Serial Killer Rodney Alcala Flown to New York City on Tax-Payer Dollars

Impact

Rodney Alcala, the 68-year-old serial killer, was flown to New York City just this past Wednesday to face charges of allegedly killing two women from the New York area. 

Alcala served more than 33 years of a death sentence in California’s San Quentin State Prison, and currently resides on death row awaiting fulfillment of his death sentence. The sentence was handed down to him in 2010 nearly three decades after he was incarcerated in California, where he was found guilty in a local court for the killing of four women and a twelve-year-old girl back in the 1970’s.

Fox News recently reported that Alcala had previously been convicted and served prison time for another crime which he had committed just prior to being indicted for a single killing back in 1979, the year of his initial arrest for the killings.

Alcala was also indicted on two additional homicide accounts, back in January of 2011. Already having served more than 30 years in a state prison, with a portion of the time served on death row, Alcala was recently flown to the New York City Manhattan area where a grand jury indicted him for the murders of Cornelia Crilley, a flight attendant for TWA who was found, strangled in her Manhattan apartment in 1971, and Ellen Hover, the Ciro's heiress who at 23 was living in Manhattan -- her remains were found on a wooded suburban estate in 1978, a year after her disappearance.

My initial thoughts of course, were of disgust, it’s sickened me to think that such an individual would be allowed to survive another day after being convicted of such crimes, while many of his victim’s lives were taken more than 30 years prior. 

What purpose could it possibly serve to keep an already convicted serial killer, who is currently serving a death sentence, alive a single day after his conviction? Especially when there is so much damning evidence against him that there is no possible way that California’s court systems could have gotten it wrong. 

I cannot understand why the U.S. justice system seems to be so broken. What do we hope to gain by flying Alcala, with our taxpayer dollars, across the United States of America to a New York City courthouse, to potentially further convict him of additional crimes, which he allegedly committed, even though he has already earned himself a “death sentence” here in California?

That was my initial reaction ...  however, upon further conversation with others, another viewpoint was soon pointed out to me.  Enabling the families of these victims, to face the killer, who allegedly took their loved ones life, might enable the families to actually gain closure and some form of justice for the alleged victims.

Don’t these families deserve some sort of closure? In flying Alcala to face the relatives and their memories of each of his victims head on, is exactly that for these families … some sort of “justice” and “closure”. That is, if he is convicted of these additional crimes which he is accused of. 

Additional photos of possible victims which were taken by Alcala, recently surfaced and the New York City Police Department is requesting that anyone with any information about any of these photos linked above, call (800) 577-TIPS and reference photo 001. Alcala remains on death row at San Quentin State Prison.