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Rodney Alcala: The 'Dating Game Killer'

Jun 5
3 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

In 1978, a bright, smiling bachelor named 'Bachelor Number One' won a date on the popular television show The Dating Game, charming both the studio audience and the young woman choosing between three suitors. His name was Rodney Alcala, and at the very moment the cameras were rolling, he was in the middle of a murder spree. The woman who picked him later said she found him unsettling and refused to go on the date — an instinct that may have saved her life. The episode gave Alcala the nickname that follows his case to this day, and it remains one of the most chilling illustrations of how completely a predator can hide in plain sight. Out of respect for the victims, this account avoids graphic detail.

Collage of Rodney Alcala mugshots and portraits with title The Dating Game Killer, evidence photos, and a newspaper clipping.

Alcala was ultimately convicted of several murders, but investigators have estimated his true toll could run as high as 130, making him potentially one of the most prolific killers in American history.

A promising mind, a dangerous man

Alcala was born on 23 August 1943 in San Antonio, Texas. After his father left, his mother relocated the family to the Los Angeles area. He joined the U.S. Army as a teenager but was discharged a few years later following a breakdown and a diagnosis associated with antisocial personality disorder. He went on to earn a university degree and studied film in New York, projecting the image of a talented, educated young man — a carefully maintained mask that helped him operate undetected for years.

The first known attack

In 1968, Alcala lured an eight-year-old girl, Tali Shapiro, to his Los Angeles apartment and brutally assaulted her. A passer-by who had grown suspicious alerted police, whose intervention almost certainly saved the child's life. Alcala fled to the East Coast, where he reinvented himself under a false name and continued his studies — a pattern of flight and reinvention that would recur. He later served time for offences against children and was paroled in the 1970s, free to harm again.

A photographer who hunted

Alcala frequently presented himself as a fashion or freelance photographer, an approach that gave him a plausible reason to approach women and girls and to ask them to pose for him. This 'photographer' persona became central to how he gained trust and isolated his victims. Investigators would later recover a large cache of photographs he had taken of women and children, raising the harrowing fear that some of those pictured may have been victims who were never identified.

The murders

Alcala's confirmed victims span both coasts of the United States. In New York he was linked to the killings of Cornelia Crilley, a young flight attendant, in 1971, and Ellen Hover in 1977. In California, DNA and other evidence connected him to the murders of Jill Barcomb and Georgia Wixted in 1977, Charlotte Lamb in 1978, and Jill Parenteau in 1979. His best-known victim is twelve-year-old Robin Samsoe, abducted in Huntington Beach in the summer of 1979, whose disappearance ultimately helped bring him down.

Decades of trials

Alcala was first convicted of Samsoe's murder in 1980 and sentenced to death, but that verdict was overturned on appeal; a second conviction in 1986 was likewise overturned. It was not until advances in DNA testing — applied in part to jewellery and other items recovered from a storage locker he kept — that prosecutors built a far stronger case. In 2010 he was convicted of five California murders and again sentenced to death, and in 2013 he pleaded guilty to two of the New York killings.

Death and unanswered questions

Alcala died of natural causes in July 2021, at the age of seventy-seven, while on California's death row. Because executions in the state had been halted, he was never put to death. His passing left open the most haunting question of all: how many people he truly killed. The photographs released to the public, and unsolved cases in several states, strongly suggest his confirmed convictions represent only a fraction of his crimes.

Alcala's case returned to wide attention through the 2024 film 'Woman of the Hour', which dramatised his Dating Game appearance and the danger he posed. Yet beyond the cultural fascination lies a sober lesson about charm as camouflage, about a system that released a known offender, and about victims — among them children — whose stories deserve to be remembered far more than the man who took their lives.