In April 1969, a 14-year-old girl encountered a 25-year-old man who would go on to be known as a notorious serial killer, and decades later she got the chance to ask him why he didn't kill her.
Rodney Alcala came to be known as the 'Dating Game killer', named after the TV show he appeared on in the 70s in the middle of his murder spree.
While Alcala was chosen by The Dating Game contestant Cheryl Bradshaw, she got a bad feeling from him and ultimately said she didn't want to go anywhere with him.
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That story was recently told in new film Woman of the Hour, a Netflix movie directed by Anna Kendrick who also stars as Bradshaw, covering a number of the murders Alcala did commit.
Rodney Alcala's heinous crimes
The serial killer was linked to eight murders, but the actual figure could be as high as 130, and he died in prison in 2021 while on death row having been arrested in 1979.
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Writing in The Cut, Alice Feiring explained that she was approached by Alcala in a New York bookshop just a few months after he had lured an eight-year-old girl into his apartment in California and then raped and beaten her into a coma.
She explained that he started talking to her at a bookshop and introduced himself as Jon Burger, writing that he scared her and followed her out of the shop after she bought her book.
Alcala apparently wouldn't stop talking about how he'd just moved over from Hollywood, then asked to take pictures of her. At the age of 14, Feiring said she 'didn't know I had a right to say no'.
Alice Feiring's miraculous escape
Not wanting to go into his apartment, he instead took pictures of her on the roof of the building. But when the weather turned, he started 'yelling with violence' at her to help him carry his equipment back inside.
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Feiring wrote that the apartment felt 'terrifyingly wrong' and among the things he gave her to pack away were polaroid pictures of naked women 'dead and posed', as well as 'alive and posed' and 'drugged and posed'.
She made a run for it while Alcala was in the bathroom and as she left, he emerged from it 'naked from the waist down'.
Feiring was almost out of the building when she remembered she'd left the book she bought behind, and writing that she was 'still stunned by this epic stupidity' to this day she explained that she ran back up to his apartment and knocked on the door to ask for her book back.
Alcala handed the book over, and as the 14-year-old ran away again he shouted 'just let me masturbate, I won't hurt you' after her.
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Meeting the serial killer again, face to face
It was a situation in which she could very easily have been killed, and decades later in 2013, she was able to meet Alcala again while he was behind bars and ask him why he didn't.
The serial killer told her he 'had a great time during those years' he was in New York where he'd been raping and murdering women.
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During their conversation, he tried to claim he hadn't hurt some of his victims as badly as authorities had made out, then asked Feiring if he'd hurt her.
She ended up visiting him once more the following year and while she wanted to find out why he didn't kill her, Alcala never gave Feiring an answer.
In the end, her conclusion as to how she survived her encounter with the serial killer was that she 'just got lucky'.
Topics: US News, True Crime, Crime
Joe Harker