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. Read the full story after the jump…
(CNN)–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.
