Rodney James Alcala (; born Rodrigo Jacques Alcala; August 23, 1943 – July 24, 2021), also known as John Berger and John Burger, was an American serial killer and convicted sex offender who was sentenced to death in California for five murders committed between 1977 and 1979. He pleaded guilty and received two sentences, both twenty-five years to life, for two further murders committed in New York State. He was also indicted for one murder in Wyoming, although the charges filed there were dropped. While Alcala has been conclusively linked to nine murders, the true number of victims remains unknown and could be as high as 130.
Alcala compiled a collection of more than 1,000 photographs of women, teenage girls and boys, many in sexually explicit poses. In 2016 he was charged with the 1977 murder of a woman identified in one of his photos. Alcala is known to have assaulted one other photo subject and police have speculated that others could be rape or murder victims as well.
Prosecutors have said that Alcala "toyed" with his victims, strangling them until they lost consciousness then waiting until they revived, sometimes repeating this process several times before finally killing them. One police detective described Alcala as "a killing machine," and others have compared him to Ted Bundy. He is often referred to as the Dating Game Killer, as he appeared as a contestant on the television show The Dating Game in 1978, during his murder spree.
Rodney Alcala was born on August 23, 1943, in San Antonio, Texas, the third of four children born to a Mexican American couple, Raul Alcala Buquor and Anna Maria Gutierrez. Alcala's father moved the family to Mexico in 1951 and then abandoned them three years later.
In 1954, when he was aged 11, Alcala's mother moved him and his two sisters to suburban Los Angeles. Alcala was an academically gifted student who was reasonably popular among his peers and was supported by his family. He attended various private schools in the Los Angeles area during his youth and graduated from Cantwell-Sacred Heart of Mary High School, where he was on the yearbook planning committee and on the track and cross-country teams.
In 1961, at the age of 17, Alcala joined the United States Army to become a paratrooper and served as a clerk. During his service, Alcala was noted for being manipulative, vindictive and insubordinate, and he was disciplined on several occasions for assaulting young women. In 1964, after what was described as a nervous breakdown—during which he went AWOL and hitchhiked from Fort Bragg in North Carolina to his mother's house in California—Alcala was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder and estimated to have an IQ of 135 by a military psychiatrist. He was subsequently discharged from the Army on medical grounds. Other diagnoses later proposed by various psychiatric experts at his trials included: narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder and malignant narcissism with psychopathy and sexual sadism comorbidities.
After being discharged from the Army, Alcala graduated from the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. While it was later claimed that he studied film under Roman Polanski at New York University (NYU), he never met Polanski during his time at NYU.
On September 25, 1968, a passing motorist named Donald Haines called police after witnessing Alcala lure Tali Shapiro, aged eight, into his Hollywood apartment. Shapiro, who was residing at the Chateau Marmont with her family, was approached by Alcala on her way to school when he pulled up beside her in his car and asked if she needed a ride. Shapiro initially refused, but when she heard him say that he knew her parents, she got into his car. Alcala then took her to his apartment, where he told Shapiro he wanted to show her a picture. When the police arrived, Shapiro was found alive in a pool of her own blood, having been raped and beaten with a steel bar; Alcala had fled. Shapiro was in a coma for 32 days and spent months in recovery.
To evade the arrest warrant stemming from the Shapiro assault, Alcala left California and enrolled at NYU, using the name "John Berger". Cornelia Crilley, a 23-year-old Trans World Airlines flight attendant, was found raped and murdered in her Manhattan apartment on June 12, 1971. Alcala had strangled her with her own nylon stockings, leaving her dead in her apartment at 427 East 83rd Street. It is believed that Crilley met Alcala as she moved into her new apartment and she accepted his help in moving some furniture. Her murder remained unsolved until 2011.
Identification, arrest, and conviction
In 1971, Alcala obtained a job at a New Hampshire arts camp (Camp New Beginnings in the village of Georges Mills on Lake Sunapee) as a counselor for children using a slightly different alias, "John Burger." The FBI added Alcala to its list of Most Wanted Fugitives in early 1971 (not to be confused with the Ten Most Wanted List). A few months later, two campers at the arts camp noticed his photo on an FBI poster at the post office. That August, Alcala was arrested and extradited to California. By then, Tali Shapiro's parents had relocated their entire family to Mexico and refused to allow Shapiro to testify at the trial. Without their primary witness, prosecutors were unwilling to charge Alcala with rape and attempted murder; he was instead convicted of child molestation, then a lesser charge, and sentenced to three years. Alcala was paroled in 1974 after thirty-four months.
Less than two months after his release, Alcala was re-arrested and convicted for assaulting a 13-year-old girl identified in court records as "Julie J.", who had accepted what she thought would be a ride to school. Alcala was again paroled after serving two years in prison, and released in 1977 as a registered sex offender.
After Alcala's second release in 1977, his Los Angeles parole officer made the unusual choice of permitting a repeat offender—and known flight risk—to travel to New York City. New York Police Department investigators now believe that a week after returning to Manhattan, Alcala killed Ellen Jane Hover, 23-year-old daughter of nightclub owner Herman Hover and goddaughter of Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. Hover was last seen at her New York apartment on July 15, 1977. Her datebook showed that she had an appointment to meet with one "John Berger" that same day.
Later in 1977, the FBI received a tip about Alcala's 1971 arrest in New Hampshire, related to the Shapiro case in California. Alcala admitted under questioning to knowing Hover, but investigators could not arrest him, since they had not found her body. Her remains were discovered in 1978 buried under heavy rocks on a hillside overlooking the Hudson River, near a location on the John D. Rockefeller Estate where an aspiring model would later report that "Berger" had taken photos of her.
In 1977, Alcala worked briefly at the Los Angeles Times as a typesetter, and was interviewed by members of the Hillside Strangler task force as part of their investigation of known sex offenders. Although Alcala was ruled out as the Strangler, he was arrested and served a brief sentence for marijuana possession. During this period, Alcala convinced hundreds of young men and women that he was a professional fashion photographer and took pictures of them for his "portfolio".
A Times co-worker later recalled that Alcala shared his photos with workmates: "I thought it was weird, but I was young; I didn't know anything," she said. "When I asked why he took the photos, he said their moms asked him to. I remember the girls were naked." Liane Leedom, who was 17 when Alcala photographed her in 1979, reported that, "He said he was a professional, so in my mind I was being a model for him." Leedom further reported that the portfolio Alcala shared with her also included "spread after spread of [naked] teenage boys."
In 1978, in the midst of his killing spree, Alcala was a contestant on the popular game show The Dating Game. Host Jim Lange introduced him as a "successful photographer...between takes you might find him skydiving or motorcycling." Jed Mills, a fellow "bachelor" contestant on the episode, later described Alcala as "very obnoxious and creepy" and "a standout creepy guy in my life". Alcala won the competition, and a date with the episode's bachelorette, Cheryl Bradshaw, who subsequently refused to go out with him because she found him "creepy".