‘Woman of the Hour’: Who was Rodney Alcala, ‘The Dating Game’ killer?

In 1978, Rodney Alcala seemed like the ideal contestant for a TV game show. He was tall, had long, wavy hair, and rocked a trendy, 1970s style. He even appeared on The Dating Game, filmed in Los Angeles, where his charm made him seem like a good match for the show. However, the producers had no idea of Alcala’s dark past, a chilling story now dramatized in Netflix’s Woman of the Hour.

The Dating Game is structured around three bachelors vying for a date with a woman. On Alcala’s episode, Cheryl Bradshaw was the bachelorette. She chose him, but later declined to go on the date because she found him “creepy,” a reaction that proved an understatement. At the time, Alcala had already served prison time for molesting a child and had raped and murdered two women, though he hadn’t been caught for these crimes yet. This was long before background checks or social media existed, making it easier for someone with a dark past to slip through the cracks.

Alcala had once been on the FBI’s most-wanted list. After his appearance on The Dating Game, he went on to commit at least six more murders across Southern California before he was finally arrested in 1979 and convicted in 1980. Because of his time on the show, he earned the nickname “The Dating Game Killer.”

Jed Mills, another contestant on the episode, later shared his discomfort, recalling that he had an instinctive urge to avoid Alcala, leaning away from him without knowing exactly why. “I could not be near him,” he said, suggesting that even then, something felt disturbingly off about Alcala.

After his arrest, police believed Alcala had killed at least seven women, and he had abducted and assaulted eight-year-old Tali Shapiro, though she survived. Alcala had already served time for attacking Shapiro. He was sentenced to death in 1980 for the murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe, but his verdict was overturned on technical issues multiple times.

Eventually, DNA evidence connected him to four more victims, all young women: Jill Barcomb, Jill Parenteau, Georgia Wixted, and Charlotte Lamb, all of whom were killed in Southern California. In the 2010s, he was also linked to the murders of two women in New York—Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Jane Hover—and a pregnant woman, Christine Ruth Thornton, in Wyoming. Investigators now suspect that Alcala may have been responsible for up to 130 murders.

One survivor, Cynthia Libby, went on a date with Alcala during his killing spree when she was just 16. He failed to show up for their second date, and years later, when she learned of his crimes, she was stunned. Reflecting on how close she came to being a victim, she told People, “I still have a hard time believing it. I could have been one of the dead girls.”

Alcala often lured his victims by posing as a fashion photographer, photographing them in vulnerable situations before killing them. Many of his victims were sexually assaulted and strangled, and he sometimes revived his victims only to continue his attacks, leaving some posed in photos even after their deaths. To this day, over 100 people in Alcala’s photographs, including some teenage boys, remain unidentified, leading authorities to believe they may be linked to other unsolved disappearances.

Over the years, Alcala’s sentences and death penalties were repeatedly overturned and retried in court. He eventually died of natural causes in 2021 at age 77, while serving a life sentence in prison. Reflecting on Alcala’s brutality, Bruce Barcomb, brother of one of the victims, Jill Barcomb, said, “There is murder and rape, and then there is the unequivocal carnage of a Rodney Alcala-style murder.”