Rodney Alcala, convicted Calif. serial killer, to be sentenced today in two NYC murders

By: Crimesider Staff
Topics: Daily Blotter

Rodney Alcala

/ file, AP Photo

(CBS/AP) NEW YORK - Rodney Alcala, a convicted California serial killer who admitted last month to murdering two young women in New York City in the 1970s, will be sentenced today for those killings, WABC reports.

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Alcala, 69, was found guilty in 2010 of killing four women and a 12-year-old girl in Southern California in the 1970s.

While pursuing an appeal in California, Alcala was indicted last year in the killings of Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Hover in New York, partly on evidence that emerged during his California trial, prosecutors said.

In December 2011 Alcala told a Manhattan judge he wanted to plead guilty to the two murder counts in New York City so he could get back to California to pursue an appeal in his death penalty case.

Crilley was found strangled with a stocking in her Manhattan apartment in 1971. Hover, a comedy writer who had a degree in biology and was seeking a job as a researcher, was living in Manhattan when she vanished in 1977. Her remains were found the next year in the woods on a suburban estate.

Alcala is a former photographer and a one-time dating-show contestant who has been behind bars since 1979. With his plea, he will receive an automatic term of 25 years to life for his crimes in New York, to be served concurrently with his other sentences.

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