Serial sex murderer Rodney Alcala was sentenced to 25 years to life today for taking the lives of two Manhattan women, both age 23, in the 1970s — a pair of cold cases resurrected by the Manhattan DA’s office thanks to old-fashioned legwork and paperwork.
Alcala is already sentenced to death for his 2010 conviction of an LA-area spree of rape and mutilation that left four women and a 12-year-old girl dead, and the heinousness of his cross-country murder career along with an emotion-wrought victim impact statement by one of the two East Coast victims’ sister brought his Manhattan judge to tears.
“I want to thank the family and friends of the two victims for their eloquent statements,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Bonnie Wittner told the courtroom, which was packed with friends and family of TWA flight attendant Cornelia Crilley, who Alcala murdered in 1971, and Ellen Hover, the daughter of a Hollywood nightclub owner, who he murdered in 1977.
“This kind of case is the kind I’ve never experienced and hope to never again” the judge said before turning away from her microphone breaking into tears on the bench for several seconds. “Sorry,” the judge said, gathering herself and continuing. “I just want to say I hope the family finds some peace and solace.
“In 30 years,” she added, “I’ve never had a case like this.”
It’s a token sentence for a monster already sentenced to lethal injection in California for his Feb., 2010 conviction on the LA-area sex slays, committed between 1977 and 1979. Alcala will now be returned to San Quentin, where he is appealing his death sentence.
But for the families and friends of the two murdered Manhattan women, the chance to confront the gray, mop-haired Alcala, and to see him led in and out of court in handcuffs and an orange prison jumpsuit, offered a measure of comfort and closure, they said.
“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.
“And Mr. Alcala, it breaks my hear to think that you were the last person to see that smile– because she would have smiled at you.”
Catching Alcala had been a priority when Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance took office in Jan. 2010. In the ensuing year, prosecutors from his Cold Case Unit, working with detectives from Cold Case Homicide Squad and the city Medical Examiner’s office poured over thousands of pages of transcripts and interviewed scores of witnesses, officials said.
Investigators here already knew that Alcala was using the name “John Berger” in New York — the name that was found in Hover’s date book entry for the day she disappeared. And as far back as 2004, investigators knew that a fingerprint found on an envelope under Crilley’s strangled, beaten and bitten body was Alcala’s.
But through old-fashioned detective work, investigators were able to establish an ironclad chronology putting Alcala in New York on the days the women disappeared.
Meanwhile, Alcala was also 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 liked to viciously bite his victims on their breasts — could now come into any potential Manhattan murder trial as fact, not theory.
“Cold cases are not forgotten cases, and you do not get away with murder,” Vance said after the sentencing, a message he had also pressed when his office indicted Alcala in Jan. 2011.
“These crimes eat away at surviving friends and relatives, who wonder if their loved ones would be alive if families had done something different,” the DA told reporters.
Alcala’s plea to the Hover and Crilley slayings are, Vance noted, “the first acknowledgement of murder that Rodney Alcala has ever made.”
Alcala once appeared on the “Dating Game” and won the date. But the featured single gal found him too creepy, and they never actually went out.