This is supposed to be just another ridiculous episode of “The Dating Game.”
In a 1978 taping of the popular TV show, host Jim Lange introduced three male suitors who were there to be hilariously asked by a single woman, Cheryl Bradshaw, sitting on the other side of the partition.
He looks for love in all the wrong places.
The studio lights came up on a long-haired man with sunken eyes and a wide grin, which the audience could see but Bradshaw could not.
“Bachelor No. 1 is a successful photographer who started when his father met him in the dark room at the age of 13 with development,” Lange quipped in ABC hit sexually. “Between takes you can find him skydiving or riding a motorcycle. Welcome Rodney Alcala!”
Skydiving and cars are not the half of it.
Unbeknownst to Lange, Bradshaw, and the game show’s producer, 35-year-old Alcala, he is secretly a killer in the midst of a mass murder spree in New York, California, and Wyoming.
Between 1971 and 1979, he killed at least eight people – including children and pregnant women – but authorities estimate the number of victims to be more than 100.
Bradshaw could almost be one. The woman actually chose to go on a date with the monster at the end of the episode.
A new film about Alcala, a grizzly crime, and an unusual TV appearance, premiered last night at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Called “Woman of the Hour” and directed and starring Anna Kendrick, the film should bring new attention to the deviant who killed many victims during the same decade as the more famous rampages of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy.
“When you go back and look (in the ‘Dating Game’ video), the most surprising thing is that he has committed a crime,” criminal profiler Pat Brown told CNN. “A little girl was raped. Here is a man who portrays himself as a desirable young man while he is a sexually violent predator of children.”
How about a serial killer on a great national game show?
In the days before the internet, background checks on talent were difficult and a basic Google search was impossible. Even so, the husband-and-wife production team of Mike and Ellen Metzger disagreed about Alcala’s casting at first.
Ellen thought the man was attractive and charming, but Mike remembered feeling uncomfortable about the situation.
“He has a mystique about him that I don’t feel comfortable with,” Mike told ABC’s “20/20.”
However, he was rejected, and Alcala made the cut. While the answer in the air killer for Bradshaw is typical for the double-entendre-stuffed program, it is chilling in retrospect.
“I served you dinner. What are you called and what do you look like?” the woman asked.
“I’m called a banana and I look good,” Alcala replied. “That’s enough of me.”
Alcala didn’t lie during the “Dating Game” interview, though. He really is a photographer. What is left out of the biographies is that he used his profession to lure unsuspecting women and men into his home and then brutally kill and sometimes rape them after taking photographs.
Born in San Antonio, Texas, and raised in Mexico and California, Alcala was remembered as a friendly person who had many friends.
According to the book “The Dating Game Killer: The True Story of a TV Dating Show, a Violent Sociopath, and a Series of Brutal Murders,” a professor at UCLA, where Alcala used to be a student, told police that he “wouldn’t hurt a fly. “
Like Bundy, Alcala hides his true tendencies with charisma.
The earliest known crime was the gruesome assault of 8-year-old Tali Shapiro. He abducted the girl outside the family’s temporary home at Chateau Marmont in 1968 under the pretense that she was a friend of his parents.
In the apartment, he took a picture of her, brutally bashed her head in, and almost strangled her to death with a barbell. Thanks to a tip, the police found the girl barely alive.
He survived, and his family moved to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. But Alcala escaped out the back door and soon fled to New York where he applied to NYU under the false name of John Berger. There he studied film under director Roman Polanski.
While living in Manhattan, he raped and killed TWA flight attendant Cornelia Crilley in her apartment on East 83rd Street.
Added to the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List for attacking Shapiro, Alcala was spotted and arrested at a camp in New Hampshire and later extradited to California. Despite all this, he was released due to problems with the witness and was allowed to leave the country.
Back in New York in 1977, he murdered Ellen Hoover, the 23-year-old daughter of the owner of Ciro’s in West Hollywood. One of the newspaper headlines read “Nightclub heir goes missing.”
His remains were found 11 months later in Westchester near the Rockefeller estate.
Alcala’s blood trail grew in the late 70s. In California, he killed 18-year-old Jill Barcomb, 27-year-old nurse Georgia Wixted, 31-year-old legal secretary Charlotte Lamb, 21-year-old typist Jill Parenteau, and 12-year-old Robin Samsoe. Alcala, police learned, approached Samsoe, who was cycling to ballet class, with an offer to take her picture.
After filming “The Dating Game” in 1978, Bradshaw was saved by her own instincts.
“He said, ‘Ellen, I can’t go out with this guy,'” Ellen Metzger recalled to “20/20.” “There’s a weird vibe coming off of him. He’s really weird. I don’t feel comfortable. Is that going to be a problem?’
Bradshaw decided not to go through with the date, and only a year later Alcala was charged with the death of Samsoe. He was found guilty in 1980. The verdict was later overturned, the case was retried and then affirmed several times, and the killer always remained behind bars.
His terrifying truth has only been known since 2003, when investigators began tying Alcala’s DNA to unsolved murders. In addition to the death sentence in California, he was given 25 years to life in 2013 for the New York murder.
Alcala died in a California prison in 2021 of unspecified natural causes at the age of 77.
Matt Murphy, a former Sr. Deputy District Attorney in Orange County, California, summed up the surreal ordeal on “20/20.”
“Looking back, it’s heartening to know that this wonderful show that celebrates love and romance will unknowingly turn into a remorseless killer,” he said.
