When “The Dating Game” host Jim Lange introduced Rodney Alcala as Bachelor Number One, a successful photographer, he didn’t know that the man had already murdered at least five women and been charged with the attempted murder of a little girl.
Alcala has since been convicted of killing seven women in the 1970s. He was charged with murder for the first time in 1979 for the death of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe, who disappeared in June that year on her way to a ballet studio. Her remains were found nearly two weeks later in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles.
“The ‘Dating Game’ appearance is just a bizarre part about this case,” said Matt Murphy, an ABC News contributor and former prosecutor who was assigned to Alcala’s case in 2003. “And I think that what it reflects is the narcissism and the ego and the arrogance of a serial killer.”
Rodney James Alcala is pictured in a file photo from 1980.
Bettmann Archive via Getty Images
Alcala appeared on a 1978 episode of the hit TV game show. Executive producer Mike Metzger and his future wife, contestant coordinator Ellen Metzger, say they initially disagreed on whether Alcala should’ve been a contestant when he auditioned.
Watch the full story on “20/20” Friday at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.
At the time, the technology didn’t exist for background checks or national databases, so nobody who worked on the show was aware that Alcala had a criminal history by this point that included an attempted murder charge of an 8-year-old girl.
He was attractive and all the women were going to love him, Ellen Metzger told “20/20.” But her future husband felt differently, saying that he had a “strange personality.”
Mike and Ellen Metzger, the respective former executive producer and contestant coordinator for “The Dating Game,” talk to “20/20” about casting serial killer Rodney Alcala on the hit show in 1978. Without the technology to do background checks, they were unaware of his criminal history.
ABC News
“He had a mystique about him that I found uncomfortable,” said Mike Metzger, the show’s executive producer.
Ultimately, they decided to have Alcala on the show.
David Greenfield, a producer on the game show when Alcala appeared on it, said that he’d grown up watching the show but didn’t realize until he started working on it that many of the people who audition for it aren’t looking for a date, but rather a chance to be on TV.
David Greenfield talks to “20/20” about hit TV game show “The Dating Game,” where serial killer Rodney Alcala appeared in 1978.
ABC News
The show’s format involved one bachelorette choosing which of three bachelors to go on a date with after a questioning period in which the bachelors are hidden from view.
It had become “hugely popular” during the 1960s because “there had never been a dating show of that nature, and people could live vicariously through either the bachelor or bachelorette,” Greenfield said.
When the 1970s came around, the show’s producers changed the show to match American culture at the time, and its popularity continued to rise.
“One of our edicts was to make the show much sexier and much more provocative than the show in the ‘60s,” said Greenfield.
Part of this meant making the bachelorettes’ questions more open-ended in order to elicit raunchier responses.
“It was rather astonishing to see these bachelors and bachelorettes vie for each other in such an outward way….
