2 Women Who Survived the Same Serial Killer Speak Out: 'I Didn't Pray to Live, I Prayed to Die' (2024)

• Years before his 1978 appearance on The Dating Game, Rodney Alcala, was already preying on young girls
• In 1968, he attacked 16-year-old Morgan Rowan. Weeks later, he raped and nearly killed 8-year-old Tali Shapiro
• Alcala was arrested in 1979 for the murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe. He was convicted of seven murders, although he is believed to have killed dozens more young women. He died in prison in 2021

Terrified and utterly alone in a locked bedroom with a man who had lured her and two friends to his house in Los Angeles, 16-year-old Morgan Rowan felt certain she would die.

The man took off his belt and wrapped it around his fist.

“I watched his transformation,” Rowan, now 72, recalls of that life-changing night in August 1968. “I watched his face turn purple. He punched me between my eyes with a belt buckle. I saw stars shooting, and I dropped to my knees.”

The man bound Rowan’s wrists with a necktie, punched her until her ribs broke, removed his pants and raped her.

“I wanted it to be over,” Rowan says. “I wasn’t praying to live. I was praying to die.”

A friend broke through a window to get inside.

Wearing only a ripped shirt, Rowan ran from the house to a nearby alley, where she hid with her friends in a dumpster shed.

Rowan didn’t know it then, but she had just escaped a lethal predator.

Known as the "Dating Game Killer" because he once appeared on the iconic 1970s TV show of the same name, Rodney Alcala, a smooth-talking professional photographer who is believed to have killed dozens of women in the 1960s and 1970s, was eventually convicted of seven murders.

Rowan’s harrowing story of being viciously attacked by him as a teenager and, years later, finding a healing friendship with another survivor in whom she could confide is told in “Surviving the Dating Game Killer” on People Magazine Investigates: Surviving a Serial Killer, premiering May 5 at 9/8 C on ID and streaming on Max.

Weeks after her attack, Rowan had moved to Upstate New York with her family and received a letter with a newspaper clipping inside from a friend back in L.A.: Alcala, the man who had attacked her, was wanted by police for the kidnapping and rape of another girl who was just 8 years old.

On the morning of Sept. 25, 1968, Tali Shapiro, dressed for school in a white dress and Mary Jane shoes, was walking on Sunset Boulevard when Alcala persuaded her to get into his car and drove her to his house, where he knocked her unconscious.

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He was assaulting her when police, tipped off by a bystander who had seen Shapiro get into Alcala’s car, arrived at the scene and caused him to flee.

“They made a choice of saving me or chasing him,” recalls Shapiro, 64, whom police found near death in a pool of blood.

After more than a month in a coma, Shapiro — who has no memory of the attack — emerged and lived for decades without knowing the severity of what happened to her.

In 2010 she testified at Alcala’s trial for the murders of five women, helping to convict him and keep him in prison for the rest of his life. (He died behind bars in 2021.)

That’s when Rowan learned that the 8-year-old she had read about decades earlier had survived.

“I had always felt responsible for her,” says Rowan, who later reached out to Shapiro on Facebook. “I just poured my heart out that I was sorry, and I should have done something.”

Shapiro says, “I told her there’s nothing to forgive. There’s only one person that’s responsible for this, and he’s pure evil.”

The two women, who live a few hours apart in California, began to get together every few months and now consider themselves close friends.

And while at first their conversations focused on the trauma they share, “neither of us want to be defined by it,” Rowan says. She and Shapiro haven’t discussed Alcala in years. “Tali does not ever see herself as a victim, and I’m learning from her to see myself as strong also.”

“She’s the sister I always wish I had,” Shapiro adds. “We’re chosen family.”

Surviving the Dating Game Killer premiers May 5 at 9/8 C on People Magazine Investigates: Surviving a Serial Killer on ID and streams on Max.

• With reporting by Wendy Grossman Kantor