'Dating Game' Serial Killer Suspected In Bay Area Murder Dies

MARIN COUNTY, CA — Thrice condemned serial rapist and killer Rodney James Alcala, the Dating Game Killer, died of natural causes Saturday, according to the California Department of Corrections.

Alcala was ultimately convicted of seven murders in Califonia and New York, but investigators suspect him of scores of other murders across the nation including the 1977 Bay Area murder of Pamela Jean Lambson, a 19-year-old aspiring actress whose body was found by a hiking trail near Marin County. She disappeared after making a trip to Fisherman's Wharf to meet a man who offered to photograph her.

In 2011 detectives announced they linked Alcala to the crime based, in part, on his modus operandi. Posing as a photographer, Alcala lured victims, and investigators found hundreds of explicit photographs after he was arrested. Some of the photos were later identified as his murder victims. Alcala was never tried in the Lambson case as he was already on Death Row.

“We’re absolutely certain Rodney Alcala is responsible for the murder of Pam Lambson,” Marin County Sheriff’s Detective Ryan Petersen told the Orange County Register in 2011.

Alcala was a 77-year-old inmate sentenced to death for kidnapping and murdering a 12-year-old Huntington Beach girl and killing four other women in Orange County in the 1970s. He would later be convicted of two murders in New York, charged with one in Wyoming and linked to multiple others in Los Angeles, Washington New Hampshire, New York and Arizona.

Alcala was perhaps best known for his multiple trials and court appearances in which he grinned and mugged for the cameras, seemingly taunting the families of his victims much as he toyed with his victims before killing them.

He was first sentenced to death in Orange County in 1980 for the 1979 kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe. The conviction was appealed and overturned by the California Supreme Court in 1984.

Alcala was granted a new trial and was, again, sentenced to death for murdering Samsoe. This time a federal appeals court in 2003 overturned the sentence. Once again, Alcala was given a new trial.

The third time, however, investigators had matched Alcala's DNA to evidence in other murders, and Orange County prosecutors indicted Alcala for the murders of four other women. In 2010, an Orange County jury convicted Alcala of five counts of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to death for the killing of Samsoe as well as the 1977 deaths of 18-year-old Jill Barcomb and 27-year-old Georgia Wixted; the 1978 death of 32-year-old Charlotte Lamb, and the 1979 death of 21- year-old Jill Parenteau.

His third conviction stuck. After he was condemned to die a third time, investigators using DNA technology began linking Alcala to cold case murders around the nation.

In 2012, Alcala was extradited to New York after he was indicted for the 1971 murder of Cornelia Crilley and the 1977 murder of Ellen Jane Hover. He pleaded guilty and in 2013 was sentenced in New York to 25 years to life.

In 2016, prosecutors in Wyoming charged Alcala with the murder of Christine Ruth Thornton, 28, who disappeared in 1978 and whose body was found in 1982. She was six months pregnant.

Prosecutors said Alcala stalked women like prey and took earrings as trophies from some of his victims. Earrings helped put him on death row.

“You’re talking about a guy who is hunting through Southern California looking for people to kill because he enjoys it,” Orange County, California, prosecutor Matt Murphy said during his trial.
Investigators say his true victim count may never be known.

The mother of Samsoe, his 12-year-old victim, testified at his murder trial that a pair of gold ball earrings found in a jewelry pouch in Alcala’s storage locker belonged to her daughter.

But Alcala claimed that the earrings were his and that a video clip from his 1978 appearance on “The Dating Game” shows him wearing the studs nearly a year before Samsoe died. He denied the slayings and cited inconsistencies in witness’ accounts and descriptions.

California prosecutors said Alcala also took earrings from at least two of his adult victims as trophies.

Two of the four women were posed nude after their deaths, one was raped with a claw hammer and all were repeatedly strangled and resuscitated to prolong their agony, prosecutors said.
Investigators said one victim’s DNA was found on a rose-shaped earring in Alcala’s possession, and his DNA was found in her body.

Alcala was eventually sent to California's Death Row, where like most condemned killers in California, he died of natural causes. He died Saturday at 1:43 a.m. at a hospital in the community near Corcoran State Prison, according to the California Department of Corrections.

Alcala was born in Texas but raised by his mother in Los Angeles. He was first convicted of a crime in connection with the rape and beating of an eight-year-old girl in Hollywood after children at a summer camp where Alcala worked as a counselor reportedly recognized him from an FBI's most-wanted poster.

Alcala was known as the Dating Game Killer because he appeared as a contestant on the television show "The Dating Game" in 1978. When he was arrested, investigators found a collection of more than 1,000 often explicit photographs of women and teenage girls and boys. The photos including some of his victims.

After he was convicted a third time, authorities released more than 100 photos of young women and girls found in Alcala’s possession in hopes of linking him to other unsolved murders around the country.

“There is murder and rape and then there is the unequivocal carnage of a Rodney Alcala-style murder,” Bruce Barcomb, the brother of 18-year-old victim Jill Barcomb, said as Alcala was sentenced to death.

City News Service and the Associated Press contributed to this report.