Introduction
In September 1978, Rodney Alcala was a winning contestant on Chuck Barris’s The Dating Game. Barris would later claim the show was a front for his work with the CIA; Alcala’s tale is at least as lurid.
The game show had recently been revamped to be more suggestive. It was as corny as ever. Alcala, with his long hair, leisure suit, gold chain, earrings, and pushy charms, fit the part perfectly. The episode introduced him to bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw as “a successful photographer who got his start at the age of 13 when his father found him in the dark room — fully developed.” The host told Bradshaw that Alcala, from Los Angeles, was into skydiving and motorcycling.
Alcala managed to be somewhat less awkward than his two competitors. Bradshaw, a teacher from Phoenix, Ariz., asked the three bachelors — hidden from her view behind a screen — to describe themselves: “I’m serving you for dinner. What are you called and what do you look like?”
“I’m called the banana, and I look really good,” the lean Alcala confidently told her. “Peel me!”
Intrigued, Bradshaw then asked him to pretend to audition for her drama class. She suggested he take the part of a dirty old man. As a convicted sex offender, it was something he had some experience with already, so he just growled, “Come on over here!”
Somehow, his come-ons worked, and the lucky pair won tennis lessons and a trip to Magic Mountain, one of the Los Angeles area’s local amusement parks. But after talking to Alcala backstage, Bradshaw wisely decided that Alcala was less a swinging single than simply creepy. She never did accompany him on that date.
More than 20 years later Alcala would point to a tape of that Dating Game episode as proof that he’d already owned the pair of gold-ball earrings that prosecutors would contend he was keeping as a trophy of his kills, along with a collection of photographs of his sexual assault and murder victims and targets.
In January 2010, Rodney James Alcala started his third trial for the 1979 murder of a 12-year-old girl from Huntington Beach, Calif., Robin Samsoe. The courts had thrown out his two previous convictions on technicalities. Thanks to developments in DNA and blood-evidence technology, in the 2010 trial prosecutors would also charge him with the sexual assaults and deaths of Jill Barcomb, Georgia Wixted, Charlotte Lamb and Jill Parenteau.
He’d already been convicted of two sex crimes, and New York detectives now believe he also killed two women in Manhattan during the 70s.
James Alcala was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1943. By the time he was 12, he and his mother and sisters were living in suburban Los Angeles. His father had run off.
Alcala joined the Army when he was 17 and served as an Army clerk, but he only lasted a few years. In 1964 he had a nervous breakdown. A military psychiatrist described him as an anti-social personality. Discharged, he returned to Los Angeles and enrolled at UCLA, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1968.
That same year he abducted, raped and nearly killed an eight-year-old girl.
“Tali S.”, as the press would know her, was on her way to school in Hollywood when a passerby saw Rodney Alcala lure her into his car on Sunset Boulevard. The witness followed Alcala and the girl to his De Longpre Avenue apartment and called the police. By the time officers arrived on the scene, Alcala had bashed the girl’s skull with a metal pipe and raped her. When they knocked, he stalled and snuck out the back, leaving the child near dead, surrounded by photography equipment.
Los Angeles Police Detective Steve Hodel investigated. He says professors at UCLA told him they must have the wrong guy. They just couldn’t imagine that the well-spoken, sophisticated art student could have committed such a crime.
Alcala fled Los Angeles to New York to evade arrest.
Under the name John Berger, Alcala balanced a playboy lifestyle with coursework at New York University, including a film class taught by future sex offender Roman Polanski. If NYPD investigators are right, Alcala also followed his crimes against Tali S. with another attack, this one deadly.
On June 12, 1971, someone raped Cornelia “Michael” Crilley and strangled her with her own nylon stockings, leaving her dead in her apartment at 427 E. 83rd Street. The 23-year-old TWA flight attendant had just moved to the block, back then famous among Manhattan singles for its unusually high concentration of stewardesses and secretaries. Perhaps it struck the attacker as a fertile hunting ground.
At the time of the discovery of the body, the NYPD initially suspected Crilley’s boyfriend, Leon Borstein. They now believe that Rodney Alcala committed the crime, and say that saliva evidence ties him to the crime scene.
Borstein was then a Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney; he has since served as a chief special prosecutor for New York City. Borstein thinks Crilley met Alcala as she moved in to her new apartment. He speculates that the friendly young woman might have accepted Alcala’s help in moving some furniture.
With the cops distracted by Borstein, Alcala slipped away again. Still using the John Berger alias, he took a job at a drama camp near New Hampshire’s Lake Sunapee. When two teenage girls took shelter from a sudden summer storm in the post office of the tiny village of Georges Mills, they noticed that their camp counselor John Berger looked a lot like the Rodney Alcala pictured on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted poster. The authorities were seeking Alcala for the California assault on young Tali S. The campers alerted authorities, and in August of 1971 Alcala was arrested for that crime.
The Crilley case was still open, but Alcala was found guilty and sentenced for kidnapping and raping Tali S. Thanks to then-lenient California laws that emphasized rehabilitating sex offenders rather than putting them away, he served only 34 months, despite indications that the girl would have died from her injuries had the witness not led police to Alcala’s apartment so quickly.
Rodney Alcala would soon be free to strike again.
In 1974, a 13-year-old girl known in trial reports as “Julie J.” made an emergency call claiming that a man had kidnapped her in Huntington Beach. She’d been waiting for the bus, and Rodney Alcala had offered her a ride to school. He then refused to let the panicked girl out of his car until they got to Bolsa Chica State Beach. He dragged Julie to the cliffs, forced her to smoke marijuana, and kissed her.
Alcala was convicted only of violating parole and furnishing a minor with marijuana. He spent just another two years in prison.
When he got out, Alcala’s trusting parole officer gave him permission to go to New York to visit relatives, for the summer of 1977. David Berkowitz, better known as the Son of Sam, would be arrested that August for a two-year crime spree during which he shot seven young women and two men around New York City. Alcala allegedly added to this summer of terror.
NYPD investigators believe Alcala murdered a young Manhattan socialite that summer. Ellen Hover, 23, was the daughter of Herman Hover, the owner of Ciro’s, a legendary Hollywood nightclub. Ciro’s was first the epitome of Big Band swing, the height of Rat Pack glamour. Sammy Davis, Jr., and Dean Martin served as Ellen’s godfathers. Her grandmother was a gossip writer; her aunt, Sheila Weller, writes for Vanity Fair.
Ellen Hover was last seen in her apartment on Third Avenue at 44th Street on July 15, 1977. Her datebook showed that she had an appointment to meet with one John Berger that same day.
Her stepfather hired a private investigator, and the family took out an ad in the New York Times, soliciting information on the mysterious John Berger.
Alcala simply moved back to Los Angeles, reverted to his own name, and got a job as a typesetter at the Los Angeles Times.
No one came forward with information on “John Berger” until later that year. A tip to the FBI pointed out that a New Hampshire drama camp counselor named John Berger had been taken away by the police a few years before. The FBI finally connected the dots and questioned Alcala in Los Angeles. He admitted knowing Ellen Hover, but investigators hadn’t yet found her body, so they let him go and apparently filed the case away.
Ellen Hover’s body was eventually found on the Rockefeller estate in North Tarrytown, N. Y., just miles from a Hover family summer house, and mere yards from where an aspiring model would later report that “Berger” had taken photos of her.
Meanwhile, Rodney Alcala was up to his old tricks.
While New York was busy with the Son of Sam killings, Los Angeles endured the Hillside Strangler, which actually turned out to be two men who were killing young women and dumping their bodies in the wooded ravines around the city. And Los Angeles also had Rodney Alcala again.
The Los Angeles Police Department initially thought the murder of Jill Barcomb, 18, was the Hillside Strangler’s work.
Jill Barcomb was a runaway originally from Brooklyn. One of 11 kids, she’d volunteered as a candy striper and played the trumpet in high school. She was barely five-feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds when her abductor picked her up on Sunset Boulevard.
Her lifeless body showed up on a service road off Mulholland Drive, near Marlon Brando’s home, in November 1977. The discovery of Barcomb’s corpse interrupted a film shoot. She was nude, kneeling as if she’d been deliberately posed. Her skull had been crushed, probably with a bloodied rock found nearby. She’d been sexually assaulted and she’d been strangled three times — with a belt, with her pantyhose, and with one of her pants’ legs.
Investigators now say that DNA evidence at the scene matches Alcala.
The Hillside Strangler Task Force eventually followed Alcala to his mother’s home, interviewing him there in March 1978. They were questioning all sex offenders in the area. They didn’t actually suspect him of the killings, but did charge him with possession of a small amount of marijuana.
He was out of jail on the drug charge by the end of June. Soon after, he appeared on The Dating Game. But Rodney Alcala had already claimed other victims.
Georgia Wixted
In December 1977, Georgia Wixted, a 27-year-old nurse, was discovered dead in her Malibu apartment. This was just a month after Jill Barcomb’s murder — and a mere few days after the FBI had questioned Rodney Alcala regarding Ellen Hover’s death in New York earlier that year.
Wixted, 27, was last seen when she drove another nurse, Barbara Gale, home from a bar. When she didn’t show up for work the next day, Gale and their coworkers reported her missing. Police arrived at Wixted’s apartment to find signs of forced entry. Wixted was posed naked on her bedroom floor, strangled with her nylons. She’d been sexually assaulted and her skull had been bashed in, apparently with a nearby hammer, and her genitals had been mutilated. Prosecutors now say DNA evidence and a handprint found at the scene match Alcala’s.
Rodney Alcala’s crimes seem to have been falling into a pattern. But no one saw it at the time.
Charlotte Lamb
In June 1978, Charlotte Lamb, a 32-year-old legal secretary from Santa Monica, was found dead under similar circumstances in the laundry room of the apartment complex where she was living in El Segundo. She’d been sexually assaulted, beaten and strangled with a shoelace, and was posed with her hands behind her back.
DNA at the scene would once again turn out to match that of Rodney Alcala, and DNA on a pair of earrings found in his storage locker after Robin Samsoe’s murder would eventually prove to match Lamb’s DNA.
Alcala had been interviewed by the Hillside Strangler Task Force in conjunction with Jill Barcomb’s death just weeks before he allegedly raped and killed Lamb.
There would be more.
“Monique H.”
In February 1979, Rodney Alcala later confessed, he picked up a 15-year-old hitchhiker in Riverside County. He drove “Monique H.” to his apartment, and they engaged in intercourse, supposedly with her consent. In the morning, they drove to the mountains. Alcala took nude photos of her, as well as several of the two of them simulating sex acts.
But he scared her. She screamed and tried to get away. He tied her up, beat, and raped her. In his confession he would claim that it hadn’t been planned and that things had gone wrong. He’d lost control of the situation. He drove her back to Riverside. From a motel, she called police to report the rape and kidnapping.
Rodney Alcala’s mother posted bail. And he would strike again.
Jill Parenteau
In June 1979, Jill Parenteau, a 21-year-old computer keypunch operator, left work early to go to a baseball game. When she didn’t make it to work the next day, police went to her Burbank apartment to investigate. They once again found a scene of forced entry, and a woman dead. Parenteau was dead, naked on her bathroom floor. She was posed with pillows under her shoulders. She’d been sexually assaulted, beaten and strangled. Her killer cut himself crawling in a window; blood evidence matching that of 3% of the population did not rule out or confirm Rodney Alcala as the perpetrator.
Parenteau’s friend, Katharine Bryant, testified that she and Parenteau had met Alcala at a club several times.
The same month that Jill Parenteau was raped and murdered, Alcala allegedly killed an underage girl.
On June 20, 1979, Robin Samsoe, a 12-year-old Huntington Beach girl, was on her way to ballet class. She was late, so she’d borrowed her best friend’s yellow Schwinn bicycle. She and the bicycle disappeared that day. Her decomposing body was later found in the foothills of the Sierra Madres.
Earilier, neighbor Jackye Young had chased a strange man away from Robin Samsoe and her friend, Bridget Wilvert, when they were playing along Huntington Beach’s low cliffs. According to Young, the man was trying to get little girls in swimsuits to let him photograph them. Young and Wilvert would later provide police with information that helped them produce a sketch that a parole officer would recognize as Rodney Alcala.
Toni Esparza, 15, and Joanne Murchland, 14, would later testify that, on June 19 at the same beach, a man fitting Alcala’s description had offered them marijuana and begged to take their photos for a bikini contest. Several other witnesses, including Lorraine Werts and Patty Elmendorf said that Alcala had accosted them on June 20. Esparza and Murchland came forward when they saw Alcala on the news; Werts was contacted after police found a photo of Werts in Alcala’s Seattle storage locker.
Dana Crappa, then working as a ranger in the Los Angeles National Forest, has testified that she saw a man trying to lead a girl down to a stream the same day that Robin Samsoe disappeared. She says he was driving a Datsun F10, which was the make and model that Alcala owned in 1979.
Twelve days after Samsoe’s disappearance, William Poepke, another U. S. Parks ranger, found Robin Samsoe’s decomposing remains. He initially assumed they were deer bones, and tossed one to Crappa.
Robin’s left foot and portions of her hands were missing, and her skull had been separated from her neck. A kitchen knife and one of her shoes was nearby. The decomposition meant that investigators were unable to determine whether she’d been raped.
On July 24, 1979, police arrested Alcala at his mother’s Monterey Park . They soon charged him with the murder of Robin Samsoe.
The story was far from over.
When investigators searched Rodney Alcala’s mother’s house, they found a receipt for a storage locker in Seattle. The locker held numerous photographs of young girls, including one of Lorrie Werts. They also found a pair of gold ball earrings allegedly worn by Robin Samsoe and belonging to her mother; Alcala still claims he’d long owned those himself. A second pair of earrings, with tiny roses, would, years later, reveal Charlotte Lamb’s DNA. Police believe that Alcala was keeping the photos and earrings as trophies of his crimes.
Alcala apparently spent just a few days in Seattle that July. He told his girlfriend, Elizabeth Kelleher, that he’d been in Dallas, where he said he was planning to open a photography studio. He told other friends and acquaintances that he was moving to Chicago.
With the evidence from the storage locker and testimony from witnesses, prosecutors brought Alcala to trial for his crimes against Robin Samsoe.
Robin Samsoe’s mother, Marianne Connelly, brought a .25-caliber pistol to the trial. She ultimately decided not to use it, believing that the legal system would deal justly with her daughter’s killer.
Alcala had an alibi. He claimed that at the time of her abduction he was at Knott’s Berry Farm, applying for a job to become a disco photographer. Alcala’s sisters (Christine De La Cerda and Marie Troiano) and his mother insisted that Alcala had called both sisters from his mother’s house around the time of Robin’s abduction. While those calls do appear on phone bills, there’s no way of confirming whether Alcala or his mother made them.
The jury found against him. In 1978 Rodney James Alcala was found guilty of first degree murder with a deadly weapon and kidnapping. The kidnapping charge qualified as a special circumstance that exposed him to the death penalty.
Marianne Connelly, though, never worked again, and she developed a drug problem. Robin’s three siblings, Taranne, Tim and Robert were never the same.
Because Alcala’s conviction was overturned.
Twice.
Rodney Alcala was twice found guilty of the kidnapping and murder of Robin Samsoe. Both convictions were overturned on technicalities, first by the California Supreme Court in 1984, then by a U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2001.
In 1984, the California Supreme Court determined that the jury shouldn’t have been allowed to hear about Alcala’s other convictions. Furthermore, the judges believed that two of Alcala’s inmates who testified against him had perjured themselves.
Robert Dove and Michael Herrera testified that Alcala had told Herrera that he had lured the girl into his car by offering her money for photos and promising to drive her to her ballet class. Dove had overheard the conversation, in which Alcala allegedly had told Herrera that he hadn’t stabbed the girl, but beat her unconscious. Herrera also said that Alcala told him that he’d left the girl’s bicycle behind a thrift store; the owner of a thrift store in El Monte testified that he had indeed found a child’s yellow Schwinn behind his shop.
In 2001, the defense claimed that the prosecution hadn’t properly handled Dana Crappa’s statements. She had claimed amnesia and didn’t testify during the second trial, but her previous testimony was presented in her absence.
Alcala has since remained in prison, and he’s been keeping himself busy. He’s tried to sue the California state prison system over a fall that he took — and over refusing to provide him with a low-fat diet. He’s spoken out against the new state policy of routinely testing and comparing DNA, the practice that has tied him to the rapes or murders of Jill Barcomb, Georgia Wixted, Charlotte Lamb and Jill Parenteau. And in 1994 he wrote a book defending himself, You, the Jury.
He still denies that he killed Robin Samsoe. He’s flip-flopped, first saying that an insanity defense exculpates him in the deaths of Barcomb, Wixted, Lamb and Parenteau, and then insisting that he didn’t kill them either.
But now he’s on trial for the deaths of the girl and all four women.
Rodney James Alcala stands accused of killing Robin Samsoe, Jill Barcomb, Georgia Wixted, Charlotte Lamb and Jill Parenteau. He’s eligible for the death penalty due to special circumstances, because he’s accused of multiple murders as well as murder during rape or kidnapping.
He’s already objected to trying the five murders in a single case.
Superior Court Judge Francisco P. Briseno is presiding over the case in Santa Ana, Calif. Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy is prosecuting.
And Rodney Alcala is representing himself.
The trial is expected to wrap up in late February or March, 2010.
During “Dating Game Killer” Rodney Alcala’s 2010 trial, Orange County Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy called Alcala a monster and said he deserved to die. He told the jury that Alcala was a hunter who stalked and killed his prey simply because “he liked it.” Murphy alleged that Alcala would strangle victims with his bare hands until they passed out; when they came to, he’d strangle them again with pantyhose or shoe laces. Once they were dead, he’d pose their bodies and take pictures.
On February 25, 2010, a third jury found “Dating Game Killer” Rodney Alcala guilty of the 1979 murder and kidnapping of Huntington Beach ballerina Robin Samsoe, 12. They also finally found him guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of four adult women, Jill Barcomb, Georgia Wixted, Charlotte Lamb and Jill Parenteau. On March 30, 2010, Judge Francisco Briseno sentenced him to death for the crimes.
It was Alcala’s third death sentence; the verdicts in his other two trials for Samsoe’s murder were overturned. If third time’s the charm, maybe the sentence will stick this time. But the haunting contents of Alcala’s Seattle storage locker have left Huntington Beach police fearing that this fiend’s crimes weren’t limited to the deadly sexual assaults in southern California for which this trial has hopefully finally brought justice.
Unsurprisingly, the trial was a circus. Alcala defended himself. Judge Briseno had to speak privately with Alcala numerous times throughout the proceedings to explain basic legal terms to him and to curb the 66-year-old’s theatrics.
Not only the victims’ families watched the proceedings: also attending the trial was Charlize Theron, the South African actress who played serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster.
New forensic evidence buttressing the charges against Alcala for his crimes against the women was supplemented by testimony from two other victims whom he’d long been convicted and sentenced for assaulting. He’d picked up Monique H. to take photographs, brought her to a secluded rural area, then beat, sodomized and raped her.
Alcala did what he could to evade the charges and their penalty. Early in the trial, he showed a clip from his winning 1978 appearance on television’s Dating Game, claiming that it showed him already wearing the earrings that supposedly tied him to the Samsoe murder. Jurors seem to have had trouble making out the earrings in the grainy footage. They weren’t convinced by his defense.
Arlo Guthrie (pictured).
In his closing arguments Alcala told jurors that if they gave him the death penalty, they would be killers themselves. He then played them an extract from Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” a sprawling anti-Vietnam epic: “I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL.”
Alcala reminded the jury that he would fight a death sentence, and it would be automatically appealed. He suggested that a life sentence would be easiest for everyone.
The families of the victims spoke at the sentencing. In 2005, Jill Barcomb’s brother Bruce had sent Alcala a present: a copy of Out of the Shadows, a book on sex addiction. With the book he had sent a letter in which he begged Alcala to spare the families the pain of a trial, and confess to any murders he’d committed. Clearly, Bruce Barcomb hadn’t persuaded this brutal killer to come clean.
After Alcala was convicted, Huntington Beach detectives released photos from the Shoreline, Wash., storage locker where Alcala had squirreled away “trophies” from his attacks, including photos of many of his victims as well as earrings that linked him to Robin Samsoe and Charlotte Lamb. The suburban Seattle locker also held hundreds of photos of women and children — both boys and girls — often at the beach or park, sometimes nude.
Some of those photos had addresses scrawled on the back. Police have tracked down those families and were able to confirm that their loved ones were still alive. Authorities continue to hope people who recognize the other photographs will come forward.
Seattle police requested DNA samples so they can determine whether Alcala was behind the deaths of two teenagers killed in Seattle in the 1970s. Antionette Witaker, 13, was found dead in a vacant lot in northeast Seattle’s Lake City in July 1977. Joyce Gaunt, 17, was found dead in south Seattle’s Seward Park in February 1978. Witaker had not been sexually assaulted, but the developmentally disabled Gaunt had been. Detectives have requested a DNA comparison to see whether Alcala is a match.
The King County sheriff’s office is also looking into whether Alcala may have been responsible for deaths in the surrounding area, including that of Cherry Greenman, who disappeared from Waterville, Wash., at the age of 19 in 1976. Just as the Los Angeles Police Department originally attributed Jill Barcomb’s death to the Hillside Strangler, authorities at one time had looked for a link between Greenman and the Green River Killer.
New Hampshire investigators are looking into whether Alcala may have been responsible for any crimes when he worked, as John Berger, as a camp counselor in the area between 1969 and 1971.
Rodney Alcala also remains a person of interest in the deaths of heiress Ellen Hover and TWA stewardess Cornelia “Michael” Crilley in New York in the 1970s.