The California Supreme Court Wednesday denied serial killer Rodney Alcala's request to block his extradition to New York, where he is accused of murdering two young women in the 1970s.
Prosecutors in New York City filed extradition papers after Alcala, who is sitting on California's death row, was convicted in Orange County in March 2010 of murdering five females in the '70s, including 12-year-old Robin Samsoe of Huntington Beach.
]
It marked the third time Alcala, who is adept at filing paperwork that gums up the legal system, had been convicted of killing Samsoe, as two previous convictions were overturned on appeal.
Matt Murphy, the veteran Orange County homicide prosecutor, will travel to New York on his own dime to help the prosecution there, according to an Orange County Register report. Because New York does not have the death penalty, Alcala will likely return to California no matter what the outcome is back east.
During the 1970s, Alcala, a photographer and onetime contestant on The Dating Game, bounced between California and New York, where he went by John Berger.
He is accused of raping and strangling TWA flight attendant Cornelia Crilley, whose body was
found in her Upper East Side apartment in June 1971.
His second alleged NYC victim, Ellen Hover, went missing from her Manhattan residence that same year, before Alcala was sent back to California to be prosecuted for a 1968 rape in Los Angeles. Hover's body was found in Westchester County in 1977.
Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
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.