"It's sad to see that she didn't get to see everybody's children," Kate Stigell said.
They're memories that Stigell made without her sister Cornelia Crilly, a 23-year-old TWA flight attendant who was brutally raped and murdered in June of 1971 in Manhattan by now 69-year-old Rodney Alcala, who prosecutors say is the "face of evil."
A weeping judge sentenced Alcala to two counts of 25 years to life for murdering Crilly and 23-year-old Ellen Jane Hoover. Hover, a comedy writer and former Hollywood nightclub owner's daughter who had a degree in biology and was seeking a job as a researcher, was living in Manhattan when she vanished in 1977. Her remains were found the next year in the woods on a suburban estate.
"Their loved ones' killer has finally, finally, finally been held accountable and brought to justice," Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said.
Vance's cold case unit cracked open these unsolved murders
Around the time of the murders, Alcala appeared on The Dating Game as bachelor number one. Investigators say he was a master manipulator and a deranged serial killer.
He's currently on death row in California.
A former photographer with an IQ said to top 160, Alcala was convicted in 2010 of killing four women and a 12-year-old girl in Southern California in the 1970s. He represented himself, offering a defense that involved showing a clip of his 1978 appearance on "The Dating Game" and playing Arlo Guthrie's classic 1967 song "Alice's Restaurant."
While appealing his death sentence in California, Alcala was indicted in 2011 in New York, partly on evidence that emerged during his California trial, prosecutors said.
The details of his crimes were so brutal that the judge broke down crying in court during sentencing.
But today is all about closure.
"There's so much love in this room and I know that she sees that," Kate Stigell said.
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