Murder: True Crime Stories - MYSTERY: Dating Game Killer

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

In the late 1970s, a charming amateur photographer named Rodney Alcala appeared on the popular TV show The Dating Game, flashing a quick smile and winning a date with the bachelorette. What the audience didn't know was that the contestant lighting up their screens was already a serial killer. For years, Alcala had used his camera to lure women and children, charming them with compliments and the promise of a modeling shoot before turning violent. He slipped through the system again and again, serving short sentences and talking his way past parole boards while leaving a trail of victims across California and New York. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy traces the chilling double life of the Dating Game Killer, the manipulation and missed chances that let him keep killing for years, and the disturbing collection of photographs he left behind. Please note, this episode contains descriptions of sexual violence and child abuse and may not be suitable for all audiences.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love crimes of Reddit. A new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap.

It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. A photograph is supposed to be a way of remembering. It's proof that someone was here,

that a person stood in the light for a second and mattered enough for somebody to press a shutter. The man in this story took thousands of them. he told the people in front of his lens that they were beautiful, that they could be models, that he'd make them into something great. For a lot of them, those pictures are the only trace we have left, not as keepsakes, but as a gallery of the missing. The person taking those photos wasn't a stranger in the shadows.

He hid in plain sight for more than a decade. He even did it on national television. And by the time anyone understood who he really was, no one could say how many lives he'd already taken. This is the story of Rodney Alcala, the dating game killer. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending.

I'm Carter Roy. And this is Murder True Crime Stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the crimehouse community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, add free access to every episode. Subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content.

To join, go to Crimehouse Plus. or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to another episode of Murder Mystery Fridays, where I'm covering cases with questions that I can't get out of my head, the ones where the evidence points in multiple directions, and every theory feels like a possibility. Remember, these episodes are also on YouTube with full video. Just search for Crimehouse Studios, and be sure to like and subscribe. Before we start, a heads up, this episode includes descriptions of violence, sexual assault, and crimes against children.

Please listen with care. Today's case is a little different because the mystery isn't who did it. We know that much. What I can't get past is how the same man kept ending up in handcuffs and kept walking free. Rodney Alcala was arrested, charged, convicted, and paroled over and over. He even landed on the FBI's most wanted list, and right in the middle of all of it. He walked onto one of the most popular shows on television, and the audience cheered for him. The thing that finally stopped Rodney wasn't a fingerprint or a confession.

It was a 12-year-old girl on a borrowed bicycle and a mother who refused to let her daughter be forgotten. All that and more coming up. On the morning of September 25, 1968, a man named Donniemereld, Ronald Haynes was driving to work through Hollywood, California, when something caught his eye. A little girl was walking to school, carrying her books, and she looked about eight years old, and a car had slowed to a crawl beside her. Haynes watched her keep walking, like she was trying to ignore whoever was inside, but the car kept pace with her. Then it stopped. And the two of them talked for a minute, and then the little girl got into the car.

Something about it felt wrong to him, so Haynes followed. He trailed the car a couple of miles to a quiet apartment building and watched a tall man with long, dark hair, walk the girl toward the door. By that point, Haynes had seen enough. He found a pay phone and called the police. LAPD officer Chris Camacho got there quickly. He knocked. A man appeared at the window and said he'd just gotten out of the shower. He needed a minute to get dressed.

Camacho didn't buy it. He put his ear to the door, and he heard something on the other side. A faint, low sound, like a child in pain. He gave the man ten seconds, then he kicked the door in. There, on the kitchen floor was eight-year-old Tali Shapiro in a pool of blood, with a heavy metal bar laid across her throat. she had been beaten, sexually assaulted, and left her dead. Camacho pulled the bar off her neck and she gasped for air.

Tally Shapiro should not have survived that morning, but against all odds, she spent time in a coma and made it out alive. There was just one problem. The man who tried to kill her was already gone by the time Camacho saved her. He slipped out the back. but he'd left something behind. Inside the apartment, officers found a wallet, and the wallet gave them a name, Rodney Alcala.

A student ID told them he was studying fine arts right there in Los Angeles. So, who was he? On paper, he was about the last person you'd expect. Rodney James Alcala was born in San Antonio, Texas, on August 23, 1943, the third of four kids. When he was eight, the family moved to Mexico. A few years later, his father walked out and his mother brought the children to the Los Angeles area to start over.

By all early accounts, Rodney was bright and charming. The kind of student teachers remember and other kids wanted to be near. When he was tested years later, his IQ came back in the genius range, One examiner put it at around 135, and over time, the number got repeated and inflated until people were throwing around figures as high as 160. He enlisted in the Army at 17 to train as a paratrooper. It should have been the start of a good, steady life, but the Army is where another side of Rodney first appeared.

He got in trouble for misconduct, including assaulting young women. and in the early 1960s, after he went AWOL and had a breakdown, an army psychiatrist diagnosed him with antisocial personality disorder. They discharged him on medical grounds. He came home to L.A. and enrolled at UCLA and graduated with a fine arts degree in 1968. And somewhere in there, he found the tool he would use for the rest of his life. A camera. Rodney figured out that a camera was a camera was a. kind of key. He'd approach a young woman or a girl, tell her she was beautiful and should be a model

and asked to take her picture. He said he was a professional building a portfolio, and people believed him. For a kid who feels invisible, a stranger who says you've got something special, that he can see it through the lens doesn't feel like danger. It feels like the best thing that's happened all week. That was the whole trick. Rodney almost never forced his way in. He got himself invited. That's what he was doing when Tali Shapiro crossed his path. But in the fall of 1968, no one knew that yet.

All the LAPD had was a bloody department, a little girl in the hospital, and a name. By the time detectives came back with a warrant, Rodney Alcala was already gone. He'd left California. The FBI added him to its list of most wanted fugitives, and his face went up on posters across the country. But 3,000 miles away, a young man named John Berger was quietly starting a brand new life. Nobody there had any idea who he really was. As John Berger, Rodney talked his way into the film program at NYU.

The man wanted for nearly killing a child, was now a student in Manhattan, charming his professors, walking the streets with his camera, asking women if he could take their picture. In the summers, he found work as a counselor at an arts camp for kids up in New Hampshire. To everyone around him, John Berger was talented and a little intense, but not in a way that worried anyone. For nearly three years, that cover held. Then, in June of 1971, the 23rd. three-year-old woman named Cornelia Crilly was moving into a new apartment on the upper east side of

Manhattan. She was a flight attendant for TWA. Her boyfriend described her as beautiful and sophisticated, someone who carried herself with real poise. It was supposed to be the start of something new, a new place, a new chapter. She spent the whole day moving in. When her boyfriend came by that evening, her door was locked and no one answered the phone, so he called. the police. When officers got inside, they found Cornelia dead. She'd been sexually assaulted and strangled with her own stocking. There was a bite mark on her body. It was a horrifying scene, and it should have set off an enormous manhunt. But this was New York City in 1971, a year with around 1,500 homicides. There was no DNA testing. There were no strong leads.

Detectives did what they could and preserved what evidence they had, but the case went cold. It would stay cold for 40 years. For most of that time, Rodney Alcala wasn't even a name in the file. Just another face who'd passed through a huge, overwhelmed city. There was nothing to connect him to Cornelia. Not yet. Here's the thing, though. At the exact moment Cornelia Crilly's murder investigation was going nowhere,

Rodney Alcala's luck was about to run out for a completely different reason. That summer, two girls from the New Hampshire camp walked to the local post office. On the wall, there was an FBI most wanted poster. They recognized the face immediately. It was their camp counselor. But the name under the photo wasn't John Berger. It was Rodney Alcala. The girls told an adult who went and looked for themselves,

and in August of 1971, Rodney was arrested and extradited back to California to finally answer for what he'd done to Tully Shapiro. Under questioning, he was strangely calm about all of it. He told a detective he wasn't a danger to anyone that with a little therapy, he'd be just fine. The detective wasn't swayed, and for a moment it looked like justice would finally be served. But then the case fell apart. By 1971, Tali Shapiro's family had left the country. They'd moved to Mexico, and after everything their daughter had been through, they would not bring her back to sit in a courtroom and face her attacker.

Without Tully's testimony, prosecutors didn't believe they could win the serious charges, the rape, the attempted murder, so they made a deal. Rodney pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, child molestation, and he was sentenced under a system California used at the time where a parole board decided when an inmate had been rehabilitated and could go home. The board decided Rodney Alcala was rehabilitated in 1974. He'd served 34 months. Less than two months after his release back in California, He approached a 13-year-old girl and offered her what she thought was a ride to school. Instead, he drove her to a secluded spot.

He was interrupted before it went any further and was arrested again. This time, he was convicted of kidnapping and of giving drugs to a minor, and once again, under that same system, he served about two years and walked out. By 1977, Rodney Alcala was a free man for the, the third time, a registered sex offender, a repeat criminal, unknown flight risk. And then he asked his parole officer for permission to travel to New York City to visit family. He didn't have any family in New York. But no one checked.

And the parole officer said yes. So Rodney packed his camera and flew back to the one city where he'd already gotten away with murder. In the summer of 1977, Rodney Alcala was back in Manhattan, back to being John Berger, back on the streets with his camera. And within a week or so of arriving, he crossed paths with a 23-year-old named Ellen Hover. Ellen came from a glamorous world. Her father, Herman Hover, had owned Chiros, one of the most famous nightclubs in Hollywood. Her godfathers were Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. But the people who knew Ellen didn't describe a socialite.

They described someone gentle and warm, a musician, a person who chose to see the good in everyone she met. On July 15, 1977, Ellen didn't turn up to meet a friend. One police checked her apartment. There was no sign of a struggle and no sign of Ellen. The only clue was a name written in her date book for that day, John Berger. Nobody in Ellen's life had ever heard of a John Berger. Her family was frantic. They knew something was wrong right away because Ellen always stayed in touch.

It would be almost a year before there were any answers, a year of not knowing whether she was still alive. And when the answer finally came, it was the worst kind. In 1978, Ellen's remains were found buried under heavy rocks on a wooded estate north of the city. Another young woman later told police that John Berger had brought her to that same area to take pictures. That was the second time the name John Berger had surfaced, first in Ellen's date book, now from this woman. But he was a ghost. No one could say who he actually was. Then there was a break in the case.

Ellen's disappearance had made the papers and the name was out there in print. A former summer camp counselor saw it and remembered something. Back in 1971, the FBI had arrested a camp photographer by that exact name. She called the police, and that tip led investigators straight to the truth. John Berger was Rodney Alcala. Rodney was long gone by then. He drifted back to California that fall, and when his parole officer asked how the New York trip was, he reportedly said he'd had a good time.

Just months after Ellen vanished, he took a steady, ordinary job as a typesetter at the Los Angeles Times. From the outside, it looked like a man settling down. It was the opposite, because over the next several months, women in Los Angeles started dying. In November of 1977, 18-year-old Jill Barkham was found in the hills above the city. She was raised in upstate New York and went west to chase a bigger life. She'd only been in California for a few weeks when she was found beaten, assaulted, and strangled. Her body had also been posed. About a month later, in December, a 27-year-old nurse named Georgia Wickssted was found beaten and strangled in her Malibu apartment.

The following June in 1978, a 32-year-old legal secretary named Charlotte Lamb was found dead in the laundry room of her El Segundo apartment building. She had been strangled and posed. Three women were murdered in the same city under eerily similar circumstances. And in each case, the killer left almost nothing investigators could use. There was biological evidence, but this was the 1970s, and the technology to turn that evidence into a name was still years away. All detectives could do was collect it, store it, and wait. And there was another reason Rodney was able to disappear.

Right around this time, the city was gripped by a pair of killers the press called the Hillside Strangler. Young woman had been found in the hills, sexually assaulted with their bodies posed. It was one of the biggest manhunts in the city's history. So when Jill Barkham turned up in the hills posed, the working assumption was that she was a hillside strangler victim. She wasn't. Investigators actually did pull Rodney in during the Hillside Strangler investigation

because he was a known sex offender, and that's exactly who you round up in a panic like that, but he had alibis for those specific killings and they cleared him. And it wasn't the only time he sat across from a detective. That December, investigators had even questioned him about Ellen Hover's disappearance back in New York. He admitted he'd met her. He said they'd crossed paths at the New York Public Library, and that was the extent of the interrogation. Rodney must have felt untouchable, because that's the only way I can explain what he did next. In September of 1978, 35-year-old Rodney Alcala went on television for The Dating Game.

Back then, that show was everywhere. The format was simple. A woman asked three bachelor's questions, and picked one for a date. The catch. They were hidden behind a wall, so she couldn't see them, but the studio audience,

and everyone at home, could. Rodney auditioned and got cast as Bachelor number one. By then, he'd already been in jail twice and already killed. But the producers didn't run background checks, and in 1978, there was no national crime database, so they had no idea. Although one of them, executive producer Mike Metzschilder, Lader later said he'd sent something off about Rodney at the audition.

But Mike was overruled, so the taping went ahead. The host, Jim Lang, introduced the three bachelors. When he got to Rodney, he called him a successful photographer who likes skydiving and motorcycling. And then added a line that lands very differently now. He said, Rodney, quote, got his start when his father found him in the dark room at the age of third. fully developed.

On the other side of the wall, asking the questions was the Bachelorette, an aspiring actress named Cheryl Bradshaw. On camera, Rodney was quick and flirtatious. When Bradshaw asked what he'd be if she were serving him for dinner, he grinned and called himself the banana and told her to peel me. When she asked about his favorite time of day, he said, quote, Nighttime is when it really gets good. The audience ate it up. Well, most of them. Bachelor number three later said that you could hear people in the seats shifting,

even murmuring a few booze, as if some part of the room could feel what the cameras couldn't. Backstage, one of the other bachelors, an actor named Jed Mills, had already gotten a bad feeling. He said Rodney came right up into his face and told him, quote, I always get my girl. Mills called him one of the creepiest people he'd ever met. Still, when the game was over, Cheryl Bradshaw chose Bachelor number one.

Her excitement didn't last long. When she went backstage to meet the man she'd picked, something in her changed. She'd later say that she started to feel ill, that up close he was, in her word, creepy. A day or two after the taping, she called the show's staff and told them she would not go on the date. She never saw Rodney Alcala again. Years later, when the world learned who Bachelor number one really was, Cheryl Bradshaw put it plainly, quote, I could have been one of the dead girls.

That instinct saves Cheryl's life. But investigators have wondered whether her rejection set something off in her. him because for five months after that show Rodney didn't kill anyone and then something shifted. The careful distance he'd always kept between his crimes collapsed. In the space of four months, he attacked three more people. Those attacks came fast in the first half of 1979 and they show a man coming apart. Reckless where he'd once been careful, sloppy where he'd once been in control. In February, he offered a ride to a 15-year-old runaway named Monique Hoyt. He stuck to his usual script. He said he needed a model for a photo contest and that she was beautiful. Monique didn't

hesitate. She got in the car with him. He took her out to a remote stretch of mountains to shoot pictures and there he turned on her, bludgeoning her and assaulting her. But Monique did something extraordinary. When it was over, instead of running, she pretended she wasn't afraid. She told him she wanted to keep seeing him. She kept up the act the whole drive back toward town until he pulled into a gas station and stepped into the bathroom. On the second he was out of sight, she ran and found help. Monique's quick thinking saved her. And she wanted to make sure Rodney could never hurt anyone again. She reported the assault and Rodney. was arrested. But sadly, that is not where this story ends because his mother posted his bail

and he walked out still a free man and angrier than ever. On June 13, 1979, 21-year-old Jill Parentho left work early to go to a baseball game. When she didn't come in the next morning, coworkers got worried. Police went to her Burbank apartment. Someone had broken in, and inside. They found Jill dead. This time the killer made a mistake. Climbing out of a window, he cut himself and left his own blood behind the scene, but it would take time to process. And a week after that, Rodney drove down to Huntington Beach, where he came across Robin Samso. She was 12 years old, and she loved the beach. She and her best friend Bridget were the ones out on the sand, doing cartwheels and back walkovers.

The other love of her life was her mom, Marianne. Robin was the kind of daughter who brought her a white daisy and breakfast in bed on Saturday mornings. On June 20th, 1979, Robin was starting her first ever job, answering phones at a ballet studio in exchange for dance lessons. But first, she and Bridget went to the beach. While they were there, a man with a camera walked out, and asked to take their picture.

He said it was for a contest. The girl said, okay, but a neighbor nearby noticed felt that something was off and came over to ask what was going on. After that, the man just walked off. Later that afternoon, Robin borrowed a bike to ride to the ballet studio. She never got there. When Robin didn't come home that night, her family immediately started searching. The next day,

Riggins described the man from the beach to a sketch artist, dark hair, sharp features. Twelve days later, a forest ranger found Robbins' remains in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, about 50 miles from home. For a while, that sketch was all detectives had. They kept circulating it, and eventually, it worked. Rodney Alcala's own parole officer saw the drawing and recognized him. They showed Bridget a photo lineup. She picked Rodney without hesitating.

On July 24th, 1979, police arrested him. And this time, it would finally stick. By the summer of 1979, 35-year-old Rodney Alcala was finally in custody, charged with the murder of Robin Samso. But arresting him and convicting him were two very different. things. Robin's body had been out in the elements for almost two weeks and there was no forensic evidence tying him to her. The case rested on eyewitnesses. Rodney had to know that and he almost certainly thought he could wiggle his way out of trouble again. But two things went wrong for him.

The first was a scrap of paper. When police searched his home, they found a receipt for a storage locker up in Seattle, Washington, a thousand miles away. seemed odd, so a detective copied down the address. The second was his own mouth. While he was in jail, his sister came to visit. What Rodney didn't know was that the conversation was being recorded, and on that tape he told her about the storage locker in Seattle, the one he thought the police didn't know about, and asked her to go clear it out. They beat her to it. When detectives opened that locker, they finally understood what they were dealing with. Inside were more than a thousand photographs.

Women, teenage girls, some children. A few of the pictures were ordinary portraits. Many were not, and most of the people in them were completely unidentifiable. But buried in all of it was a little pouch of jewelry. Police showed the jewelry to Robin Samso's mother. mother, Marianne recognized a pair of gold ball earrings right away. They were hers. Robin had borrowed them. Years later, testing showed that another pair of earrings in that same pouch, rose-shaped ones, carried the DNA of Charlotte Lamb, a legal secretary from El Segundo. This wasn't a man who kept one

dark souvenir. It was a collection. And it forced investigators to ask how many of those little pieces had a story like Robbins or Charlott's behind them. For all the mysteries in that locker, it was one pair of earrings, Robbins, that mattered most right now. In 1980, 36-year-old Rodney Alcala went on trial for kidnapping and murdering Robin Samso. He was convicted and sentenced to death. Afterward, Robin's mother summed up what the verdict did and didn't give her. She said, quote,

It was a poor exchange of my daughter's life, but maybe it will save someone else's by him being gone. That should have been the end, but it wasn't, and not for a long time. Because a death sentence triggers automatic appeals, and Rodney was smart, and he had nothing but time. His first conviction was overturned in 1984. He was convicted again in 1986. That one was also overturned in 2001. Twice. Robin's family sat through the whole thing.

Twice they watched it come undone. Her mother said the hardest part was never being able to feel safe. Because as long as the appeals kept going, there was always a chance he'd walk free. But while Rodney was busy fighting his case, the science was catching up to him. By the 2000s, DNA testing had finally matured. Under a new California law, authorities took a sample of Rodney's DNA.

And the evidence that had been sitting in storage for decades, from Jill Barkham, from Georgia Wickstead, from Charlotte Lamb, from Jill Parento, could finally speak. There was DNA on three of the women, a bloody handprint, and blood he'd left behind on a towel in one of their homes. Peace by piece, it came back to one man. Rodney Alcala. In 2010, more than 30 years after Robin Samso rode off on that borrowed bike,

Rodney went on trial one last time, now for five murders at once. He represented himself. For hours, he questioned himself on the stand, dropping into a lower voice to play his own attorney, then answering as the witness. He even played the jury a clip of his dating game appearance, trying to argue that the gold earrings in his locker were his own. And in his closing argument, he did something almost impossible to sit through.

He played the jurors a song, Arlo Guthrie's Alice's restaurant, queued to the part where the narrator insists he wants to kill. And he made Robin's mother relive all of it. as his own lawyer, he questioned Marianne directly. At one point, he brought up a rumor that during the very first trial back in 1980, she'd smuggled a gun into the courtroom. She didn't deny it. She said, quote, I was going to shoot him right between the eyes if I could have gotten a shot at him. She said what stopped her was Robin. She suddenly smelled her daughter's shampoo and felt her right there beside her and couldn't do it. And the jurors probably understood where she was coming from.

They took less than two days to reach a verdict. Rodney Alcala was found guilty on all five counts. He was sentenced to death for the third time. At the sentencing, the families finally got to speak. One after another, they stood up and faced him. Georgia Wicksdard's sister asked the only question that still mattered to her. how anyone could have done what Rodney did. Jill Parento's sister said she has never been able to look at a gray June day the same way since the afternoon she got the news. Jill Barkham's brother did something almost no one expected.

He told Alcala he felt no hatred for him and asked him to do one decent thing with the life he had left and help identify the others. he never would. Through all of it, Alcala barely moved, and when he was finally let out of that courtroom for the last time, the families broke into applause. Rodney's first two convictions had been overturned on appeal.

This one would stand, and New York had cases of its own to add to the pile. The same wave of DNA and forensic work finally tied Rodney to Cornelia Crilly, the flight attendant he had killed back in the evening. There had been a letter under her body with one of his fingerprints and a bite mark that matched his teeth. Those same techniques also connected Rodney to the murder of Ellen Hover, the woman who was meeting John Berger for a date and never came home. In 2012, he pleaded guilty to both New York murders. That makes seven people he was convicted of killing. Cornelia Crilly and Ellen Hover in New York, Jill Barkham, Georgia Wickstead, Charlotte Lamb, and Jill Parento across Los Angeles, and 12-year-old Robin Samso in Orange County.

Rodney Alcala died of natural causes on July 24, 2021, 42 years to the day after his arrest for Robin's murder. He was 77 years old, still on California's death row. So why does this one sit in the murder mystery Friday pile if he was caught and convicted? Because we don't actually know how it ends. I remember that storage locker with more than a thousand photographs. In 2010, police made a hard decision. They released more than a hundred of those pictures to the public, hoping someone might recognize a face.

They held back many more that were too graphic to ever show. The response came fast. Some women called in to say, that's me, I'm okay. But some families looked at those photos and saw someone they'd lost. A loved one who had vanished years earlier and was never found.

In 2013, one of those pictures finally got a name. A woman was looking through the released photos when she saw a face she knew better than her own, her sister, Christine Thornton, who had disciplined. appeared in 1977. In the photo, Christine is sitting on a motorcycle, looking right at the camera. She was about six months pregnant when she vanished.

Her remains had been found out in Wyoming years earlier, but no one had ever been able to identify them. Rodney was charged with her murder in 2016, but by then he was too sick to ever face trial for it. That's why investigators have said for years that his real number could, be far higher than seven. Some estimates run into the dozens. A few go as high as 130. We may never know. But after his conviction, police in Washington State named him a person of interest in other unsolved killings, and detectives in several states pulled old cases back off the shelf. Here's what I keep coming back to. For a long time, the story of Rodney Alcala got told as a kind of grim novelty, the serial killer who went on a game show and won. It's the clip that goes

viral every few years, and I understand why it is almost impossible to believe. One of the prosecutors who worked the case, put it simply, it comes down to sheer arrogance that someone in the middle of a killing spree would walk onto national television, flirt on camera, win, and feel completely safe doing it. But the game show isn't the story. The people are. Tally Shapiro survived that morning in 1968, grew up and testified against him,

not once but three separate times across three trials decade after decade. When she heard he had finally died, she didn't dress it up. She said the planet was a better place without him. Monique Hoyt outsmarted him at 15 and years later as a grown woman, she walked into a courtroom and faced him again. Prosecutor said she put the nail in his coffin.

But for all the survivors, there could be countless more victims out there. Rodney Alcala spent his whole life hiding behind a camera, turning real people into pictures he could keep flattening them into something he owned. The least we can do is make sure. He didn't succeed. We can turn them back into people with names, Cornelia and Ellen, Jill and Georgia, Charlotte, Robin, and Christine. And for the faces we still can't name, we keep looking because somewhere out there, someone is still waiting to find out what happened to the person they lost. Thanks so much for listening.

I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of another murder and all the people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your murder true crime stories listening experience,

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page. We'll be back on Tuesday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. This episode is brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Protovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Nicolette Tavallero, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? hours, well, you'll love crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling

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