Suspected 'Dating Game' Serial Killer Faces Two More Murder Charges

The shaggy grey-haired man has been on death row since 2010 for killing four women and a 12-year-old girl between November 1977 and June 1979 in a murder spree spreading across suburban Los Angeles, from Burbank to El Segundo.

In a casting oversight that is far worse than a modern reality-TV blunder, Alcala was the winning bachelor on the television show The Dating Game, even after he had been convicted in the 1968 rape of an eight-year-old girl and served a 34-month sentence for the sex crime.

According to CNN, a year before his appearance on the game show, the contestant raped, sodomized and killed 18-year-old Jill Barcomb and 27-year-old nurse Georgia Wixted in California.

A far cry from the murderer who smashed one victim's face in with a rock and beat another with the claw of a hammer, Alcala's biography on the show described him as a "successful photographer" who had a passion for skydiving and motorcycling.

Last year, prosecutors in New York charged the California-based convict in the deaths of Cornelia Crilley, a 23-year-old TWA flight attendant, who was found raped and strangled inside her Upper East Side apartment in June 1971, and Ellen Hover, also 23 and living in Manhattan, who was found dead in Westchester County in 1977.

"Cold cases are not forgotten cases -- our prosecutors, investigators and partners in the NYPD do not give up," Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said in the statement.