track down Alcala in New Hampshire, where he was living under the assumed name of John Berger and working as a teen counselor.

A teen who attended the camp told The Huffington Post that she clearly remembers Alcala, aka Berger, and said he was "creepy" and made her feel "uneasy."

On Aug. 12, 1971, Alcala was arrested and extradited to Los Angeles to face rape and attempted murder charges. Alcala was later convicted, but he did not stay behind bars long. He was released in 1974 after a state prison psychiatrist ruled that he was ready to be released.

In 1974, just two months after he was paroled, Alcala was arrested after a 13-year-old girl told police that he had kidnapped her in Huntington Beach, Calif. Alcala was later found guilty of violating parole and providing drugs to a minor. He served roughly two years before earning his release, then he traveled to New York. It was during Alcala's time in New York, authorities claim, that he murdered Crilley and Hover.

A RETURN TO THE WEST COAST

In early 1979 Alcala was again arrested in California, after a teen hitchhiker called police and reported that he had kidnapped and raped her. Alcala was released after his mother posted his $10,000 bond.

As Alcala awaited trial in that case, authorities received a report on June 20, 1979, that 12-year-old Robin Samsoe had disappeared en route to ballet class. Less than two weeks later, her body was found in a wooded area near Sierra Madre, Calif. Witnesses told police they had seen Robin talking to a photographer the day she had disappeared. When police questioned Alcala, he denied involvement, but during a search of his home authorities found a receipt for a storage locker in Seattle. When detectives opened the locker, they found several photos of young girls, as well as earrings that allegedly belonged to Robin.

Alcala was arrested on July 24, 1979, and charged with Robin's murder. He has been behind bars ever since.

In 1980, a jury found Alcala guilty of murdering Robin and sentenced him to death. Alcala filed an appeal and this conviction was overturned by the California Supreme Court, because the original trial judge had allowed the jury to hear about Alcala's child rape and kidnapping incidents.

Prosecutors retried the murder case in 1986 and won a conviction but in 2001 that decision was again overturned when a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled that the second trial judge had improperly not allowed the testimony of a defense witness who claimed the park ranger who had found Robin's body had been hypnotized by police.

DNA EVIDENCE EXAMINED

While preparing a third prosecution, Matt Murphy, an Orange County senior deputy district attorney, learned that a recent DNA test conducted on Alcala allegedly matched DNA evidence from two unsolved homicides from the 1970s.

The victims, Georgia Wixted, 27, and Charlotte Lamb, 32, had been slain in 1977 and 1978, respectively. Both victims had been raped and killed and set in poses. Semen was found at the scene, but detectives had been unable to match it to a possible suspect.

After receiving the DNA test results, prosecutors in Orange and Los Angeles counties began to examine other cold cases. The following year, they allegedly matched his DNA to evidence connected with the case of Jill Barcomb, an 18-year-old woman killed in 1977. Like Wixted and Lamb, Barcomb had also been posed and semen had been found on her body.

Not long after identifying Barcomb's case, prosecutors began to look at the unsolved murder of Jill Parenteau. The 21-year-old victim's body had been found inside her apartment in 1979. She had been sexually assaulted, beaten and strangled. The killer had also posed her body.

In Barcomb's case, a rape test had been performed, but the evidence was not preserved. Her killer did, however, cut himself while crawling through a broken window but analysis of that blood was unable to either rule out or confirm Alcala had been at the scene. Nevertheless, authorities did find a witness who could place Alcala as having been with Parenteau at a bar prior to her death.

Alcala was indicted for the murders of Barcomb, Wixted, Lamb and Parenteau. The indictment also alleged special circumstances of torture, multiple murder, robbery, rape, burglary and oral copulation.

Los Angeles and Orange County district attorneys decided that the best place to try the cases was in Orange County, where Alcala was already facing retrial for Robin's murder. They also decided to try the five murders in a single case.

Alcala pleaded not guilty to all charges and elected to represent himself.

FIVE CASES ARE JOINED

In 2006, the California Supreme Court approved a motion by the prosecution to join Robin’s case with those of the four newly discovered victims. Alcala's trial in the California cases began on Jan. 11, 2010. During the six-week trial, DNA and other evidence was presented in each of the cases, but much of the trial centered on Robin's murder.

Murphy presented witnesses who testified that they had seen Alcala attempting to take photos of the girl before she disappeared. Murphy also called Marianne Connelly, Robin's mother, to the stand. She testified that the gold-ball earrings recovered from Alcala's rented storage locker belonged to her daughter.

In defending himself, Alcala also focused on Robin's death and did not offer testimony in regard to the other cases. Alcala did not deny photographing girls where Robin was last seen, but claimed he did not photograph her. He also claimed he was interviewing for a job at the time she went missing. He called several witnesses who he claimed could place him at the interview; none of them, however, was able to pinpoint the exact day he came in.

Alcala claimed the earrings found in his storage locker belonged to him. As evidence, he entered a video clip into evidence, taken during the 1978 episode of "The Dating Game" in which he appeared. Alcala instructed the jury to pay close attention to one particular shot, during which they would be able to see that he was wearing gold-ball earrings.

"You'll see a flash of my hair going up and a flash of gold," he testified. "Two little specks, you'll see that."

When Alcala played the video, he never paused it or attempted to point out the frame in question. Despite his intent, the evidence appeared to be lost on the jury.

Closing arguments in the trial began Feb. 22, 2010, with Murphy telling the jury that Alcala was a "hunter" with "no soul or feeling," who killed because he "enjoyed it."

"You will never see cases with more brutality," Murphy said. "All of these victims put up resistance and he punished them for it ... He tortured his victims because he enjoyed it."

When it came time to present his own closing arguments, Alcala told the jury that the evidence against him in Robin's case was based on "gimmicks" and "lies." He attacked Connelly's testimony and said she made up the story about her daughter's earrings in order to implicate him in the murder.

"I'm not trying to make Mrs. Connelly into a bad person," Alcala said. "She deserves your empathy and your sympathy because she lost her daughter ... but it does not give her the right to make up a story."

The jury found Alcala guilty of five counts of murder -- in connection with the killings of not only Robin, but also of Barcomb, Wixted, Lamb and Parenteau. According to police, each of the victims' bodies had been posed in “carefully chosen positions.”

Acala was later sentenced to death.

MORE VICTIMS?

During the investigation of the Robin Samsoe case in 1979, detectives had located a Seattle storage locker rented by Alcala and found a cache of more than 1,000 photographs. Suspecting some of the women and children pictured could be additional victims, authorities in California and New York released hundreds of the photos on March 2010.

Dozens of women in the pictures have been identified but more than 100 remain posted online, as police continue to solicit the public's help with further identifications.

Speaking with the Orange County Register, Murphy said he was pleased with the California Supreme Court's decision to allow Alcala's extradition to New York. The deputy DA also said he intends to assist prosecutors in New York.

"I'm planning to go over there on my own dime and sit down with them to show them my PowerPoint [presentation] and give them all the history," Murphy told the Register.

It remains unclear when Alcala will arrive in Manhattan. District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.'s office told The Huffington Post it had no immediate comment on the case Friday.

Alcala's attorney, Peter Arian, would not discuss the extradition. "I'm not going to comment on that," Arian told HuffPost.

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Michael Goulding / AP

Rodney Alcala, now 68, has been behind bars since his 1979 arrest in a California killing. He appeared on a 1978 episode of "The Dating Game," the innuendo-filled matchmaking show that was a hit in its era.

By The Associated Press
NEW YORK - A man already convicted and on California's death row for the decades-old murders of four women and a 12-year-old girl now faces charges in the slayings of two Manhattan women in the 1970s.

Rodney Alcala was scheduled for arraignment Thursday for the deaths of Trans World Airlines flight attendant Cornelia Crilley and aspiring researcher Ellen Hover, both 23.

It was unclear who would represent Alcala or even whether he would have a lawyer. A former photographer with an IQ said to top 160, Alcala represented himself at his California trial that ended with his convictions in 2010 for the five murders. He is appealing.

Decades of suspicion, an indictment last year and 18 months of legal maneuvering over extraditing him culminated Wednesday with his arrival in New York City on a U.S. Marshals Service plane. He was placed in police custody.

'One brick at a time'
Alcala was indicted only recently, after the Manhattan district attorney's cold-case unit re-examined the cases, looked at evidence that emerged during the California trial and conducted new interviews with more than 100 witnesses.
California authorities had said they were exploring whether Alcala could be tied to cases in New York and other states, and they had released more than 100 photos, found in his storage locker, of young women and girls.

California authorities say that they have had hundreds of tips to the photos released in the Rodney Alcala case. Msnbc's Alex Witt reports.

"These cases were built one brick at a time, as each new lead brought us closer to where we are today," District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said when Alcala was indicted, adding that he hoped the indictment "brings a small measure of peace to the families and friends who have spent decades searching for answers, and justice."

Crilley was found, strangled with a stocking, in her Manhattan apartment in 1971. Hover was living in Manhattan when she vanished in 1977. Her remains were found the next year in the woods on a suburban estate.

Hover had a degree in biology and was seeking a job as a researcher, a private investigator for her family said at the time. A talented pianist, Hover was "enamored of the counterculture of the 1960s," cousin Sheila Weller wrote in a 2010 Marie Claire magazine piece about Hover's death. Weller has said she's gratified by his indictment in her cousin's death; she declined Wednesday to elaborate.

Hover's father, comedy writer Herman Hover, had been an owner of the one-time Hollywood hotspot Ciro's.

Her disappearance and Crilley's death made headlines and spurred extensive searches. TWA offered a $5,000 reward for information about Crilley's killing. Hover's relatives papered walls and kiosks with posters.

Lunch date
A note in Hover's calendar for the day she vanished showed she planned to have lunch with a photographer she had recently met, according to the family's private detective and news reports at the time. Her lunch date's name, authorities later said, was an alias that Alcala used.

Alcala had been eyed in Crilley's death for at least several years. New York Police Department detectives investigating her killing went to California in 2003 with a warrant to interview Alcala and get a dental impression from him.

A forensic dentist later found that a bite mark on Crilley's body was consistent with Alcala's impression, a law enforcement official has said. The official was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Alcala, now 68, has been behind bars since his 1979 arrest in one of the California killings. Before that arrest, he also served a prison sentence on convictions of furnishing marijuana to a minor and kidnapping and trying to kill an 8-year-old girl.

California detectives investigating the Rodney Alcala murders are receiving tips from the public after releasing a series of photographs apparently taken by Alcala in the 1970s. Msnbc's Lynn Berry talks with investigative reporter Michelle Sigona.

He also had attended college and worked briefly as a typist at The Los Angeles Times, according to a 1979 story in the newspaper.

And he had made his way onto a 1978 episode of "The Dating Game," the innuendo-filled matchmaking show that was a hit in its era.

Introduced as a photographer with a yen for motorcycling and skydiving, the long-haired, leisure-suited Alcala won the contest. But the woman who chose him over two other contestants ultimately didn't go on a date with him, according to news reports.

His conviction last year came after a series of trials, overturned convictions and strange courtroom moments. Acting as his own lawyer, Alcala offered a rambling defense that included questioning the mother of one of his victims, showing a clip of his appearance on "The Dating Game" and playing Arlo Guthrie's 1967 song "Alice's Restaurant."

Alcala fought his extradition to New York, saying he needed to stay in California to attend court hearings and do other preparatory work on his appeal. The California Supreme Court rejected his argument last month.

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California serial killer Rodney Alcala was sentenced to additional prison time in New York for the murders of two more women, a case that brought a veteran judge to tears during the hearing.

Alcala, who is already on death row in California for the murders of four women and a girl, pleaded guilty in December to the 1971 murder of Cornelia Crilley and the 1977 murder of Ellen Hover, both in New York. On Monday, New York Supreme Court Judge Bonnie Wittner handed down a sentence of 25 years to life in prison, the Wall Street Journal reported.

"This kind of case is something I've never experienced, hope to never again. I just want to say I hope these families find some peace and solace for these inexplicably brutal and horrific acts," Wittner said, according to the Journal.

Wittner then dissolved into tears. "As I said, in 30 years I've never had a case like this," she said.

Alcala raped and strangled Crilley, a 23-year-old TWA flight attendant, inside her Upper East Side apartment in 1971. Six years later, he killed Hover, also 23 and living in Manhattan. Her body was found in Westchester County, not far from her family's estate.

The Journal reported that many in attendance at Monday's sentencing wore stickers bearing the black-and-white photograph that initially appeared in stories about Crilley's death. "Cornelia Always in Our Hearts," the stickers read.

Crilley's sister, Katie Stigell, spoke to the court, using most of her time talking about her sister, who "was in her prime" and "wouldn't hurt anybody." But Stigell also had words for Alcala.

"Mr. Alcala, I want you to know you broke my parents' hearts," Stigell said. "They never really recovered."

Hover's stepsisters declined to appear in court. Instead, prosecutor Alex Spiro read a letter on their behalf, the Journal reported.

"Ellen was a sweet, kind, generous, compassionate, loving and beautiful young woman. She chose to see the good in everyone she met because she had a huge and open heart," the letter read. "Her senseless murder irreparably damaged our family."

Alcala, a self-styled playboy who once appeared on "The Dating Game" TV match-making show, spent much of the 1970s eluding police by changing identities and locales. He has been behind bars since 1979, when he was arrested in the death of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe of Huntington Beach.
Twice he was sent to death row for murder, but both convictions were overturned on appeal. In February 2010, he was convicted again for Samsoe's murder and for the murders of four women in Los Angeles County. He is now awaiting execution.

At a news conference after Monday's hearing, Manhattan Dist. Atty. Cyrus Vance said Alcala would be returned to California, where he is appealing his death-penalty conviction. Should that conviction be overturned, Vance said, Alcala would return to New York for his sentence.

The extent of Alcala's crimes were revealed as a task force formed by the Los Angeles Police Department and other agencies that was examining cold cases tied him to slayings across Southern California. New York police had long considered Alcala a suspect in the slayings of Crilley and Hover and had taken impressions of his teeth in 2003. Alcala had lived in New York periodically between 1968 and 1977.

During that period, Crilley was found raped and strangled with her nylon stockings in her Manhattan apartment. Around that time, Alcala was working at a summer camp for girls in New Hampshire, authorities said.

Hover went missing in July 1977 and her body was discovered the following year. Before she disappeared, she had written the name "John Berger" in a planner, a name police believe Alcala used as an alias while in New York.

The Southern California killings began just a few months later.
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Picture taken Monday in the New York courtroom.

He looks Demonic!!

Thank you for the update,Raine.