US jury recommends death for serial killer

Santa Ana: Relatives of four women and a 12-year-old girl who were brutally slain in the late 1970s exploded in applause Tuesday as the jury recommended death for Rodney Alcala, a convicted serial killer whose bizarre defense strategy included lyrics from an Arlo Guthrie song and showing an episode of "The Dating Game."

Jurors took just an hour to return the death recommendation after a six-week trial in which the 66-year-old Alcala - who was representing himself - grilled the mother of one of his victims, cross-examined police investigators and answered his own questions while taking the stand in his own defense.

Alcala has been sentenced to death twice before in the 1979 murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe, but those verdicts were overturned on appeal.

Prosecutors refiled charges in that case and added the four other murders in 2006 after investigators linked them to Alcala using DNA samples and other forensic evidence.

Those cases, which had gone unsolved for decades, went on trial for the first time this year.

Alcala, an amateur photographer and University of California Los Angeles graduate, focused his entire defense on the Samsoe case and ignored the murders of the four Los Angeles County women murdered between 1977 and 1979.

Samsoe's surviving siblings, now in their mid-40s, thanked the jury and said they were glad to see the other families get closure after years of not knowing who had killed their loved ones.

"Thirty-six people now have convicted him of death and that's a great feeling knowing that Robin did not die for nothing. We took a monster off the street, we've got closure for other families who didn't have it," said Robin's older brother, 44-year-old Robert Samsoe. "This is a joyous occasion."

Alcala gave his own closing arguments earlier Tuesday, telling jurors that a death recommendation would make them "de facto killers" and "wannabe killers in waiting."