Rodney Alcala: The Dating Game Killer and the Photos in His Storage Locker
Updated: Oct 27
In September 1978, viewers of the hit TV show The Dating Game watched a young woman called Cheryl Bradshaw choose between three hidden bachelors. Bachelor No. 1 was a charming, shaggy-haired photographer with a cheeky line in innuendo. The host introduced him as a successful photographer who'd got his start when his dad found him in the darkroom at 13, and who liked skydiving and motorcycling in his spare time. Bradshaw picked him, and the audience applauded.
What nobody in the studio knew was that Bachelor No. 1 was Rodney Alcala, a convicted child rapist who had already killed at least two women and was about to kill several more. Bradshaw never went on the date. When she met him backstage, she later said, he was acting really creepy, and she turned him down. It may well have saved her life.
Quick Answers
Who was Rodney Alcala? An American serial killer and sex offender, known as the Dating Game Killer, who was convicted of seven murders in California and New York between 1971 and 1979.
Was he really on The Dating Game? Yes. In September 1978 he appeared as Bachelor No. 1 and won, but the woman who picked him, Cheryl Bradshaw, refused to go on the date because she found him creepy.
How many people did he kill? He was convicted of seven murders and charged with an eighth. Investigators believe the real number could be far higher, with some estimates as high as 130.
What was in his storage locker? Police found hundreds of photographs of women, girls and boys in a locker he rented in Seattle, along with earrings belonging to 12-year-old victim Robin Samsoe.
What happened to him? He was sentenced to death in 2010 and died of natural causes in a California hospital on 24 July 2021, aged 77, still on death row.
A Charming Man With a Camera
Rodney Alcala was born Rodrigo Jacques Alcala-Buquor in San Antonio, Texas, on 23 August 1943. When he was a boy his father left the family, and he grew up mostly in Los Angeles with his mother. He joined the army at 17, but was discharged after a breakdown and diagnosed with a personality disorder.
He was clever, good-looking and could be very charming. He studied fine art at the University of California, Los Angeles, and became obsessed with photography. A camera became his way in. He'd approach young women and teenage girls, flatter them and ask if he could take their picture. Some of those photo shoots ended with them being attacked.
Tali Shapiro and the Years on the Run
In 1968, a passing motorist in Hollywood saw Alcala lure an eight-year-old girl called Tali Shapiro into his car and called the police. When officers broke into his apartment they found the little girl raped and badly beaten. Alcala got out of the back and disappeared. Tali survived.
Alcala fled to New York, changed his name to John Berger and enrolled at New York University, where he took a film class taught by Roman Polanski. In 1971 the FBI added him to its Most Wanted list. That summer he was working as a counsellor at a children's arts camp in New Hampshire when two girls spotted his face on a wanted poster in the local post office. He was arrested and sent back to California.
Incredibly, he served only 34 months. Because Tali Shapiro's family had moved abroad and wouldn't put her through a trial, he was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge and was paroled in 1974. Within weeks he was back in prison for giving marijuana to a 13-year-old girl he'd picked up. He was released again in 1977.
Even with that record, he got a job as a typesetter at the Los Angeles Times. In 1978 police even questioned him as a possible suspect in the Hillside Strangler killings, then cleared him. A few months later he was on national television, chatting up Cheryl Bradshaw.
Robin Samsoe
On 20 June 1979, 12-year-old Robin Samsoe was approached on Huntington Beach by a man offering to take photos of her and a friend. Later that afternoon Robin set off on a borrowed bike to her ballet class. She never got there. Twelve days later, her remains were found in the foothills of the Angeles National Forest.
A police sketch of the man on the beach was circulated, and Alcala's parole officer recognised him. He was arrested on 24 July 1979. Investigators then traced a storage locker he'd rented in Seattle, and what they found inside would haunt the case for decades.
The Storage Locker
The locker contained hundreds of photographs that Alcala had taken over the years: women, teenage girls and boys, many of them posed in sexually explicit ways. Some of the people in them were happy, smiling and fully clothed. Some were clearly not. Nobody knew who most of them were.
Among his belongings was a small pouch of jewellery. In it was a pair of gold ball earrings that Robin Samsoe's mother identified as her daughter's. Alcala insisted for years that they were his own, and that he'd worn them on The Dating Game.
He wasn't the only killer to turn a camera into a trophy collection. In the late 1960s, Oregon murderer Jerry Brudos had photographed his victims too. But the sheer size of Alcala's collection has made it one of the most unsettling pieces of evidence in American criminal history.
The Women He Killed
Over the years, investigators linked Alcala to a string of murders on both coasts. In California, he was eventually convicted of killing Robin Samsoe and four women murdered in the Los Angeles area between 1977 and 1979: Jill Barcomb, an 18-year-old from New York who'd moved to California; Georgia Wixted, a 27-year-old nurse attacked in her Malibu apartment; Charlotte Lamb, a 32-year-old legal secretary found in the laundry room of an apartment complex; and Jill Parenteau, 21, killed in her apartment in Burbank.
In New York, cold case detectives tied him to two more. Cornelia Crilley, a 23-year-old TWA flight attendant, had been raped and strangled in her Manhattan apartment in 1971, while Alcala was on the run. Ellen Hover, 23, the daughter of a Hollywood nightclub owner, disappeared in July 1977. Her remains were found the following year in Westchester County, on land that had belonged to the Rockefeller family. Her appointment book showed she'd arranged to meet a photographer called John Berger, the alias Alcala had used in New York.
In 2016, Wyoming prosecutors also charged him with the 1977 murder of Christine Ruth Thornton, a 28-year-old woman who was pregnant when she died. Her sister recognised her in one of the photos from the storage locker. He was never brought to trial for it.
Three Trials and a Song
Alcala's legal story dragged on for more than 30 years. He was convicted of Robin Samsoe's murder and sentenced to death in 1980, but the California Supreme Court threw it out in 1984 because the jury had been told about his past sex crimes. He was convicted and sentenced to death again in 1986, and that was overturned on appeal in 2001.
By the time of his third trial in 2010, prosecutors had DNA evidence linking him to the four Los Angeles murders, and they were all tried together with Robin Samsoe's. Alcala sacked his lawyers and represented himself. It was a bizarre spectacle. He spent hours on the witness stand asking himself questions in a deep voice, then answering them in his normal one. In his closing argument he played Arlo Guthrie's song Alice's Restaurant to the jury.
It didn't help him. In February 2010 the jury found him guilty of all five murders, and in March he was sentenced to death. In 2012 he was taken to New York, where he pleaded guilty to the murders of Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Hover and was given another 25 years to life.
Who Are the People in the Photos?
In 2010, Huntington Beach Police released 120 of the photographs from the Seattle locker, hoping people would recognise themselves or someone they'd lost. Hundreds of people got in touch. Some found pictures of themselves taken by a friendly photographer decades earlier and realised how lucky they'd been. A few families recognised women who'd gone missing, including Christine Thornton.
Many of the people in the photos have still never been identified. The pictures were published online, and police have continued to ask anyone who recognises a face to come forward.
The photos are on this Flickr album, and the Huntington Beach Police Department has asked anyone who recognises someone to get in touch.
How Many Did He Really Kill?
Nobody knows. Alcala never confessed to anything beyond what was proved against him, and he went to his grave insisting he was innocent of Robin Samsoe's murder. Some investigators have suggested the true toll could be around 50. Others have put it as high as 130, although that figure is an estimate based on the number of people in the photos and the years he spent free, not on proven cases.
Alcala was never executed. California hasn't carried out an execution since 2006, and in 2019 the state put a moratorium on the death penalty. On 24 July 2021, exactly 42 years after he was arrested for Robin Samsoe's murder, he died of natural causes in a hospital in California's San Joaquin Valley. He was 77.
The Woman Who Said No
Cheryl Bradshaw has kept almost entirely out of the public eye, but the story of her lucky escape has never gone away. In 2023 Anna Kendrick directed and starred in Woman of the Hour, a film based on Alcala's appearance on the show, which was released on Netflix in 2024 and brought his story to a whole new audience.
It's a story that still makes people's skin crawl, because it isn't really about a monster lurking in the shadows. It's about a smiling, likeable man with a camera, who got a job at a major newspaper and a spot on primetime TV, while a string of people who should have stopped him didn't.
Suggested Reading
Want to dig deeper into the Rodney Alcala case? These are worth a look.
The Dating Game Killer by Stella Sands. A detailed account of Alcala's crimes, his long legal battles and the victims he left behind.
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