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'Dating Game Killer' kept 'trophies' that ultimately led to his downfall: detective

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'Dating Game Killer' kept 'trophies' that ultimately led to his downfall: detective

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While the recent release of a new film has brought the infamous case of serial killer Rodney Alcala back into the public eye, a former detective who helped put the “monster” behind bars for life told Fox News Digital about a pair of earrings that led to Alcala’s ultimate downfall. 

Alcala has been dubbed the “Dating Game killer” because he appeared on the television show “The Dating Game” as Bachelor No. 1 in 1978 during his killing spree.

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“One of our detectives went home from work, sat down with the newspaper and probably a beer … had the TV on in the background and heard Jim Lange from ‘The Dating Game’ mention Rodney Alcala,” Steven Mack, who worked as a detective for 18 years, told Fox News Digital. 

“[Alcala] reportedly had an IQ of 140. He thought he was smarter than everybody else and that nobody would ever connect him to these murders.”

DNA LINKS CALIFORNIA MAN TO 1979 COLD CASE MURDER, YEARS AFTER PASSING LIE DETECTOR

In this March 30, 2010, file photo, convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala listens as victim-impact statements are read in a Santa Ana, Calif. (AP)

Serial killer Rodney Alcala died of natural causes on July 24, 2021, while awaiting execution in California. (Prosecutor Matt Murphy)

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The Netflix movie “Woman of the Hour,” released last month, is based on details from Alcala’s case and his participation on the dating show. 

In 2003, Mack was a homicide detective with the Huntington Beach Police Department in California and began taking a lead role in investigating Alcala’s case. 

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At the time, he was already familiar with the case, as he had worked as a patrol officer in 1979 when detectives were searching for a missing 12-year-old girl, Robin Samsoe, who was last seen riding a bicycle to her dance class.

“Loved life, loved going to the beach, loved dancing, loved her family, loved her friends,” Mack said. It really bothers me on an emotional level because she was a 12-year-old child.”

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NEWS ANCHOR’S MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE WAS CRIME OF ‘JEALOUSY’: PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

Alcala has been dubbed the “Dating Game killer” because he appeared on the television show “The Dating Game” as Bachelor No. 1 in 1978 during his killing spree. (Prosecutor Matt Murphy)

When Mack began investigating, Alcala had already been sentenced to death in Samsoe’s murder twice – in 1980 and again in 1986 – but both convictions were overturned.

“What I knew was that Rodney Alcala was a convicted murderer. What I believed in, what everybody else began to believe, is that he was a serial killer,” Mack said. “The DNA collected during my involvement proved that.”

During his investigation, Mack went through evidence preserved by previous investigators decades earlier from inside a storage locker belonging to Alcala. 

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“My first thought was, like most serial killers, he kept trophies so that he could go back and relive the circumstances, relive the murder,” he said. “He was a sexually sadistic serial killer. And those individuals love to relive their crimes.”

COP WHO SURVIVED SERIAL KILLER AS A TEEN IS NOW ON TRACK TO BECOME A DETECTIVE

Rodney Alcala’s jewelry “trophies” Mack found when going through evidence preserved by previous investigators decades earlier from inside a storage locker belonging to Alcala. (Evidence photo courtesy of Prosecutor Matt Murphy)

In the preserved evidence, Mack noticed a pair of rose-shaped earrings in a small satin pouch, believing they might belong to one of Alcala’s victims. 

“Examining the earrings, souvenirs that he kept from the various cases, we were able to connect DNA to one of the Los Angeles homicide victims, which solidified the case against him for L.A. and was able to join the two prosecutions, Los Angeles and Orange County, into one trial.” 

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The DNA found on the rose-shaped earrings was determined to be that of 32-year-old Charlotte Lamb, who was murdered in 1978 in Los Angeles. 

“We finally had the forensic connection that arguably was missing before,” Matt Murphy, the lead prosecutor on Alcala’s case, told Fox News Digital. 

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12-year-old Robin Samsoe. Alcala was sentenced to death in 2010 for five murders in California in the late 1970s, including that of Samsoe, 18-year-old Jill Barcomb, 21-year-old Jill Parenteau, 27-year-old Georgia Wixted and 32-year-old Charlotte Lamb after new DNA evidence connected him to the victims. (Prosecutor Matt Murphy)

Alcala was sentenced to death in 2010 for five murders in California in the late 1970s, including that of 12-year-old Samsoe. He was charged in the additional killings of 18-year-old Jill Barcomb, 21-year-old Jill Parenteau, 27-year-old Georgia Wixted and 32-year-old Lamb after new DNA evidence connected him to the victims.

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Nobody believed that he was going to actually get the death penalty in the state of California,” Mack said.

In 2013, he received an additional 25 years to life after pleading guilty to two slayings in New York.

“Once we had the DNA in the system, then other agencies … New York PD and police agencies around the country started looking into their homicides and their Jane Doe’s,” Mack explained. “They were able to connect Alcala to their crimes.”

In 2016, he was charged again, this time with the murder of a 28-year-old pregnant woman after DNA evidence connected him to her 1977 death in Wyoming.

SEARCH FOR MISSING NEWS ANCHOR EXPANDS AFTER AUTHORITIES GET NEW TIP

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32-year-old Charlotte Lamb (Prosecutor Matt Murphy)

Alcala was sentenced to death in 2010 for five murders in California in the late 1970s. In 2013, he received an additional 25 years to life after pleading guilty to two slayings. In 2016, he was charged again, this time, with the murder of a 28-year-old pregnant woman after DNA evidence connected him to her 1977 death in Wyoming. (AP Photo/David Handschuh, Pool/File)

Alcala died of natural causes on July 24, 2021, while awaiting execution in California. He was 77 at the time of his death. 

“He did end up … living a miserable life when he died in a prison hospital,” Mack said. “Whatever happened to him wasn’t enough. In my opinion, he should have suffered more than just the loss of freedom.”

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Rodney Alcala talks with his investigator before being convicted in Santa Ana, Calif., on Feb. 25, 2010, of murdering a 12-year-old girl and four women in the late 1970s. (ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER)

Mack believes the true victim count may be higher than the convicted number.

“I don’t believe that the death of a suspect gives any family closure,” Mack added. “Closure would be able to forget what happened to their loved ones, and they don’t.” 

The former detective mentioned that he doesn’t like to say Alcala’s name and instead prefers using the term “monster,” explaining that he “doesn’t deserve any recognition at all.”  

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“It changed my children’s ability to go places by themselves,” Mack disclosed, sharing how the case impacted his own family and community.

“Huntington Beach, you know, is a safe place, and this just destroyed that image for a lot of people.”



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Montana

Montana Lottery Powerball, Lotto America results for July 4, 2026

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The Montana Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big.

Here’s a look at July 4, 2026, results for each game:

Winning Powerball numbers from July 4 drawing

17-38-46-50-69, Powerball: 20, Power Play: 2

Check Powerball payouts and previous drawings here.

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Winning Lotto America numbers from July 4 drawing

09-17-22-35-37, Star Ball: 05, ASB: 02

Check Lotto America payouts and previous drawings here.

Winning Big Sky Bonus numbers from July 4 drawing

04-13-19-26, Bonus: 07

Check Big Sky Bonus payouts and previous drawings here.

Winning Montana Cash numbers from July 4 drawing

09-13-17-27-33

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Check Montana Cash payouts and previous drawings here.

Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results

When are the Montana Lottery drawings held?

  • Powerball: 8:59 p.m. MT on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
  • Mega Millions: 9 p.m. MT on Tuesday and Friday.
  • Lucky For Life: 8:38 p.m. MT daily.
  • Lotto America: 9 p.m. MT on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.
  • Big Sky Bonus: 7:30 p.m. MT daily.
  • Powerball Double Play: 8:59 p.m. MT on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
  • Montana Cash: 8 p.m. MT on Wednesday and Saturday.
  • Millionaire for Life: 9:15 p.m. MT daily.

Missed a draw? Peek at the past week’s winning numbers.

This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a Great Falls Tribune editor. You can send feedback using this form.



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Nevada

11 Nevada Towns With A Slower Pace Of Life

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11 Nevada Towns With A Slower Pace Of Life


Genoa was a Mormon trading post in 1851, a decade before Nevada was a state, and it has never been in a hurry since. Up and down the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada and out across the Great Basin, the towns that grew up around silver strikes, railroad water stops, and dam construction camps mostly emptied out when the work ran dry, and what stayed behind is a string of places where the clock loosened its grip. Opera houses still host the occasional show. Saloons still pour for whoever walks in. The eleven towns below trade Nevada’s neon for porch time, dark skies, and roads with almost nothing on them.

Genoa

Mormon Station State Historic Park in Genoa, Nevada. Image credit Ritu Manoj Jethani via Shutterstock

The Genoa Bar and Saloon has been pouring drinks since 1853, which makes it the oldest bar in the state, and most of its counter and fixtures date to the 1860s. That is the pace of the place in one building. Genoa itself is Nevada’s oldest permanent settlement, and Mormon Station State Historic Park preserves a reconstructed log trading post on the site of the original 1851 station, with a small museum and grounds that fill up for community events through the summer. Genoa Town Park carries the warm-month concert schedule. When the afternoon calls for it, David Walley’s Resort sits a short walk off, with mineral hot springs that have drawn soakers to this corner of the Carson Valley for well over a century.

Ely

Main Street in Ely, Nevada.
Main Street in Ely, Nevada.

At the Nevada Northern Railway Museum, the locomotives are not models behind glass; the collection is one of the most complete original short-line operations left in the country, and the steam excursions run on the same track the copper trains used. That is Ely’s main event, and it sets the tempo. The Ward Charcoal Ovens State Historic Park, just outside town, preserves six beehive-shaped stone kilns that fed the smelters during the mining boom, close enough to reach for an afternoon. The White Pine Public Museum fills in the rest, with mining, ranching, and Native history. Back on Aultman Street, the Hotel Nevada and Gambling Hall has anchored downtown since it opened in 1929, when it was briefly the tallest building in the state, and it still pours a cold one for anyone coming in off Highway 50.

Tonopah

The Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah, Nevada.
The Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah, Nevada. Image credit Travelview via Shutterstock

On a clear, moonless night at the Clair Blackburn Memorial Stargazing Park, you can pick out more than 7,000 stars with your eyes alone. Most cities show you 25 or 50. The park, off Highway 95 with concrete pads laid out for telescopes, is reason enough to time a visit around the new moon. By day, the Tonopah Historic Mining Park spreads across 100 acres of the original silver works, with tunnels and headframes from the boom that built the town. The Mizpah Hotel, restored and operating since its 1907 opening, holds the Pittman Café for breakfast and the Jack Dempsey Room for a sit-down dinner, named for the heavyweight champion who once worked the hotel as a bouncer.

Virginia City

Aerial scenic view of the historic Main Street in downtown Virginia City, Nevada.
The historic Main Street in downtown Virginia City, Nevada.

The Comstock Lode silver strike of 1859 turned Virginia City into one of the richest mining centers in the West almost overnight, and the wooden boardwalks and stacked 19th-century storefronts climbing the hillside are what the money left behind. The Virginia and Truckee Railroad runs short excursions along the old mining route, and the Chollar Mine tour takes you underground into the works themselves. The Bucket of Blood Saloon has been serving since 1876, built on the footprint of an earlier saloon right after the Great Fire of 1875 cleared the block. It is an easy place to lose a slow afternoon over a beer.

Boulder City

Downtown streets of Boulder City, Nevada.
Downtown streets of Boulder City, Nevada. Image credit gg-foto via Shutterstock

Gambling is illegal here by city ordinance, one of only two Nevada towns where that is true, a rule that traces straight back to why the town exists. The federal government built Boulder City in the early 1930s to house the workers raising Hoover Dam, laying out organized streets and civic buildings, and the planned layout still shapes a walkable downtown. The dam itself draws most visitors, best taken in without rushing. The Boulder City-Hoover Dam Museum, inside the historic Boulder Dam Hotel, tells the Depression-era construction story, and the Coffee Cup Café is the institution where locals linger over breakfast. At Hemenway Park, desert bighorn sheep come down to graze against the backdrop of Lake Mead country.

Caliente

Downtown street in Caliente, Nevada.
Downtown street in Caliente, Nevada.

The Caliente Railroad Depot, a restored Mission Revival building from the Union Pacific era, now does double duty as the town’s visitor center and the anchor of its main street. The name comes from the hot springs that first drew settlers, and cottonwoods shade a town that sits well off the southern Nevada rush. Two miles south, Kershaw-Ryan State Park tucks shaded picnic areas, spring-fed wading pools, and trails beneath steep canyon walls. The Barnes Canyon trail network gives mountain bikers and hikers desert terrain to work through at their own speed, and Meadow Valley Wash supports cottonwood stands and wildlife unusual for country this dry.

Eureka

Aerial view of the tiny town of Eureka, Nevada on Highway 50.
Overlooking Eureka, Nevada, on Highway 50.

Sixteen smelters once belched enough smoke over Eureka to earn it the nickname “Pittsburgh of the West,” back when 9,000 people and a hundred-odd saloons crowded the canyon. About 600 people live here now, and the boom-era buildings have the streets mostly to themselves. The Eureka Opera House, built in 1880 on a block cleared by the previous year’s fire, still stages performances under its restored interior. The Eureka Sentinel Museum occupies the original 1879 newspaper building, presses and type cases left where they sat. The Jackson House Hotel has put up guests since the 19th century, and the Owl Club Bar and Steakhouse feeds travelers and locals along Highway 50, the stretch a magazine once branded the Loneliest Road in America.

Gardnerville

Overlooking Gardnerville, Nevada.
Overlooking Gardnerville, Nevada. Image credit G Chapel via Shutterstock

Basque sheepherders settled the Carson Valley, and their cooking is still the reason to plan dinner in Gardnerville, served family-style at long tables in the valley’s old boarding-house tradition. The town grew as a ranching center under the Sierra Nevada, and the Carson Valley Museum and Cultural Center, housed in a former high school, lays out that agricultural and pioneer history. Lampe Park gives the community its gathering ground, with a quiet stream and walking paths and a calendar of seasonal events. Jobs Peak rises over the whole valley, a granite wall that turns gold at the end of the day.

Wells

Looking out over the landscape in Wells, Nevada.
Landscape surrounding Wells, Nevada. Image credit Famartin – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

The Angel Lake Scenic Byway climbs out of the desert flats into the East Humboldt Range, ending at a glacial lake cupped high against the peaks, good for a morning of fishing or a slow walk along the alpine shore. Wells grew up as a railroad town, and the Front Street Historic District still shows the bones of that era, when this was a working junction on the transcontinental line. The Trail of the 49ers Interpretive Center on 6th Street covers the emigrant routes that funneled through here on the way west, the California Trail travelers who passed through long before the rails did.

Winnemucca

Downtown street in Winnemucca, Nevada.
Downtown street in Winnemucca, Nevada.

The Humboldt River made Winnemucca a crossing long before the railroad came through, and the Humboldt Museum tells that regional story through Native, ranching, and transportation exhibits. The town’s other inheritance is Basque: sheepherders settled here in numbers, and the dining room at the Martin Hotel still serves the lamb and the family-style spread that the town celebrates each summer at its Basque Festival. The Winnemucca Sand Dunes draw the off-road and open-desert crowd just outside town. For something quieter, Water Canyon climbs along a running stream into terrain more rugged than the valley floor lets on.

Lovelock

Downtown Lovelock, Nevada.
Downtown Lovelock, Nevada. Image credit Ken Lund via Flickr

The Pershing County Courthouse is round, one of the few circular courthouses still in use anywhere in the country, and it sits at the center of town with its early-20th-century architecture intact. Behind it, Lovers Lock Plaza invites visitors to clip a padlock to a chain as a token of commitment, a small local tradition that has become the town’s signature stop. The deeper history is just outside town at Lovelock Cave, where excavations turned up evidence of human use going back thousands of years. Rye Patch State Recreation Area, along the reservoir on the Humboldt River, handles the boating, fishing, and lakeside afternoons.

Wide Open Spaces And Unhurried Places

What these towns share is not scenery so much as arithmetic: the work that built them mostly left, and the people who stayed kept the opera houses, the saloons, and the depots running at a fraction of the old traffic. That is why a steam train in Ely or a 7,000-star sky over Tonopah feels unhurried in a way a manufactured attraction never quite manages. The pace was not designed. It is what is left when the boom moves on and the place decides to stay anyway.

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New Mexico

First July 4 display at Miles park for 250th honors America and New Mexican identity

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First July 4 display at Miles park for 250th honors America and New Mexican identity


The City Different’s Fourth of July celebration began a little differently this year.

Instead of gathering near Santa Fe Place mall as residents have for years, thousands spread across Franklin E. Miles Park for the city’s first Independence Day celebration at the new venue. They came to watch a drone show debut, celebrating the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding by blending American symbols with ones signifying New Mexican identity, followed by the traditional fireworks.

The move to Franklin E. Miles Park followed months of debate after the former venue became unavailable due to construction tied to a new hotel. And for some nearby residents, the change exceeded expectations.

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Lewis and his son Aidan Herrera make their way in matching patriotic garb towards live music by Lumpy on Saturday, July 4, 2026, at Franklin E. Miles Park.



‘A learning curve’



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Nathan Montoya, 3, catches a ride with Carlos Montoya while skateboarding at Franklin E. Miles Park during the Fourth of July celebration on Saturday.


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‘Santa Fe should be proud’







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Pop-its fireworks entertain children as they are thrown against the ground during July 4 celebrations Saturday at Franklin E. Miles Park.



‘We’re the City Different’



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Lana Bolin of Lumpy serenades the crowd during Fourth of July celebrations Saturday at Franklin E. Miles Park.


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