New Netflix movie Woman of the Hour tells the unlikely story of American serial killer Rodney Alcala who ended up as a contestant on a dating show.
Anna Kendrick plays Sheryl Bradshaw, the single woman on the 1970s blind-dating show The Dating Game, who was eventually paired with Alcala.
Kendrick also directed the film, which was released on the streaming service on 18 October.
Speaking about her reason for taking on the role and the film, she said: “I really like the complicated journey of a woman who is shrinking herself and being very pleasing and then manages to rebel and take back some power.”
In reality, Sheryl Bradshaw managed to escape from the man dubbed the “Dating Game Killer”, but others were not so lucky.
We take a look at the true story of serial killer and sex offender Alcala.
Who was Rodney Alcala?
Rodrigo Jacques Alcala-Buquor was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1943. The son of Mexican-American parents, he spent part of his childhood in Mexico before moving to Los Angeles with his mother.
Academically gifted, he enrolled in the US army as a paratrooper at the age of 17 but went AWOL three years into his service and was discharged on medical grounds. A military psychiatrist diagnosed him with an antisocial personality disorder.
After leaving the army, he graduated from the UCLA School of Fine Arts and later studied film under Roman Polanski at New York University (NYU).
In September 1968, a witness saw Alcala lure eight-year-old Tali Shapiro into his Hollywood apartment. Police found her at the flat, raped, beaten but still alive. Alcala had fled the scene.
To evade arrest, Alcala moved to New York where he enrolled at NYU using the name John Berger. While in the city, he raped and murdered 23-year-old Trans World Airlines flight attendant Cornelia Crilley in 1971.
Shortly afterwards the FBI caught up with him and he was extradited to California, where he was convicted of child molestation and sentenced to three years for his attack on Tali Shapiro.
Released in 1974, he was subsequently re-arrested for assaulting a 13-year-old girl and spent a further two years in jail.
After his second release, he was permitted back to New York where he killed Ellen Jane Hover, the 23-year-old daughter of nightclub owner Herman Hover and goddaughter of actor Dean Martin in 1977.
After killing Hover, he moved back to LA to work for the Los Angeles Times as a typesetter. During this time he convinced hundreds of young people he was a professional photographer and took nude photos of them for his “portfolio”.
He murdered again in 1977. First, Jill Terry Barcomb, an 18-year-old girl from Oneida, New York, disposing of her body on a dirt path near Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles.
Then 27-year-old nurse Georgia Marie Wixted was discovered dead in her Malibu apartment, and Alcala’s DNA was found at the scene.
In 1978, he famously took part in the television game show The Dating Game, winning a date with aspiring actress Sheryl Bradshaw.
Soon after his television appearance, he killed Charlotte Lee Lamb, a 31-year-old legal secretary from Santa Monica, in the laundry room of the apartment complex where she was living.
The following year in February 1979, he picked up 15-year-old hitch-hiker Monique Hoyt in Riverside County, California, and raped and beat her. Remarkably, she managed to escape when he pulled in at a petrol station.
He murdered Jill Marie Parenteau, a 21-year-old computer keypunch operator, at her flat in Burbank a few months later in June.
And the same month, 12-year-old Robin Christine Samsoe disappeared as she rode a borrowed bicycle from her Huntington Beach home to her ballet class. Her body was found 12 days later in the Los Angeles foothills. She had been beaten, raped and stabbed.
When detectives circulated a sketch of the suspect, Alcala’s parole officer recognised him and he was arrested.
A subsequent a search of Alcala’s mother’s house led to a storage locker in Seattle, where officers found hundreds of photographs of unidentified women, girls, boys and jewellery he is believed to have kept as trophies.
What happened on The Dating Game?
In 1978, Alcala appeared on an episode of The Dating Game. He was 35 years old at the time and had already served two prison sentences.
The show featured a single woman contestant, for this episode Sheryl Bradshaw, who was paired with three eligible single men hidden behind a screen.
She had to ask each man a series of questions before selecting one contestant for a date at the end of the episode.
Bradshaw picked Alcala and the pair were given tennis lessons and tickets to the Los Angeles amusement park Magic Mountain for their date.
However, the date never went ahead as she refused to go out with him.
She reportedly told contestant co-ordinator Ellen Metzger that there were “weird vibes” coming off of him and she was “not comfortable” spending time with him.
How was Rodney Alcala caught and what happened to him?
Alcala was finally arrested after murdering 12-year-old Robin Samsoe.
He was charged and went on trial for her murder and was found guilty in May 1980, and sentenced to death.
However, the verdict was overturned in 1984 because jurors had been informed of his previous convictions. He was tried again in 1986, convicted and sentenced to death and this was overturned in 2001.
In 2003, he was charged with the murders of four other victims: Jill Barcomb, Georgia Wixted, Charlotte Lamb and Jill Parenteau.
And in 2010, he went on trial for all five murders. Defending himself at the trial, he even showed a clip from The Dating Game.
He was convicted of all five murder and sentenced to death for a third time.
Two years later in 2012, he pleaded guilty in New York to the murders of Crilley and Ms Hover and was sentenced to life in prison.
And then in 2016, Wyoming prosecutors charged him with the murder of 28-year-old Christine Ruth Thornton, a Texan who was pregnant at the time of her death in 1977.
Alcala was reported to be too ill to stand trial on the charges in Wyoming. He died, aged 77, of natural causes on 24 July, 2021 at a hospital in Kings County, California.
Although only officially linked to eight cases, police believe he may have had up to 130 victims.
In March 2010, police departments in California and New York released 120 of Alcala’s photographs to try and identify the people in them.
