Even the judge cried.
Tears flowed throughout a packed Manhattan courtroom yesterday as serial killer Rodney Alcala was sentenced to 25 years to life yesterday for raping, torturing and strangling two women, both 23, in the 1970s.
Dubbed “The Dating Game Killer” for his 1978 TV game-show appearance as “Bachelor No. 1,” the mop-haired Alcala now returns to San Quentin prison in California, where he will languish on death row for a ’70s West Coast murder spree that claimed four women and a 12-year-old girl.
“This is the kind of case I’ve never experienced, and hope to never again,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Bonnie Wittner told yesterday’s courtroom audience, which was packed with family members and friends of the two young New York victims.
Then the judge turned away from her microphone and broke into sobs before gathering herself and continuing.
“Sorry,” she said. “In 30 years, I’ve never had a case like this.”
The first of Alcala’s New York victims was TWA flight attendant Cornelia Crilley, whom Alcala strangled with pantyhose in 1971, leaving her raped, bitten and beaten body in her Upper West Side apartment.
The second was Ellen Hover, the daughter of a Hollywood nightclub owner, whose strangled body was found a year later in Westchester County, scavenged by animals in a wooded park.
The Crilley and Hover slayings lingered unsolved for all these years as authorities in California pursued a slow prosecution of their own cases.
But convicting Alcala became a priority when Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. took office in January 2010. In the ensuing year, prosecutors from his Cold Case Unit, working with detectives from the NYPD’s Cold Case Homicide Squad, pored over thousands of pages of transcripts and interviewed scores of witnesses, officials said.
Meanwhile, Alcala was convicted in California, just one month after Vance took office. That gave the case its biggest evidentiary boost.
All of the modus-operandi evidence from the California murders — including that Alcala viciously bit his victims on their breasts — could now come into any potential Manhattan murder trial as fact, not accusation.
While yesterday’s sentence is redundant, as Alcala is already facing lethal injection in California, the victims’ loved ones who filled the courtroom yesterday said it offered some comfort.
“Mr. Alcala, I want you to know that you broke my parents’ hearts and they never really recovered,” Crilley’s sister, Katie Stigall, 63, of Rockland County, said in an emotional victim-impact statement.
Like many in the audience, Hover’s childhood friend Anita Feinberg said it was chilling to see Alcala in person for the first time.
She described him as: “Lifeless. Motionless. I don’t think I even saw him breathe.”
“It meant a lot to me,” she said of the judge’s reaction. “I’ve actually never, even on television, seen a judge cry.”