Sex Crimes

November 22, 2010 Updated Jan 8, 2013

Rodney Alcala

A registered sex-offender, Rodney Alcala got his 15-minutes of fame as a successful contestant on "The Dating Game" in 1978.  Before that appearance, he had already been convicted of raping an 8-year-old girl and had murdered four women. He would go on to murder a 13-year-old girl.

Update: On death row at San Quentin since 1979, Rodney Alcala, now 69, was sentenced in New York Supreme Court on January 7, 2012 to two concurrent 25 years to life in prison sentences for raping and murdering two women in New York in the 1970s. In 1971, Cornelia M. Crilley, a 23-year-old TWA flight attendant, was raped and strangled in her Upper East Side apartment. Seven years later, the body of Ellen Jane Hover, 23, an aspiring orchestra conductor, was found at the Rockefeller estate in Westchester County. Alcala pled guilty to the two murders on December 14. He will now be returned to death row at San Quentin. Since 2006, there has been a court-ordered moratorium on executions in California over the lethal-injection controversy.

By Denise Noe

Bachelor Number One

Airing in the 1960s and 1970s, “The Dating Game” was a popular show about singles finding romance. Usually, a young woman would be on one side of a partition asking a series of quirky and often sexually suggestive questions of a trio of bachelors on the other side of it. Without seeing them, and not being allowed to ask their names, occupations, ages, or incomes, she would think over their answers during a commercial break and then select one of the three for a date.

Occasionally, the roles were reversed and a man would do the selecting from a group of three “bachelorettes.” The show did not use the term “spinsters” for its unmarried female guests probably because that word, so strongly associated with starched gingham and hair-in-a-bun prudishness, would have been out of place in the time period.

“The Dating Game” was hosted by Jim Lange who began every episode by stepping through a flower-speckled partition that suggested the “flower power” that would become a cliché in that hippie era.

In 1978, a program aired in which Lange introduced “Bachelor Number One” as “a successful photographer who got his start when his father found him in the darkroom at the age of 13 – fully developed.”  Lange paused while the audience laughed appreciatively at the double entendre. Then the host continued, “Between takes you might find him skydiving or motorcycling. Please welcome Rodney Alcala.”

The audience saw Bachelor Number One, a handsome, dark-haired young man with a ready smile.

Nov. 1, 2010

Johann "Jack" Unterweger

With the help of future Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek and other prominent Austrian literati, Jack Unterweger wrote his way out of a lifetime sentence for murder. Paroled in 1990, and now a famous crime writer himself, he embarked on a wide-ranging killing spree, murdering women in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Los Angeles. 

by Mark Pulham

Vienna. People sitting in cafés eating Sachertorte, listening to the music of Mozart and Strauss, walking through the Vienna Woods, and if you are a film buff, thinking about The Third Man. Vienna is synonymous with culture. It is not the first place anyone thinks of when you mention serial killers. Yet in the spring of 1991, particularly in the red-light district, the fear of a killer on the loose gripped the city.

It began on April 8, 1991, when a young prostitute named Silvia Zagler vanished. When last seen, she had been standing on her regular corner around 10:30 p.m. Sabine Moitzi worked in a bakery during the day. At night, unknown to her husband, she occasionally boosted her income by working as a “secret prostitute,” which meant that she was not, as is required by the laws of Vienna, registered with the Office of Health. Eight days after Zagler’s disappearance, Sabine’s friend, Ilse, dropped the 25-year-old woman off near the rail yard of the West Train Station. A short while later, she disappeared.

Dr. Edward F. Jackson

The case of Dr. Edward F. Jackson combined the elements of a lurid crime novel with an almost Shakespearean theme – a brilliant, prideful physician brought down by a fatal flaw. He was a man with a Jekyll-Hyde personality. By day, he was a respected internist. At night, he was a rapist, breaking and entering women’s apartments. 

by Barbara Kussow

Dr. Edward F. Jackson’s respectable life began to unravel shortly after 6 a.m., on September 5, 1982. Jackson, a 38-year-old, prominent black physician in Columbus, Ohio, was arrested in the home of two women who were not at home at the time. In Dr. Jackson’s possession were a flashlight, ski mask, rope, gloves, pry tool, and a plastic bag. He was charged with possession of criminal tools and aggravated burglary. He was held in the Franklin County Jail on $75,000 bond, and then freed on a reduced $25,000 bond.

Three days later, local papers reported that Dr Jackson was being investigated in connection with a number of rapes occurring throughout Franklin County since the mid-1970s – rapes attributed to the so-called “Grandview Rapist,” who had worn surgical gloves during some of his attacks. (Grandview is a suburb of northwest Columbus.)

The next revelation was even more damning. Dr. Jackson was said to possess a list of 65 women and dates in his own handwriting. Many of the names on the list were known rape victims. (In a later report, the Columbus Dispatch (July 10 1984, 1B) reported that the list was disguised as a list of patients with the heading “P.I.D non GC (pelvic inflammatory disease, no gonorrhea).”

June 20, 2010 

Jeffery Dahmer

by Laura Schultz, MFT

“You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body.  You’re looking into their eyes. A person in this situation is God. Sometimes I feel like a vampire and I like to kill. I’m the most cold-blooded sonofabitch you will ever meet. We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere. AND there will be more of your children dead tomorrow. I wouldn’t trade the person I am or what I’ve done for anything. So I don’t think about it. And at times it’s a rather mellow trip to lay back and remember”.

---Ted Bundy

“I love to kill people. I love watching them die. I’d shoot them in the head and they would wiggle and squirm all over the place and just stop. Or I’d cut them with a knife and watch their faces turn real white.  I love all that blood.”

---Richard Ramirez, aka The Night Stalker

“I am a monster. I am the ‘Son of Sam’. I am programmed to kill. I love to hunt, prowling the streets looking for fair game – tasty meat.  I live for the hunt—my life. Sam is a thirsty lad and he won’t let me stop killing until he gets his fill of blood”.

---excerpt from letters of David Burkowitz, aka “Son of Sam”          

Each of these killers “hunted” by night in the shroud of darkness as a deer hunter might stalk his prey. One can only imagine the horror and agony each of the human victims experienced as they were being bound, beaten, choked, raped, shot and/or tortured. For some, death was a release that ended the unspeakable horror, the utter horror of it all. Others scratched, screamed and fought back with all their strength until the inevitable last gasp. But very few escaped with their lives. Those who did live to testify and talk about what they had endured, constantly replayed the tape of the lurid details in their minds for years to come. Never again could they return to the life they had known before being captured in the clutches of their worst nightmare – a human killing machine.

Nov. 19, 2009 Updated Nov. 7, 2011

André Bamberski

For 27 years the heartbroken André Bamberski kept an eye on the fugitive serial rapist who murdered his 14-year-old daughter. Then he arranged a vigilante kidnapping to deliver the murderer to the police. 

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins 

In the early hours of the morning little happens in the town of Mulhouse.

Mulhouse, of slightly over 110,000 inhabitants, is geographically in eastern France, in the region of Alsace, but it is often said by skeptical French that the Mulhousiens and the Mulhousiennes, as the inhabitants are called, have German hearts. The reason is that Germany starts just a few miles east of Alsace, and indeed of Mulhouse, and the Germans have therefore annexed the region three times. The first annexation had been after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war (July 1870-May1871), the second, during World War 1 (1914-1918), and the third in World War Two, after France’s June 1940 capitulation to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi army. This third annexation had lasted until the end of the war in May 1945. Since, Alsace has remained French.

During the early morning of Sunday, October 18, 2009 Mulhouse was again silent, but the silence was disturbed when the computer screens in front of the officers on duty in the police’s emergency call room flashed an incoming call.

The caller, a male, speaking with a marked Russian accent despite his flawless French, gave the cop who took the call the name of a local street: Rue de Tilleul. On that street, said the caller before he rang off, the fugitive, Dieter Krombach, could be found.

October 6, 2002

Ted Bundy

Ted Bundy didn't have it all but he had most of it: good looks, charm, smarts, and ambition. He could have been anything he wanted to be. Instead he became the poster boy for serial killers, killing as many as 40 young women and girls as young as 12 years old during a four-year rampage in the mid 1970s. He was so mainstream that the Washington State Republican Party hired him, so cunning that twice he escaped from jail, and so dashing a figure that women sent marriage proposals to him on death row.

by David Lohr

Mention the term "serial killer" and Ted Bundy's name is frequently the first to pop into mind. Before he was executed in 1989, he admitted to murdering 40 young women in almost a dozen states during his four-year reign of terror in the mid-'70s. In the process he became one of the most feared and prolific serial killers in U.S. history. But what sets Bundy apart is how different he was from the stereotype of the homicidal madman: He was so mainstream that the Washington State Republican Party hired him, so cunning that he twice escaped from jail, so dashing a figure that women sent marriage proposals to him on death row.

What caused Ted Bundy to snap and murder countless young women and girls as young as 12 years old for no apparent reason? The devil is in the details. Many of his early victims bore a physical resemblance to Bundy's first girlfriend, who was tall and slender and wore her long brown hair with a part in the middle.

Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, in Burlington, Vermont. Bundy's mother, Eleanor Louise Cowell, was unmarried and just 22-years-old at the time of his birth. Bundy's father, Lloyd Marshall, apparently wanted nothing to do with him, so he and his mother moved to Philadelphia to live with her parents. In an unusual twist, Eleanor's parents, out of fear that their daughter would be criticized for having a bastard child, raised Bundy as their own son, leaving him to believe that his mother was his older sister.

Dayton Leroy Rogers

For serial killers, prostitutes make easy targets. Dayton Leroy Rogers bound and stabbed to death at least eight of them before his rampage ran its course.

by David Lohr

In the early morning hours of August 7, 1987, serial-killer Dayton Leroy Rogers picked up his last prostitute victim, 26-year-old Jenny Smith. He drove her into the parking lot of a small business complex in Clackamas County, a small suburb of Portland, Ore.

Rogers was known by prostitutes for his odd behavior and bondage fetishes; it probably came as no surprise to Smith when he asked her to remove her clothes and bound her hands with a restraint fashioned from a shoe lace. He then began to cut her back and breasts with a knife. Smith screamed in horror. Rogers then shoved the knife into her vagina and began to stab her uncontrollably. Suddenly, the restraint gave way and Smith fell out onto the pavement. Bleeding profusely from her wounds, she tried to escape. Rogers quickly got out of the truck and grabbed her by the neck. He threw her to the ground and continued to stab her over and over.

April 3, 2003 Updated  Feb. 6, 2004

John Schneeberger

It's said that the Royal Canadian Mounties always get their man -- but in this case justice was delayed for seven years, and the doctor might never have answered for his crimes if it hadn't been for one very determined young woman who knew that her doctor had drugged her, raped her, and somehow had managed to falsify his DNA to escape prosecution.

by Lona Manning

For an instant, Candice Foley didn't know where she was when she woke up that morning. She wasn't in her own bed. Or on a friend's sofa. She was in a hospital bed. And while she was familiar with how it felt to wake up with a hangover, this was also different – she felt spaced out, a little woozy. Had she been in a car accident or something?

What was the last thing she remembered? She closed her eyes tightly and tried to recall all the events of the previous night. She'd been at her job at the gas station, and was in a bad mood, because it was Halloween night and she was stuck behind a counter. Her boyfriend had come by. Something he said caused her to flare up, one thing led to another, and soon Candice had lost her temper completely. She was so angry that she had grabbed her purse and jacket, jumped into her car and screeched away. At the time she had felt she could have killed her boyfriend, but their fight seemed so distant and unimportant now.