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(NewsNation) — Morgan Rowan said she spoke with police after surviving two attacks by “Dating Game” serial killer Rodney Alcala, but there is no physical report.
Alcala is confirmed to have killed at least seven women and girls in California, New York and Wyoming. Rowan and at least one other girl were able to escape Alcala’s attacks — which occurred a decade before he appeared on “The Dating Game.”
“There is no actual report,” Rowan said during an appearance Tuesday on NewsNation’s “Banfield.” “The officer told me that because I had gotten into his (Alcala’s) car and gone into his home, I knew him and no one would ever put him away for rape.”
Rowan met Alcala when she was 13 years old, and he was 21, in 1965 at a teen nightclub in Hollywood. Rowan lightly scratched his arm with her fingernails to get his attention, but then he dragged her into an alley behind the club, beat her and knocked her out, according to Rowan.
Three years later, in August 1968, Rowan encountered Alcala again at a party. According to Rowan, Alcala pulled her into a bedroom where he attacked and raped her. Rowan’s friends, wondering where they had gone, were able to stop the attack.
Rowan said the police “didn’t like hippies,” so she felt her case wasn’t taken seriously.
“They thought we were troublemakers, and they just literally didn’t like you,” Rowan said on “Banfield.” “They saw us as people fighting. He couldn’t get a grip on what actually happened… Men always got the benefit of the doubt.”
Alcala died in 2021 of natural causes, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He was 77 years old.
Alcala, who earned his nickname due to a 1978 appearance on the television show “The Dating Game,” was sentenced to death in 1980 for the kidnapping and murder of Orange County 12-year-old Robin Samsoe a year earlier.
Though Alcala’s sentence was reversed and reinstated multiple times on appeal, he was sentenced to death again in 2010 after his DNA was linked to evidence in other murders.
Alcala was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder by an Orange County jury in 2010. Along with the killing of Samsoe, Alcala was convicted for the killings of Jill Barcomb, 18, and Georgia Wixted, 27, in 1977; Charlotte Lamb, 32, in 1978; and Jill Parenteau, 21, in 1979.
He was also connected to a pair of murders in New York, and he was extradited in 2012 to face trial for the murder of Cornelia Crilley in 1971 and Ellen Jane Hover in 1977. He pleaded guilty in 2012 and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. Additionally, he was charged with another murder in 2016, this time for the killing of 28-year-old Christine Ruth Thornton, who disappeared in Wyoming in 1978 and who was six months pregnant at the time.
Law enforcement investigators connected or suspected Alcala in other cases, including in Los Angeles, Marin County, Seattle, New York, New Hampshire and Arizona, according to the CDCR release.
Nexstar Media Wire contributed to this report.