50 Years After Upper East Side Murder, Killer Rodney Alcala Dies

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The death this week of Rodney Alcala, the serial murderer known as the "Dating Game Killer," came just weeks after the 50th anniversary of a murder he committed on the Upper East Side.

Alcala, 77, died from natural causes Saturday in a California hospital. He had been on death row since the 1980s, when he was sentenced for the 1979 murder of a 12-year-old girl in Southern California.

Alcala first rose to infamy for the five murders he committed in California, acquiring his nickname because of his 1978 appearance on the TV game show. Years before those homicides, however, Alcala killed two women in New York City — including a Yorkville resident whose murder remained unsolved for decades.

"This used to be a neighborhood"

Cornelia Crilley, 23, was working as a flight attendant and living in the five-story walkup building at 427 East 83rd St., between First and York avenues. She worked for Trans World Airlines and had just moved to Manhattan, having grown up in Bayside, Queens, newspapers reported at the time.

On June 24, 1971, after Crilley's boyfriend had been unable to reach her all day, police found her body inside her second-floor apartment. She had been raped and strangled with a stocking, police said.

The murder puzzled investigators, who found her front door locked and had to enter through a rear window using a fire escape, the New York Times reported. Authorities said they did not know how the killer had entered or left the apartment and ruled out robbery as a motive, since no valuables or money were missing.

The next day, a 25-person detective team conducted a door-to-door search across Yorkville, which the Times noted had "a large number of young people, particularly women, living in both luxury and not-so-luxury apartment buildings."

Crilley's death rattled the neighborhood. By Sunday, June 27, the Times reported that neighbors were flocking to Abbey Locksmiths on Second Avenue, purchasing locks and $1,000 burglar alarms.

The neighborhood had grown less safe, residents complained at the time. Police said there had been 16 rapes in Yorkville in recent months, while the Second Avenue Hungarian shop Paprikás Weiss closed early each day to avoid nighttime bandits.

"This used to be a neighborhood," one elderly woman complained to a reporter, citing the trend of luxury apartment houses replacing small tenements. "Now you have to worry if some dope addict is hiding in the hallway."

Indeed, the city recorded a record-high 1,466 murders in 1971, a total that was eclipsed the following year before reaching an all-time high of 2,245 in 1990. (Following a yearslong drop, last year's total was 462 — a 44 percent increase from 2019.)

The following week, Crilley's funeral in Queens drew 1,500 mourners as her employer, T.W.A., offered a $5,000 award for information leading to an arrest. A mailman was taken in for questioning, as was a man arrested in July for committing other rapes on the Upper West Side, but no charges were brought.

Extradition and conviction

Then, in January 2011, Manhattan prosecutors announced they had indicted Alcala in connection with Crilley's death, as well as the 1977 murder of 23-year-old Ellen Jane Hover: an aspiring conductor who disappeared from her Midtown apartment, and whose remains were found months later in Westchester County.

Alcala had lived in the city in the 1970s and worked as a photographer, authorities said.

Details of the investigation were not immediately disclosed, though NYPD officials revealed that they had visited Alcala in prison to take a dental impression which matched a bite mark on Crilley's body, according to officials.

After being extradited to New York, Alcala pleaded guilty in 2012 to the murders of Crilley and Hover. He was sentenced to 25 years to life, on top of the California death sentence.

At the time of his death this week, Alcala was suspected in, or linked to, other murders in California, Washington, New Hampshire and Arizona.