Whisper
#byefelicia
Rodney Alcala, Alleged Serial Killer with Genius IQ, to Match Wits with Calif. Justice System
<<Georgia Wixted
<< Robin Samsoe,,
<<Jill Barcomb
<< Jill Parenteau
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http://www.laweekly.com/2010-01-21/news/rodney-alcala-the-fine-art-of-killing/1Rodney Alcala is a man stuck in a time warp, his flowing silver hair, granny glasses, beige blazer and jeans reminiscent of a creative-writing professor circa 1980, the year he began life behind bars. As he walked into an Orange County Superior Court room one recent day, news photographers snapped his lean, no-longer-handsome face. His handcuffs were removed, he picked up a pen with his left hand and waited for Orange County Superior Court Judge F.P. Briseno to bring in the 12 jurors who will decide if he should die or spend the rest of his life in prison — or, though exceedingly unlikely, go free.
The once-dashing ladies' man, UCLA fine-arts grad, former Los Angeles Times typesetter, amateur photographer and film student of Roman Polanski's is believed to have used his smooth-talking charm and access to the creative communities in L.A. and Greenwich Village during the 1970s to entrap and murder seven women and girls, and to rape several others. So smooth was Alcala that he was selected to compete on the ABC prime-time show The Dating Game in 1978, where "bachelorette" Cheryl Bradshaw picked him as her date. Later, police say, she reportedly refused to go on the winning date, sensing that there was something creepy about Bachelor Number One.
Now 66, Alcala has twice stood trial in Orange County for the murder of 12-year-old ballet student Robin Samsoe of Huntington Beach. The sensational crime rocked the sleepy beachside city 31 years ago. He was twice convicted of slaying the small girl, who disappeared on her way to ballet class riding a yellow Schwinn bicycle. Two different juries said Alcala should die. But twice his convictions were reversed on different technicalities — once by the California Supreme Court in 1984 and a second time by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2001.
With a near-genius IQ of 135, Alcala has spent his time behind bars penning You, the Jury, a 1994 book in which he claims his innocence and points to a different suspect; suing the California prisons for a slip-and-fall claim and for failing to provide him a low-fat diet; and, according to prosecutors, complaining about a law that required he and other death-row inmates to submit DNA mouth swabs for comparison by police against unsolved crimes.
Alcala is still as cocky as ever — bold enough to represent himself in the trial for his life, now unfolding in Orange County. And why not? He has a talent for mining legal technicalities and has repeatedly enjoyed success with appellate judges. And, in the past at least, he had the support of women in his Monterey Park–based family. His mother provided Alcala $10,000 in bail after he was arrested for the rape of a teenager decades ago, and Huntington Beach detectives suspect another female family member of trying to hide a receipt to Alcala's secret locker in Seattle, where detectives found "trophy" earrings they say were taken from his alleged murder victims.
Using evidence such as those earrings and multiple DNA and blood matches, an unusual, dual-jurisdiction team of Los Angeles and Orange County prosecutors hopes to prove that Alcala not only murdered Samsoe but also killed four young Los Angeles–area women in the 1970s: Georgia Wixted, Jill Parenteau, Charlotte Lamb and Jill Barcomb. Their bodies were found in carefully arranged poses, and in a least one instance a lamp shade had been removed, increasing brightness. LAPD homicide Detective Cliff Shepard says the consensus among investigators is that fine-arts graduate Alcala, who preyed on attractive females ranging from stunningly beautiful career women to young and pretty teens, took their photos "to defile the victims as best he can in death."
Although the trial now under way gives Alcala one more chance to argue he did not kill the tiny ballerina Samsoe and dump her in the foothills above Sierra Madre, police contend that he has long been a vicious predator. His first known attack was in 1968, when he abducted a second-grade girl walking to school in Hollywood, using a pipe to badly bash her head and then raping her — only to be caught red-handed because a Good Samaritan spotted him luring the child and called police. When LAPD officers demanded he open the door of his Hollywood apartment on De Longpre Avenue, Alcala fled out the back. Inside, police found the barely-alive, raped little girl on Alcala's floor. It took LAPD three years to catch the fugitive Alcala, living under the name John Berger in New Hampshire — where the glib and charming child rapist had been hired, disturbingly, as a counselor at an arts-and-drama camp for teenagers.
When Alcala was caught hiding out under the assumed name Berger on the East Coast, a conviction for brutally raping a child in California was not a guarantee of a long prison sentence. California's state government of that era had embraced a philosophy that the state could successfully treat rapists and murderers through education and psychotherapy.
The hallmark of the philosophy was "indeterminate sentencing," under which judges left open the number of prison years to be served by a violent felon, and parole boards later determined when the offender had been reformed. Rapists and murderers — including Alcala — went free after very short stints. He served a scant 34 months for viciously raping the 8-year-old, who is known in official documents only as "Tali."
controversial, "indeterminate sentencing" was ended by then-governor Jerry Brown. But by that time, Alcala was free. It was years before police realized that, when they caught up with him in New Hampshire, Alcala had already begun his alleged murderous romp through the party-and-artsy society of Greenwich Village, which ultimately ended in California's beach communities.
Retired LAPD Detective Steve Hodel, who investigated Alcala's rape of Tali, recalls, "My impression was that it was his first sex crime, and we got him early — and society is relatively safe now. I had no idea in two years [he would be out] and continue his reign of terror and horror. I expected he was put away and society was safe. ... It is such a tragedy that so much more came after that."
In 1974, two months after he got out of state prison, Alcala was found at Bolsa Chica State Beach with a 13-year-old girl who claimed he'd kidnapped her. He was convicted only of violating parole and giving pot to a minor, however, and two years later, upon his second release from prison, the law went easy on Alcala again. His parole officer in Los Angeles permitted Alcala, though a registered child rapist and known flight risk, to jaunt off to New York City to visit relatives. NYPD cold-case investigators now believe that one week after arriving in Manhattan, Alcala killed the Ciro's nightclub heiress Ellen Hover, burying her on the vast Rockefeller Estate in ritzy Westchester County.
Orange County Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy, who hopes during the current trial to put Alcala permanently on death row for Samsoe's 1979 murder and the slayings of four women in the Los Angeles area, says: "The '70s in California was insane as far as treatment of sexual predators. Rodney Alcala is a poster boy for this. It is a total comedy of outrageous stupidity."
Alcala was convicted in 1980 of murdering Samsoe, and the saga might have ended with him on death row. But his conviction was overturned by the California Supreme Court because the Orange County Superior Court trial judge had allowed the jury to hear about Alcala's child-rape and kidnapping incidents. Prosecutors went back to court, and in 1986 Alcala was convicted for the second time of Samsoe's murder. For the second time, a jury awarded the death penalty. But a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel in 2001 overthrew his conviction once again, in part because the second trial judge did not allow a witness to back up the defense's claim that the park ranger who found Robin Samsoe's animal-ravaged body in the mountains had been hypnotized by police investigators.
Alcala, in many ways, has long seemed the victor. Robert Samsoe, who was 13 when his little sister was slain, tells L.A. Weekly, "I don't have any faith in the system. Some people, they are just afforded all the chances in the world. Alcala has cost the state of California more than any other person because of his lawsuits. And they treat him like a king. Everybody is walking on pins and needles around him. He has had 30 years to study the law on death row. He is afforded that right."
But everything changed one day in 2003, as Orange County's Senior Deputy D.A. Murphy was working on a new strategy for reprosecuting the twice-overturned Alcala murder conviction. Murphy got a call from his boss, who'd just heard from the office of Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley. DNA swabs taken from Alcala's mouth in prison — tests that Alcala opposed — had unexpectedly matched the DNA in semen left at the rape-murders of two Westside career women in Los Angeles, whose bodies were left in eerie, artfully posed positions. The semen left on Wixted, a 27-year-old nurse who was found in 1977 in her Malibu bedroom, and the semen left on Lamb, 32, a Santa Monica legal secretary who was found in 1978 in a laundry room in El Segundo, matched Alcala's.
"My reaction was, how many more would we get?" recalls Murphy. As the prosecutors in Orange and Los Angeles counties began to work closely together on the growing case, another DNA match came through in 2004 when LAPD Detective Shepard learned that Alcala's semen was left on the carefully posed body of Barcomb, a small and delicate 18-year-old runaway found on a dirt road snaking through tangled ravines near Marlon Brando's Mulholland Drive home back in 1977.
Stunned by the revelation of a long-undetected serial killer, detectives from the LAPD, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and Huntington Beach began scouring cold murder cases involving attractive young women who moved in the singles circuit of the 1970s.
"I wasn't surprised at all," said retired Huntington Beach Detective Steve Mack, when he heard that Alcala's DNA was being tied to several unsolved murders. "I am convinced there are others we don't know about."
Last fall Alcala insisted he was not guilty by reason of insanity in the murders of Malibu resident Wixted, Santa Monica resident Lamb, Burbank resident Parenteau and Barcomb, the petite teen runaway police say he picked up on Sunset Boulevard. Alcala has since changed his tune, pleading not guilty to all of those slayings, and continues to deny that he killed ballet student Samsoe.
.Rodney Alcala grins during a recent court appearance
The rest is at the link kinda long but worth the read,,,,http://www.laweekly.com/2010-01-21/news/rodney-alcala-the-fine-art-of-killing/3 http://www.laweekly.com/2010-01-21/news/rodney-alcala-the-fine-art-of-killing/4 http://www.laweekly.com/2010-01-21/news/rodney-alcala-the-fine-art-of-killing/5 sorry so long but out of respect for the murder victims I wanted to put all of their faces out there,makes it more real with a face to the storyIn the late 1970s, Rodney Alcala was the winning bachelor on The Dating Game
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pebo said something relevant for a change... :faint2:
