Police seek more victims of killer

March 20, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif.

Police have been overwhelmed since they released more than 100 photos found in a serial killer’s storage locker, more than 30-year-old pictures of unidentified girls and women in bell bottoms, bikinis and Farrah Fawcett hair.

They look like long-lost sisters, mothers and daughters to bereaved callers across the country and from as far away as Denmark. Police have gotten more than 400 phone calls in a little more than a week.

The photos had been in the possession of Rodney Alcala, who has been in custody since 1979 and was recently convicted of murdering four young women and a 12-year-old girl. Jurors recommended the death penalty this month.

Prosecutors say Alcala used his camera to lure his victims, and he was seen taking pictures of the girl before she disappeared. They fear some of the unidentified people in the photos released last week may have fallen victim to Alcala as well.

“The first thing is, ‘Oh, my God, I hope these girls are OK,’ and the next thing is, ‘I wonder if any of them are victims.’ Everyone has that question,” prosecutor Matt Murphy said. “I can’t imagine for a million years that we’ve got him for the only murders he’s done.”

The photos, available on the Orange County district attorney’s Web site, are just a fraction of the more than 1,000 images investigators found in Alcala’s storage locker when he was arrested in the 1979 murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe in Huntington Beach.

They show leggy teenagers in bikinis and short-shorts on Southern California’s sun-splashed beaches; young women in flowery blouses and hippie necklaces listening to music; and girls wearing heavy makeup, apparently posing nude.

One photo shows a baby in a diaper toddling near the shoreline, and another shows two young children in swimsuits on the beach.

Detectives have withheld about 900 pictures because they are too sexually explicit, and others have been cropped for release, said Huntington Beach police Capt. Chuck Thomas. Police are chasing leads from Seattle to Phoenix to Orange County, Calif. Even before the photos were released, Alcala was a suspect in several cases in New York City, where he lived from 1968 to 1971, and in New Hampshire, Murphy said.