Rodney Alcala

What the record shows

Rodney James Alcala, known as the Dating Game Killer, was convicted of seven murders committed in California and New York between 1971 and 1979. In February 2010 an Orange County jury found him guilty of five counts of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to death; in December 2012 he pleaded guilty in Manhattan to two further murders and received 25 years to life. He had twice before been convicted and sentenced to death for one of the California killings, the 1979 murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe, but both judgments were overturned on appeal. He died of natural causes on California's death row on 24 July 2021.

According to NBC New York's report on the 2013 sentencing, the earliest murder was that of Cornelia Crilley, a 23-year-old flight attendant strangled with a stocking in her Manhattan apartment in June 1971. Ellen Jane Hover, 23, disappeared from Manhattan in July 1977; her remains were found the next year in Westchester County, and her calendar noted a lunch with a photographer using one of Alcala's aliases. In California, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) lists the five 2010 convictions as the murders of Jill Barcomb, 18, and Georgia Wixted, 27, in 1977; Charlotte Lamb, 32, in 1978; and Jill Parenteau, 21, and Robin Samsoe, 12, in 1979.

The Ninth Circuit's 2003 opinion in Alcala v. Woodford describes the Samsoe case. She left a friend's apartment just after 3 p.m. on 20 June 1979 and never arrived; her body was found in a remote ravine about fifty miles away almost two weeks later, too decomposed to establish a cause of death. Alcala was arrested on 24 July 1979. The circumstantial case rested on beachgoers approached by a photographer, a witness who placed him near the body, and earrings identified as Samsoe's, found in a Seattle storage locker he rented after the disappearance. The locker also held a large collection of photographs of women and girls that police later released publicly to identify possible victims.

Alcala was convicted and sentenced to death in 1980. In 1984 the California Supreme Court reversed because the trial court had erroneously admitted evidence of his prior offences, and ordered a new trial. A second jury convicted him in 1986 and he was again sentenced to death; the state supreme court affirmed in 1992. In 2001 a federal district judge conditionally granted his habeas petition, and in June 2003 the Ninth Circuit affirmed, finding ineffective assistance of counsel on his alibi, the wrongful exclusion of a defence expert, and cumulative error that denied him a fair trial.

Before a third trial, DNA evidence connected Alcala to four unsolved Los Angeles County murders. In Alcala v. Superior Court (2008) the California Supreme Court held that those charges could be joined with the Orange County retrial. Alcala represented himself. On 25 February 2010 the jury found him guilty on all five counts, and he was sentenced to death in March 2010. ABC News reported that his closing argument cited his 1978 appearance as a contestant on The Dating Game, the source of his nickname.

Manhattan prosecutors indicted him in January 2011 for the Crilley and Hover murders after a cold-case review. He was extradited in 2012, pleaded guilty in December, and on 7 January 2013 was sentenced to a concurrent 25 years to life. In 2016 Wyoming prosecutors charged him with the murder of Christine Ruth Thornton, 28, whose 1982 remains were identified by relatives' DNA in 2015 after a sister recognised her in a storage-locker photograph, CBS News and CDCR reported; he was never extradited. Investigators have also linked him to other deaths in California, Washington, New York, New Hampshire and Arizona without further convictions.

Alcala was born Rodrigo Jacques Alcala Buquor in San Antonio, Texas, on 23 August 1943, and grew up near Los Angeles. He served in the Army before a medical discharge and later studied fine arts at UCLA. In 1968 he attacked an eight-year-old girl in Hollywood and fled; arrested in New Hampshire in 1971 under an alias, he was convicted in California and paroled in 1974, then paroled again in 1977 after a second assault conviction.