Rodney Alcala was kind of smarmy on his 1978 The Dating Game appearance, but he was a good-looking guy, so he got away with it. His long hair masked the creepy intentions hidden in his answers about night, and his California tan made viewers think he was smooth rather than sleazy.
That was why he won.
It was good news that bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw caught on to Alcala's true nature and refused to go out with him. By the time the show aired, Alacala was a convicted rapist--something the background checks on the show failed to discover. He'd also murdered by this time, later being revealed as a notorious serial killer later dubbed "The Dating Game Killer," who has potentially killed as many as 50 women.
A year after his The Dating Game appearance, Alcala was arrested and sentenced to death in California for five murders between 1977 and 1979. He has not yet been put to death, and was convicted in 2011 for two more murders in New York City.
Alcala's M.O. was particularly brutal. He would strangle his victims until they lost consciousness several times, waiting until they awoke to strangle them again. After these women's deaths, he would keep pairs of their earrings in storage lockers. Alcala's first crime was in 1968 in Los Angeles, taking an eight-year-old girl into his apartment, raping her and beating her with a steel bar. A witness saw Alcala luring the girl to his apartment, but he escaped, fleeing then to New York.
His first conviction was for the death of Robin Samsoe, a 12-year-old California girl who disappeared in 1979. Alcala was sentenced to death for Samsoe's murder in 1980, but his conviction was overturned because the jury had been told of his prior sex crimes. He was convicted again for the Samsoe murder, but his death sentence was overturned in 2001.
He also isn't a model prisoner. He self-published a book in 1994 called You, the Jury asserting that he was innocent in the Samsoe case and suggesting another murderer. He filed a lawsuit against the state of California because they would not give him a low-fat diet at San Quentin State Prison.
Since 2001, Alcala's DNA has been matched with a number of cold cases in California and New York. Most notorious is the 40-year cold case of Cornelia Michel Crilley, a TWA flight attendant who was raped and strangled in her Manhattan apartment in 1971.