In the summer of 1978, Rodney Alcala stepped onto the set of The Dating Game, flashed a confident smile, and charmed his way to winning a date he would never actually go on. What neither the producers, the studio audience, nor bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw knew was that the handsome contestant with the full beard and easy laugh was already a serial killer — and was almost certainly murdering women between tapings. What unfolded over the following decades would redefine how the American public understood predators hiding in plain sight.

A Childhood Fractured, a Mind Darkened

Rodney James Alcala was born on August 23, 1943, in San Antonio, Texas. When he was eight years old, his father abandoned the family, and his mother eventually relocated to Los Angeles with her children. Alcala enlisted in the U.S. Army at seventeen and showed early academic promise — he later studied film at UCLA under director Roman Polanski. But by his mid-twenties, the architecture of something profoundly disordered had begun to emerge. In 1968, he lured eight-year-old Tali Shapiro into his Hollywood apartment, where he beat and sexually assaulted her. A neighbor happened to see Shapiro enter the apartment and called police. Officers broke down the door in time to save the child — but Alcala had already slipped out the back and fled to New York.

Reinvention and the Pattern of Predation

In New York, Alcala enrolled in New York University’s film school under a false name. He was eventually identified and arrested in 1971, pleaded guilty to a charge of child molestation, and was paroled after serving just thirty-four months. He was arrested again in 1974 after a thirteen-year-old girl in Monterey County told police he had offered to photograph her. Despite these red flags, Alcala drifted in and out of supervision and continued to operate freely. His method was consistent: he presented himself as a professional photographer, used the promise of modeling photos to gain access to victims, and was known to be charismatic and physically attractive. He reportedly used the stage name “John Berger” during his modeling pursuits.

The Dating Game and the Murders No One Saw

On September 13, 1978, Alcala’s episode of The Dating Game aired on ABC. He was introduced as a “successful photographer who got his start when his father found him in the darkroom at the age of thirteen.” Contestant Cheryl Bradshaw selected him as her date but refused to go when she met him in person backstage. She later described him as “creepy” and said his behavior during their brief meeting was off-putting in a way she could not explain. What she could not have known was that at least four women had already died at his hands — and more would follow. Investigators later established that he murdered Ellen Jane Hover, a New York socialite, in 1977, and Jill Barcomb, Georgia Wixted, Charlotte Lamb, and Jill Parenteau in California between 1977 and 1979. Twelve-year-old Robin Samsoe disappeared from a Huntington Beach beach in June 1979, and her remains were found in the mountains weeks later. Samsoe’s murder became the case that finally put Alcala behind bars.

Arrest, Trial, and a Theater of Self-Representation

Alcala was arrested in July 1979 after a tip from a former classmate who recognized his picture in a news bulletin. At the time of his arrest, authorities discovered a storage locker in Seattle containing more than a thousand photographs of women, girls, and young men — many in vulnerable or sexualized poses. Some of the subjects appeared to be unaware they were being photographed; others had clearly posed willingly. The locker became central to decades of subsequent investigation. Alcala was convicted of Robin Samsoe’s murder in 1980, but the conviction was overturned on appeal due to improper jury instructions. He was retried and convicted again in 1986, but that verdict was also overturned after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the jury had been allowed to hear improper evidence about prior sex offenses. His third and final trial, in 2010, was a spectacle: Alcala chose to represent himself and, in a surreal display, cross-examined himself on the witness stand. The jury convicted him of five murders and sentenced him to death.

The Archive of the Unknown

After his 2010 conviction, the Huntington Beach Police Department released selections from Alcala’s vast photo collection to the public, hoping to identify additional victims. Of more than a thousand images recovered, police were able to identify at least twenty-one women by name. Over a hundred subjects remain unidentified to this day. Investigators continued to link Alcala to additional murders in New York and New Hampshire. In 2012, he was charged with two additional murders in New York — Christine Thornton and Cornelia Crilley — and he was separately named as a suspect in the 1971 murder of a New Hampshire woman, though those charges were never prosecuted before his death. The full scope of his crimes remains unknown.

Why This Case Still Matters

Rodney Alcala died of natural causes on July 24, 2021, at a hospital near Corcoran State Prison in California, at age seventy-seven — without ever having been executed and without ever fully accounting for how many lives he took. Law enforcement estimates his victims could number anywhere from nine to as many as one hundred thirty, though the higher figures remain speculative. His case became a touchstone in the study of how killers exploit social trust: the photography ruse, the charm, the television appearance. The Netflix film Woman of the Hour (2023), directed by Anna Kendrick, dramatized his Dating Game appearance and the investigators who pursued him, bringing renewed attention to the unidentified women in his photographs. More than a hundred images remain posted by police in hopes that someone, somewhere, will recognize a face.

Rodney Alcala was convicted, retried, and convicted again — and still the system could not fully contain the damage he had done before anyone stopped him. The storage locker full of photographs, the faces of women whose names nobody has yet been able to reclaim: what does it mean when a killer’s archive outlives every effort to close it, and when the most important question — how many? — may never have an answer?