Calif. jury recommends death for serial killer

[March 10, 2010]  SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) -- It was 2005 when Bruce Barcomb received the call he'd been awaiting for nearly three decades: Police had finally identified the man who raped and murdered his little sister in a remote canyon on a dark night in 1977.

Police told Barcomb the suspect, Rodney James Alcala, was already on death row for killing a 12-year-old girl and had to exhaust his appeals before there could be a new trial with the newly discovered victims included.

So Barcomb wrote Alcala in prison, begging him to admit to killing his 18-year-old sister, Jill, and four others in stranglings between 1977 and 1979. Alcala never wrote back.

"I wrote to him four times," Barcomb said Tuesday, after a jury recommended the death penalty for Alcala in Jill Barcomb's murder and four others more than 30 years after the crimes.

"It was always about why put us through the carnage of this trial? Really tell us the truth: 'I'm a serial killer, this is what I did' and give up the victims."

Jurors took just an hour Tuesday to return the death recommendation after a sometimes surreal six-week trial in which the 66-year-old Alcala -- who was representing himself -- grilled the mother of one of his victims, cross-examined police investigators and answered his own questions while taking the stand in his own defense.

Alcala also relied on a piece of an Arlo Guthrie song and a 1978 clip of himself as a winning contestant on "The Dating Game" in his rambling and sometimes incoherent defense.

Alcala has been sentenced to death twice before in the 1979 murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe of Orange County, but those verdicts were overturned on appeal.

Prosecutors refiled charges in that case and added Jill Barcomb's murder and three others in 2006 after investigators linked them to Alcala using DNA samples and other forensic evidence. Those cases, which had gone unsolved for decades, went on trial for the first time this year.

Alcala, an amateur photographer and UCLA graduate, focused his entire defense on the Samsoe case and ignored the murders of the four Los Angeles County cases.

"Thirty-six people now have convicted him of death and that's a great feeling knowing that Robin did not die for nothing. We took a monster off the street, we've got closure for other families who didn't have it," said Robin's older brother, Robert Samsoe, 44. "This is a joyous occasion."

Alcala gave his own closing arguments earlier Tuesday, telling jurors that a death recommendation would make them "de facto killers" and "wanna-be killers in waiting."

He then played a piece of Arlo Guthrie's 1967 song "Alice's Restaurant," in which the narrator tries to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War by trying to convince a psychiatrist that he's unfit for the military because of his supposed extreme desire to kill.

"I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth," the song's narrator sings. "Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean: kill, kill, kill, kill."

Robert Samsoe stalked out of court as the song was played.

Juror Greg Lacey said the lyrics deeply affected the panel -- but not in the way Alcala had hoped.

"It didn't make sense to us. We're sitting there doing our duty, we're not out there stalking someone," Lacey said, adding that the gruesome evidence in the case gave him many sleepless nights.

Robin Samsoe was kidnapped while riding a bicycle to ballet class on June 20, 1979. Her body was found 12 days later in the Angeles National Forest.

Alcala was arrested a month after Samsoe's disappearance when his parole agent recognized him from a police sketch and called authorities. Alcala has been in custody ever since.

He was first tried in Samsoe's murder in 1980. Prosecutors added the murders of the four women in 2006 after investigators discovered forensic evidence linking him to those crimes, including DNA found on three of the women, a bloody hand-print and marker testing done on blood Alcala left on a towel in the fourth victim's home.

The jury convicted Alcala of the murders on Feb. 25, and also found true special-circumstance allegations of rape, torture and kidnapping, making him eligible for the death penalty.

During the guilt phase of trial, Alcala's defense took a surreal turn when he played a seconds-long clip showing himself on a 1978 episode of "The Dating Game."

He said the grainy clip proved that he was wearing a gold-ball earring almost a year before Samsoe was killed.

Prosecutors said the earring, found in a small pouch with other earrings in a storage locker Alcala had rented, belong to Samsoe and that Alcala had taken it as a trophy.

The other women murdered were Georgia Wixted, 27, a nurse from Malibu; Charlotte Lamb, 32, a legal secretary from Santa Monica; and Jill Parenteau, 21, a key punch operator from Burbank.

[Associated Press; By GILLIAN FLACCUS]

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