Manhattan
District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. announced at a news
conference Thursday that convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala will be extradited from
California to the Big Apple to face trial for the murders of two women in the 1970s.
Alcala, 67, is currently rotting on death row at San
Quentin Prison for the sexual assault, torture and strangling of four Los
Angeles County women and 12-year-old Robin Samsoe, of Huntington Beach, also in the
1970s (See Christine Pelisek's “The Fine Art of Killing,”Jan. 21, 2010.)
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Simone Wilson gets the scoop for our sister site, LA Weekly.
Alcala's latest alleged victims are two 23-year-old women: flight attendant Cornelia Crilley, whose nude and battered body was found in her New York City apartment in June 1971, and Ellen Jane Hover, who disappeared from her apartment
in June 1977 and whose skeletal remains were found on the Rockefeller estate in
Westchester County a year later. She was the daughter of the owner of legendary Hollywood nightclub Ciro's.
Alcala has always been the prime suspect in Hover's disappearance and murder, a fact NYC tabloids have long exploited. Hover had left her apartment to meet a photographer for lunch before she went missing. Alcala lived on the East Coast as photographer Robert Berger while a fugitive from Los Angeles for the 1968 rape and beating of an 8-year-old girl in Hollywood.
He admitted to detectives at the time that he had been with Hover the day she disappeared but claimed he did not know what happened to her. He refused to take a polygraph, and by the time Hover's remains were found, he was already back in LA. He was never charged.
Last year's third trial, conviction and death sentence of Alcala in Orange County led detectives in New York to reopen their cold-case murder files on the two women. Technical errors discovered on appeal led to the multiple trials.
New York detectives interviewed dozens of witnesses and collected evidence from California law enforcement. Alcala was linked to Crilley's murder through DNA evidence, according to Vance.
If he is convicted in New York, Alcala could be sentenced to an additional 25-years-to-life term in prison.
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.