‘The Dating Game killer’: Who was Cheryl Bradshaw?

One of the wildest stories in all of true crime took place in the 1970s, when a real-life woman named Cheryl Bradshaw appeared on The Dating Game, a popular TV show from that era, and barely escaped going on a date with serial killer Rodney Alcala.

Anna Kendrick directs and stars in Woman of the Hour, a movie about Bradshaw’s Dating Game experience. Kendrick’s directorial debut premieres Oct. 18 on Netflix. Daniel Zovatto (Station Eleven) plays Alcala in the film.

The Dating Game’s setup was simple; a hopeful bachelorette (or less frequently, a bachelor) would ask three contestants of the opposite sex some prepared questions, then chose one they might like to go on a date with based on their responses. The gimmick was that the suitors were hidden from the view of the bachelorette by an onstage dividing wall, and encountered each other face to face only at the end of the episode. The racy hit was one of many game shows shot in Los Angeles. Alcala was a contestant on The Dating Game in 1978, a time before background checks and social media, and had already been to prison for raping and murdering an 8-year-old girl, appeared on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, and killed two women in Southern California.

The year after his TV appearance, Alcala, now commonly referred to as “The Dating Game killer,” was arrested for murdering seven women. Over the years, more murders across the country were attributed to him. Alcala died on death row in 2021, at the age of 77, of natural causes. Nobody knows for sure how many women and girls Alcala killed.

Is Woman of the Hour a true story?

Director Anna Kendrick’s first feature, Woman of the Hour, is based on a true story. But while the real Cheryl Bradshaw selected Rodney Alcala for a date, she never followed through with it, later telling the show’s producers she found him “creepy,” according to CNN.

According to The Dating Game contestant coordinator Ellen Metzger, Bradshaw said, “‘Ellen, I can’t go out with this guy. There’s weird vibes that are coming off of him. He’s very strange. I am not comfortable. Is that going to be a problem?’” Bradshaw was allowed to back out of the date, and has kept a low profile since then.

Woman of the Hour was written by Ian McDonald, who takes liberties with the truth, imagining Bradshaw going on the planned date with Alcala but escaping with her life, as well as fictionalizing other aspects of Bradshaw’s life that are unknown.

Bradshaw was not the only one with reservations about Alcala

In the real story, Cheryl Bradshaw was not the only person who felt uneasy about Rodney Alcala in 1978. Jed Mills, another male contestant on the show that day who interacted with Alcala behind the scenes, later called him “obnoxious and creepy,” just as Bradshaw described him. “[H]e became very unlikable and rude and imposing as though he was trying to intimidate. I wound up not only not liking this guy … not wanting to be near him … he got creepier and more negative. He was a standout creepy guy in my life,” Mills told CNN.

While Kendrick’s Bradshaw goes on the fateful date with Alcala in the movie, serial killer expert Pat Brown says the real Bradshaw’s decision to back out could have saved her life. “That is something he would not take too well,” Brown told CNN. Serial killers like Alcala, he added, “don’t understand the rejection. They think that something is wrong with that girl: ‘She played me. She played hard to get.'”