Originally appeared on E! Online
In a world where shows like “Love Is Blind,” “90 Day Fiancé” and “Married at First Sight” are the norm, let alone the cottage industry that is Bachelor Nation, “The Dating Game” sounds rather quaint.
As first conceived by game show impresario Chuck Barris in 1965, there was a simple premise: A woman looking for love asks three suitors who are hidden behind a screen a series of questions. At the end, she picks one to go out with.
But while charm, chemistry and double entendres ruled the hour, the vetting process left something to be desired. Because on the episode that aired Sept. 13, 1978, teacher Cheryl Bradshaw’s winning suitor turned out to be a serial killer.
“Bachelor No. 1” Rodney Alcala would later be convicted of seven murders, including the killing of a 12-year-old girl, and authorities have speculated that his true victim count could be closer to 100 women.
Anna Kendrick plays inspired-by-this-true-story Sheryl in “Woman of the Hour,” which approaches the harrowing story from the bachelorette’s perspective and marks the “Pitch Perfect” star’s directorial debut.
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“I feel very emotionally connected to the material,” Kendrick told E! News correspondent Will Marfuggi ahead of the film’s Oct. 18 premiere on Netflix. “I obviously like making kind of lighthearted fare, but I really felt drawn to this story and the way in which it teased out these larger themes around the way that women, especially, have to move through the world in a constant survival mode.”
Kendrick singled out a scene in which Alcala (played by Daniel Zavallo) is at a tiki bar as one of her trickier balancing acts in the film, sharing that a previous version of the script had a splashier moment that showed him getting upset at a waitress after she knocks over a glass.
Instead, they forwent the obvious red flag in favor of subtler creepy vibes. Kendrick thought they “could make something really terrifying happen,” she explained, “without making it clear on paper what’s happening.”
And it’s all the more terrifying because “Woman of the Hour” is based on a grisly true story. Read on for all the details on how Bradshaw was set up on a TV-facilitated date with a murderer:
How did Rodney Alcala end up on “The Dating Game?”
When Alcala showed up as Bachelor No. 1 on “The Dating Game” in an episode that aired Sept. 13, 1978, he was introduced by host Jim Lange as “a successful photographer who got his start when his father found him in the dark room at the age of 13, fully developed.”
“Between takes, you might find him skydiving or motorcycling,” Lange continued. “Please welcome Rodney Alcala.”
Bradshaw, a school teacher from Phoenix who’d previously worked as a foot masseuse, started by asking Bachelor No. 1 what his “best time” was.
Alcala’s response: “Nighttime.” Asked to explain further, he said, “Nighttime is when it really gets good. Then you’re really ready.”
Bradshaw also asked her suitors, “I am serving you for dinner. What are you called and what do you look like?”
Alcala memorably replied, “I am called the banana and I look really good.” Pressed for more detail, he said, “Peel me!”
Reflecting on how bizarre the exchange was in hindsight, former “The Dating Game” producer David Greenfield admitted on ABC News’ “20/20” in 2021 that it “sounds horrible.”
At the time, though, he explained, “that’s a good solid answer…We were looking for raunchy, sexy answers, and that was one. Take it in context now, it’s like, ‘Oh my God.'”
And after a commercial break, Bradshaw made her choice: “Well, I like bananas, so I’ll take number one.”
But she never actually went out with Alcala (the show proposed a tennis lesson date followed by a trip to the Magic Mountain amusement park), instead getting turned off quickly once she met him face to face.
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“I started to feel ill,” she told the Sunday Telegraph in 2012. “He was acting really creepy. I turned down his offer. I didn’t want to see him again.”
Ellen Metzger, who was “The Dating Game” contestant coordinator, recalled Bradshaw asking for an out the day after the taping.
“She said, ‘Ellen, I can’t go out with this guy. There’s weird vibes that are coming off of him. He’s very strange. I am not comfortable. Is that going to be a problem?’” Metzger said on 20/20. “And of course, I said, ‘No.'” (As in, no problem.)
Actor Jed Mills, Bachelor No. 2 on Bradshaw’s episode, remembered literally recoiling from Alcala during the taping.
“He was creepy,” Mills told CNN years later. “Definitely creepy. Something about him, I could not be near him. I am kind of bending toward the other guy to get away from him, and I don’t know if I did that consciously. But thinking back on that, I probably did.”
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Who was the “Dating Game Killer”?
Alcala’s fateful appearance on “The Dating Game” in 1978 came four years after his release from prison, where he’d served 34 months for child molestation after kidnapping and sexually assaulting an 8-year-old girl in 1968.
Between committing that crime and being arrested for it, however, he killed at least one woman — a murder he wouldn’t be prosecuted for until decades later once advancements in DNA testing linked him to a series of cold cases — and he murdered at least four more before he was Bachelor No. 1.
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But thanks to a good Samaritan who witnessed the 8-year-old getting into a car with a man she seemingly didn’t know, after which he tailed them to an apartment building and called police, officers found the child alive on the evening of Sept. 25, 1968.
They also found Alcala’s UCLA student ID at the scene, so they had a suspect immediately.
But Alcala — a 25-year-old Army veteran who had gone AWOL and was diagnosed by a military psychiatrist with chronic and severe antisocial personality disorder before he went to college — was long gone, per Stella Sands’ 2011 book about the case, “The Dating Game Killer: The True Story of a TV Dating Show, a Violent Sociopath, and a Series of Brutal Murders.”
Unbeknownst to authorities in California, Alcala had surfaced in New York going by the name of John Berger. Using that alias, according to Sands, he enrolled at NYU, graduated with his bachelor’s degree in 1971 at the age of 27, worked as a photographer and secured a job as a counselor at an arts and drama camp in New Hampshire.
Who were Rodney Alcala’s murder victims?
On the evening of June 24, 1971, Cornelia Crilley, a 23-year-old TWA flight attendant, was found dead in the Manhattan apartment she’d moved into that very day. Police (called by her boyfriend, per Sands, after Crilley’s mom couldn’t get her on the phone) discovered her body in a bedroom with a stocking tied around her neck. She was partially clothed and had bite marks on her chest — so investigators were able to collect DNA at the scene, only there was no way to match it to a suspect at the time.
“He kept trophies, usually jewelry,” Kendrick, who used real-life case details to depict the killer’s crimes in “Woman of the Hour,” told “Rolling Stone”. “The mental image of him, in the aftermath of violating and brutally killing a person, taking the time to remove a delicate piece of jewelry, haunts me. He preserved them for years. He treated an earring with more respect than a human being.”
Meanwhile, about a month after Crilley was killed, Los Angeles police detectives who’d been searching for Alcala since connecting him to the aforementioned 1968 child assault contacted the FBI. The bureau subsequently added the suspect to its most-wanted list.
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In August 1971, a couple of the campers where “John Berger” was a counselor saw his picture in the local post office. Per Sands, they didn’t really think Berger could be Alcala, especially since the fugitive was accused of harming a little girl, but they told a camp director, who called the FBI.
Alcala was arrested at the camp the next day and flown back to L.A. to face charges in the 1968 assault.
However, his young victim and her family had left the country and were unavailable to testify. Alcala pleaded guilty to child molestation and on May 19, 1972, a judge sentenced him to a maximum of 10 years in prison with the possibility of parole.
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Alcala served time at the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, Calif., and the California Medical Facility (a state prison psychiatric hospital) in Vacaville. He was released in August 1974 after a state prison psychiatrist deemed him “considerably improved,” according to Sands’ book. He moved back in with his mother and was required to register as a sex offender.
On Oct. 13, 1974, he offered to give a 13-year-old girl who was waiting for her bus a ride to school but ended up taking her to Huntington Beach, where he gave her a joint. A park ranger, sensing something wasn’t right, called police. Alcala was arrested and charged that December with sale of marijuana, kidnapping and violating his parole.
He was convicted of the parole violation and giving drugs to a minor and sent back to prison. He was released on June 16, 1977.
On July 15, 1977, Ellen Jane Hover — who had recently moved to New York after graduating from college in Pennsylvania — disappeared.
Two days earlier, during the infamous city-wide blackout that swathed Manhattan in darkness and prompted far more people than usual to be congregating outside, a friend had noticed Hover talking to a tall, skinny man with a ponytail.
Asked who the “freaky-looking guy” was, per Sands, Hover told her friend he was “all right.” After the 23-year-old failed to show up for a dinner date on the 15th and her parents called police, investigators found that she had written “John Berger, photographer,” in her diary.
Police found Hover’s remains 11 months later in a shallow grave in North Tarrytown, Westchester County.
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While New York authorities were searching for Hover, the body of Jill Barcomb, 18, was found in the Hollywood Hills on Nov. 10, 1977, and Georgia Wixted, 27, was murdered in her Malibu apartment barely a month later, police finding her body on Dec. 16.
In September 1977, Alcala secured a job as a typesetter at the Los Angeles Times after presenting a mostly falsified resume. He worked there until May 1979, according to Sands.
That December he was questioned by the FBI at LAPD headquarters about Hover’s disappearance in New York — the bureau having connected the name Berger found in the woman’s diary to Alcala — and he admitted to knowing her. He told investigators he took her to a spot in Westchester to photograph her but then took her back to Manhattan and dropped her off at her apartment, alive and well.
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In March 1978, Alcala — since he was a registered sex offender — was interviewed by detectives from the LAPD’s Hillside Strangler task force before they ultimately arrested cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr. in connection with the murders of 10 women between October 1977 and February 1978.
Meanwhile, he continued to work at the LA Times and take pictures on the side.
On June 24, 1978, 32-year-old Charlotte Lamb was found dead in the laundry room of an El Segundo, Calif., apartment complex — but because she didn’t live there, she wasn’t identified for several days.
Lamb told friends she was going to a nightclub on June 23 and her family called police three days later once they realized no one had seen her since. Authorities soon realized the missing woman was their Jane Doe.
Less than three months later, Alcala was the man of the hour on “The Dating Game.”
On June 14, 1979, Jill Parenteau, 21, was strangled to death in her Burbank apartment. Six days later, 12-year-old Robin Samsoe was reported missing after last being seen riding her bike to a ballet lesson. The child’s remains were found July 2 in the Sierra Madre foothills.
The Samsoe case was headline news. And, according to Sands’ book, it was ultimately the same good Samaritan who called police in 1968 to report that he had seen a young girl get into a car with a suspicious man — leading authorities to where Alcala had taken his 8-year-old victim — who called again to suggest they should look at the perpetrator of that crime for this one.
Once police dug up Alcala’s mug shot, he looked a lot like the composite drawn up with the help of witnesses who told police they’d seen a man photographing Samsoe by the Huntington Beach Pier the day she disappeared.
He was arrested July 24, 1979.
What happened to Rodney Alcala?
Alcala was found guilty of Samsoe’s murder in 1980 and given the death penalty.
His conviction was overturned four years later after the California Supreme Court ruled that introducing evidence of his previous crimes at trial had been prejudicial — but he was retried, re-convicted and re-sentenced to death in 1986.
A federal appeals court overturned his conviction yet again in 2003 and he was granted a new trial, but he remained locked up.
With the help of advances in DNA testing, Alcala, then 66, was convicted in Orange County, Calif., of the 1970s-era murders of Barcomb, Wixted, Parenteau and Lamb in 2010, bite marks containing traces of Alcala’s saliva and other bodily fluids from the killer connecting him to all four victims.
During the same proceedings, he was also found guilty of Samsoe’s murder for a third time.
Alcala, who defended himself and maintained he had an alibi for Samsoe’s disappearance (but did not offer any defense regarding the other victims), was again sentenced to death.
“There are 36 people now that all agree that this man deserves to die,” Samsoe’s brother told the Los Angeles Times, referring to the three 12-person juries who’d arrived at the same conclusion.
In 2012, again linked by DNA, Alcala pleaded guilty to the New York murders of Crilley in 1971 and Hover in 1977. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
Alcala spent the rest of his days behind bars at Corcoran State Prison before dying of natural causes at a nearby hospital in July 2021. He was 77.
“The planet is a better place without him, that’s for sure,” Tali Shapiro, the 8-year-old girl Alcala assaulted in 1968, told the New York Times after his death.
“I know it’s awful what happened to me, but I’ve never identified with it,” the 61-year-old added. “I’ve moved on with my life, so this doesn’t really affect me. It’s a long time coming, but he’s got his karma.”
“Woman of the Hour” is streaming on Netflix.
