Original subtitles

Huntington Beach, in those days,

was a small enclave

consisting of maybe the two square miles downtown.

Old town Huntington Beach.

You didn't have to worry

about all the things

that you have to worry about nowadays for your kids.

Back then, we all looked out for each other.

But, you know,

it was never really a concern

until this happened with Robin.

In Huntington Beach today,

a memorial for a girl kidnapped and murdered

by a serial killer 35 years ago.

It was a 12-year-old girl

that was kidnapped off the beach

of the city that I was sworn to protect.

It's just unbelievable

that a girl that age

would just vanish into thin air

and then be found later,

discarded like trash.

Who did this?

Who could do this to a little girl?

The sketch artist

composed a sketch of the suspect,

a male with long curly hair.

A parole officer out of Los Angeles County

was reading the newspaper

and saw the sketch in the paper

and thought it looked like one of his clients,

Rodney Alcala.

And that unlocks the incredible murder spree

that had taken place over the previous decade.

He would approach these young women and girls,

and essentially say, "I'm a professional photographer.

I would love for you to model for me."

- Now, the spider just pulls you into the web

and you're never gonna get out of it.

He looked for every opportunity

to take the life of these people.

Each one of these photographs

represents a possible victim.

How many more are out there?

All these murders,

all across the country, and never get caught.

He's out there hunting.

He tortured, literally tortured his victims.

It's harrowing

to think what he did to those women,

who really were in the prime of their lives.

We have no way of knowing how many people

he really killed.

He was hiding in plain sight.

- The devil in disguise.

- We're dealing with a sadistic maniac.

Please welcome Rodney Alcala.

Rod, welcome.

LA was the center of youthful culture

in the late '60s.

It was a gathering place for a counterculture.

The Golden State,

where all the girls wore bikinis

and were gorgeous blondes,

and all the guys drove woodies

and carried surfboards in the back of them.

This is where people came,

packing their bikinis and their dreams

at the same time,

because this was a city of reinvention.

Everything about California

has been a place to come

to change yourself, to change your identity,

to change your way of being.

This is kind of the free love era,

where some of the more stodgy social norms

of the '50s began giving way

to the free love of the late '60s and early '70s.

Los Angeles, at the time, specifically,

centered around Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard,

was an amazingly creative place and time.

The Whisky a Go Go, the Hullabaloo Club,

the Hollywood Palladium.

It was a place that you went to be seen

and to see what was going on,

because this is where all the cool people went.

- To be really quite frank, it was fun.

- But don't forget,

one of the primary motivations of the hippie movement

was free love.

And with free love,

you can kind of talk your way

into almost anybody's pants.

And the bad souls took advantage of that.

- Oh, there's Gardner Street.

I would go up that street.

That was where my school was,

right there on the corner.

I don't remember too much of that morning in 1968.

We were living in the Chateau Marmont

because there was a fire at our house.

And while they were repairing it,

we lived at one of the bungalows at Chateau Marmont.

I would walk to school

down to Gardner Street

because I didn't like taking the public bus.

I'd mentioned it to my parents.

Nothing was being done about it.

So I took matters in my own hands.

My way of doing it

was I just got up early and walked to school.

I vaguely remember being stopped and talked to.

I said something corny like,

"Oh, I'm not supposed to talk to strangers."

And he told me that he knew my parents,

and that would've made sense, but...

I do remember feeling hesitant getting in the car.

And then he asked me what time my school started.

And of course, I was way early.

He mentioned he wanted to take,

to show me a poster at his house,

and I remember feeling extremely uncomfortable,

but I wasn't gonna open the door and jump out.

I received a call to see a man

about a possible kidnapping.

I met this gentleman called Donald Hines.

And he explained to me

that he was driving down Sunset Boulevard

on his way to work.

And he saw this beige car

following this young girl,

and he didn't see any license plates on the car.

The car stopped.

He said he saw the driver get out,

go around to the passenger side,

and open the back door

and put the little girl in the back seat.

It just didn't seem right to him.

- And he followed the car

with Rodney Alcala in it and Tali Shapiro.

He followed it

just a little bit further into Hollywood,

where Alcala had an apartment.

And he watched Rodney

take the little girl Tali into his apartment.

He just,

he just had a bad feeling.

Just had a really bad feeling.

- I don't remember going into the house.

I vaguely remember looking at the poster

and that's all I remember.

This is De Longpre,

where Donald Hines followed

Rodney Alcala's car.

This was the house at that time.

When I arrived at this location,

I walked around

to what would've been a parking driveway here.

What immediately rose my suspicion

was the no license plates.

I cannot emphasize that enough.

I had asked for backup.

Two other officers showed up.

So I asked one to cover the side of the house

and one to go to the back,

and I went to the front door.

When I started knocking on the door

and I said, "It's a police officer. Open up.

I need to talk to you."

After a certain amount of time,

that's when he came to the front door,

pushed the drape aside.

And I looked at him eye to eye,

and I said, you know, "Open the door.

I need to speak with you."

His response was,

"I just got out of the shower.

Gimme a minute to put some clothes on."

I said, "No. Open the door."

He's nude.

No towel.

His hair's not wet.

There's nothing you would associate

with somebody getting out of a shower.

So I put my ear to the door

and I heard what I thought was moaning.

I said, "You need to open this right now

or I'm gonna kick the door in."

So I gave it 15, 20 seconds

and I kicked the door in.

As soon as I entered the residence,

there was poor Tali, laying on the floor

with a pool of blood all about her.

I can still see Tali.

I can just

still see that little girl laying on the floor.

She was completely naked.

She was naked from head to toe.

Clothes strewn all over the floor,

her shoes, her dress.

Heavy metal bar across her neck,

a gash on the side of her head,

just blood all over.

Blood...

And there was more blood

than you could ever think

would be in an eight-year-old.

- He, at that time, had to make a decision

to chase after the suspect or help the little girl.

- I couldn't leave her there with that bar on her neck.

I got a towel and I took it off.

- He made the right choice.

He tried to help Tali,

and that's what saved her life.

And as he did that,

Rodney Alcala went out the back door

and just into the wind.

- How he got away from us is...

But I'll live with that.

After Tali was transported to the hospital,

where she was in a coma for over 30 days,

they looked to see,

they wanted to ID this guy.

His wallet was there.

He was a student of photography at UCLA.

They got his name, Rodney Alcala.

They found a treasure trove of photographs

of little boys, girls, women,

that he was a student of photography.

I knew that he was a danger to society.

So it was paramount in our mind

that we apprehend him.

- But what they didn't know was that he left the state,

went to the East Coast and changed his name.

- He became John Berger.

- It's still amazing to think, for us, now,

that someone could easily disappear,

could move across the country,

could change your name

and take up a new life.

Anybody could go anywhere

and say you're anybody.

And even if you did have an ID,

nobody ever asked for it.

So he could go anywhere he wanted.

What a great place for a predator to live.

Look, 7 million people,

and there was three women for every guy at that time.

It was a dirty place, really.

You know, the trash pickups

weren't as regular as they are now.

It wasn't sort of the Disney feel that you have

around Manhattan now in a lot of places.

It's so commercial.

The '70s were a much looser,

less organized time in New York City,

and also attracted some folks on the periphery

who were

bad people.

When Alcala arrived in New York,

newly minted as John Berger,

he would roam the streets of New York

with his camera, his 35 millimeter camera,

taking pictures of young ladies and boys.

- Nowadays, we take it so for granted

that everyone has a camera in his pocket,

that all you need to do

is pull out your cell phone

and take a photograph.

But think of, in the 1970s,

photographic equipment,

really high quality equipment, was expensive.

You didn't see a lot of it around.

Someone shows up with expensive-looking cameras

around his neck,

good-looking, professional-looking, and says,

"I'm a photographer.

I'd like to take your picture."

A lot of people would still fall for that.

- I mean, what better way

to sort of make people trust you

than have this camera around your neck?

"Oh, he's just a guy out taking pictures."

It's a way to approach people.

He went to New York film school.

Actually studied under famed film director Roman Polanski.

- "Roman Polanski?"

People clamor to get into his classes.

- We found some reference letters from professors

who thought he was amazing, charming, hardworking.

One of their best students.

Couldn't praise him enough.

He must have thought

that he had just fooled everybody

and that everything that he touched,

he could just go and flimflam the world.

And you know what?

You know what? He was right.

- In the summer of 1971,

there was a beautiful young woman named Cornelia Crilley,

who was a flight attendant for TWA.

She was going from city to city,

and she was having a wonderful time.

She was gorgeous.

Had long, brown, beautiful hair,

Irish eyes that knock your socks off.

Very, very funny and very playful

and nice.

My friends all loved her.

We had been going out for years

and we were together.

She had just moved into this apartment

and she was supposed to actually have been flying that day.

But there was a malfunction

on one of the planes.

So they called her and said, "No, don't come in."

That's the reason she was home.

She was a young woman with everything to live for.

One day, I'm at the DA's office.

I get a call from her mother,

trying to find out where she is.

And that day, as far as I knew,

she was doing something with the new apartment,

but she wasn't staying there

'cause they didn't have furniture.

So I said, "I don't know where she is."

We didn't have cell phones at the time.

So I said, "When I get home, I'll check it out."

So I got home.

My door was not locked. I went inside.

I figured she might have been inside.

She was not.

I changed my clothes and I went over,

I walked over to her new place,

and I couldn't get in.

I went downstairs, tried to get in the back door,

but she was up on the second floor

and I couldn't get up to the second floor

from the garden in the back.

So then I called the police.

They came over,

they came into the back, climbed up,

broke the window, and went in and found her.

She had been sexually assaulted.

She had blunt force trauma to the head.

She had been strangled with a ligature,

which was her pantyhose.

- She had been, looked like tortured, almost,

as well as raped,

and then murdered.

- The autopsy suggested that she died a slow death,

that she was strangled,

almost killed,

allowed to come back,

and then strangled again

and then allowed to revive

and then strangled and killed again.

So that he was toying with her life,

watching her die repeatedly,

in a very cruel way.

Almost all the physical damage

was done before she was dead.

So he literally tortured her

and then he killed her

and he posed her.

- Sometimes criminals,

especially the real sadistic ones,

to shock the normal person like you or I or the police,

they will victimize a victim

even after they've died,

by facing their body towards the door

so that the first person that walks in,

the only thing they're gonna see is that,

and putting their body in such a way,

like in a sexual assault,

opening a woman's legs, you know,

putting her feet behind her and her body bent over.

So that basically all you see

is her genitals and her in such a contorted way

that is not normal,

that basically she didn't die that way.

You put her that way.

- I refused to go inside.

They asked me to go in and identify the body,

and I refused.

I didn't wanna see it,

'cause if I see it, I can't forget it.

- Initially, the police really believed

the boyfriend was involved,

and they really were focused on him.

They did canvas the neighborhood.

They did talk to the landlord,

talked to a lot of the neighbors,

the people that she knew,

the family.

They went through all the motions correctly,

but their focus was definitely the boyfriend.

- I went through, I don't know,

3, 4, 5 interviews and fingerprints

and bite prints 'cause apparently,

she had a bite on her left breast,

I think it was.

And it affected me my whole life,

to be honest with you,

even up to now.

Back in the early '70s, remember,

we are really in the infancy of forensic science.

So once they eliminated the boyfriend as a suspect,

at that point,

there isn't much for the detectives to do

other than wait and hope somebody calls with a tip

or, I mean, tragically,

there might be another murder similar enough

that they can make a match

or an identification of who the killer may be.

That would've sent shockwaves

through the community that she lived in,

because you've got a killer on the loose

who went in and murdered this beautiful young woman,

and nobody knew who it was.

- I didn't think the cops would ever find anybody who did it

to tell you the truth.

And I know they were trying.

Cops are good in New York.

Nobody really focused on Rodney Alcala

at that time.

Nobody really knew he was there.

However, because of the horrendous crime

that he was accused of,

and a fugitive from in Los Angeles,

the brutal assault, kidnapping, rape of Tali Shapiro,

he landed on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list,

as Rodney Alcala.

As a patrol officer,

you can only do so much.

I would check in periodically to see

how the investigation was going

and if they'd had any luck

capturing this person.

I went to that residence several times

to just check,

and I ran into his mother

and his sister on one occasion.

And, of course, they were in denial

as to what their son was suspected of doing.

When I finally found out

that he had been apprehended,

of all places, he was in a summer girls camp

at New Hampshire,

working as a counselor.

Living as John Berger in New York,

because, of course,

Rodney Alcala was one of the 10 Most Wanted

on the FBI list.

He got a job as, of all things,

a camp counselor in New Hampshire.

He was at a teenager club for kids.

- He's there for a couple of years

in the summer,

as a camp counselor.

- We think that bringing camp counselors

into the midst of children,

like inviting the fox into the henhouse.

We were all just there for his pickings.

And he went to the camp,

where there were girls that he then preyed upon.

- Two of the girls at the camp had to mail letters.

They wanted to mail letters home.

So they went to the post office,

and back in those days in the post office,

they used to always have the Most Wanted pictures up

of criminals, FBI Most Wanted.

So they mailed the letters,

and there was a real downpour of rain that came.

So they decided they would wait out in the post office

until the showers stopped.

- They saw this one,

this one guy, this one poster.

And they, "Whoa, that looks just like Mr. Berger!"

And they were confused,

'cause his name on the poster was Rodney Alcala.

He was wanted by the FBI.

So the girls went back

and talked to a different counselor,

one of the head people at the camp,

and said, "We're not 100% sure,

but we saw this FBI poster at the post office,

and it looks like Mr. Berger."

And he said, "Okay. Don't say anything to anyone.

I'm gonna contact the authorities,"

which is what he did.

- The next day, the FBI showed up

and they took fingerprints and confirmed

it was Rodney Alcala.

The detective at the time was from LA Police,

and he was the one sent to pick up Alcala

and extradite him back to California.

During that trip,

he made quite a few inquiries into Alcala,

like, "Why did you do this?"

And Alcala would respond, "Well, that's Rodney Alcala.

I don't wanna talk about him."

He almost seemed totally disassociated.

It was almost like it was a different person.

It was really, I think,

the first real point of understanding

that he sort of had a couple of personalities going on

and there was a separation between them.

- Prosecutors in Los Angeles had a problem.

They wanted to throw the book at Rodney Alcala.

He was a very dangerous person.

They knew it. They could tell it.

But the problem was they didn't have a witness.

They didn't have Tali Shapiro

because her parents had moved out of Los Angeles

and into Mexico,

and they didn't want their young traumatized child

brought back to Los Angeles to testify in court

in this sensational case.

It would be too traumatic.

You had a young girl, in her formative years,

who now is sexually assaulted and almost killed.

I can just imagine what is going on in her head.

So for her to leave the country at that time

is totally understandable.

I mean, I would've done the same thing.

I think any parent would.

The number one feature is to protect your family

or your child.

Of course.

- Oz Janiger was a psychiatrist in LA at the time,

good friends with my parents,

and he had told them to not bring it up unless I did.

And I did bring it up to my mother one morning

at the Chateau Marmont in the kitchen.

She changed the subject and said,

"I think there's a box of chocolates in the refrigerator."

So that was kind of a typical thing to say.

My family never spoke about it.

I remember years later, with my brother,

and something came up

and I said, "How come no one ever talked about it?"

And he said, "Well, no one knew

how you were gonna turn out."

It's something horrible that happened to me.

But it's,

I've never allowed it to be a part of me.

I try to be

a strong,

conscientious,

you know, try to be helpful

to those around me.

I don't trust very easily.

I don't...

Unfortunately,

I don't do well

with partnerships very well.

Never married, and that's okay.

I met,

early on, there was,

I had some good boyfriends,

but later on, after my dad passed away,

it just wasn't...

I was just too independent,

and I was okay with that.

Since Tali Shapiro's parents

ended up taking her to Mexico,

it's difficult for prosecutors.

You're caught in a position

where you understand

why a family wants to protect their child

from the justice process.

But you also know

that you can't hold the offender accountable

without the cooperation of the witnesses.

- So the police were literally hand tied,

unable to really prosecute this case

the way they wanted to.

- I was very upset.

I believe that there was a strong enough case

with myself, with Don Hines,

with the other officers,

that a case could've been brought against him

very easily,

and he would've been found guilty.

But they gave him a plea deal.

- A lesser charge, child molestation,

which meant a lesser sentence.

In fact,

a sentence of between one year and life.

It was an undetermined sentence,

that allowed the Board of Parole to,

every year, assess the inmate and ask the question,

"Has he been rehabilitated?"

And if so, they could then let him go.

While Rodney Alcala was in prison,

he was undergoing therapy

as a child molester,

convicted child molester.

He was being counseled

and given therapy to rehabilitate himself.

So after less than three years,

the parole board decided

he had been rehabilitated,

that the counseling, the therapy, had worked,

he can be free.

So after just 34 months

locked up for this horrible crime,

he was allowed to go free.

- I have no problem criticizing that decision

or the people that made it.

It's outrageous to me

that even back then,

that you would release somebody

of such a predatory nature,

somebody that kidnaps an eight-year-old girl,

rapes her,

which means there's a sexual component to that,

and attempts to kill her,

only prevented so by the heroic actions

of Officer Camacho.

That's a man who is going to be a danger

as long as he draws breath.

Like a lot of serial killers,

he is charming.

He's manipulative.

He has no empathy.

And he's freakishly intelligent,

which means for a guy like Rodney Alcala,

it's not tough to figure out,

"What do they want to hear from me?"

And to go in and, and say,

"Yeah, I've worked on my issues.

I've explored my,

you know, my inner demons,"

or whatever jargon of the day

would work as buzzwords.

Whoever signed off on Rodney Alcala being released,

that decision resulted in dozens of people being murdered.

- But they didn't really know

about all of his medical issues

in the military.

Early 1960s, back when there was still a draft,

he joined the Army,

and there were some prophetic writings about Rodney Alcala.

His commanding officer wrote

that he was highly manipulative.

He wouldn't take responsibility.

- He went AWOL a couple of times

and he would go

and he would spend time drinking, stealing.

He attacked a few girls.

He exposed him himself to other girls.

He did quite a few smaller crimes,

not like what he got known for later.

And all of a sudden, he showed up at his mother's house.

She was cooking dinner at the time.

And she was shocked,

almost like, "Wow, what happened here?"

And she couldn't figure out

what he had done or why he had done it.

And he just decided to go AWOL,

just leave and come home.

And after a couple of days,

she got him, or convinced him,

to go back in and surrender himself,

'cause she didn't want him being arrested.

And so he went into the military and surrendered.

- The Army sent him to one of their psychiatrists,

who correctly diagnosed him

with antisocial personality disorder,

chronic and severe.

Not just a little bit,

but chronic and severe.

- But their answer to that,

the solution, was just to get rid of him,

get him out of the Army.

But he was given an honorable discharge.

An honorable discharge

after being accused of a sexual assault,

after being AWOL, and all this other behavior.

He was given an honorable discharge from the military.

That meant he could still use his GI Bill benefits

to go to college,

and he could go and get a job,

showing his honorable discharge.

No stigma related to all of that activity

from when he was a young private in the army.

He had a great charm.

People really, really liked him

when he would meet them.

So he had no problem getting jobs,

meeting people and having them accept him.

So here's this guy in the late '60s,

a handsome young man.

And he had a house in Hollywood

with, you know, this breadth of experience,

and he began murdering people.

- As quick as that happened for Tali Shapiro,

I have no doubt that he'd done that before.

That is not a common action.

It's just the first time he got caught

doing what he did.

- I was in my senior year, and a couple weeks into school,

I got a letter,

and when I opened it,

a newspaper clipping fell out.

The newspaper clipping said

that he had raped

and tried to murder an eight-year-old girl.

I just fell to my knees.

That felt like it was my fault

that I hadn't stopped him.

I was 13 or 14.

There was a teenage nightclub in Hollywood.

It was an all age club.

People of all ages went there,

but they called it teenage

because you couldn't get alcohol there.

We would go over there

to watch the bands unload and come in,

because they got

The Doors, The Byrds, you know,

top name entertainment there.

And my friend and I walked over there

and Rod was standing in the parking lot

talking to someone else.

He was constantly picking up young girls, you know,

13-, 14-, 15-year-old girls,

taking 'em back to his house,

taking their pictures,

having little make out sessions with them.

He was attractive,

laughed easily.

He was obviously flirting with us.

He would look over and wink

and, you know, smile,

and eventually, kind of waved his hand,

called us over.

I wanted his attention.

So I reached over

and I lightly scratched his arm with my nails

and he put his arm around me

and he pulled me close,

and I thought that was pretty cool.

So I did it again,

and he wasn't quite as happy the next time.

He grabbed my arm

and pulled me to the back of the club.

My feet barely touched the ground.

He just, you know,

I only weighed 80 pounds.

When we got to the back of the club,

I'm not sure what he did.

If I had to guess,

I think he slammed my head against the wall.

He knocked me out.

He put me behind a dumpster

and pushed it up against me.

So when I woke up,

I had this strong pain in my chest

and pushed this dumpster off of me.

I didn't want my parents to know

because they wouldn't let me go back there.

When I was 16,

a few years later,

used to go up to Sunset Strip

and there would just be hundreds of people

dancing, singing,

hanging out in front of the clubs,

talking to each other.

Someone came up and said, "Come on.

We're all going down to IHOP

to get a strawberry waffle."

You know, it was a big thing at the time.

We jumped into a car,

the guy that invited us

got in the passenger seat.

I was in the back between my two friends.

We were just laughing and talking,

and Rod got in the driver's seat

and drove away quickly.

And I said, "I don't wanna go. Let me out.

Please let me out."

And he just ignored me.

He didn't say no. He didn't say anything.

He just ignored me.

He turned off of Sunset

and drove a couple blocks

and stopped in front of a house,

his house.

And he said, "Come on in, guys. I've got pot."

And my friends thought that was great.

They jumped outta the car, ran in the house.

I didn't wanna go in.

And I didn't know what to do,

because now I didn't really know where I was

and it was dark

and Hollywood's not the safest place.

And I was like, "Do I walk away?

Will he follow me?

What do I do? Where do I go?"

We didn't have cell phones.

I didn't have anything.

And he was kind of hiding around a corner

and he just grabbed me.

And he just threw me head first into this room,

into his bedroom.

I staggered to my feet

and turned around,

and he was holding this metal bar,

about five foot long, heavy metal bar.

And he dropped it into some brackets

on the back of his door so you couldn't open the door.

And then I got really scared.

Soon as he dropped that bar,

he came across that room so quickly,

and I was up against a wall.

He took a,

actually took a second

to brace himself,

and then just punched me in the face.

He took his belt

and he pushed it into my throat.

He pushed it in my mouth

and kept pushing it until it was deep in my throat

and I couldn't get a breath.

I just kept fighting because I couldn't breathe.

So he just lifted me by my hair

and punched me in the stomach as hard as he could,

quite a few times.

And I could feel my ribs breaking.

He cut the rest of my clothes off of me

and he raped me, of course.

And he just,

he looked like an animal.

I mean, he just looked

like a raging animal.

Then he put his hands around my neck

and everything kind of went black.

I felt like I was falling down a dark well.

I heard glass breaking

and I felt a little cool air

and it woke me up.

You know, I just kind of came back to the light,

and my friends had broken the window in his room.

He got off me then,

pulled the belt outta my mouth.

And I choked,

tried to get a little air.

And he took the bar off the door

and my friends ran in

and his friends ran in

and he just stood there,

naked from the waist down,

with my blood all over his shirt.

And he just said, "Take her. Just take her."

Like he owned me, "Just take her."

When I went home,

I told my parents that we'd been in a car

and somebody hit the brakes really fast,

and I just kind of went flying into the dashboard.

All they could really see

was the black eye and the cut lip

and they didn't know about the rest.

Suddenly Rod's face was there.

And I took such a deep breath,

I couldn't breathe out.

I had a panic attack.

At night, I was having these horrible nightmares

of him swinging that bar into her head,

'cause I knew.

I knew he had used that bar

that was on the back of his door

because of the way he had held it.

I know he considered doing that,

but he didn't have room to swing it in that room.

I had these horrible nightmares

with him swinging that bar into her head.

- She asked for my forgiveness,

and I don't think she could have done anything.

I mean, look how many times he got off

of what he did to me,

after the case.

- If the penal code was followed in those days,

he would've spent 150 years in prison,

'cause he had rape, kidnapping,

child molestation,

assault with a deadly weapon,

fleeing authorities.

It just goes on and on and on.

And for him to be able to navigate the system

and talk his way out of prison,

he should have never gotten out of prison

after that incident with Tali.

- His walking out of prison

made him feel more powerful,

that, "If this is all I have to pay

when I get caught,

well, then, it's not very much of a price, is it?"

- He's out there hunting.

And he's looking for his prey.

One of the first things he did

was pick up a 13-year-old girl

and take her to a bluffs over in Huntington Beach

and make her smoke dope with him.

And he tried to kiss her.

He did kiss her.

And a park ranger came up

and the girl said,

"I'm not here."

You know, "I don't wanna be here.

I don't want this man with me.

I don't wanna be here."

And they were both arrested for the possession charge,

but then it became clear

that it was it was Rodney,

and the little girl was innocent.

- But Rodney Alcala, of course,

was on parole for kidnapping

in the near murder Tali Shapiro.

So when he was arrested and processed,

they violated his parole,

and he got two and a half additional years

for, essentially, providing marijuana to a minor.

However, he was released

in less than two and a half years.

They should have kept him forever, at that point.

And he was released again.

So once again, this predatory monster

has been caught.

To anybody with,

that's on the ball,

they should have realized that he's a danger.

He's not changed his ways.

This is a man who kidnapped, raped,

and almost murdered an eight-year-old girl,

with another minor

that he's providing marijuana to.

And there's absolutely no doubt in my mind,

had they not been caught by that park ranger,

he would've raped and murdered

that young girl, as well.

- Once he's out,

he convinces his parole officer

that he wants to go back to New York for family,

or he gives him some nonsense,

or a vacation,

whatever nonsense he feeds the parole officer.

The officer says, "Go ahead, go."

- Not expecting that he wouldn't come back

or that he would disappear

and then go and commit other crimes.

Rodney Alcala then became John Berger again in New York.

It was over that next ten-year period

that he did all of these killings,

maybe murdered more than a hundred people.