When the cameras rolled on ABC’s The Dating Game in 1978, millions tuned in expecting a harmless dose of televised flirtation. What they got instead was a real-life nightmare in disguise. It was a serial killer smiling his way into America’s living rooms.
25-year-old Rodney Alcala looked the part of a ’70s heartthrob. Tall, tanned, and smooth-talking. He introduced himself as a “photographer who likes to take pictures of beautiful women.” Sitting behind the partition, bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw giggled through the show’s cheeky questions as Alcala answered with unsettling confidence.
But the laughter stopped once the cameras did. Though Alcaca had won, Bradshaw later refused to go on the date, telling producers that something about him felt “off.” Her instincts were right. At the time, Alcala was already in the middle of a years-long killing spree across California and New York.
A monster behind the mask
Born on Aug. 23, 1943, Alcala once studied film under Roman Polanski and worked as a typesetter for the Los Angeles Times. But beneath that façade, he had already been arrested for luring an eight-year-old girl into his apartment in 1968. Though she survived, Alcala fled, changed his name, and slipped through cracks in the justice system.
He also earned a degree from NYU and even joined a summer camp as a counselor while still a wanted man. By the time he appeared on The Dating Game, police believed he had already killed multiple women. He would charm his victims, often offering to photograph them, then brutally assault and murder them. His apartment was later found filled with more than a thousand photographs of women and children, many of whom remain unidentified till now.
Alcala’s arrest
Alcala was arrested in July 1979 after a 12-year-old girl, Robin Samsoe, vanished while riding her bike in Huntington Beach. Her body was found in the mountains ten days later. A trail of evidence led to Alcala, and during the trial, investigators linked him to several other unsolved murders. He was convicted and sentenced to death in June 1980, though the sentence was overturned twice before being reinstated in 2010.
He was conclusively linked to nine murders, but the true number of his victims remains unknown and could be as high as 130. After the shocking revelation of his crimes, The Dating Game episode became one of the most haunting clips in television history. Once introduced as a successful photographer, Alcala has been a smiling murderer hiding in plain sight all this time.
He died in prison in 2021, at the age of 77, never expressing remorse. The game show that once made him a household name now is a chilling reminder of how easily evil can masquerade as charm and how one woman’s intuition may have saved her life.
