The Serial Killer On “The Dating Game”
At the point when “The Dating Game” host Jim Lange presented Rodney Alcala as Bachelor Number One, a charming photographer, he didn’t realize that the man had killed at least five women and been accused of the attempted murder of a young girl. At that point, the technology didn’t exist for individual verifications or background checks, so no one who dealt with the show knew that Alcala had a severe criminal history by this point. At that point, the technology didn’t exist for individual verifications or background checks, so no one who dealt with the show knew that Alcala had a severe criminal history by this point.
While he was a contestant on the show, Alcala won bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw’s heart among the other bachelors. According to other contestants backstage, Alcala boasted “I always get the girl”. “When I watch the show now, it’s hard for me to watch it without looking behind his eyes and knowing what this guy had to be thinking,” said a producer. “Just the evil behind the smile. There’s sometimes where I can see it but I think that’s my mind working overtime because again, I can’t imagine anybody that would commit a crime and then purposely go on television.”
Alcala’s first victim was an eight-year-old girl by the name Tali Shapiro, whom he stole as she was headed to class. After he baited her into his vehicle, an observer followed him back to his flat on De Longpre Avenue and called the police. When they showed up, Alcala had hit Shapiro with a steel pole and assaulted her. At the point when they thumped on the entryway, he got away out the back and avoided capture. He was then put into the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted list. In spite of the fact that severely harmed, Shapiro survived. Alcala escaped toward the East Coast and took on NYU. In 1971, Alcala is said to have raped and choked Cornelia Crilley, a Trans World Airlines airline steward, in her Manhattan condo.
Alcala has since been sentenced for the murders of seven women during the 1970s. He was charged with his murder in 1979 for the demise of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe, who vanished in June that year on her way to a ballet studio. Her body was discovered almost fourteen days after the fact in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles.
At the point when the investigators looked through Alcala’s mother’s home, they discovered a receipt for a storage closet in Seattle which ended up containing many photographs, for the most part of young women. Authorities have released some of these images to the public in hopes of discovering the subjects’ identities and whereabouts.
In numerous photographs, the subjects are naked or wearing swimwear. Alcala himself is presented in a couple of the photos of his own. The storage locker additionally contained a couple of earrings that had belonged to one of his victims and another pair that was subsequently found to have the DNA of Charlotte Lamb, a 31-year-elderly person killed in her kitchen in 1978, on them. While in jail, he wrote a book titled You, The Jury, in which he denied killing a supposed victim and placed blame on another suspect.