Did Anyone Survive the ‘Dating Game Killer’ Rodney Alcala’s Attacks? Here’s Where Tali Shapiro and Morgan Rowan Are Now

It’s been four years since Rodney Alcala died on July 24, 2021.

Known as the “Dating Game Killer,” his reign of terror spanned decades, leaving behind survivors. Alcala is confirmed to have killed at least seven women and girls across three states, but at least two girls were able to escape death at his hand. Tali Shapiro and Morgan Rowan were attached by him and lived to tell their stories, both incidents taking place a decade before he appeared on The Dating Game.

Rowan was 16 and Shapiro 8 years old when Alcala raped and attempted to murder each of them. Known as The Dating Game Killer for his appearance on the hit TV game show in 1978, Alcala is suspected to have murdered as many as 130 victims throughout the 1960s and 1970s before finally being brought to justice.

In 1979, Alcala was arrested for the murder of 8-year-old Robin Samsoe, and was convicted in California in 1980 of her slaying, as well as those of Jill Barcomb, 18; Jill Parenteau, 21; Georgia Wixted, 27 and Charlotte Lamb, 32. He was also convicted of the murders of Cornelia Michael Crilley, 23, and Ellen Hover, 23, in New York. He was sentenced to death for the California murders and died of natural causes while awaiting his execution.

His crimes and infamous moment on The Dating Game was the subject of the 2023 Netflix movie Woman of the Hour, directed by and starring Anna Kendrick.

Here’s everything to know about the two women who survived their encounters with one of the most prolific sexual predators and serial killers in American history.

What happened to Tali Shapiro?

On Sept. 25, 1968, second grader Shapiro was walking to school along Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles from the Chateau Marmont hotel, where her family was living temporarily when Alcala pulled up and offered her a ride. She initially said no, but when Alcala said he knew her parents, she agreed.

Shapiro’s father worked in the music business, and stars like Mama Cass, Jim Morrison and Lenny Bruce frequently visited.

“It was totally possible [that he knew my parents],” she said in PEOPLE Magazine Investigates: Surviving a Serial Killer. “There were always people going in and out of my house. It was [like] Grand Central Station.”

Shapiro said she got into the car and Alcala told her he was a professional photographer and wanted to show her a poster at his home.

“He drove me to his house. I followed him in, and that’s all I remember. There was nothing else to remember,” she recalled. “He obviously hit me over the head right after that and that was it.”

Alcala raped Shapiro and beat her with a metal bar.

Police found Shapiro lying on the floor of Alcala’s apartment in a pool of blood, naked, with a metal bar lying across her neck. She was unconscious but groaning, so they knew she was alive.

“[After the attack, I needed] over 27 stitches in the back of my head,” Shapiro said at a 2010 sentencing hearing for Alcala. “He hit me right over the head, in the back of the head.”

According to ABC News, Shapiro was in a coma for 32 days and was hospitalized “for months,” but eventually made a full physical recovery.

How did Tali Shapiro survive?

Donald Haines was the bystander who followed Alcala and called the police, unsettled by how Alcala was behaving around Shapiro.

“He was fixated on this little girl,” Haines recalled on PEOPLE Magazine Investigates: Surviving a Serial Killer. “That disturbed me.” When Haines saw Shapiro get in the backseat of Alcala’s van, he said, “All the signs were there.”

Haines tailed Alcala to his apartment but was scared to approach him, fearing he may have a gun. Instead, he found the nearest payphone and called 911. Police arrived in time to get Shapiro much-needed medical help.

Alcala was naked when he opened the door, and officer Christopher Camacho told PEOPLE Magazine Investigates that he could see “a rage in his eyes.”

Camacho eventually kicked in the door and saw Shapiro unresponsive in a pool of blood on the floor with a metal bar on her neck. They initially thought she was dead, but when Camacho removed the bar from Shapiro’s neck, they heard her breathing, and an ambulance came to take her to the hospital.

While officers tended to Shapiro, Alcala escaped through the back door of his apartment. Camacho found Alcala’s ID at the crime scene, which aided investigations later. “They made a choice of saving me or chasing him,” Shapiro told 20/20.

It took more than two years for police to find and arrest Alcala for raping and attempting to murder Shapiro. She later said that her parents refused to let her testify in Alcala’s trial for fear of re-traumatizing her, and Shapiro said she was grateful for that.

“None of this was my knowledge, and I didn’t need to know about those things,” she explained on PEOPLE Magazine Investigates. “Knowing about them years and years later, I can digest that because it’s not part of me. I didn’t have to live with it. But it would have totally messed up my childhood.”

Because Shapiro couldn’t testify, however, prosecutors didn’t have a key witness in the case, and Alcala ended up pleading guilty to child molestation and serving 34 months in prison. He went on to commit at least eight other rapes and murders in California, New York and Wyoming.

What happened to Morgan Rowan?

Rowan told PEOPLE Magazine Investigates that she first met Alcala when she was 13 years old in 1965 in the parking lot of a teen nightclub with her friends.

Rowan recalled that he was “tall, attractive, charismatic.”

“He laughed easily, told stories. Young girls loved him,” she said. “I never saw that as dangerous, but actually, it was.”

She said Alcala kept looking over at their group of friends and smiling. Rowan lightly scratched his arm with her fingernails to get his attention. When he told her to stop, she didn’t, and he grabbed her arm and dragged her into an alley behind the club.

“I think he slammed my head into the wall because I was unconscious,” she said.

When she woke up, she recalled feeling something on her chest: It was a large industrial dumpster that Alcala had pushed against her. Rowan screamed for help, and the owner of the club and his wife came out and helped get her out from behind the dumpster and iced her head.

After that incident, Rowan said she avoided Alcala for the next three years. In August 1968, however, she encountered him again.

Rowan and her family were slated to move to New York, and four days before they departed, Rowan and her friends went out to have a going-away celebration on the Sunset Strip. Rowan said Alcala was among a crowd and that she felt “creeped out” when she saw him. Rowan sat in the backseat between two of her friends to go to a local restaurant and was fearful when she saw Alcala get into the driver’s seat, but didn’t leave.

At the restaurant, Rowan went to the bathroom, and when she was about to go back to her table, Alcala came and said they were all ready to go back to the Strip. The group got into the car, and Alcala made a sudden turn and stopped in front of his house. He gave marijuana to the group, who smoked and listened to loud music in his living room.

Alcala then grabbed Rowan by the arm and pulled her into a bedroom and locked the door behind him. Rowan said she knew she was in trouble and kept backing away from him until she was against a wall.

“He took his belt off and wrapped it around his fist. I tried to be brave and said, ‘No, you can’t keep me here,’ and he just punched me between the eyes as hard as he could,” she recalled. Rowan said her head hit the wall and she fell to her knees and saw stars, but was still conscious. Alcala had a knife and cut the tie of her blouse around her neck, nicking her skin.

“I could feel blood start to flow down my chest,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘He cut my neck. I’m going to die.’ “

Rowan recalled him shoving his belt in her mouth, blocking her airway so she struggled to breathe, and binding her wrists with a necktie. He punched her in the stomach until she felt her ribs breaking, then took his knife to cut off the rest of her clothes. He put the knife down to remove his pants and raped her.

“His face was red and swollen, his eyes were glassy,” she said, unable to get up or move. “He was out of control, like an animal … I wanted it to be over. I wasn’t praying to live. I was praying to die.”

How did Morgan Rowan survive?

Rowan’s friends noticed she and Alcala were missing from the living room and began pounding on the bedroom door. When no one could get it open, Rowan’s friend Mike broke into the bedroom through the window, at which point Alcala stood up with blood all over his shirt and said, “Take her.”

“If my friend Mike hadn’t broken in through the window, I would not be here today,” Rowan said. “I have no doubt he was going to kill me.”

She ran out of the house wearing only a ripped blouse, running in front of a moving car with a man and woman inside. Her friends joined her, and the couple drove them away. Her friend Mike took her to his apartment by the beach, where his neighbor, a nurse, provided first aid, and Mike took care of her for the next four days. She arrived back at her parents’ home minutes before they drove back to New York.

She was traumatized and slept next to her parents’ bed after moving, but never told them what happened.

After Rowan moved to New York City, a friend mailed her a newspaper clipping about Alcala’s rape and attempted murder of Shapiro, and Rowan said she was ravaged by guilt, blaming herself for Shapiro’s trauma because she had never reported Alcala’s attack.

“I should have stopped it. I should have told my parents,” she said. “I should have gone back to that house and killed him myself … I fully felt that it was my fault, that I should have done something.”

Where is Tali Shapiro now?

Shapiro appeared at Alcala’s sentencing in 2010 and testified against him.

“I didn’t have any feelings except of duty, of justice,” she told PEOPLE Magazine Investigates. “I never once looked his way. I consciously didn’t want to give him any energy whatsoever. I didn’t glance at him, I didn’t acknowledge him, I never spoke his name. I didn’t give him any satisfaction.”

After the hearing, she approached Haines, who was also present, and introduced herself.

“I said, ‘I’m so glad to see you,’ ” he recalled.

When Alcala died in 2021, Shapiro, who lives in Palm Springs, Calif., told The New York Times, “The planet is a better place without him, that’s for sure.”

In October 2024, Shapiro told News Nation, “Bad things happen to good people, and I knew something horrible had happened to me, but I don’t live that. I’m not a victim, I’m a survivor.”

Where is Morgan Rowan now?

After decades of guilt, Rowan had a panic attack watching Alcala on the news when she heard of his 2010 sentencing, but was happy to put a name and a face to Shapiro. She wanted to contact Shapiro but feared she’d hate her for not stopping or reporting Alcala.

Rowan spent days writing a letter to Shapiro over Facebook in which she apologized for not reporting Alcala sooner.

Shapiro responded that there was nothing to forgive and that it wasn’t Rowan’s fault. “Tali saying she forgave me changed everything,” Rowan said on PEOPLE Magazine Investigates. “It was definitely a huge step to my recovery.”

They met up and became close. “It was just wonderful. We spent a couple days together. We were like sisters,” Rowan said.

Shapiro added, “She cares for me immensely. I love her. We have a bond.”

Rowan and Shapiro live a few hours apart in California and remain “chosen family,” seeing each other every few months. They rarely discuss Alcala and don’t want to be defined by what he did to them, though Rowan still feels the impacts of her attack nearly six decades later.

When Alcala died in 2021, Rowan said she cried, which surprised her.

“I always thought when he died I would laugh and sing, you know? It was never more real to me than that day,” she told PEOPLE Magazine Investigates. “I couldn’t stop thinking about all the darkness and all the pain he had brought into the world. When evil touches you, it changes you. But evil will never own you. I try very hard to live that way, that I just will not let evil own me or change my decisions.”

Though Alcala is dead, he still lives on in her memory. “Sometimes when I close my eyes at night he’s still there,” she said. “But I’ll be okay.”

In May 2024, Rowan told My San Antonio that she plans on watching Woman of the Hour in part because she’s interested in looking for discrepancies between the film and actual events. She also said that she hopes telling her story to PEOPLE can help women and girls in the future, noting, “I hope that maybe if a young girl watches, and the next time she feels uncomfortable, she will remove herself from the situation.”

If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org.

Read the original article on People