World's Most Evil Killers - Season 2, Episode 9 - Rodney Alcala - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-In September 1978, one of the contestants on a U.S. TV show called "The Dating Game"
was hiding a deadly secret. Nobody knew it, but the bachelor in seat number one was responsible for the death of four women.
-Please welcome Rodney Alcala. Rod, welcome. [ Cheers and applause ] -When I found out he was a serial killer,
it was like, "Bing." It just all came together like a slap in the face. -By the time 35-year-old Rodney Alcala
was finally arrested 10 months later, he had killed another two women and a 12-year-old girl.
♪♪ Pictures of missing persons found hidden away pointed towards there being even more victims.
-I think the day he rots away and finally dies will be a good day for the whole world.
-After two convictions were quashed, Alcala was given the death sentence for a third time in 2010.
-I really hope that he's suffering and that, one day, I get that phone call that he is gone,
and nobody will ever have to hear his name again. -Rodney Alcala will go down in history
as one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ It was a murder that stunned a community.
When the remains of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe were found on July the 2nd, 1979, the schoolgirl had already been missing for 12 days.
The police were certain that the killer was a 35-year-old photographer named Rodney Alcala.
After his arrest, hundreds of pictures of young women were found in his possession, but who were they?
It would take 34 years before Alcala was finally found to be responsible for the death of at least seven women across two states.
Orange County Deputy D.A. Matt Murphy was the third prosecutor to take Alcala to trial for the murder of Robin Samsoe
after the first two death-penalty sentences were overturned. -The tough part about that and what nobody thinks about
is there's a victim's family involved in this. And Robin Samsoe had a mother who loved her,
and she had brothers who loved her. She had friends who loved her. And every time the case gets reversed,
you have to drag the family through this, and they have to go through the process again.
I don't think it's a stretch to say this ruined the life of this girl's poor mother.
-At Alcala's third trial in January 2010, the convicted killer decided to defend himself.
District Attorney Matt spent weeks sparring with the 67-year-old and had to treat him with respect in the courtroom.
-After my closing argument, that's when he realized -- After I pointed at him and called him the devil,
he realized I wasn't his buddy. I think the day he rots away and finally dies will be a good day for the whole world.
-This killer's story began over 70 years ago. Rodney Alcala was born in San Antonio, Texas,
on the 23rd of August, 1943. -He was, on the surface, a perfectly normal boy -- didn't kill small animals
or do any of those other horrible things that serial killers tend to on to do. But in 1951, when he was 8,
his grandmother, who was ill, decided that she wanted to go back to die in Mexico.
And so the whole family left Texas and went to Mexico. -But while living south of the U.S. border,
Alcala's father left the family home to start a new life. -The father abandons the family at that point in time
and then goes back to living in the U.S., and I think that's quite a significant thing.
I think that Alcala's relationship with his father was quite an important one to him.
And I think that's something that stayed with Alcala throughout his life, and I think it does feed into his offending behavior.
-Age 12, Alcala's mother moved him and his three siblings to Los Angeles to start a new life back in the U.S.
-He's popular. He's on the yearbook committee. He plays the piano. He runs for the school.
He has girlfriends. He's, on the surface, an All-American, or All-Mexican-American boy.
-After graduating from high school, Alcala joined the Army. But his time was cut short
after a death in the family had a devastating effect on him. -Whilst he's in the Army, he has a nervous breakdown,
and this is after his father has died. And he's given a medical discharge from the Army
because he has this nervous breakdown, and then he kind of goes off the radar for a while.
So I think this is the period in which he starts, perhaps, fantasizing. His offending starts to take shape in his mind,
if not in reality. -And in September 1968, Alcala committed a horrific crime. He lured an 8-year-old girl
into his Hollywood home. -This is the worst nightmare for any parent. Rodney Alcala and people like him are the reason
why you can't send your kids walking to school alone. He kidnaps her. He rapes her.
A good Samaritan sees her get into his car, and it doesn't look right. And he follows the car to the house,
and it doesn't look right. Now, this is 1968, so it's long before cellphones. He finds a pay phone, calls it in.
The police get there, knock on the door. Rodney shows up naked and says, "Hey. I'll be right with you."
-The 25-year-old Alcala wasn't planning on getting caught red-handed. -He runs out the back naked, okay,
and the police officer, who's by himself, looks down, and it's one of those situations
where it's save this bleeding little girl on the floor who's unconscious and very close to death --
She was in a coma for 33 days after this happened -- So it's save the little girl or catch the bad guy
running out of the back, and he did the right thing. He saved the little girl. But that meant Alcala got away.
-It was a horrifically depraved and violent attack on a child that seemingly came out of nowhere.
-Where was the motive for that? There was no sexual abuse that we know of in his childhood.
There was no antipathy to women. It was an unexpected bolt from the blue. -Alcala decided to run away from his crimes --
3,000 miles across the U.S. -He does not hang around. He decides to leave Los Angeles
and turns up in New York, where he enlists in the New York Film School under the name of John Berger.
-This is quite a cunning way of both avoiding detection and of starting to build up these new personas,
these knew characters, to present to the people that he comes into contact with.
So he's somebody who can put on and shed identities just like a snake, and that's how I describe Alcala.
He's constantly shedding his skin and reinventing himself. -Under the name John Berger, Rodney Alcala
had begun teaching at a summer camp in New Hampshire. But by July 1971, his time was running out.
Three years after the attack on the 8-year-old girl in his own home, Alcala was still the prime suspect,
and he was added to the FBI's nationwide 10 most-wanted list. He was soon spotted by two of his students.
-So two of these girls go to the post office to mail a letter, and they see Rodney Alcala's picture
under the name of, you know, Rodney Alcala. They're like, "Hey. That's Mr. Berger.
He works at the camp." So that's how he got caught. They extradite him back to California,
and they try him for the kidnapping, and he received a life sentence. -But unbelievably, in August 1975,
after serving less than three years, Alcala was freed and soon found work as a photographer.
-I have no idea what the parole board was thinking. They're looking at this guy. He kidnapped,
raped, and almost murdered an 8-year-old little girl who was a stranger. Wasn't even somebody that lived in his house.
This was a girl walking down the street. That is as predatory, pathological, and psychotic
as you can possibly get. And they released him after 34 months. He had a life sentence.
They released him after 34 months. -But his freedom didn't last long. Just two months later, Alcala was arrested once more,
this time for plying a minor with drugs. -He leaves state custody in August. In October, he kidnaps a 13-year-old
and provides her with marijuana. And he's convicted of breaking his parole and selling drugs to a minor.
He goes back to jail. -Again, Alcala's stay in prison was surprisingly brief. He was declared reformed by authorities
after 2 1/2 years. In the summer of 1977, he was allowed, by his parole officer,
to head back to New York. ♪♪ -There's a huge lesson here on Rodney Alcala, because people are starting to do this again.
In California, the pendulum is swinging back towards early release, towards therapy for these guys, all that sort of thing.
People like Rodney Alcala, when they get out, they are going to kill other people.
Sex offenders do not get better, okay? All the treatment in the world does not fix sex offenders.
So if you release violent sex offenders like Rodney Alcala, at the very least, they're going to commit additional rapes
or child molestations. -Alcala's stay in New York was brief. In September 1977, he was back in Southern California.
Two years later, 12-year-old Robin Samsoe would disappear after being approached by a photographer
on Huntington Beach. ♪♪ By the summer of 1979, convicted child molester Rodney Alcala
had been in prison twice and was flitting between two separate lives -- one in California
and one in New York. The 35-year-old was unemployed but remained a keen amateur photographer.
On June the 20th, 1979, 12-year-old Robin Samsoe disappeared after speaking to a stranger
on Huntington Beach in Orange County, California. -He approached Robin and her friend, who was also 12 years old.
They were sunbathing on Huntington Beach right before Robin's ballet lesson, and he said, "Hey. I'm in a photography contest.
Will you allow me to take your picture?" This photographer was a suspect right away,
because 45 minutes later, Robin disappeared and was never seen again. -Robin had last been spotted on her bicycle
heading to her ballet class. The following morning, police officer Steve Mack reported for duty.
-I'd only been with the City of Huntington Beach for a year. We go to briefings in the morning,
and they give us any crimes that have occurred during the evening that we should be on the lookout for.
And that morning, on the 21st, they told of us Robin's disappearance and the description of the bicycle
that she was riding at the time of her disappearance. -The vanishing of Robin Samsoe rocked Orange County.
-This was an extreme rarity in Huntington Beach. It was a bedroom community, quite quiet and peaceful.
We get literally hundreds of thousands of people coming to our beach annually because of its serenity and beauty.
They put out a press release, and they talked to one of Robin's friends that she was with the day before
and obtained a composite of a person that had been taking photographs of them at the beach.
As patrol officers, we began scouring the alleys and behind grocery stores and shopping centers
looking to see if the bicycle had been discarded. For probably the next two weeks,
the alleys and behind shopping centers were probably some of the safest places, because even though they'd been checked
at 10:00 in the morning, somebody was probably driving by at 2:00 in the afternoon.
Everybody wanted to find that bicycle. -The description of the potential kidnapper
given to a police sketch artist by Robin's friend looked remarkably similar to a known child molester.
-This was a big deal media-wise because we had a missing 12-year-old girl. And Alcala's parole officer
saw the composite on TV, and he called detectives and said, "You guys need to check out Rodney Alcala.
It looks like him. It sounds like him. You got to look at Rodney Alcala." And like 15 minutes after they received that phone call,
one of the cops is home, turns on the TV and sees Alcala on "The Dating Game." -Bachelor number one is a successful photographer.
Please welcome Rodney Alcala. Rod, welcome. [ Cheers and applause ] -And the host introduced the bachelors,
and bachelor number one was Rodney Alcala. The detective frantically tried to call the police department
and let other detectives know that he was on television so that they could turn it on and see him.
-Alcala's appearance on the program, where women pick eligible bachelors without seeing their faces,
was recorded 10 months earlier in September 1978. On the show that day with Alcala
was actor Jed Mills. -The vibes I got from him, while we were doing the show and backstage and even during the actual filming
were not good vibes. There was something wrong with this guy. -Jed had met Alcala backstage
before the recording. -Didn't talk much. We were guys, and he was this rather good-looking,
creepy-looking guy, though. He had the weirdest football haircut. You know, everything was, like, perfect.
The other guy and I were getting along very nicely, and we were talking about this and that.
And every now and then, this creepy guy would say something. Like, he had an attitude,
'cause he knew better than everybody else. -When the cameras began rolling, Alcala turned on the charm.
-I'm called "The Banana," and I look really good. [ Laughter ] -Can you be a little more descriptive?
-Peel me. [ Laughter ] -On "The Dating Game" show, the woman questioner asks each of the eligible bachelors...
"I'm going to eat you. What food are you?" So Alcala, when he gave his answer, says,
"Well, I'm a banana. Unpeel me." -And I said, "Oh, my God. This guys is such a creep." [ Laughs ]
-But it was enough to win him the date. -Well, I like bananas, so I'll take one.
-Number one, bachelor number one. All right. -On the outside, Alcala appeared to be a charming, good-looking man.
But deep inside, he was hiding a dark history. What the viewing public didn't know
was that contestant number one was a serial killer. By the time he appeared on the show in September 1978,
Alcala had already killed five women. Over 35 years on, Jed Mills still feels anger towards his fellow contestant.
-Thinking back on it, it was very scary. It was spooky, you know, that I was in a room with this guy.
Had I known, I'd have killed him right there with my bare hands, you know -- that he's killing women.
Horrible, just horrible. -Prior to his national TV appearance, Alcala had already murdered 23-year-old Cornelia Crilley
in June 1971 in New York. And then in July 1977, he killed another young woman in the city --
23-year-old Ellen Hover. Over the following 12 months, he struck again, this time in Southern California.
Among his innocent victims, 18-year-old Jill Barcomb, 27-year-old Georgia Wixted,
and 32-year-old Charlotte Lamb. All were murdered by the 34-year-old who was now hiding in plain sight.
-Most serial killers or killers in general want to avoid detection, want to avoid publicity,
want to avoid the spotlight. And this guy was actually seeking it out, which is, you know, an indication of his personality.
-He really does love being in the limelight, so I think he would've really enjoyed a pairing
on that dating show in the 1970s because he's the center of attention. He's the one that this woman's picked,
and he really is on top of the world. -Serial killer Alcala's joy, however, would be short-lived.
-He's saying all of these awfully cheesy things, and the audience are laughing along,
but this is a man who's killed. This is a man who is going to kill again. And I think that the lady
that was going to have the date with him was lucky to escape with her life, because she went and chatted to him backstage
just before they were about to go on the date, and picked up on the fact there was something a little bit creepy about him
and decided not to go through with that date. And I think that's probably the best decision she ever made.
-She did not go out with him, you know, 'cause he was too creepy. She did not keep the date.
So even though he won, she refused to go on the date with him. -So that kind of gives you an indication
of what kind of person you're dealing with where, on the surface, when she only could hear his voice
and then ultimately see his face, it's okay. But then when she started interacting with him
on a more human level, she realizes, "There's something wrong with this guy that just makes me uncomfortable."
And as a female, she said no. -Now, whether Alcala took that as a rejection, which I think is possible,
it was no doubt an accelerant to his later killings. If you have this narcissistic character,
and suddenly, someone turns him down, I think he takes his revenge on women in general,
women as a group. So anyone becomes fair prey. You then get a run of killings. -Eight months after his TV debut, Alcala killed again.
On the 14th of June, 1979, 21-year-old Jill Parenteau was found dead in her Burbank apartment in Los Angeles county.
And just six days later, Rodney Alcala abducted 12-year-old Robin Samsoe in Orange County.
Her body was found in the Angeles National Forest on July the 2nd, 1979. -Robin's body was discovered 12 days after her disappearance
up in an area called Chantry Flats. It was her remains. He whole body wasn't found.
Oddly enough, a forest ranger had seen Alcala, who we refer to as "The Monster" --
The family prefers that his name never be used -- dragging a blonde little girl into the woods.
And then it was 12 days later, they were doing some fire prevention clean-out up in the area, and they came across some human bones.
-It was heartbreaking news. The entire state of California wanted to see justice for the murder of Robin Samsoe.
The police had a number-one suspect, but he had a history of absconding. They needed to find Rodney Alcala,
and they needed to do it fast. ♪♪ In July 1979, detectives in Orange County, California,
had begun to investigate the murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe after her remains had been discovered
in the Angeles National Forest. Having been seen on national TV and his face matched to a sketch of a man
seen in the area where Robin had disappeared, detectives honed in on Rodney Alcala.
The convicted child molester was now their prime suspect, and they were certain he was culpable
in the murder of the little girl. -It turns to a homicide investigation immediately,
and the detectives ramp up their investigation and work it hard. And ultimately, Alcala is arrested
on July 24th. -Alcala had been found staying with his parents 40 miles north of Huntington Beach
in Monterrey Park. -As luck would have it, on the day that Alcala was arrested, they did a search warrant at his house,
and one of the detectives saw a receipt for a storage facility in the Seattle area.
-This discovery would be the first step in unearthing the secret murderous history
of Rodney Alcala. -When we got into his storage locker immediately after he was identified and arrested,
there's thousands of photographs of young women and young boys and adult women, young girls,
that, to this day, we've been unable to identify many of them. So being alone in the company of Rodney Alcala,
knowing what he did to Robin Samsoe, we always suspected that there were more victims.
We just didn't know who they were and couldn't prove it. -The photos in the storage locker
were not only of young girls. There were pictures of boys, too. -So he's targeting prepubescent girls.
He's targeting women. Sometimes he taking pictures of young boys. But I think we shouldn't look
at the differences between his victims. We need to look at what they've all got in common,
And they've all got in common a particular vulnerability, something that he sees as a weakness,
something that he can prey on. So that's what he's looking for, and it doesn't really matter to him who he sees that in.
-The photos suggested that all the potential victims had willingly posed for Alcala.
-Alcala is one of those strange but not uncommon serial killers who has a high I.Q.,
is fairly good-looking by objective standards. And we've seen this before with people like Ted Bundy
and others, where, you know, they could probably, you know, attract women themselves
and get into relationships with women in a normal relationship. But for some reason,
there's something very wrong in their minds, and that they then get involved with women
and then have that sexual relationship and then end up killing them. -In fact, Alcala appears to be a person
who could have achieved many of his sexual desires without committing a homicide,
and that makes him somewhat mystifying as serial killers go. -The police did not know it yet,
but Alcala had killed at least seven women over the previous eight years. 12-year-old Robin Samsoe was his final victim.
Over time, he had perfected his pernicious pickup technique. -Essentially, the nature of Alcala's crimes were
that he would present himself to women, often through an alias, as a photographer.
He would basically convince people that he was doing a photo shoot, that they were a desirable part of the photo shoot.
He would bring them to the photo shoot, and then he would rape, torture, and kill them.
-Alcala is somebody who knows what his victims want to hear. When he comes across young women,
he knows that he needs to appeal to their better natures and to compliment them, tell them how pretty they are,
that they could be models, that he's a photographer who can make all of this happen for them.
And he knows how to sound genuine, so he's a very accomplished predator. He sniffs out his prey,
identifies their vulnerabilities, and moves in for the kill. -As well as finding photographs of unknown victims
in the storage unit, detectives also uncovered a bag of jewelry. -On the serial killers, especially the rapists,
they'll keep a little keepsake. They'll keep a trophy. And we had a silk pouch with all kinds of unidentified jewelry in there,
stuff that we still, to this day, have no idea where it came from or who the jewelry belonged to.
-They'll look at the trophy that they kept, in this case, jewelry, and they can relive that crime
by looking at this piece of jewelry. The Monster was a sexually sadistic serial killer.
He literally fantasized about these cases and relived them in his mind when he would look at these items of jewelry,
these trophies. -And one particular item gave investigators their biggest clue yet.
-One of the pairs of earrings in there were gold-ball earrings that Robin's mother identified
as the ones Robin was wearing. -It was evidence that helped convince a jury. On June the 20th, 1980,
Rodney Alcala was sentenced to death for the murder of Samsoe. But his story does not end there.
By 1984, the conviction had been overturned. -I think for everyone involved in law enforcement,
it's always frustrating when a convicted murdered has his sentence overturned. But it was first overturned based on the fact
that improper evidence was introduced at the penalty phase. While we suspected that Robin had been sexually assaulted,
there was no physical evidence to it at all. -The Supreme Court ruled that the jury
should not have been informed of Alcala's conviction for molesting the 8-year-old girl
in 1968. He remained on remand, and at a second trial in June 1986, Alcala was again found guilty of Robin Samsoe's murder
and sentenced to death for a second time. But, once more, the conviction was quashed
in April 2001. -The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals felt that the defense didn't give him adequate protection
and that they should've gone to the crime scene where the body was discovered, and, for that reason, it was overturned.
-Once again, Alcala remained on remand while authorities considered whether to try him
for the murder of Robin Samsoe for a third time. It was heartbreaking for her family.
-The Samsoe family was devastated each time it was overturned. I know this after talking to them.
Through the years, I've become friends with the family. I know their personal feelings and their frustrations,
and it was devastating to Robin's mother, as well as her siblings. -Next in line to prosecute the 58-year-old
was Orange County Deputy D.A. Matt Murphy. Since Alcala's arrest in July 1979, technology had made great advances.
And investigators had begun to look into other possible victims. -I obtained court orders with the assistance of Matt Murphy
from the District Attorney's Office to get certain pieces of evidence out of court evidence
to have resubmitted for DNA testing. In the 1980s, when these trials were taking place,
nobody had ever heard of DNA. Now there had been advancements which, even since that time,
have been further advanced. -Revisiting postmortem reports, investigators found that Alcala was likely to be responsible
for more deaths than just Robin Samsoe's. -There were four unsolved murders out of L.A. County.
There was Jill Barcomb, who was found on a fire road up in the mountains about Hollywood.
There was Georgia Wixted, who was a young woman who'd just moved into her own apartment in Malibu.
There was Charlotte Lamb, who was another woman who'd moved here from the Midwest.
She was found in a laundry room in an apartment complex in the city of El Segundo.
And then we have Jill Parenteau, who lived in Burbank. We had these four murders.
Now, three of them, we had really good DNA, and one of the things that was consistent
with all of Rodney Alcala's rapes and murders is that his semen was located in virtually every inch of the body of these poor women.
So they're -- These were long, ongoing, torturous murders and rapes. -Over the years, Alcala had developed a familiar M.O.
-He would kill, very often, by strangulation. But before ultimately killing somebody,
he would strangle them to the point of near death and then allow them to be revived.
Strangle them to the point of death, allow them to be returned to life, and then finally, at some point, kill them.
This is a man who got his sexual excitement and arousal from being right there at the precipice of life and death.
He needs to see the fire of terror in the woman's eyes as he's on the verge of snuffing out her soul
for him to be aroused. -As Matt Murphy prepared to try Alcala with the four newly discovered murders,
he was still intent on getting a third guilty verdict for Robin Samsoe and her family.
-There's no free murders. If somebody kills 10 people, and there's an 11th out there that's really hard,
we don't give them a freebie and just go with the 10. We hold them accountable for every single person they kill.
And it's more work for the prosecution. It's more work for the police. But to a man and woman,
the police who have worked on this, they understand. People are happy to do the work
if we can bring justice to the families, so it's -- Every one that we can get him on, we're going to try him on.
-Rodney Alcala's latest trial was set for January the 11th, 2010, but this time, he was ready to employ a new tactic.
The 66-year-old believed there was only one person in the world who could do a decent job of defending him,
and that man was himself. He was accused of the murder of four women and one child, 12-year-old Robin Samsoe.
-Alcala decides to represent himself at trial. And there's an old saying that says,
"Anyone who chooses to represent themselves has a fool for a client," and that's very true in this case.
And he's not just a fool. He's an absolute narcissist, as well. -He wanted to be up there in the spotlight,
and he wanted to tell his side of the story, because he thought he was the smartest guy in the room.
-Alcala was up against the formidable prosecution team of Gina Satriano and Orange County Deputy D.A. Matt Murphy.
-Matt Murphy is a prosecutorial genius. He's got the charm and the wit to draw a jury in
and control them in the palm of his hand. He knows what to say and when to say it for its maximum effect.
I couldn't have asked for a better prosecutor in this case. -It's kind of this very surreal process,
but you actually kind of get to know the guy. You know, it's like you would a lawyer.
You spend hours together. You're sitting next to each other. You're working out complex evidentiary things
and figuring out what the questionnaires are going to contain. And just like you get to know a lawyer,
here was Rodney Alcala. It was very dark but also fascinating. Maybe I'm twisted, but it was interesting.
-Murphy would have to treat Alcala with the same respect he did with any other defense attorney he may have come up against.
-As a professional, you've got to deal with him, and you've got to engage him in conversation,
and you got to talk to him. And what I saw when I dealt with him is I could see how every one of these young women
would get in the car, because he was so intelligent. He was a handsome guy -- not by the time we got to him, but back then.
You know, all that, you could see how this very intelligent, very charming, very handsome guy
could lure these women into positions of vulnerability where he would rape them and murder them.
-During one of their conversations, Alcala shared his experience of living on death row.
-He goes, "We have six yards." He goes -- They have a softy yard, basically. They call it the wienie yard.
And he goes, "Matt --" He called me Matt -- "Matt, I'm not violent. I'm not a violent guy. I'm in the wienie yard.
I'm not with those guys. I'm not violent." This is a guy who raped and bashed the skull in
of Georgia Wixted. This is a guy who smashed the face in of Jill Barcomb with a rock, and he's looking at me like,
"Hey, buddy, I'm not violent. I'm not on that yard with those guys. I'm with the respectable guys on death row."
You know, that was just -- That was a moment I'll also never forget. -Alcala didn't seem to offer any defense
to the four new murder charges against him, but he defiantly fought the Robin Samsoe one.
By 2010, Huntington Beach detective Steve Mack had retired after spending most of his career
fighting for justice for Robin's family. -I sat with the family through a lot of the trial,
and I would speak to them before we went into court and afterwards. And every now and then, I would talk to Matt Murphy
regarding the tactics of the trial. But since I wasn't actually participating, I tried to stay out of that aspect of it.
-During the five-week trial at Orange County Superior Court, Alcala continued to mentally torture
Robin Samsoe's mother. -This woman has been -- Her credibility is questioned. And, you know, here, the third time around,
Rodney Alcala is representing himself, so she's getting cross-examined by the murderer of her daughter,
who's calling her a liar. I mean, imagine that. -To watch him cross-examine Robin's mother
and get within feet of her and ask her personal questions really made me angry that he should be allowed to be that close.
I think the court should've ruled that if you want to talk to her, you want to cross-examine her,
that you need to remain in your chair and sitting at the counsel table. It got real frustrating for me that he was allowed to do that.
Again, in my mind, he's reliving that incident through his questions of Robin's mother.
-This time around, the prosecution were armed with new evidence in relation to Robin's murder --
a pair of earrings found in Alcala's storage locker back in 1979. The killer had always claimed that they belonged to him,
but DNA testing proved that to be a lie. They in fact belonged to another of his victims.
-We got 0.06 nanograms of DNA belonging to Charlotte Lamb, so when we're in that courtroom, it's almost like Charlotte Lamb
is whispering from the grave to our jury, "Robin's mother was right. Rodney Alcala keeps earrings."
It was the most powerful evidence you could ever hope. And just this tiny, little piece of DNA
that sat there for decades and, you know, technology caught up to it, thank God.
And that was sort of an emotional part of the trial, when the jury got to realize that Robin's mother,
after all of these years and after all of these cross-examinations, was conclusively proven to be right
by the DNA of Charlotte Lamb on another earring found in the exact same pouch as the ones that Robin was wearing that day.
-Linking the murder of Charlotte Lamb to the murder of Robin Samsoe looked to be the final nail in the coffin for Rodney Alcala.
On February the 25th, 2010, the jury had reached a verdict on all five murder charges.
-Three of those cases, we had very strong DNA, but on Jill Parenteau, it was a tougher case.
But we had a -- Fortunately, we had a great jury, and we had Francisco Briseno as our judge.
So they did the right thing, and they convicted on all of the murders -- on Robin, on Jill Barcomb,
on Georgia Wixted, all of them. So he was held accountable for every one of those young women.
-On March the 30th, 2010, Rodney Alcala was sentenced to death for a third time.
The tactic of representing himself in court had backfired spectacularly. -This guy just thought, you know,
nothing could touch him, and he was the smartest guy in the room, and as long as he could talk, he would get away with it.
Ultimately, he was proven wrong. -When the verdict came back, it came back as I expected that it was,
but it's still a feeling of elation that this guy lost his third attempt at freedom.
I'm just waiting for the day to get the phone call that Mother Nature and Father Time
did what the courts would never do and that he's no longer stealing oxygen from decent people.
-The following year, 2011, Alcala was charged with two murders in New York -- 23-year-olds Cornelia Crilley in 1971
and Ellen Hover in 1977. -Alcala is one of those killers who believed he was cleverer.
He could hide in plain sight. "I'm John Berger in New York." "I'm an ordinary, humble man in Los Angeles.
I couldn't possibly be dangerous." He is, in some respects, even more dangerous,
like a perfectly camouflaged snake that you tread on by accident because you don't realize it's there.
-To avoid another trial, Alcala pled guilty to both New York murders, taking his total number of victims to seven.
In 2010, over 100 pictures found in Alcala's Seattle storage unit were released into the public domain by detectives
in a bid to identify potential victims. As a result, Alcala has since been charged
with killing a 28-year-old woman in Wyoming in 1977. Many of the photographs found in the locker
were too graphic to be released, meaning many of the women remain unaccounted for.
-Alcala may be the most dangerous of all the killers that have ever been caught because while he was only charged
with a relatively small number of murders, the number of pictures he had means that he may have killed in excess of 100 people.
♪♪ -Given the volume of the photographs, you know, we always knew that we had other victims.
We just -- We didn't know who they were. -Alcala was forced to pay for some of his crimes.
But for the families of the deceased, the pain of losing a loved one is a punishment that lasts forever.
-I don't think Robin's family is ever going to be at peace. They had their 12-year-old sister kidnapped
and brutally murdered in the mountains of Los Angeles County. They live with that every day
when they look at her photographs that they have on their shelves. It tormented them then, and when people bring it up today,
it's further torment for them, so I don't think they'll ever be at peace. They'll certainly be elated the day he dies,
but at peace? I think they're just dealing with it. ♪♪ -74-year-old Rodney Alcala
remains on death row in Corcoran State Prison in California. He has never admitted to any other murders.
-Well, if I was to describe Alcala with three words, it would be "me, me, me." This man is an absolute narcissist.
And he doesn't care about the rights or the feelings of other people, and all of his behavior revolves around him.
So he's somebody who was only going to ever pursue his own desires, and unfortunately,
this ended up in a lot of people losing their lives. -For these psychopaths, their main thing --
They want to control things. They want to be in control. They want the attention on them. That's kind of what drives them.
He went up. He made his whole pitch, and they soundly rejected him. They rejected his defense.
They rejected everything that he stood for and found that he deserved to die for what he did.
-My feelings towards The Monster. It's rage. It's anger, and I really hope that he's suffering.
He's in poor physical health. He's being fed through a feeding tube. It's reported that he has Alzheimer's.
I hope all of this is true and that, one day, I get that phone call that he is gone,
and nobody will ever have to hear his name again. -Rodney Alcala killed at least six women
and a 12-year-old girl. He was a terrifying predator hiding behind a charming persona
and attacked his victims for nothing other than his own selfish pleasures. To this day, we still do not know why he did it.
When he finally dies, Alcala will be remembered as one of the most dangerous men in America
and one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Rodney Alcala appeared on "The Dating Game" and it led to his arrest. In 2011, he was found guilty of murdering six women and a twelve-year-old girl.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Rodney Alcala, a serial killer, appeared on "The Dating Game" while hiding his crimes, ultimately convicted for multiple murders including that of Robin Samsoe.

Key points

Rodney Alcala's Deadly Secret. The bachelor on 'The Dating Game' was a serial killer responsible for multiple deaths.
The Disappearance of Robin Samsoe. The murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe shocked a community and led to a manhunt for Alcala.
Alcala's Arrest on National TV. Rodney Alcala was caught after appearing on 'The Dating Game' while being a prime suspect.
Rodney Alcala's Conviction. Alcala was sentenced to death for the murder of Robin Samsoe, but his story continues.
Alcala Represents Himself. In a surprising turn, Alcala decided to defend himself in court, showcasing his narcissism.
DNA Evidence Links Murders. New DNA evidence linked Alcala to multiple murders, providing crucial proof against him.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

It just all came together like a slap in the face.

0:28WatchJul 20, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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