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. "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 and broke ribs and removed his pants and sexually assaulted her.
"I wasn't praying to live-I was praying to die.
" Rowan didn't know it then, but when one of her concerned friends broke a bedroom window and persuaded her assailant to unlock the door, the man she managed to escape from was 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.
This story is from the May 06, 2024 edition of People US.
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This story is from the May 06, 2024 edition of People US.
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