Convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala, 77, died of natural causes in a California hospital on Saturday at 1:43 am, according to California prison officials.
He was awaiting a death sentence at Corcoran State Prison.
Alcala was convicted of killing seven women in the 1970s, with five murders in California and two in New York. His youngest murder victim was just 12-years-old, whom he abducted as she made her way to ballet practice in Los Angeles in 1979.
He later earned the moniker ‘the Dating Game Killer’, and was known for biting his dead victims' naked bodies before photographing them in sexually explicit poses.
He has been linked to over 130 women and children’s deaths, although his exact number of victims remains unknown.
The 'Dating Game Killer' Rodney Alcala, 77, died on Saturday of natural causes while awaiting a death sentence in a California prison
Investigators said Alcala used his camera to lure his victims
Alcala pictured during his third trial in the early 2000s, after appealing his murder charge in the death of a 12-year-old girl
The serial killer has been convicted of killing seven women in the 1970s, with five murders in California and two in New York
Alcala’s first known committed crime occurred in 1968, when an eye-witness called police after seeing him lure an eight-year-old girl named Tali Shapiro into his Hollywood apartment.
When police arrived, they found Talia alive but she had been raped brutally beaten with a steel bar and was laying in a pool of her own blood.
Alcala had fled the scene and later left the state, enrolling in NYU to study film under Roman Polanski, under the pseudonym ‘John Berger’.
In June 1971, 23-year-old TWA flight attendant Cornelia Michel Crilley was found raped and strangled in her Manhattan apartment. Her death would go unsolved until 2011 when DNA evidence linked Alcala to the killing.
In the meantime, Alcala was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list that same year. He was arrested within months after children at a New Hampshire arts camp where he was working as a counselor recognized his image on a wanted poster.
He was extradited back to California to face trial for attempted murder, but Shapiro’s parents refused to let the girl testify at trial and he later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of assault, securing parole after just 17 months in 1974.
Alcala appeared as Bachelor Number One on the show winning the affections of bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw
During the episode, Bradshaw had asked questions such as, ‘What’s your best time?’ and ‘I’m serving you for dinner. What are you called and what do you look like?’ Alcala responded to the last question by replying, ‘I’m called the banana and I look good'
Bradshaw ended up choosing Alcala at the end of the show, but she later backed out of their scheduled date - tennis lessons and a trip to Magic Mountain – because she got an uneasy feeling from him
Billing himself as a professional fashion photographer, Alcala, who is said to have an IQ above 160, convinced hundreds of young men and women to pose naked for him for his ‘portfolio’.
He would
