The year is 1978 and on one particular evening,
millions of people in the USA have tuned in to watch their favorite TV show, The Dating
Game. At the start of the show after a partition
moves to the side, three silhouetted bachelors are revealed. Host Jim Lange introduces bachelor number
one, a man he says is a “successful photographer who got his start when his father found him
in the darkroom at the age of 13...fully developed.” As the audience laughs at the gag, he adds,
“Between takes you might find him skydiving or motorcycling.” Lange announces his name as Rodney Alcala,
just as the spotlight shines on a longhaired, handsome man with glistening white teeth. What no one knows is this man is a prolific
killer, who murdered before the show and he’ll murder after. He’s a psychopath of the highest degree
who’ll one day be called by police a “killing machine.” He also wins the heart of the bachelorette
in the show, but the date doesn’t go down very well. We’ll come back to that later. First of all, to appear in one of the most
popular TV shows in US history while you are in the process of becoming one of the world’s
most vile serial killers is about as brazen and pathologically narcissistic as you can
get. To understand this, we must look at Alcala’s
past. He was born on August 23, 1943, in San Antonio,
Texas. When he was a kid his pop moved the family
back to Mexico, but a few years later his dear old daddy just picked up and left. A few years after that, the mother took 11-year
Rodney back to LA along with his two sisters. It wasn’t a happy childhood, and he certainly
was never discovered in the darkroom by his father at the age of 13. At that point in his life, his pop was well
gone, and wanted nothing to do with Rodney. But abandonment by a parent is hardly that
unusual. It can be devastating for a child, but in
the history of serial killing, childhood traumas run deeper than being brought up in a single-parent
family. Still, something happened during his formative
years that may have led to what he became. It was evident something was wrong with him
not long after he joined the army at the age of 17. Three years later he went AWOL after having
what was described as a breakdown. When he returned to the army a military psychiatrist
diagnosed him with an antisocial personality disorder. That’s when a person shows no regard to
how others feel about their actions. This lack of conscience can manifest as aggression,
sometimes getting involved in petty crimes. Whatever Alcala did was enough for the army
to discharge him on medical grounds. The army was right. Years later he’d be diagnosed with malignant
narcissism and sexual sadism comorbidities. If you don’t understand those terms, you
soon will. Personality disorders aren’t always evident
to other people, and so Alcala seemed to have no problems picking up a degree from the UCLA
School of Fine Arts. It was 1968 when he graduated, the year after
the “summer of love”, a time when being a budding artist was a fashionable endeavor. Nonetheless, Alcala was far from embracing
the hippie movement and the endless love it promoted. He’d already decided to become a monster. That year he lured a young girl named Tali
Shapiro to his apartment in Hollywood. There he beat her with an iron bar until she
was unconscious. He’d been spotted, though, taking the girl
back, and that person called the cops. It was just a pity that when they got to his
apartment, they found no sign of Alcala and only a girl lying in a pool of blood. What they didn’t know is that he was hiding
somewhere nearby, but because the girl was still breathing all efforts were focused on
keeping her alive. That’s when Alcala somehow slipped away. The girl was in a coma for 32 days and later
had to learn to walk again. The good news is decades later she testified
against him, with her loving husband watching from the gallery. Knowing he was now wanted, he left California
and went to New York where he enrolled at NYU film school. There he changed his name to “John Berger”. In the meantime cops back in California had
found something worrying: photos he’d taken of young women and girls. It seemed likely that this man would strike
again. In New York, though, when frequenting the
trendy clubs and bars with his camera in hand, he was the arty photographer guy who people
loved to pose for. They had no idea that when he looked at them
through the viewfinder, he was imagining what they’d look like after he had killed them. In 1971, the FBI put him on its Most Wanted
list, and that meant pictures of Alcala being circulated. He’d already killed again by this time,
a young woman who worked as a flight attendant. She’d been strangled, and the killer had
arranged her body in a certain kind of pose. Now we need to explain something. Serial killers might have a modus operandi,
which could be how they pick up their victims, but they may also leave a personal mark on
their crimes, called a signature. The MO often changes, but signatures nearly
always stay the same. That’s because they relate to the psychological
needs of the killer, and for Alcala, he derived sexual gratification from leaving his victims
in certain poses, an act criminal profilers call “staging”. Police didn’t know it yet, but in the years
to come, they would find quite a few bodies that had been staged. After getting a job at a New Hampshire arts
camp for children, one day two of the kids Acarla taught saw his face on a wanted poster
in the post office. They called the cops and Alcala was swiftly
arrested and sent back to California to face the music. Ok, crime solved, surely that must have been
it, but you know very well one day he’d win the Dating Game. What went wrong? The main reason why he didn’t spend a long,
long time in prison was that Shapiro’s parents had decided to leave the crime-infested USA
and move to Mexico. They didn’t want their daughter to return
to the US to testify and suffer more trauma than she’d already gone through, and so
with no other witnesses, Alcala did a short stint in prison for the crime of assault. Cops had no idea at this point he’d killed
a woman in New York. He was back out on the streets in 17 months
after a parole board found the educated artist with a smooth tongue to seem like a person
who really regretted what he’d done. Remember that this man was a psychopath, a
monumental manipulator. The parole board was no match for his deceit. But then it should have been known to the
authorities what Arcala was capable of two months after his release when he was arrested
again for picking up a girl when she was on the way to school. He pushed her into smoking some weed, after
which he tried to kiss her. She reported him, and for what he’d done,
he ended up spending two more years in prison. Yet again, he had managed to convince a parole
board that he was mentally well and not a danger to society. He even persuaded his parole officer to allow
him to stay outside the state. He moved back to New York City where he murdered
23-year old, Ellen Jane Hover, a wealthy socialite whose godparents were Dean Martin and Sammy
Davis Jr. In her diary that police later found, the
last entry stated that she was going to meet with the photographer, John Burgh. That looked a lot like John Berger, and it
was known that this very attractive woman had been hanging around with some strange-looking
dude. In fact, her boyfriend asked her, who was
the freaky guy she was with. She replied, “Oh, he’s all right. He is a photographer.” It took years to join the dots, though, and
Alcala wasn’t convicted of that crime until 2013. He returned to LA in 1978 and soon got a job
as a typesetter for the Los Angeles Times. After a while, he began showing his “artwork”
to some of his colleagues. This art consisted of 100s of photographs
he’d taken of girls and young women. Those who saw the photos could have had no
idea their colleague might have killed the girls they were looking at. One of his co-workers at the Times did later
say that it seemed rather weird that Acarla was shooting snaps of young girls. That colleague later said, “When I asked
why he took the photos, he said their moms asked him to. I remember the girls were naked.” Boys also appeared in some photographs, and
they were told the same as all the other people who sat to pose for Alcala. He was a professional, he saw something in
them, they were his models, and one day he’d make them famous. Now we arrive at the beginning again when
this killer had the audacity to smile in front of the camera while millions of Americans
sat glued to their TVs. As you know, he won the game, but how did
it go down? He certainly came across as unnerving, unnatural,
but that’s easy to say in hindsight. To give you an example of why he won, the
woman behind the screen asked him, “I am serving you for dinner. What are you called and what do you look like?” Alcala responded, “I’m called a banana
and I look really good.”She then asked him to be more descriptive, and he replied, “Peel
me.” Maybe that doesn’t sound especially crazy,
but his fake open-mouthed grin in front of the camera did look kind of maniacal. When it was announced she’d picked him as
the winner, he smiled like a wolf who’d just been told he’d won an all-expenses-paid
day out with the three pigs. They won some free tennis lessons and a trip
to the Magic Mountain theme park, although they never ended up going because the woman
said he was just too “creepy.” She called the show the next day and said,
“I can’t go out with this guy. There’s weird vibes that are coming off
of him. He’s very strange. I am not comfortable. Is that going to be a problem?” It wasn’t a problem, so the date never happened. It seems a few people, including other male
contestants, felt this guy was a bit unhinged. The producer later admitted, “He had a mystique
about him that I found uncomfortable.” It was another rejection for Alcala, a reminder
of the abandonment by his father. The narcissist was furious now, and someone
had to pay. There could have been any number of victims
soon after he was jilted by the bachelorette, but as far as future convictions go, in 1979
he brutally murdered 18-year old Jill Barcomb who had run away from New York and landed
in California. He hit her in the face with a rock and strangled
her, after which he positioned her dead body so her knees were on the ground and her head
was in the dirt. Police said she looked like a rolled-up ball. Soon after he used a claw hammer to kill a
27-year-old nurse named Georgia Wixted. Her body was found staged in her Malibu apartment. Other victims included 33-year-old legal secretary
Charlotte Lamb, who was found in the laundry room at the bottom of her apartment block. Again, the body had been staged. 21-year-old Jill Parenteau was discovered
in her apartment not long after, and she too had been positioned in a certain way. The same month Arcala was walking down a road
in Huntington Beach, a city southeast of Los Angeles known as Surf City. There he met two young girls, Robin Samsoe
and her buddy Bridget Wilvert. He asked them to pose for him so he could
take photos, but a resident soon approached them after becoming suspicious. Wilvert got on her bicycle and headed to her
dance class, but the next time Samsoe was seen was when police found her beaten up body
at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. Her friends told police about the man who’d
taken her photograph, and after a sketch of the guy had been passed around Alcala’s
parole officer told them he knew the face. The game was almost up. Cops went to Alcala’s mother’s house and
there they found a receipt that led them to a storage locker in Seattle. In that locker, they found Samsoe’s earrings
as well as hundreds of photos of girls and young women. In 1980, he was convicted of Samsoe’s murder
and sentenced to death, but that was overturned when it was discovered that there had been
some prejudice because the jury had been informed about his previous crimes. Years passed, and with DNA evidence he was
indicted for more murders. In prison, he wrote a book that described
his wrongful arrest and the corruption of those who’d put him in prison. He even sued the prison after he slipped and
fell, blaming the accident on the low-fat diet he’d been refused. This was all in line with his malignant narcissism
diagnosis. He was in and out of court over the years,
but what police wanted to know was who were all the girls in the hundreds of photos he’d
taken? Some of the photos were released to the public,
but because of the sexual nature of many of them, the vast majority remained behind closed
doors. 21 women who’d seen the photos told police
it was them in the image, with another six families coming forward to tell the cops they
thought their loved one who’d gone missing and was never found was in some of the images. In 2013, police linked a cold case to one
photo, but still today there is a mystery about those people in the photos. Moreover, 900 pictures have never even been
released to the public. That’s why anyone involved with Alcala’s
case thinks he killed many more people than the few he was convicted of killing. He may have murdered as many as 130 women
and girls, so he’s still a person of interest in various investigations. It remains to be seen if the full extent of
his crimes will ever be known, but when that cop called him a “killing machine” he
was likely right. As we write this, Acarla is a 77-year old
man residing in California State Prison. Maybe he’ll come forward and admit to more
crimes, but psychopaths aren’t generally known for their remorsefulness. We doubt he’ll even ever admit he never
once went skydiving. As for if he will ever have his date with
a lethal injection, that’s doubtful seeing as he’s so old and in 2019 California instituted
a moratorium on the death penalty, which means a reprieve for those sentenced to death. Now you need to watch, “Serial Killer With
More Victims Than Any Other Killer in American History.” Or, have a look at…
