48 Hours Mystery: Rodney Alcala - The Killing Game

Network 	Network
CBS: February 17, 2018	
Correspondent 	Correspondent
Peter Van Sant 	
Packager 	Packager
CBS News Productions 	
48 Hours Mystery: Rodney Alcala - The Killing Game was an episode of the long-running news magazine series where it investigated the case of the late Rodney Alcala who had been convicted of the murder of five California women.
==Plot==
Rodney Alcala worked as a photographer and a typesetter and was once a contestant on The Dating Game. However, police say he was also a chameleon and a serial killer, perhaps the deadliest in the country's history, and investigators are unsure if they will ever know how many victims he left behind.
Alcala's known crime career began in 1968 when Los Angeles police found an 8 year old Tail Shapiro near death in his home. She survived, but he fled out the back door, it would take years for police to catch up to him, then working in a New Hampshire girls camp and using an alias.
What could have been the end of Alcala's crime history was far from it. He pleaded guilty to child molestation in the Shapiro case and was released after serving less than three years in prison. In 1979, he approached two young girls on a beach in California. Later that day, one of them, Robin Samsoe, disappeared. Her remains turned up to 12 days later some 40 miles away. Her friend, however, gave policed a detailed description of the man who saw then on the beach. Alcala's parole officer saw a sketch and told police. As police worked to investigate the Samsoe case, detectives overheard Alcala telling his sister that he had a storage locker in Seattle, Wash. There, police found thousands of photographs of women, many in vulnerable positions.
Twice, Alcala was tried and convicted for the murder of Samsoe. Twice, he received the death penalty and twice those convictions were overturned. But, while he remained on death row awaiting his third trial, DNA technology caught up with him. This time Alcala was tried and convicted for the murder, kidnapping and rape of five California women, including Samsoe. Most of the evidence. He received five separate death penalties and was sent back to death row.
By 2012, Alcala had been on California's death row for more than 30 years. Yet, police have never stopped digging, especially in New York City. That year, Alcala was sent to New York to face justice in two cold cases from the 1970s that had been recently solved - the 1971 murder of Cornelia Michael Crilley and the 1977 killing of Ellen Hover. The cases never went to trial. He pleaded guilty to both. The New York prosecutors were shocked because Alcala denied every crime he was accused of in the past. Alcala was sentenced to two concurrent prison terms of 25 years to life and returned to California.
Meanwhile, Kathy Thornton had spent 39 years trying to find her sister, Christine, who went missing after a trip out west with her boyfriend. Thorton had never heard on Alcala, but her son did. He had watched 48 Hours and saw its website of Alcala's unidentified photos of women. He urged his mother to look.
When Thorton looked at it, she stopped on an image of a beautiful woman on a motorcycle.
Was her sister on of Alcala's victims, or just a woman in a picture he had in his collection? in would take years for Thorton to find out for sure.
==Trivia==
This episode was the last story by the well respected Harold Dow. Dow passed away as a result of complications from acute asthma during its production; he had arrived at a hospital emergency room and an inhaler was later found on the floor of his vehicle. Dow's son was brought in to finish narration of the episode as the series itself dedicated posthumously to him.
==Related Shows==
The Dating Game
The Dating Game (1973)
The Dating Game (1978)
The Dating Game (1986)
The Dating Game (1996)
Three on a Date
The Dating Game Killer
Murder Made Me Famous: The Dating Game Killer
The Celebrity Dating Game
20/20: The Dating Game Killer
Dating Death
==Full Episode==
Rodney Alcala: The Killing Game
Category:The Dating Game