The second time I met Rodney Alcala was on March 23, 2013. We were inside one of the North Infirmary Command buildings on Rikers Island, two months after he’d been sentenced for raping and murdering Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Jane Hover, both women in their early 20s and living in New York City, in the 1970s. He was trailed by a prison guard, his baggy dove-gray jumpsuit hung loosely around his bony frame. His once black hair had turned the color of steel wool, still in greasy ringlets streaming past his shoulders. He was so much shorter than I remembered. Glasses that had been round wires were now rectangular. As he stiffly shuffled toward me, I felt stage fright — then a surge of real fright when I realized he wasn’t handcuffed.
The first time was in April 1969, on a wet day on St. Marks Place in the East Village. He introduced himself as Jon Burger; I was 14 years old and he was 25. Four-decades-plus later, I learned his real name when it flashed across a television screen beneath his familiar face and orange jumpsuit: “Rodney Alcala, The Dating Game Serial Killer, Sentenced to Death.” It couldn’t be the same man, I’d thought to myself. But after hours of Googling I had to accept the truth: Jon Burger was an alias; he was the winning bachelor on The Dating Game nine years after I met him; and he is believed to have been one of the most prolific of serial killers, officially responsible for at least seven murders with authorities estimating his real body count at about 130. I am not one of those people who are fascinated by serial killers. I don’t even like horror films. But I couldn’t stop searching, reading, asking. When Alcala died in 2021, I thought I was finally done. Then the new, inescapably popular Netflix film Woman of the Hour, directed by and starring Anna Kendrick, showed me that there are some experiences that never really go away.
Detective Wendell Stradford, the NYPD officer largely responsible for extraditing Alcala from California to New York City, had encouraged my visit to that grimy jail. After reading about his involvement with the case, I’d reached out to Stradford on Facebook and, over the course of a few months, we had several conversations, both about my own story and talking over the case in detail. I especially wanted to know whether there were any others who had gotten as close as I had to such danger and walked away.
“Go,” he’d told me, “it can give you closure.”
I didn’t need it. I didn’t consider myself one of his “survivors.” Still, I wanted to know so badly why he didn’t kill me. I felt a driving need to see where it would lead, if anywhere. Enlightenment?
We sat down in a partitioned-off side area on low plastic, primary-colored chairs, so close that my nose twitched with the stench of his alkaline prison soap. The guard said he’d be outside and walked away. Alcala smiled at me, thin lips concealing the same teeth that had bitten off nipples according to the FBI reports I had read. He seemed excited, thrilled even — I could have been a beautifully wrapped present he was about to dismantle.
I had rehearsed my lines and was about to start. But Alcala had his own agenda. In those long fingers that had committed such brutality, he held a piece of paper. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who wanted something.
“I have a problem,” he said, jabbing the paper with his finger. “It says right here that I was supposed to be sent back to San Quentin. Rikers is no San Quentin.” His complaining was robotic. It was too cold. No library. No computers. The food was making him “fat.”
“I can’t help you,” I told him.
“You’re not a lawyer?”
“No.”
“Social worker?” he asked.
“No.”
He was not happy. “Why are you here?”
“I met you in 1969.”
“That was a long time ago.” I remember thinking that his face registered no surprise.
“Yes, it was,” I said.
“Where did we meet?” he asked.
“The East Side Bookstore, on St. Marks Place.”
“That’s when I was in New York?”
“That’s right,” I said.
He liked that. Big smile. “I had a great time during those years.”
Alcala was killing and raping during those years, which included the two women who were victims of the crimes he had plead guilty to and was redundantly sentenced to life for in New York, a ruling that followed a prior death-row sentencing in California.
He approached me as I was pulling a copy of The Plague off the bookshelf. “Camus?” He asked me and I turned around to see a tall man with a strong Adam’s apple. Handsome, though there was something chilling about the way his eyes didn’t reflect light. He scared me. I had wanted to spend time in the bookstore while I waited for my dad to get a haircut — or, as I suspected and wrote about for New York in 2011, some hanky-panky — a few blocks away, but I ran downstairs to the register, paid, and left. He followed me out and wouldn’t stop talking about having just come from California, about NYU, about the baked apples at the restaurant we were passing. He then asked to photograph me. What a line, I remember thinking, I’m not that dumb. At 14, though, I didn’t know I had a right to say “no.”
“You wanted to photograph me,” I told the 70-year-old Alcala sitting across from me. He’d said something about my red hair, the black of my rain slicker. The colors against the gray day.
The color argument won me over. And so he led me to an apartment building on 6th Street between a shul and the drug-detox center Odyssey House. Alcala had wanted to shoot in his apartment; I’d resisted, so he suggested his roof.
A storm was threatening and at the first dramatic jag of lightning up there, Alcala had turned demonic, yelling with violence to help him carry equipment down to the apartment. I still remember clearly the feeling of knowing something was wrong inside of that apartment. Terrifyingly wrong. It was a mess — women’s clothes everywhere. He pushed a packet of Polaroids into my hand and went to the bathroom. Women. Dead and posed. Alive and posed. Drugged and posed. Naked. Posed. The photos fell from my hands as I sprang for the door.
“Why are you here?” Alcala finally asked in an irritated tone.
“I wanted to know if you remembered me.”
He paused, then repeated, “It was a long time ago.”
“Yes,” I said, “it was. But my story was a little unusual.”
“What was unusual about it?”
“I went back for my book.”
He was confused.
By the time Alcala’s bathroom door opened, I recalled to him, I was still struggling with the door and turned around to see him heading in my direction, naked from the waist down.
“Naked from the waist down?” He repeated back to me.
I did not want to say what I said next, to titillate him in any way, but I couldn’t figure out how else to communicate that his penis was hard and pointed in my direction.
“And you had an erection.”
“Strange,” he said, disconnectedly, his affect changed. His eyes were still hollow, I remember, but he looked the tiniest bit concerned.
Miraculously, I’d somehow gotten the door open and fled. But two flights down: My Camus! I sped back up. Furiously, I pounded on the door. “Book, please!”
I’m still stunned by this epic stupidity. At that age I knew pain but not evil. My despair over leaving the book behind, and the money spent on it, obliterated any fear. The man who opened the door was different, still naked, almost gentle. I thought pervert, not killer. He handed me the book. I snatched it from him and sped down the stairs as he pleaded, “Just let me masturbate, I won’t hurt you.” I was so sheltered, from an Orthodox Jewish household, I had no idea what he meant.
I had posited to Detective Stradford if the reason Alcala let me out — because he easily could have prevented my escape — was because he hadn’t yet turned into a killer. My earlier research had all but told me otherwise: By the time we’d met, Alcala was already wanted for the assault on 8-year-old Tali Shapiro in Los Angeles. “He had already killed for sure by 1969,” Stradford told me, adding that some of his victims might have escaped with their life, but brutal rape and torture were certain. Stradford stated, “You were just his type, a young, tiny dancer.”
“When we met,” I told Alcala, “It was only six months after Tali Shapiro.”
I can still picture him flinching at her name. “I didn’t hurt her as much as they said I did.”
“Come on,” I blurted out, suddenly infuriated. She was in a coma for 32 days and spent months in the hospital.
“They lied,” he flared.
I knew he could ignite. I had seen it in the past. Even though he looked frail, his anger and adrenaline could make him forget his surroundings. I softened my voice but still pushed back, “They lied?”
“They said I did things. I can’t remember.”
“You can’t?”
“Nothing.”
Could it have been possible that he killed during fugue experiences? If that had been true, how grossly unjust that he should be spared the memory of what he did and the pain he caused.
Alcala leaned into me and asked, “Did I hurt you?”
“No,” I said. “You didn’t hurt me.”
Gruffly, the guard interrupted this, standing in the doorway. “Out! Bus is leaving.” I felt if I didn’t make that bus back to the Rikers reception, I would be trapped. Still, I also didn’t feel finished. “Perhaps I’ll see you in San Quentin?” (Thinking Alcala had a rapport with me, Stradford supported making another visit. “Perhaps you’ll find clues to more bodies,” he’d told me. And so I did, in fact, visit him at the California prison in the spring of 2014. I thought I would turn this all into a memoir but shortly after that second sit-down, I gave up on the book notion. I no longer had the stomach for it.) As if he were my new best friend, he said,“That would be nice.”
At the locker where I’d stored my jacket, my hands were shaking uncontrollably. Seeing my incapacity, the presiding officer, very kindly, helped me. I ran out into the cold, not taking the time to put it on, and stepped into the busted shuttle bus that would take me back to Rikers Island’s main building where I could collect my other personal belongings and get the hell out of there. There were two other people inside, a man who looked to be in his 30s and with him a young girl in bouncy pigtails. I sat down on a ripped seat near the driver and stared in front of me trying to remember everything Alcala said, as if my brain was a notepad. I was deep into it when the other passenger came toward me.
“Ma’am. Do you mind me asking you a question?”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Why did you go and visit that guy?”
“How do you know who I was seeing?” I asked him.
His brother was in the same building, he explained. He saw the guard leading Alcala out. “No one talks to him. He never gets visitors.”
“I once escaped him.”
His eyes went large. “Oh, Jesus,” he said.
“Why come back? To yell at him?”
“To find out why he didn’t kill me.”
“And?” he asked.
In the end, Alcala didn’t give me an answer. I was just one of the hundreds he went out fishing for, and one of the few he threw back into the river. Whether it was because I didn’t cry, because I was stupidly defiant, or because of something completely random, it came down to one thing.
“I just got lucky,” I said.
The child came up to us then and sat next to him. She must have been 8 years old or so, the same age as Tali Shapiro. She was dressed in pink down to the bubbles she blew. He drew her, his brother’s daughter, close to him, protectively and said, “You really did.” As we were driven through the barbed-wired campus, we stayed silent.