UPDATE, 2-25-2010: "Guilty Verdict for Serial Killer and "The Dating Game" Contestant Rodney Alcala."
PHOTO BY MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Rodney Alcala, escorted by a bailiff, avoids looking at victims' relatives.
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In 2005, when DNA evidence linked alleged serial killer Rodney Alcala to the 1977 murder of petite 18-year-old New York runaway Jill Barcomb, her brother Bruce sent letters and a book on sex addiction called Out of the Shadows to Alcala in his Orange County jail cell, where he was preparing his defense against charges that he murdered Jill Barcomb and four others.
In the letters, Barcomb compared Alcala to notorious serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, and begged him to spare the victims' relatives from a painful trial — including the family of 12-year-old Huntington Beach ballet student Robin Samsoe, and Barcomb's own elderly mother, who was undergoing chemotherapy.
Barcomb reminded Alcala that even the cannibal Dahmer expressed remorse for his crimes. And the slyly charming Bundy, executed in Florida in 1989, assisted police in solving many of his own slayings, also giving advice (albeit not helpful) on how to find Washington state's Green River Killer.
Barcomb hoped that Alcala, an amateur photographer and former Los Angeles Times typesetter, would confess to the cold-case murders he is suspected of committing in the 1960s and 1970s, during an alleged murderous romp from New York's Greenwich Village to California's beach cities. It was Barcomb's desire that Alcala also reveal to police any unsolved murders he may have committed.
"I asked him to own his truth," says Barcomb, 49, who lives in North Hollywood. "He needs to give up the rest of his victims. Not to me, but to law enforcement — so other families can know what happened to their loved ones."
Alcala never replied. "He has chosen ego," Barcomb tells L.A. Weekly sadly.
Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective Cliff Shepard, who is handling the Jill Barcomb murder investigation, thinks he knows why: "This is the last thing a [serial killer] has control of. They have the power and knowledge. You don't, and they won't give it up. This is about power and control."
Alcala's third trial for murdering Samsoe is winding down in a Santa Ana courtroom. He has twice been sent to death row, but escaped execution both times on appeal. Alcala is now acting as his own defense attorney in the trial for Samsoe's Orange County slaying, and in the trials for the four Los Angeles County murders. A jury verdict is expected sometime soon.
Alcala, a once-dashing ladies' man, UCLA fine-arts graduate and former film student of Roman Polanski's, is believed to have used his wit and his access to the creative communities in L.A. and Greenwich Village during the '60s and '70s to entrap and murder seven women and girls, and to rape several others. So smooth was Alcala that he appeared on the ABC prime-time show The Dating Game in 1978, on which "bachelorette" Cheryl Bradshaw picked him as her date.
Prosecutors contend he killed Jill Barcomb, 32-year-old legal secretary Charlotte Lamb, 27-year-old nurse Georgia Wixted, 21-year-old keypunch operator Jill Parenteau and 12-year-old ballet student Samsoe. The killings unfolded both before and after his splashy television debut.
New York City detectives believe the now-wizened and bespectacled 66-year-old is also responsible for the cold-case murders of flight attendant Cornelia Crilley and Manhattan socialite Ellen Jane Hover. The latter woman's disappearance decades ago sent fear through L.A.'s and New York City's jet sets, both of which Hover associated with.
In one fantastic irony, even as the L.A. Times was publishing sensational articles in the late 1970s about the mysterious Hillside Strangler, who terrorized much of L.A. at that time, Alcala, who worked typesetting articles for that paper, was being questioned by the LAPD in relation to those very murders.
In an interview with the Weekly, Alcala's former Times colleague Sharon Gonzalez remembers: "He would talk about going to parties in Hollywood. It seemed like he knew famous people. He kept his body in great shape. He was very open about his sexuality. It was all new to me."
He brought his photography portfolio to show his Times workmates, she says, and the photos were "of young girls. I thought it was weird, but I was young, I didn't know anything. When I asked why he took the photos, he said their moms asked him to. I remember the girls were naked."
Gonzalez adds that she wasn't "smart enough or mature enough to know" that she was looking at child porn. Yet incredibly, she describes how L.A. Times' management in the 1970s had a golden opportunity to turn Alcala in, but did nothing: "There were other people in the department who were in their 40s and 50s. The [Times] supervisor at the time — she saw it." Instead, the reaction at the newspaper was, "We thought he was a little different. Strange about sex."
Today, Alcala, who has attended his trial in an ill-fitting beige blazer, is anything but smooth. He has displayed a rambling and unprepared defense, during which Orange County Superior Court Judge F.P. Briseno has often asked him to speak up. On many occasions, Briseno asked jurors to leave the room so he could explain basic legalese to Alcala. "I am having so many conversations with you, I am losing my voice," the judge complained.
