A California jury deliberated only an hour Tuesday before recommended that Rodney Alcala, 66, who once appeared on "The Dating Game" be executed for the murders of four women and a child.

He should be formally sentenced today.

The slayings took place between November 1977 and June 1979, covering a wide swath of suburban Los Angeles from Burbank to El Segundo, prosecutors said.
Before he was a convicted serial killer, Alcala was a winning bachelor on "The Dating Game."

Alcala, who already had been convicted for the 1968 rape of an 8-year-old girl, was the first contestant to be introduced in the game-show episode. After picking him the bachelorette refused to go on a date with him.

Within months of his "Dating Game" appearance, Alcala would become a killer, prosecutors said, abducting and murdering a 12-year-old girl in 1979. Before the decade was over, Alcala would claim four more victims, according to testimony at his trial.