Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance announced indictment of serial sex killer Rodney Alcala this afternoon in a pair of 30-year-old murders — meanwhile deflecting questions of the fiscal propriety of extraditing, prosecuting, housing and potentially trying a man who is already on California’s death row for five other slayings.
“You don’t get away with murder,” Vance said when asked by The Post about the sense of spending state money on Alcala, 67. “And every victim in a homicide deserves to know that the prosecutors and police never forget their case.”
A Manhattan grand jury has indicted Alcala in the murders of two Manhattan women — an heiress and a TWA flight attendant, both 23 — committed in 1971 and 1977. The investigation turned on new DNA technology and more than 100 witnesses interviewed in Manhattan and across the country, officials said — including Alcala himself, who they visited in prison in California.
Victim Cornelia Crilley was a TWA flight attendant. She was found raped and strangled in her Upper East Side apartment in June of 1971. The second victim, Ellen Hover, daughter of a Hollywood nightclub owner, also lived in Manhattan. Her body was found in Westchester County in 1977.
Alcala had worked as a photographer in the 70s, and gained his victims’ trust by asking them to model for him.
He earned the sardonic nickname, “The Dating Game Killer” from his 1978 appearance as the winning Bachelor No. 1 in an episode of the once-popular game show — an appearance he was cast for despite his being a registered sex offender who, at the time, had already served a 34-month term for the near-fatal 1968 molestation of an 8-year-old girl.
The retroactively-creepy game show episode aired in the very midst of Alcala’s suburban LA sex-slay-spree, which left four women and a 12-year-old girl defiled, bludgeoned and strangled between 1977 to 1979.
Alcala remains in California, where he is on death row at San Quentin prison following his Feb., 2010 conviction. The extradition process is lengthy, but proceeding, officials here said.
“Cold cases are never, ever forgotten cases,” Vance said in defense of undertaking the costly Alcala case.
Another incentive to pursue justice, he said, is that Alcala has twice had murder convictions overturned. Those reversals came in the ’80s, when Alcala was twice found by the California Supreme Court to have received an unfair trial in the 1979 murder of his 12-year-old victim, Robin Samsoe. Alcala was eventually convicted of the Samsoe murder a third time when California jurors found him guilty of all five of the LA-area slayings, and put him on death row.
Vance credited two of his top prosecutors, Martha Bashford and Melissa Mourges — who he called two of the country’s preeminent DNA experts — with helping crack the case through the DA’s Cold Case Unit, which continues to investigate a workload of 3,000 cases.
Chief of Detectives Phil Pulaski, who joined Vance in an afternoon press conference touting the indictments, credited the NYPD’s own cold case detectives. He mentioned 2003 as the year when the case against Alcala picked up speed. “It was as a result of changes in technology that we were able to get this investigation moving… and identify Alcala as a suspect,” he said.
“It was really great detective work,” the chief added.