Judge OKs Merging 5 Trials for Murder

A man accused of killing a 12-year-old Huntington Beach girl as well as four Los Angeles-area women in the 1970s will be tried in all five cases in Orange County at once, prosecutors said Friday.

Attorney John P. Dolan, who once represented Rodney James Alcala, called the ruling by Superior Court Judge Francisco Briseno “a big victory for the prosecution.”

Alcala, 62, has spent much of the last 26 years on death row for the 1979 kidnapping and killing of Robin Samsoe, the Huntington Beach girl.

He is in an Orange County jail awaiting his second retrial in the case. In September, he was also charged with murdering four Los Angeles County women: Jill Barcomb, 18, Georgia Wixted, 27, Charlotte Lamb, 32, and Jill Parenteau, 21. The women were sexually assaulted, then strangled.

State officials linked Alcala to the four Los Angeles County slayings after testing his DNA as part of a program of taking the genetic material samples from state prison inmates.

Despite objections from defense lawyers, Briseno’s ruling came at the request of prosecutors from both counties.

Alcala’s attorneys could not be reached Friday.

Dolan said that after Alcala’s second conviction in the Samsoe murder was overturned, the case against him “is paper thin.”

But lumping that case with the others makes the prosecution’s case much easier.

“If you’re a juror and you hear one murder case, you may be able to find reasonable doubt,” he said. “But it’s very hard to say you have reasonable doubt on all five, especially when four of the five aren’t alleged by eyewitnesses but are proven by DNA matches.”

Samsoe disappeared June 20, 1979, as she bicycled to a dance lesson. Her remains were found 12 days later in the San Gabriel Mountain foothills.

A jury convicted Alcala in 1980 of murdering her. He won a second trial in 1984 after the state Supreme Court said evidence about his prior attacks against young girls should not have been allowed at trial.

Alcala was tried again in 1986 and convicted. That conviction was overturned on grounds that Alcala’s lawyers weren’t allowed to introduce testimony that cast doubt on a key prosecution witness.

An appeals court upheld the U.S. district judge’s order that Alcala be retried or released.