(CNN) -- Before he was a convicted serial killer, Rodney Alcala was a winning bachelor on "The Dating Game."
"Oh yeah, I remember it quite clearly," said Jed Mills, the game-show contestant who sat next to Alcala in 1978. "He was creepy. Definitely creepy."
Found guilty in February of murdering four women and a child, Alcala, 66, is acting as his own attorney in the penalty phase of the trial. He is hoping to persuade the jury in Santa Ana, California, to spare his life.
The crimes Alcala committed date to the late 1970s. Nobody at the time knew the man with the wavy long hair and toothy grin was an apparent psychopath -- an unstable, antisocial personality.
That includes Mills, a veteran television and film actor, whose only encounter with Alcala was when both of them appeared on "The Dating Game."
"That's when I became part of a nightmare, and I didn't realize it was a nightmare until 32 years later," Mills said.
Alcala, who already had been convicted for the...
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