Smile: Behind the Lens of the ‘Dating Game Killer’ (True Crime)

Rodney James Alcala was a serial killer and sex offender who was sentenced to death in California for five murders committed between 1977 and 1979. He pleaded guilty to two further homicides committed in New York earlier. Alcala's true number of victims remains unknown and could be much higher. Using modeling/posing opportunities as a lure, Alcala compiled a collection of more than 1,000 photographs of women, teenage girls, and boys, many in sexually explicit poses. In 2016 he was charged with the 1977 murder of a woman identified in one of his photos. Even today these photos are being used to try and identify victims.

In the unabridged audiobook narrated by Steve White, Green relates cases of victims and survivors of this homicidal show more maniac who appears to have "toyed" with his victims, strangling them until they lost consciousness, then waiting until they revived, sometimes repeating this process several times before finally killing them.

Alcala's alias as the "Dating Game Killer" is because of his 1978 appearance on the television show The Dating Game during his murder spree. This comes back during one of his trials where he hilariously claims that he wore the large, gold earrings kept as a trophy from a victim during this episode. This comes across to me as an expression of his abiding psychopathy where he acted as if these young lives (he was a pedophile) were his due and indeed he could will his own reality. show less