A judge in Northern California has ruled Rodney Alcala, the serial killer sitting on Death Row for killing a 12-year-old Huntington Beach girl and four women in Los Angeles County in the 1970s, can be extradited to New York to stand trial for two murders there.
Alcala is currently scheduled to be flown to New York on April 6, although a higher court could still intervene to stop it.
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Recalling the reams of paper the 68-year-old filed while jailed in Orange County or imprisoned at San Quentin, you just know the jailhouse lawyer will keep fighting extradition. That or sue to get another ply of toilet paper.
Alcala was indicted last year for the rapes and strangulation deaths of Cornelia Crilley, a 23-year-old flight attendant found dead in her Manhattan apartment in 1971, and Ellen Hover, also 23 and the daughter of a Hollywood nightclub owner. Her body was discovered near her family's Westchester County estate in 1977. Authorities claim Alcala was in New York at the time of both slayings.
He was twice convicted of murdering the LA County victims and Surf City's Robin Samsoe, who was kidnapped while biking to a ballet class, but both convictions were later overturned. The third time was a charm for Orange County prosecutors two years ago when they won conviction again.
Assistant District Attorney Dan Wagner, who leads the Orange County agency's Homicide
Unit, tells the Orange County Register he is fine with Alcala
being extradited to New York “so
that the loved ones of those victims can get closure.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.