By LARRY WELBORN / The Orange County Register
Published: April 9,2010 Updated: April 10, 2010
The photos show long-haired girls with flowers in their hair. Some are posing seductively in bikinis, bellbottoms or with bare midriffs. Others are dancing, drinking, smoking or listening to music.
The young women have one thing in common: they had their pictures taken in the 1970s by a photographer who dealt death.
The photos were recovered by Huntington Beach homicide detectives in July of 1979 from a storage locker in Seattle rented by Rodney James Alcala, a freelance cameraman who turned out to be a serial killer.
He was sentenced to death last month after he was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder for the sexual torture and strangulation murders of four women in Los Angeles County, and the kidnap and murder of a 12-year-old girl from Huntington Beach, during a 20-month killing spree in the late 1970s.
Huntington Beach Police released the photos to The Orange County Register one month ago after a jury voted to give Alcala the death penalty.
Detectives wanted to know: are the mostly smiling models in Alcala's photo gallery still alive? Or did they become murder victims?
They have been able to identify 21 young women in the photo catalogue after they were inundated with phone calls, e-mails and other contacts, but none matched up to a missing persons case or an unsolved homicide from the 1970s.
If you know any of the people in Alcala's photos,
contact Huntington Beach Police Detective Patrick Ellis,
at 714-375-5066, or email him at pellis@hbpd.org
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