Rodney Alcala

Rodney James Alcala (born Rodrigo Jacques Alcala, August 23, 1943 – July 24, 2021) was convicted of murdering five women and girls in California between 1977 and 1979, and pleaded guilty to two additional murders in New York State. He was indicted for one further murder in Wyoming, though those charges were later dropped. While he has been conclusively linked to nine murders, investigators have said the true number of victims is unknown and could be far higher.

Alcala's known offending began with the 1968 assault of eight-year-old Tali Shapiro, who survived after being raped and beaten with a steel bar. He fled California to evade prosecution, enrolling at NYU under the alias "John Berger." While a fugitive, he murdered 23-year-old flight attendant Cornelia Crilley in her Manhattan apartment in 1971; the case went unsolved until 2011. Alcala was arrested later in 1971 after campers at a New Hampshire arts camp recognized him from an FBI wanted poster, and he was ultimately convicted only of child molestation in the Shapiro case after her family declined to allow her to testify. He served roughly three years, was paroled, then reoffended within two months by assaulting a 13-year-old girl, resulting in a further two-year sentence.

After his 1977 release, Alcala was permitted by his parole officer to travel to New York, where investigators believe he killed 23-year-old Ellen Jane Hover; her remains were found in 1978. Returning to Los Angeles, Alcala worked briefly as a typesetter and posed as a fashion photographer to photograph hundreds of young people. During this period he murdered Jill Barcomb (1977), Georgia Wixted (1977), Charlotte Lamb (1978), and Jill Parenteau (1979), and in June 1979 killed 12-year-old Robin Samsoe, whose disappearance led to his arrest after her friends described a photographer approaching them on the beach.

Alcala was convicted of Samsoe's murder in 1980 and sentenced to death; this conviction was overturned in 1984 and again after a 1986 retrial. In 2010, following DNA matches connecting him to the Barcomb, Wixted, Lamb, and Parenteau murders, he was convicted on all five joined counts and sentenced to death a third time. In 2012 he was extradited to New York and pleaded guilty to the Crilley and Hover murders, receiving two consecutive 25-years-to-life sentences.

Police have since sought to identify subjects among more than 1,000 photographs found in Alcala's possession, some of whom may be additional victims. In 2016 he was charged with the 1977 murder of Christine Thornton, identified through one of his photographs, though he was reportedly too ill to be tried in Wyoming before his death. Alcala died of a heart attack on California's death row on July 24, 2021, at age 77.