Angol
She thought she was the only one who survived him. She was wrong.
In 1965, a thirteen-year-old girl named Morgan met a charming stranger outside a Sunset Strip nightclub. Three years later, she survived him a second time - barely. In between, an eight-year-old girl vanished into his house and woke up a month later with no memory of what he'd done to her. The world would come to know him as the Dating Game Killer. For decades, these two survivors didn't know the other existed.
Ghost Girl is the true story of Rodney Alcala - a man so disarming he won a nationally televised dating show while, unknown to millions of viewers, he had already murdered at least four women. This is the story of how he did it: the plea deal that let him walk free after less than three years, the parole board that called him rehabilitated, the two death sentences overturned on appeal, and the twenty-year hunt that finally connected him to six murders across two states through DNA evidence recovered from a single storage locker in Seattle.
But this book belongs just as much to the women who lived through it. To Morgan, who carried guilt for forty years over a child she believed she should have saved. To Tali, who spent decades as an unnamed footnote in a case file before finally standing in a courtroom to speak for herself. To Marianne, who sat behind her daughter's killer with a gun in her purse - and put it away. To Kathy, who searched for her missing sister for thirty-nine years before recognizing her face in a photograph the killer himself had kept.
Drawing on court records, trial testimony, and the survivors' own accounts, Ghost Girl is a meticulously researched, unflinching, and ultimately human portrait of how a predator can hide in plain sight for decades - and of what it takes to stop being a ghost.
For readers of true crime that refuses to look away, and refuses to look for shock value either.
