Two women survived same serial killer: ‘I didn’t pray to live, I prayed to die’

Morgan Rowan and Tali Shapiro told in a documentary made by People – “People Magazine Investigates: Surviving a Serial Killer” – how they managed to escape alive from the hands of a serial killer called “Dating Game Killer”.

Morgan Rowan was 16 when she was lured into Rodney Alcala’s home. She was with two friends, but at one point she woke up completely alone in a bedroom. Alcala entered the room as well, wrapping a belt around his fist.

“I watched his transformation,” recalls Rowan, now 72, of that life-changing night in August 1968. “I saw his face turn monstrous. He hit me between the eyes with a belt buckle. I saw stars and fell to my knees.”

The man tied her wrists with a tie, beat her until her ribs were broken, removed her pants and raped her.

“I wanted it to end. I wasn’t praying to live. I was praying to die”said Morgan Rowan.

A friend broke a window and tried to enter the room. With only a torn shirt on her, Rowan ran out of the house down an alley and hid with her friends in a junk shed.

Rowan didn’t know at the time that he had just escaped with his life from the hands of a serial killer.

Known as the “Dating Game Killer” because he once appeared on a popular 1970s show of the same name, Rodney Alcala, a professional photographer from California who is believed to have killed dozens of women in the 1960s and 1970s, was eventually convicted of seven murders.

A few weeks after she was attacked, Rowan moved to upstate New York with her family, where she received a letter from a friend in Los Angeles with a newspaper clipping: Alcala, the man who had attacked her, was wanted by the police for kidnapping and raping a girl who was only 8 years old.

On the morning of September 25, 1968, Tali Shapiro, who was dressed in her school uniform, was walking down a boulevard when Alcala convinced her to get into his car and drove her to his home, where he beat her unconscious .

A passerby saw Shapiro get into Alcala’s car and alerted the police. Shapiro, now 64, was found by police in a pool of blood, nearly dead.

He was in a coma for more than a month and has no memory of the attack.

In 2010, she testified at Alcala’s trial for the murders of five women, helping to get him sentenced to life in prison. Alcala died behind bars in 2021.

At the 2010 trial, Rowan learned that the 8-year-old girl she had read about in the newspaper decades earlier had survived and was Tali Shapiro. “I always felt responsible for her”says Rowan, who later reached out to Shapiro on Facebook. “I told him there is nothing to forgive. There is only one person who is responsible for what happened”Shapiro said.

The two women, who live a few hours apart in California, see each other every few months and now consider themselves close friends.

At first their conversations focused on the trauma they experienced, but “none of us want to be defined by it,” says Rowan. She and Shapiro haven’t discussed Alcala in years. “Tali doesn’t see herself as a victim, and I learn from her to be strong.“

Who was Rodney Alcala

Alcala, known as the “Dating Game Killer” after appearing on a US TV show, was convicted in 2010. In addition to the California murders, he also pleaded guilty to the murders of two other women in New York.

Alcala was sentenced to death in Orange County in 1980 for the kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe. His sentence was overturned by the California Supreme Court and he was granted a new trial. He received the same sentence in his second trial, but it was overturned again in 2003.

In the years that followed, investigators uncovered evidence linking Alcala to other crimes in California. At trial in 2010, he was found guilty of murdering Samsoe as well as four other women aged between 18 and 32 between 1977 and 1979

In September 1978, Alcala took part in The Dating Game, an American TV show in which a woman quizzed three hidden men before choosing one based on her answers. Alcala was selected at the end of the show, but the woman later said she decided not to date him after a conversation backstage, describing him as “creepy”.

In 2012, Alcala was sentenced to life in New York. In 2021 he died behind bars.

Publisher: DC

Download the Digi24 app and find out the most important news of the day