The Circle Chase

The Dating Game Show

With his trademark long hair cascading onto his over-sized disco shirt collar, serial killer Rodney Alcala's answers are charming, funny and steeped in cheeky innuendo.

Indeed, the handsome 35-year-old makes light work of convincing the pretty contestant behind the screen to pick him as they appear on hit 1970s game show The Dating Game.

But unbeknown to her, the show's producers and the millions of viewers tuned in at home, the smiling photographer had already murdered two women and would go on to rape and mutilate four more and a 12-year-old girl.

And in a moment of spine-chilling foreboding, Alcala clinches the show by telling her: 'We're going to have a great time together, Cheryl.'
Appearing beside two other love-searching hopefuls, he appears confident, funny and ordinary - far from the violent and depraved sociopath he later turned out to be.

Cheryl Bradshaw, the contestant tasked with choosing one of three blind dates behind the screen, asks for their favourite time of day, to which he offers the chilling reply: 'The night. Night-time'.He then tells her suggestively: 'I'm called the banana, and I look really good.'
On Monday, Alcala, now 69, was sentenced to at least 25 years in prison for murdering two New York women in the 1970s. The body of the second was discovered just a year before his appearance on The Dating Game in 1978.

The sentence came as Alcala was already on death row in California for raping and mutilating four women and a 12-year-old girl in the Los Angeles area.