Rodney Alcala
Ted Soqui/Corbis via Getty ImagesRodney Alcala sits in court during his 2010 trial in Santa Ana, California.
When Rodney James Alcala was a contestant on The Dating Game, he said he liked photography, skydiving, and riding his motorcycle. He didn’t mention the most salient of his hobbies: luring women to their deaths.
On camera, he was a little odd — odd enough that while he won a date with the show’s bachelorette, off-camera she refused to hold up her end of the bargain. Other bachelors on the show would say he unnerved them with his bizarre opinions and forceful personality.
They were right to be concerned: when Alcala appeared on the show, he was already a prolific murderer and had been at the top of the FBI’s most-wanted list for a number of assaults against young women and girls.
He had served time in jail, but not very much — he kept being released for good behavior that vanished the moment he wasn’t behind bars.
In 1977, just a year before he appeared on The Dating Game, he killed young Manhattan socialite Ellen Jane Hover, though it would be years before he was linked with the crime.
He then began posing as a professional photographer, telling young men and women that he could advance their modeling careers. He amassed an enormous collection of nude and sexually explicit photographs of unidentified male and female teens — many of whom investigators now fear number among his unknown victims.
In 1979, he murdered a 12-year-old girl whose friends remembered him as the stranger who had asked to take their pictures. He was arrested, and the trial uncovered four additional murders, though police continue to believe this doesn’t come close to the true sum of his crimes.
He denied all charges, but since he was acting as his own lawyer, his performance wasn’t particularly compelling. Rodney Alcala was found guilty and sentenced to death.
