Brian Berry

Case file

Rodney Alcala: the Dating Game Killer, three trials and a Wyoming charge never tried

In 1978 a man who had served prison time for attacking a child won an episode of a television dating show, introduced as a photographer. A year later he was arrested for killing a 12-year-old girl, and it took three trials, guilty pleas in New York and a photograph recognised by a murdered woman’s family to show how far his crimes reached – a question that remains open.

Hand-drawn portrait of Rodney Alcala from the Bloody America coloring book
Rodney Alcala — a detail from the full page, drawn by hand.
  • Born1943, San Antonio, Texas (23 August, according to Biography.com)
  • Known asThe Dating Game Killer, after a 1978 television appearance
  • Convicted ofSeven murders: five in California, 1977–1979; two in New York, 1971 and 1977
  • Arrested24 July 1979, Monterey Park, California
  • TrialsOrange County, 1980 and 1986 (both convictions overturned); third trial 2010
  • SentenceDeath, March 2010; 25 years to life in New York, January 2013
  • WyomingCharged in 2016 with a 1977 murder; never tried; the county attorney said in 2021 he would dismiss the charge
  • Died24 July 2021, in a hospital in Kings County, California, aged 77, of natural causes

Rodney Alcala was convicted of murdering seven women and girls in New York and California between 1971 and 1979, and was charged with an eighth killing, in Wyoming, that never came to trial. Arrested in July 1979 for the kidnapping and murder of a 12-year-old girl in Huntington Beach, California, he was tried for her death three times. Death sentences imposed in 1980 and 1986 were overturned on appeal; in 2010 an Orange County jury convicted him of her murder and of the murders of four women in Los Angeles County, and he was sentenced to death again. In December 2012 he pleaded guilty in Manhattan to two killings from the 1970s. In 2016 Sweetwater County, Wyoming, charged him with killing a pregnant woman whose remains had been found near Granger in 1982, but he was never brought there. He died of natural causes on 24 July 2021, aged 77, while still awaiting execution in California; the Wyoming county attorney then said he would dismiss that charge.

The case is remembered for an hour of television. In 1978, years after he had served prison time for attacking an eight-year-old girl, Alcala appeared on ‘The Dating Game’, was introduced as a photographer and won; the woman who chose him declined to go on the date. It is remembered too for the photographs found in a storage locker he rented, which police released in 2010 and one of which led investigators to the Wyoming case. Authorities have estimated, according to the Associated Press, that he may have killed as many as 130 people; that figure has never been documented, and other estimates are far lower.

This account rests on two appeals-court opinions, releases from the Orange County District Attorney and California’s prison department, reporting by CBS News, DNAinfo, the Associated Press, Fox 13, the Green River Star, ABC News, CNN, the Boston Globe and TheWrap, and the Biography.com profile, listed at the end. Where they disagree, it says so. In line with this site’s rules, the people Alcala killed, their families, the girl who survived his 1968 attack, the woman who chose him on ‘The Dating Game’ and his own family are not named.

The 1968 attack and the years on the run

Alcala was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1943; Biography.com gives the date as 23 August and says he served in the Army and studied fine art at the University of California, Los Angeles; CBS News described him in 1968 as a 25-year-old UCLA graduate and photographer.

His first known crime came that September. He lured an eight-year-old girl into his car in Los Angeles and took her to an apartment, where he beat and sexually assaulted her. A passer-by who had seen them followed and called the police; an officer found the girl unconscious and badly injured, and she survived. Alcala left through the back of the building before he could be caught, according to CBS News and Biography.com, and evaded arrest for nearly three years.

He went to New York, where, according to DNAinfo, he lived in Manhattan while studying film in 1970 and 1971. Biography.com says he enrolled at New York University under the name John Berger, and that one of his teachers was the director Roman Polanski. The FBI put him on its most-wanted list, and he was eventually found working as a counsellor at a summer camp for girls in New Hampshire under an alias, after campers recognised him from a wanted poster. Biography.com dates the arrest to August 1971; the Boston Globe’s account places the recognition in 1972.

Prison, parole and the late 1970s

Returned to California, Alcala pleaded guilty in 1972 to a lesser charge of child molestation in the 1968 case and served 34 months, according to CBS News, Biography.com and the Orange County District Attorney’s office; other accounts differ (see below). He was paroled in 1974 and, within weeks, was arrested again after approaching a 13-year-old girl and giving her marijuana; the California Supreme Court’s 1984 opinion records that his parole was revoked, and Biography.com and the Boston Globe say he stayed in prison until 1977.

After his release he lived with his mother in Monterey Park, east of Los Angeles, and, according to the Orange County District Attorney, worked as a typist or typesetter for the Los Angeles Times. He also worked as a photographer; ABC News and the Boston Globe describe him approaching young women and girls with offers to photograph them.

‘The Dating Game’, 1978

In 1978 Alcala appeared as Bachelor No. 1 on ‘The Dating Game’. He was introduced as a successful photographer who liked skydiving and motorcycling, and he won. The woman who chose him later decided not to go out with him; she told the show’s staff that she felt uneasy about him, according to ABC News and the Boston Globe. ABC News reported that the producers ran no background checks, although by then he had served two prison terms.

The appearance gave him his nickname. A fictionalised feature film about the episode, ‘Woman of the Hour’, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, according to TheWrap, and Netflix released it in October 2024, according to Biography.com.

Four women in Los Angeles County, 1977–1979

By the time of the broadcast, Alcala had already begun killing in Los Angeles County, though no one would know it for decades. The four Los Angeles killings for which he was later convicted were of an 18-year-old and a 27-year-old woman in 1977, a 32-year-old woman in 1978 and a 21-year-old woman in 1979. The first, according to the Orange County District Attorney, was a young woman recently arrived from New York, whose body was found in the foothills near Hollywood on 10 November 1977. Biological evidence was collected, but the cases went cold; only years later did DNA testing connect all four to Alcala.

Huntington Beach, June 1979

On 20 June 1979 a 12-year-old girl left a friend’s apartment in Huntington Beach, in Orange County, just after 3 p.m. to cycle to a ballet lesson, and never arrived. Earlier that day she and a friend had been approached on the beach by a man who photographed them. Her remains were found almost two weeks later in a remote mountain ravine above Sierra Madre, in the Los Angeles County foothills. The friend helped police produce a composite sketch, and Alcala’s parole officer recognised it, according to CBS News and Biography.com.

Alcala was arrested at his mother’s home in Monterey Park on 24 July 1979. In a storage locker he had rented in Seattle a few weeks after the girl disappeared, police found a pair of gold earrings that her mother identified, along with hundreds of photographs. He contested the charge at every trial and would remain in custody for the rest of his life.

Three trials

In 1980 an Orange County jury convicted Alcala of first-degree murder and kidnapping, and he was sentenced to death. On 23 August 1984 the California Supreme Court reversed the conviction by five votes to one. The majority held that the trial judge had wrongly allowed the jury to hear evidence of his earlier offenses against other girls, and that the error was prejudicial; it ruled that he could be retried.

At the second trial, in 1986, a jury again convicted him and he was again sentenced to death. The California Supreme Court upheld that verdict in 1992, according to the Ninth Circuit’s later opinion, and Alcala turned to the federal courts. In 2001 a federal district judge ordered California to release him or try him again, and on 27 June 2003 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. The appeals court found that his lawyer had failed to present evidence supporting his alibi that he had been at Knott’s Berry Farm, an amusement park; that an expert on whether hypnosis had shaped a key prosecution witness’s account had been wrongly excluded; and that the errors together had denied him a fair trial.

By the time the third trial came, the case had grown. DNA testing had linked Alcala to the four Los Angeles County killings, and prosecutors joined them to the Huntington Beach case. Alcala, then 66, represented himself. According to the Associated Press, his defence included a clip of his ‘Dating Game’ appearance and a recording of Arlo Guthrie’s song ‘Alice’s Restaurant’. According to the district attorney’s office, the jury found him guilty on 25 February 2010 of five counts of murder and one of kidnapping, with special circumstances including multiple murder, murder during rape and murder involving torture; it recommended death on 9 March, and on 30 March 2010 he was sentenced to death in Santa Ana.

The photographs

The Seattle photographs had been in police hands since 1979. In March 2010, after the verdict, the Huntington Beach police and the Orange County District Attorney released more than 100 of them – pictures of unidentified women and children – and asked the public for help. They said it was not known whether any of the people pictured had been harmed. In New York, where some of the pictures appeared to have been taken, the police released more than 200 photographs the same year, according to DNAinfo. Some of the people in them came forward, Biography.com says. One would later lead to the Wyoming charge.

New York: the 2012 pleas

In 1971 a 23-year-old flight attendant was strangled in her Manhattan apartment. In July 1977 another woman, also 23, disappeared from her Manhattan apartment; her remains were found the following year in woods in Westchester County. Her calendar showed a lunch date with a photographer named John Berger, an alias Alcala had used, according to DNAinfo and ABC News. DNAinfo reported that New York detectives had matched a bite mark on the first woman’s body to Alcala’s dental impression in 2003.

In January 2011 the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., announced an indictment for both killings; his cold-case unit had re-examined the cases and, according to DNAinfo, interviewed more than 100 witnesses. Alcala was brought to New York in 2012 and in December that year pleaded guilty to two counts of murder. According to the AP, he said he wanted to return to California to pursue his appeal there. On 7 January 2013 a judge in the state Supreme Court in Manhattan sentenced him to 25 years to life, and he was returned to death row in California.

Wyoming: the charge that was never tried

In April 1982 a rancher found human remains in a remote area north-east of Granger, a small community in Sweetwater County in south-western Wyoming. They were those of a pregnant woman, but for more than 30 years no one could say who she was. In 2013, according to a Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office statement reported by Fox 13, a relative looking through the photographs released by the Huntington Beach police recognised a picture of a missing woman from San Antonio, Texas, who would have been 28 at the time. In July 2015 the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System told detectives that DNA from the remains matched samples from her siblings. The sheriff’s office said the photograph had been taken a short distance from where her remains were found. ABC News reported that when a Sweetwater County detective showed Alcala the picture, he acknowledged taking it but denied killing her.

In September 2016 Sweetwater County charged Alcala, then 73, with first-degree murder; investigators believed she had been killed in the summer of 1977, and the sheriff’s office said he could face death or life imprisonment. He was never extradited. The Sweetwater County Attorney, Dan Erramouspe, told the Green River Star in 2021 that prison officials had said Alcala was not ambulatory; he had kept the charge open, and after Alcala’s death he said he would dismiss it. Erramouspe said the case would not now be proven in court, though he remained convinced Alcala had killed her.

Wyoming is thus where Alcala was charged but never tried: no jury there heard the evidence, and he never entered a plea.

Death, and a count that remains unknown

Executions in California had been halted since 2019 by an order of Governor Gavin Newsom, ABC News noted. Alcala died of natural causes at 1:43 a.m. on 24 July 2021 in a hospital in Kings County, near Corcoran State Prison, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and CNN reported. He was 77.

How many people he killed is not known. Investigators also suspected him in deaths in other states, including Arizona, New Hampshire and Washington, according to the Boston Globe, and CNN reported that he had been linked to or suspected in deaths in four states beyond those where he was convicted. The figure of up to 130 victims, widely repeated at his death, was reported by the AP as an estimate by authorities; Biography.com notes that some authorities have put the number at about 50. None of the sources consulted explains how either figure was reached.

Where the accounts differ

  • When the second death sentence fell: the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and CNN say a federal appeals court overturned it in 2003; ABC News and Biography.com say it was overturned in 2001. The Ninth Circuit’s opinion explains both: a district court granted relief in 2001, affirmed on appeal in 2003.
  • The year of the Wyoming killing: the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office statement reported by Fox 13 says investigators believe she was killed in the summer of 1977, as do the Green River Star and ABC News; the Boston Globe says she disappeared in 1978.
  • What linked Alcala to Wyoming: the Boston Globe says ‘DNA linked him to the crime’; Fox 13, the Green River Star and ABC News describe DNA identifying the woman and a photograph from his collection connecting him to her.
  • When the photograph was recognised: the sheriff’s office statement reported by Fox 13 says a relative found it in 2013; ABC News says her sister identified it in 2015, the year of the DNA match.
  • Why he was not taken to Wyoming: the county attorney told the Green River Star he was ‘not ambulatory’; ABC News cited failing health; the Boston Globe said he was too sick to be extradited.
  • When New York indicted him: DNAinfo (reporting the district attorney’s announcement on 27 January 2011) and the AP give 2011; CNN and the Boston Globe say he was indicted in 2012.
  • When he pleaded guilty in New York: the AP reported in January 2013 that he had said the previous month he would plead guilty, and Biography.com gives 2012; ABC News says he pleaded guilty in 2013.
  • The 1968 conviction: the California Supreme Court, CBS News, Biography.com and the Orange County District Attorney describe a plea to child molestation; the AP said in 2013 that he had served time for kidnapping and attempting to kill the girl, and CNN described the conviction as one for rape.
  • The New Hampshire arrest: Biography.com dates it to August 1971; the Boston Globe places the campers’ recognition of him in 1972.
  • The earrings: the California Supreme Court’s 1984 opinion and CBS News say the girl’s mother said they resembled a pair her daughter wore; the Ninth Circuit’s 2003 opinion says she testified they belonged to her daughter.
  • How many he was convicted of killing: Fox 13 said in 2016 that he had been convicted of killing seven people; ABC News said in 2021 that authorities connect him to at least eight women; TheWrap described him in 2023 as convicted of killing eight women.
  • The total: the AP reported that authorities estimate up to 130 victims; Biography.com says some authorities put it at about 50.

The portrait

The portrait above is a detail of the coloring page drawn for Bloody America, which gives one killer to each state. The full page shows Alcala in later life, with long hair parted in the middle and rimless glasses, in a suit and tie, against a wall of planks hung with taped-up instant photographs. An old camera sits beside him and a coil of rope lies over his shoulder. In one corner is a map of the United States with Wyoming shaded and labelled; in the other, a hooded reaper with a scythe beside the figures 8–130. The nameplate reads “Rodney Alcala”, “The Dating Game Killer” and “1971 – 1979”, with a judge’s gavel and a ticket marked “Death” beneath it. For other case files, see Ted Bundy, Randall Woodfield and Gerald and Charlene Gallego.

If you find an error in this account, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

Questions people ask

Why was Rodney Alcala called the Dating Game Killer?

In 1978 he appeared as a contestant on the television show ‘The Dating Game’, introduced as a photographer, and won. The woman who chose him declined to go on the date. By then he had already served prison time for attacking an eight-year-old girl, and he had begun killing women in Los Angeles County.

How many people did Rodney Alcala kill?

He was convicted of seven murders: five in California between 1977 and 1979, and two in New York in 1971 and 1977. He was charged with an eighth in Wyoming but never tried. Authorities have estimated, according to the Associated Press, that he may have killed as many as 130 people, but that figure is unproven and other estimates are much lower.

Is Rodney Alcala still alive?

No. He died of natural causes in a hospital in Kings County, California, on 24 July 2021, aged 77. He was never executed; California had halted executions in 2019.

Why was Rodney Alcala tried three times?

He was convicted of a 12-year-old girl’s murder in 1980, but the California Supreme Court overturned the verdict in 1984 because the jury had heard evidence of his earlier crimes. He was convicted again in 1986; federal courts overturned that verdict in 2001 and 2003, citing errors including his lawyer’s handling of his alibi. At the third trial, in 2010, he was convicted of her murder and four others and sentenced to death.

What is Rodney Alcala’s connection to Wyoming?

In 2016 Sweetwater County, Wyoming, charged him with the 1977 murder of a woman whose remains were found near Granger in 1982. She was identified in 2015 through DNA, after a relative recognised her in one of the photographs police had released from his collection. He was never extradited, and after his death in 2021 the county attorney said he would dismiss the charge.

Did the woman on The Dating Game go on a date with him?

No. She chose him on the show but later decided not to go out with him, saying she felt uneasy about him.

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Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

  1. People v. Alcala, 36 Cal.3d 604Supreme Court of California, 23 August 1984 (SCOCAL, Stanford Law School)
  2. Alcala v. Woodford, 334 F.3d 862US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 27 June 2003 (Public.Resource.Org)
  3. Serial murderer sentenced to death for the kidnapping-murder of a 12-year-old Orange County girl and the sexual assault-murders of four Los Angeles womenOrange County District Attorney, 30 March 2010
  4. 48 Hours season premiere: The Killing GameCBS News, 23 September 2010
  5. ‘Dating Game’ serial killer Rodney Alcala charged with two Manhattan murdersDNAinfo, 27 January 2011
  6. Calif. serial killer gets prison for NYC slayingsAssociated Press (NBC News), 7 January 2013
  7. Imprisoned serial killer charged in 30-year-old murder cold case in WyomingFox 13 Salt Lake City, 20 September 2016
  8. ‘Dating Game’ serial killer connected to victims decades after their deathsABC News (Good Morning America), 7 January 2021
  9. Condemned inmate Rodney Alcala dies of natural causesCalifornia Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, 24 July 2021
  10. ‘Dating Game Killer’ dies of natural causes, prison officials sayCNN (ABC17 News), 24 July 2021
  11. ‘Dating Game Killer’ reportedly killed up to 130 people. He died while awaiting executionBoston Globe, 25 July 2021
  12. Wyo. charge against ‘Dating Game Killer’ dismissedGreen River Star (News Letter Journal), 29 July 2021
  13. Netflix acquires Anna Kendrick directorial debut ‘Woman of the Hour’TheWrap, 11 September 2023
  14. Rodney AlcalaBiography.com, updated 18 October 2024

The facts on this page come from public records and the published sources above. If you find an error, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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