Alcala Street name nixed by police

Dave Brooks

To detective Steve Mack, Rodney James Alcala should have been dead a

long time ago.

Instead he sits in an Orange County jail cell, preparing for a new

trial he’s spent the last 20 years obsessing over.

Twice juries convicted him for killing 12-year-old Robin Samsoe,

twice he was sentenced to die in the gas chamber and twice his case

was overturned by an appeals judge. Now, more than ever, Alcala

haunts the police department that worked so hard to put him behind

bars.

“Some cases tend to stick with you, and this is one of those cases

that is very important to us in Huntington Beach,” Mack said.

So when the homicide detective discovered a new street ina

high-end ocean-side development was to be named Alcala Street, the

detective contacted the project’s developer and insisted the name be

changed.

“It was kind of an accident,” Police spokesman Craig Junginger

said. “Det. Mack discovered it while going through some routine

police reports. Once the developer knew the circumstances, he had no

opposition to changing the name.”

The ill-conceived Alcala Street was nothing more than a

coincidence, actually named after a city near Madrid as part of the

neighborhood’s Spanish theme, but the incident has become the latest

symbol in the roller coaster trial of a man authorities now argue

could rank with some of the worst serial killers in the state.

Alcala, 60, was in court Friday for a pretrial hearing for what

will be his third trial in the killing of a Huntington Beach girl in

the summer of 1979. Alcala, who was shackled and dressed in an orange

jumpsuit, successfully petitioned Orange County Superior Court Judge

Francisco Briseno to allow him to expose several images in his camera

for evidence. Once said to be a handsome man with a thin face and

curly brown hair, Alcala has become a skeleton of his former self.

His hair and bushy mustache turned ghostly white after 20 years on

death row.

He was first convicted of Robin’s murder in 1980, when a forestry

worker testified that she saw Alcala steering a blond girl along a

hiking trail in the Sierra Madre mountains less than 300 feet from

where Samsoe’s headless body was later found, Deputy District Atty.

Matt Murphy said. That case was later over turned by the California

Supreme Court, which argued that jurors should not have been told he

had prior convictions for raping an 8-year-old girl and beating her

with a pipe, as well as attacking a 14 year-old girl, he said.

The former freelance photographer and Los Angeles Times typist was

again convicted in his second trial and sentenced to die, Murphy

said. But on April 2, 2001, a federal judge with the Ninth Circuit of

Appeals overturned the case and ordered his new public defender,

George Peters, to do a better job proving Alcala’s alibi that he had

been applying for a job at Knott’s Berry Farm the day Samsoe went

missing, Murphy said.

But accusations of new murders began to surface, said Los Angeles

Detective, Sheryl Comstock.

On the same day that Alcala’s second conviction was overturned,

officials with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department announced it had

DNA evidence linking Alcala to the 1977 rape and murder of

27-year-old Georgia Wixted in her Malibu home. DNA has also linked

Alcala to two other killings, including a dead woman found in an El

Segundo laundermat and another in Burbank, Comstock said. Prosecutors

from both Los Angeles and Orange County now plan to try Alcala for

all the cases in one joint trial, set to begin next spring.

Alcala could be tied to more cold case murders, and local police

are currently working to connect Alcala to the case with DNA, Murphy

said.

“The Huntington Beach Police Department has done a tremendous

amount of work in this case,” Murphy said. “We anticipate that the

investigation will be ongoing until the trial.”

So will the pain, said Mack, who has struggled with other officers

and the victim’s mother Marianne Connell, to get through the case.

“She’s gone through hell for the last 25 years,” he said. “And as

a police officer, this is the type of case that I never want to

investigate, let alone reinvestigate.”

* DAVE BROOKS covers City Hall. He can be reached at (714)

966-4609 or by e-mail at [email protected].