In Netflix’s Woman of the Hour, Anna Kendrick stars and makes her directorial debut in the chilling thriller. The film is based on the true story of American serial killer and sex offender Rodney Alcala, who shockingly won The Dating Game in 1978.
The movie begins with Rodney Alcala photographing a woman he is about to assault in Wyoming, then shifts between various points in his life and the women he encounters. One of those women is Sheryl Bradshaw, portrayed by Kendrick, a contestant on The Dating Game. Her character is based on Cheryl Bradshaw, who, in real life, almost went on a date with Alcala after he appeared as a bachelor on the show.
Alcala killed his first victim almost a decade before he was cast on The Dating Game and continued to commit murders until his arrest the following year. “In true crime circles you'll sometimes hear people say, ‘Oh yeah, he’s kind of like Ted Bundy.’ But the truth of the matter is, he’s kind of the opposite,” screenwriter Ian McDonald, who stumbled upon the Dating Game story on a true crime website, said in an interview with Netflix’s Tudum.
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“Ted Bundy was a chameleon. He was really good at pretending to be something he wasn’t. And Rodney Alcala really seems to have flouted a lot of his worst tendencies,” he added. “It wasn’t that he was being sneaky, it’s that other people were kind of actively looking the other way.”
Netflix’s Woman of the Hour may leave viewers with lingering questions, such as how Alcala—who had previously served time for child molestation—landed on the popular dating show. Read on to learn what happened to Alcala and how he ultimately became one of America’s most notorious serial killers.
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Who Was Rodney Alcala?
Rodrigo Jacques Alcala-Buquor was born on August 23, 1943, and spent his early childhood in Mexico before moving to Los Angeles at age 8. At 17, he enlisted in the Army but was discharged in 1965 following a nervous breakdown and allegations of sexual misconduct, according to CBS News.
Alcala graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a fine arts degree in 1968. After committing his first attack, he relocated to New York University under the alias "John Berger." An amateur photographer, Alcala often took pictures of his victims before or after their murders, with most of his crimes occurring in California and New York.
What TV Show Was Rodney Alcala On?
In 1978, at the age of 35, Rodney Alcala appeared on an episode of The Dating Game. The show featured a bachelorette who was paired with three eligible bachelors hidden behind a wall. She would ask each suitor a few questions before ultimately selecting one contestant for a date at the end of the episode.
Alcala was introduced on the saucy ABC show as a “successful photographer who got his start when his father found him in the darkroom at the age of 13, fully developed,” according to People. Bradshaw asked him questions like, “I’m serving you for dinner. What are you called and what do you look like?” Alcala answered, “I’m called the banana and I look good.”
When Bradshaw asked him to be more descriptive, Alcala provocatively replied, “Peel me.” Reflecting on the exchange, producer David Greenfield later admitted to ABC News, “In retrospect, it sounds horrible.” He added, “But at the time, 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.’”
At the end of the episode, Bradshaw selected Alcala as her winning bachelor. The pair were given tennis lessons and tickets to the Los Angeles amusement park Magic Mountain. However, their date never happened. Bradshaw expressed her concerns to contestant coordinator Ellen Metzger, saying, “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.”
The show’s producer, Mike Metzger, shared with 20/20 that he felt conflicted about choosing Alcala. “He had a mystique about him that I found uncomfortable,” he recalled.
At the time, there was no technology available for conducting background checks or accessing national databases, leaving the show’s team unaware of Alcala’s criminal history, which included an attempted murder charge involving an 8-year-old girl, according to ABC News.
What Was Rodney Alcala Convicted Of?
Serial killer Rodney Alcala was convicted of killing seven women in the 1970s, but investigators say that the actual victim count may never be known.
His first murder charge came in 1979 for the death of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe, who went missing in June while on her way to ballet class. Two weeks later, her remains were discovered in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles.
Alcala was sentenced to death for Samsoe’s murder in 1980, but this judgment was reversed in 1984, leading to a retrial. In 1986, he was sentenced to death again, only for that ruling to be overturned in 2003.
A breakthrough in the case occurred when Orange County prosecutors uncovered evidence linking Alcala to the murders of four other women between 1977 and 1979: 18-year-old Jill Barcomb, 21-year-old Jill Parenteau, 27-year-old Georgia Wixted, and 32-year-old Charlotte Lamb.
The evidence, found in a Seattle storage locker that belonging to Alcala, included hundreds of photographs of unidentified women, girls, and boys, some of whom were nude or in compromising positions, per ABC News. They also believed he kept jewelry as trophies, like gold ball earrings that matched the description of those worn by Robin when she disappeared.
In 2010, Alcala was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death once again, according to NBC News. During the trial, he represented himself and delivered a puzzling defense, which included questioning the mother of one of his victims, playing an Arlo Guthrie ballad, and showing a clip from The Dating Game.
In the following years, Alcala faced additional murder charges in other states. In New York, he was sentenced to 25 years to life in 2012 for the murders of 23-year-old Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Jane Hover, both of whom were killed in the 1970s. In 2016, Wyoming prosecutors charged him with the murder of 28-year-old Christine Ruth Thornton, a Texas native who was pregnant at the time of her death in 1977.
Did Anyone Survive Rodney Alcala?
Fortunately, at least two girls managed to escape Rodney Alcala. Tali Shapiro and Morgan Rowan were able to survive his brutal attacks, which occurred a decade before he appeared on The Dating Game.
Rowan was 16 years old and Shapiro 8 years old when Alcala raped and attempted to kill each of them, according to People. Shapiro was walking to school on Sept. 25, 1968, when Alcala pulled up and offered her a ride. She initially said no, but when Alcala said he knew her parents, she agreed.
“He drove me to his house. I followed him in, and that’s all I remember. There was nothing else to remember,” she told PEOPLE Magazine Investigates: Surviving a Serial Killer. “He obviously hit me over the head right after that, and that was it.” Alcala raped Shapiro and beat her with a metal bar.
“[After the attack, I needed] over 27 stitches in the back of my head,” Shapiro said at a 2010 sentencing hearing for Alcala, per ABC7. “He hit me right over the head, in the back of the head.”
Meanwhile, Rowan told PEOPLE Magazine Investigates that she met Alcala when she was 13 years old in the parking lot of a teen nightclub with her friends in 1965. She recalled that Alcala kept looking over at them and smiling. Rowan scratched his arm with her fingernails to get his attention, and when he told her to stop, she didn’t. He grabbed her arm and pulled her into an alley behind the club.
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“I think he slammed my head into the wall because I was unconscious,” she said. When she woke up, a large industrial dumpster that Alcala had pushed against her was on her chest. She screamed for help, and the owner of the club and his wife came and helped her. Although she survived the incident, Rowan said she encountered him again three years later in 1968.
Before she was slated to move to New York, Rowan and her friends went out for a going-out party on the Sunset Strip. Alcala showed up and eventually drove the group of people to his house, where he gave them marijuana. Alcala then grabbed Rowan and pulled her into a bedroom.
“He took his belt off and wrapped it around his fist. I tried to be brave and said, ‘No, you can’t keep me here,’ and he just punched me between the eyes as hard as he could,” she said. Rowan added that her head hit the wall, and she fell to her knees and saw stars but was still conscious. Alcala had a knife and cut the tie of her blouse around her neck.
“I could feel blood start to flow down my chest,” she recalled, “and I remember thinking, ‘He cut my neck. I’m going to die.’” He punched her in the stomach, then took his knife to cut off the rest of her clothes and raped her.
“His face was red and swollen, his eyes were glassy,” she said, unable to get up or move. “He was out of control, like an animal ... I wanted it to be over. I wasn’t praying to live. I was praying to die.” Thankfully, Rowan’s friend Mike broke into the bedroom through the window, which is when Alcala stood up with blood all over his shirt and said, “Take her.”
“If my friend Mike hadn’t broken in through the window, I would not be here today,” Rowan told People. “I have no doubt he was going to kill me.”
Where Is Rodney Alcala Now?
On July 24, 2021, Rodney Alcala died of natural causes while awaiting execution in California at the age of 77. For years, he was housed at a prison in Corcoran, where he received around-the-clock medical care, according to The Associated Press. He passed away at a hospital near Corcoran State Prison, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement.
At the time of his death, Alcala's execution in California had been postponed indefinitely due to a moratorium on the death penalty instituted by the state in 2019.
Woman of the Hour is streaming on Netflix. Watch the official trailer below.