Rodney Alcala Age, Death, Family, Biography

Some Lesser Known Facts About Rodney Alcala

• In 1961, he was admitted to the United States Army and served as a clerk.

• While serving in the army, the commanding officer claimed he had manipulative, vindictive, and insubordinate behaviour.

• In 1964, he ran away from his duty at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to his mother’s house in California. Later, after diagnosis, it was revealed that he had gone through a nervous breakdown and had antisocial personality disorder.

• After that, a military psychiatrist revealed that he had an IQ of 135.

• Later, he was discharged from the army due to medical issues.

• During his trials, various psychiatric experts proposed that he had narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and malignant narcissism with psychopathy and sexual sadism issues.

• On 25 September 1968, a man named Donald Haines called the police after he saw Alcala taking an eight-year-old girl Tali Shapiro into his Hollywood apartment. Alcala picked up Tali in his car by saying he knew her parents and brought her to his apartment. Later, when the police arrived Alcala fled and Tali was found unconscious at his apartment, sexually abused, and beaten by a steel bar.

• According to sources his crimes took place from 1968 to 1979 and had more than 130 victims.
  

  Victims of Rodney Alcala

• Thereafter, he moved to New York and enrolled at New York University, using an alias named John Berger.

• In 1971, he used the name John Burger to work as a counsellor at a New Hampshire arts camp for children.

• Later, he worked for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association in the United States with the serial killer Richar Cottingham. Thereafter, when both of them got arrested they claimed to have not known each other.

• On 12 June 1971, a 23-year-old Trans World Airlines flight attendant named Cornelia Crilley was found dead in her Manhattan apartment. Alcala sexually assaulted and murdered her with her nylon stockings.

• In early 1971, the FBI added him to the list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.

• Later, two students from an arts camp identified Alcala’s photo and got him arrested.

• In 1974, he was released from jail and after two months he was re-arrested for assaulting a 13-year-old girl named Julie J.

• In 1977, after he got released for the second time from jail he murdered a 23-year-old daughter of a nightclub owner named Ellen Jane Hover. Later, her body was found by the FBI buried under the heavy rocks near John D. Rockefeller Estate in New York.

• In 1978, Alcala worked as a typesetter for the Los Angeles Times in California.

• After that, he was arrested and sentenced to prison for a short time for marijuana possession.

• After he was released from prison, he started taking photographs of young men and women by convincing them that he was a professional fashion photographer and wanted pictures for his portfolio. Later, the police found out some of them turned out to be his cold case victims.
  

  Rodney Alcala holding a camera

• On 9 November 1977, he sexually assaulted and murdered an 18-year-old girl named Jill Terry Barcomb from Oneida, New York and dumped her body near Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles.

• On 16 December 1977, a 27-year-old nurse named Georgie Marie Wixted was sexually assaulted and brutally murdered by Alcala in her Malibu apartment.

• Some of the cases in which he was a major suspect were the disappearance of Cherry Ann Greenman in 1976, the murder case of Antoinette Jean Whitaker in 1977, and the sexual assault and murder case of Joyce Francine Gaunt in 1978.

• On 24 June 1978, a 31-year-old legal secretary named Charlotte Lee Lamb from Santa Monica was sexually assaulted, beaten, and strangled with a shoelace by Alcala.

• In 1978, he participated as a contestant on a game show known as The Dating Game. He won the show and a date with Cheryl Bradshaw, who refused to go out with him as she found him creepy.
  

  A still of Rodney Alcala from the TV show The Dating Game (1978)

• On 14 February 1979, a 15-year-old hitchhiker Monique Hoyt was picked up by Alcala and was sexually assaulted and beaten by him many times. She escaped from him when Alcala entered a gas station bathroom. She filed a report against him to the police but later Alcala’s mother bailed him out.

• On 13 June 1979, a 21-year-old computer keypunch operator named Jill Marie Perenteau was sexually assaulted, beaten, and strangled by Alcala in her apartment. The police found signs of forced entry into her Burbank apartment and her dead body on the bathroom floor.

• On 20 June 1979, a 12-year-old girl named Robin Christine Samsoe from Huntington Beach disappeared while riding a bicycle to her ballet class. After twelve days her decomposed body was found buried in the Los Angeles foothills. She was sexually assaulted, beaten, and stabbed with a knife by Alcala.

• In July 1979, he went on trial for Samsoe’s murder and was found guilty in 1980. He was sentenced to death in June 1980.

• In 1984, the sentence was overturned by the California Supreme Court and he was sent for a second trial where he was sentenced to death in August.

• In 1992, he filed a petition for unlawful imprisonment, which the United States District Court judge granted in 2001.

• In 2003 and 2004, Alcala’s DNA was matched with the sample found near several victims’ bodies which proved Alcala was the murderer of these victims.

• After that, he became his own attorney for the third trial and played both the role of an interrogator and witness.

• In March 2010, the New York City Police Department released 120 photographs of women and children clicked by Alclala to identify if there were more victims. The other 900 explicit photographs were not revealed to the public. Several photos were posted online for further identification.

• In 2010, the Seattle police suspected Alcala of several unsolved murder cases in Washington state as he rented a place in the Seattle area where the investigators found some jewellery items of two of his victims in 1979.
  

  Rodney Alcala in the courtroom of California (2010)

• In March 2011, the Marin County, California investigators were confident that Alcala murdered 19-year-old Pamela Jean Lambson.

• On 7 January 2013, Alcala was sentenced to an additional 25 years of lifetime imprisonment by the Manhattan judge.

• In September 2016, he was charged with the murder of 28-year-old Christine Ruth Thronton. He could not make it to the trials from California to Wyoming because of illness.

• Some of the films based on his life were Dating Game Killer (2017) and Woman of the Hour (2023).
  

• In 2021, 68-year-old Morgan Rowan contacted Steve Hodel an investigator that she was a victim of Alcala. In 1968, she was picked up by Alcala in his car and drove her to his apartment. He then dragged her into his bedroom and sexually assaulted her. Later, some of her friends rescued her by breaking into the room.