Cornelia Crilley

Case background and investigation

Cornelia Crilley was 23 and worked as a flight attendant for Trans World Airlines when she was killed in her apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in June 1971. Wikipedia gives the date as June 12, 1971, and the address as 427 East 83rd Street. According to CBS News and the New York Post, she had been sexually assaulted and strangled with a nylon stocking, and there was a bite mark on her body.

The New York Police Department investigated at the time but did not identify a suspect, and the case went cold. CBS News reported that a letter found beneath her body carried a fingerprint that remained unmatched for many years.

Rodney Alcala, a photographer, was arrested in California in July 1979 and, after two convictions that were overturned on appeal, was found guilty in 2010 of murdering four women and a 12-year-old girl in Southern California between 1977 and 1979. He was sentenced to death. He became widely known as the "Dating Game Killer" because he had appeared as a contestant on the television show in 1978. According to Wikipedia, Alcala had lived in New York in 1971 under the name John Berger and enrolled at New York University after fleeing a California arrest warrant.

NYPD Chief of Detectives Phil Pulaski told the New York Post that the investigation gained momentum around 2003 because of changes in technology. Court papers cited by the Associated Press, as published by HuffPost, say a New York detective interviewed Alcala in California in 2005. CBS News reported that the fingerprint on the letter was eventually matched to Alcala through the FBI database and that the bite mark was compared with an impression of his teeth. The Manhattan District Attorney's cold case unit reopened the file, and officials said more than 100 witnesses were interviewed.

In January 2011, District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announced that a Manhattan grand jury had indicted Alcala for the murders of Crilley and of Ellen Hover, 23, who disappeared from Manhattan in 1977 and whose remains were found in Westchester County the following year. Alcala was brought to New York in 2012 and first pleaded not guilty. On December 14, 2012, he changed his plea to guilty on both counts, telling the judge he wanted to return to California to work on the appeal of his death sentence.

According to Wikipedia, he was sentenced on January 7, 2013, to 25 years to life, to run concurrently with his other sentences. Alcala died of natural causes on July 24, 2021, aged 77, while still under sentence of death in California.