SANTA ANA, Calif. — A jury convicted an amateur photographer Thursday for the third time in the murder of a 12-year-old girl and also found him guilty in the brutal stranglings of four women whose deaths went unsolved for decades until investigators discovered DNA and other evidence tying the cases together.
Jurors took less than two days to find Rodney James Alcala, 66, guilty of five counts of first-degree murder after six weeks of grueling testimony. Alcala, a UCLA graduate with prior convictions for sexual molestation and rape, showed no emotion as the verdicts were read.
The jury also found true special-circumstance allegations of rape, torture and kidnapping, making him eligible for the death penalty. Jurors return next week for the penalty phase.
Alcala, who represented himself, has been sentenced to death twice before for 12-year-old Robin Samsoe’s murder, but both convictions were overturned. The four other cases were heard for the first time this year.
Investigators arrested Alcala a month after Samsoe disappeared on June 20, 1979, while riding a friend’s bike to a ballet class in Huntington Beach in Orange County. Her body was found 12 days later in the Angeles National Forest, where it had been mutilated by wild animals.
Alcala’s parole agent quickly recognized him from a police sketch and called authorities.
Alcala, who at the time was awaiting trial in the rape of a 15-year-old girl, has been in custody ever since.
In 2006, prosecutors added the murders of four Los Angeles County women, after investigators discovered forensic evidence linking him to those crimes, also in the 1970s. The evidence included DNA found on three of the women, a bloody handprint and marker testing done on blood Alcala left on a towel in the fourth victim’s home.
Prosecutors alleged Alcala took earrings from at least two of the victims as trophies.
In the Samsoe case, prosecutors relied on witnesses who saw a curly- haired photographer taking pictures of Samsoe, her friend and other teenagers on the beach minutes before she disappeared. Photos of one of the girls were later found in his possession.
Also key to the trial were a pair of gold ball earrings that Samsoe’s mother said belonged to her daughter. The earrings were found in a jewelry pouch in a storage locker that Alcala had rented in Seattle.
Investigators found other earrings in the same pouch, including a small rose-shaped stud that contained a trace of DNA from another of Alcala’s alleged victims, Charlotte Lamb.
