California authorities released more than 100 photos of women and children on Thursday that are believed to have been taken by a serial killer Rodney Alcala, who is now on trial. Alcala is convicted of killing 4 women and a girl in 1970s, but police strongly believe there might be more victims.

After releasing the photos, police have received plenty tips on a handful of other women who could be dead or missing. “We’ve received several calls saying that someone in a photo could be so-and-so who’s been missing or found dead,” Patrick Ellis, a detective with the Huntington Beach Police Department said Friday. “The response has been overwhelming, and that’s what we were looking for.”

Ellis said police received tips on as many as four dead or missing women who were identified by other people calling and e-mailing about the photos. “People are saying that they recognize someone from their past, from school or college or the neighborhood beach,” he said. They are trying to determine whether any of the people in the photos were victims of Rodney Alcala, although Ellis stressed that police have not confirmed that any of the women or children in the photos are dead or even missing.

The portrait-style photographs were discovered in a storage unit Alcala kept in Seattle, Washington, said Orange County district attorney spokeswoman Susan Kang Schroeder. The locker also contained earrings that belonged to Robin Samsoe, the 12-year-old girl whom Alcala abducted and killed in 1979. (Alcala tried to explain he had the earrings before as he was showing clips from the tv show The Dating Game. You can read more about his trial in Suspected Serial Killer Rodney Alcala’s Trial article.)

Here is the video with all the photos found in the locker in a storage unit Alcala kept In Seattle, Washington, and you can also take a look at all the photos on Nancy Grace blog

Anyone with information regarding the identities of the women and children in the photographs found in Alcala’s storage locker is asked to contact the Orange County District Attorney’s Office or the Huntington Beach Police Department.

-article from CNN rewritten and adapted by admin-

A new photo of young Peter Tobin resurfaced and presents the latest clue police are hoping will unravel the past of one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers.

On the photo on the left, you can see a sex murderer Peter Tobin as a man of 27, who is now serving a life sentence for the murder of 23-year-old Polish student Angelika Kluk and is linked to unresolved disappearances of several other young women in Sussex. Police are hoping the image will jog people’s memories if they knew Tobin as a young man and give officers a clearer view of his past.

There are fears that he may have killed many more and could have been carrying out gruesome sexual attacks in the county undetected throughout the seventies and eighties. Among those suspected of being Tobin’s victims is student Jessie Earl who disappeared from her Eastbourne bedsit in 1980 and whose remains were found at Beachy Head nine years later. Police are also listing Louise Kay, who was last seen in 1988 dropping a friend home from an Eastbourne club, as a potential Tobin victim.

Police have been gathering information about Tobin’s life in Brighton and Hove since three people came forward saying they knew about his time in the city. Tobin is thought to have been a member of a Biker Gang called the Rising Sun and officers are hoping to trace members of that group as well as a woman possibly called Lesley who lived at a seafront hotel in the city in 1986 and whose parents are believed to have attempted to legally prevent her from seeing Tobin.

They are also trying to trace items of women’s jewelry that Tobin owned which could help identify more victims and reveal the full extent of the vile acts of one of Britain’s most evil men.

Read more articles about Peter Tobin: Peter Tobin may have been a serial killer, Bible John case, serial killer Peter Tobin linked to a pedophile ring.

To contact the Operation Anagram team about Tobin call 0845 6070999.

-article from www.theargus.co.uk rewritten and adapted by admin-

Serial Killer Rodney Alcala was convicted of five serial slayings, for the third time, after being sentenced to death twice for killing the Orange County girl, but both convictions were overturned. He is also suspected in up to 30 more deaths.

A jury convicted Rodney Alcala, 66 years old amateur photographer, Thursday of murdering a 12-year-old girl and four women in the late 1970s, setting the stage for a possible death penalty in a legal saga that has dragged on 30 years. Jurors took less than two days to reach guilty verdicts against Rodney Alcala after six weeks of testimony. The penalty phase of the case begins Tuesday.

Police believe Alcala, who has been in custody since 1979 and has twice had previous convictions overturned, could be responsible for dozens more deaths in New York and Los Angeles in the 70s, and some even say he is a new Ted Bundy. Authorities said they were able to tie Alcala to the murder of four Los Angeles County women between 1977 and 1979. Investigators said they linked Alcala to the torture and murder of Jill Barcomb, 18; Georgia Wixted, 27; Charlotte Lamb, 32; and Jill Parenteau, 21, with DNA, blood and fingerprint evidence. Each murder carried a special circumstance charge that would make Alcala subject to the death penalty.

The Samsoe case, which was first tried in 1980, presented more of a challenge for prosecutors because it was built largely on circumstantial evidence. Murphy said he does not expect this third conviction to be overturned:
“This one is as clean as we can possibly make it for an appeal,” he said. “We’ve got a good jury and we feel very satisfied with the progress of the case so far.”

-articles by Gillian Flaccus and Nick Allen rewritten and adapted by admin-

Here is a Rodney Alcala’s case timeline by Kimi Yoshino:

(more…)

Rodney Alcala, 66 years old former Los Angeles Times typesetter and amateur photographer, alleged serial killer with a genius IQ, is on trial for the murder of four women and a young girl between 1977 and 1979.

The trial against 66-year-old Rodney Alcala is winding down after more than a month of testimony that included several bizarre twists in which the accused murderer questioned himself on the stand – Alcala is acting as his own attorney. Alcala is currently facing five counts of murder, with special circumstance allegations of murder in the commission of rape, torture and burglary. He is accused of the 1970’s brutal rape-murders of 27-year-old Malibu nurse Georgia Wixted, 21-year-old Pasadena key punch operator Jill Parenteau, 32-year-old Santa Monica legal secretary Charlotte Lamb, 18-year-old New York runaway Jill Barcomb, and 12-year-old Huntington Beach ballet student Robin Samsoe. Twice, Alcala has been found guilty of murdering Samsoe, but both convictions were overturned on appeal.

“He is not hunting deer or pheasants,” said Orange County Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy. “He is hunting people. You’re talking about a guy who is hunting through Southern California looking for people to kill because he enjoys it. Murphy told the packed courtroom that Alcala took his time terrorizing his victims by choking them with his bare hands, waiting for them to wake up at least once, then strangling them again — sometimes using shoelaces or panty hose. “It is a staggeringly horrific way to die,” exclaimed Murphy. “There is ample evidence the women put up some resistance….He gets off on it. It was fun.”

Alcala has pleaded not guilty to five counts of first-degree murder for the slayings of four Los Angeles County women and 12-year-old Robin Samsoe from Huntington Beach in the late 1970s. At the center of the prosecution’s case is a gold ball earring that prosecutors and Samsoe’s mother say belonged to the 12-year-old girl with Alcala’s DNA on it. Prosecutors say the earring was found in a jewelry pouch in a Seattle storage locker rented by Alcala. He has focused much of his defense on the earring and has argued that it was his. In a bizarre twist, Alcala showed jurors clips of himself as the winning contestant in a 1970s episode of the TV show “The Dating Game” to prove that he was wearing the gold ball earrings before Samsoe’s death:

“You’ll see my hair go up over my left ear and you’ll see a little flash of gold,” he told jurors. “You need to look closely, but there are two little specks there.” In one of the strangest moments, Alcala said the earring wasn’t Lamb’s. Instead, “It was an earring with Charlotte Lamb’s DNA” on it. The jury should begin deliberating on Tuesday.

Alcala has been in custody since his arrest and has remained in prison while prosecutors appealed both overturned convictions. He was one of the first inmates to arrive on death row after California reinstated capital punishment. Did he really kill all five women and was he trying to say the police planted evidence to convict him remains unclear. Even if they can’t link him to the murder of 12 years old Samsoe, there are still four other deaths.

-articles by Carlin DeGuerin Miller and Christine Pelisek rewritten and adapted by admin-

Between 1986 and 1989, at least eight people (four couples) were murdered along a Virginia route known as the Colonial Parkway. All four cases involve the slaying or disappearance of young people who were traveling by car in isolated areas. Two people are missing or presumed dead. The person responsible for these murders has never been caught.

The FBI believes those crimes are related (they were all young couples in “parking” situations in secluded areas), and there is a serial killer on the lose who is responsible for these killings and that person may have been (or remains) in law enforcement, possibly a police officer or security guard. Even though the case was never closed, it got attention again after a series of crucial photo evidence reached the public.

The first two victims were Rebecca Ann Dowski, 21 and Cathleen Marian Thomas, 27. Their bodies were discovered On October 12, 1986, inside their car. The vehicle had been pushed down an embankment. An autopsy found rope burns on their necks and wrists, signs of strangulation, and their throats had been slashed. Their purses and money were found inside the car. Both women were found fully clothed and there was no evidence of sexual assault.

In September of 1987 the bodies of David Knobling, 20, and Robin Edwards, 14, were discovered in the Ragged Island Wildlife Refuge. They had been murdered. The area they were found was on the south shore of the James River in Isle of Wight County, near Smithfield, Virginia. They were discovered about a mile down the river bank. Knobling’s truck was parked at the Refuge several days prior to discovery of the bodies.

On April 9, 1988, Cassandra Lee Hailey and Richard Keith Call were reported missing after going on a first date together. Call’s 1982 red Toyota Celica was found, abandoned on the Colonial Parkway in Yorktown, Virginia the following day. Neither body has ever been found, but both are presumed to be dead.

In October 19, 1989, the bodies of Anna-Maria Phelps, 18, and Daniel Lauer, 21, were found in New Kent County by a hunter in the woods near a rest area on Interstate 64 between Williamsburg and Richmond. They were found covered with a blanket. They had been missing since the previous month.

Four slayings are being handled by the FBI: two people killed — and two who disappeared and are presumed dead — on federal property along the Colonial Parkway. Four others are being investigated by Virginia authorities: the Phelps and Lauer slayings and those of David Knobling, 20, and Robin Edwards, 14, both of Newport News, whose bodies washed ashore on the James River at the Ragged Island Wildlife Refuge.

Agents met this month with members of the families in the FBI’s four cases and state and local investigators have recently met with the families of the Ragged Island victims. Also, last month, the FBI announced that, among other things, it was sending 130 pieces of evidence from its two Parkway cases for advanced DNA testing not available earlier. But Corrine Geller, spokeswoman for the state police, said last week that, “at this time we have not resubmitted any evidence. I can’t get into why because it’s an ongoing investigation.” But, she added, “it has nothing to do with the cost.”

Whatever their reasons are, the justice must be served because these victims can’t be forgotten, and all four cases deserve closure. It’s been 20 years since the last murder connected to parkway serial killer, and it seems like all the new technology still can’t do much about it. If you’re interested to read more about this case, I suggest you to go here.

And if you have any information concerning the Colonial Parkway murders or any of the victims, you’re advised to contact:

Virginia State Police at 757-424-6850
and/or
Federal Bureau Of Investigation, FBI Special Agent Crosby Brackett at 757-435-4708 NCIC Number: M-871430466