In April 1969, a 14-year-old girl met a 25-year-old man who would go on to become known as a notorious serial killer, and decades later, she got the chance to ask him why he didn’t kill her.

Rodney Alcala came to be known as “Dating game killer‘, named after the TV show he appeared in in the 70s in the middle of his killing spree.

While Alcala was elected by The dating game contestant Cheryl Bradshaw, she got a bad feeling from him and finally said she didn’t want to go anywhere with him.

That story was recently told in a new film Woman of the houra Netflix film directed by Anna Kendrick who also stars as Bradshaw, which covers a number of the murders committed by Alcala.

The heinous crimes of Rodney Alcala

The serial killer was linked to eight murders, but the actual number could be as high as 130, and he died in prison in 2021 while on death row after being arrested in 1979.

Entering The Cut, Alice Feiring explained that she was approached by Alcala in a New York bookstore just months after he lured an eight-year-old girl into his California apartment and then raped and beat her into a coma.

She explained that he started talking to her in a bookstore, introducing himself as Jon Burger, and wrote that he scared her and followed her out of the store after she bought her book.

Alcala apparently wouldn’t stop talking about how he had just moved over from Hollywood and then asked to take pictures of her. At age 14, Feiring said she “didn’t know I had the right to say no”.

Rodney Alcala was a serial killer who may have murdered as many as 130 people. (Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images)

Alice Feiring’s Miraculous Escape

Not wanting to go into his apartment, he instead took pictures of her on the roof of the building. But when the weather turned, he began “violently screaming” at her to help him carry his gear back inside.

Feiring wrote that the apartment felt “terrifyingly wrong” and among the things he gave her to pack away were polaroid images of nude women “dead and posed”, as well as “alive and posed” and “drugged and posed”.

She ran after it while Alcala was in the bathroom and when she left he emerged from it “naked from the waist down”.

Feiring was almost out of the building when she remembered that she had left the book she bought behind, and writing that she was “still stunned by this epic stupidity,” she explained that she ran back to his apartment and knocked on the door to ask for her book back.

Alcala handed over the book and when the 14-year-old ran off again, he shouted “just let me masturbate, I won’t hurt you” after her.

When she was 14, Alice Feiring ran into Rodney Alcala and managed to escape. Years later, she met him in prison and wanted to know why he didn’t kill her. (Neville Elder/Corbis via Getty Images)

Meeting the serial killer again, face to face

It was a situation where she could very easily have been killed, and decades later in 2013, she was able to meet Alcala again while he was behind bars and ask him why he didn’t.

The serial killer told her that he “had a great time during those years” that he was in New York where he had raped and murdered women.

During their conversation, he tried to claim that he had not hurt any of his victims as badly as authorities had indicated, then asked Feiring if he had hurt her.

She ended up visiting him one more time the following year and while she wanted to find out why he didn’t kill her, Alcala never gave Feiring an answer.

In the end, her conclusion about how she survived her encounter with the serial killer was that she was “just lucky.”