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Alcala, 77, has died of natural causes, authorities said.
Rodney Alcala, a convicted serial killer who was on death row in California, has died, authorities said on Saturday.
Alcala, 77, died of natural causes at 1:43 a.m. Saturday at a community hospital near Corcoran State Prison, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement.
Alcala was known as the killer of “The Dating Game” for his appearance as the winning contestant in the game show in 1978.
After appearing in Orange County court, he was sentenced to death in 2010 for the 1979 murder of Robin Samsoe, 12, and the murders of four other women – Jill Barcomb, 18, and Georgia , 27 years old. Wixted, both in 1977; Charlotte Lamb, 32, in 1978; and Jill Parenteau, 21, in 1979.
He had already been sentenced to death twice for Samsoe’s murder – in 1980, then again in 1986 – although those sentences were later overturned on appeal and he was granted new trials.
Alcala also pleaded guilty to the murders of two other women in New York City – Cornelia Crilley in 1971 and Ellen Jane Hover in 1977. He was sentenced to 25 years in life in 2013.
He has been linked to or suspected of murder in other states. In 2016, he was indicted by Wyoming prosecutors with the murder of Christine Ruth Thornton, 28, who disappeared in 1978 when she was six months pregnant and whose body was found four years later, although authorities ultimately decided not to extradite him to Wyoming for trial because of his failing health.
Alcala’s execution in California had been postponed indefinitely due to a state moratorium on the death penalty in 2019.
A successful photographer, Alcala often attracted women and girls by approaching them on the street and offering to take their picture before attacking them, investigators said. Investigating Samsoe’s 1979 murder, investigators found hundreds of photographs in a Seattle storage locker belonging to Alcala of unidentified women, girls and boys, as well as jewelry believed to be trophies of some of his victims. .
In 2010, the Huntington Beach Police Department released photos taken by Alcala that had been confiscated decades earlier to determine if they may have been victimized by him. Before his death, he had not disclosed whether there had been any other victims.
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