“I am serving you for dinner,” said Cheryl Bradshaw, “What are you called and what do you look like?” Bachelor number one, Rodney Alcala, replied: “I’m called the banana and I look really good … Peel me.” Bradshaw burst into laughter and so did the studio audience.

This was a seemingly innocuous episode of the television show The Dating Game in 1978. Bradshaw, able to put questions to three contestants but unable to see them, selected Alcala, a longhaired photographer who enjoyed skydiving and motorcycling in his spare time. What she could not know was that she had booked a date with one of the most prolific serial killers in American history.

The story of their close encounter, and how Bradshaw’s intuition saved her life, is retold in Woman of the Hour, the directorial debut of Anna Kendrick now streaming on Netflix.

The film traces how Alcala (played by Daniel Zovatto), armed with charm and a camera, lured young women by offering to take their picture (he was eventually convicted of five murders in Orange county, California, and two in New York, all in the 1970s). It also follows Bradshaw (Kendrick), an aspiring actor battling industry sexism who sees The Dating Game as a way to get her big break.

Their paths cross on the show, a forerunner of The Bachelor and other reality TV that featured future Hollywood stars such as Farrah Fawcett, Sally Field and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Its producers had no idea about that Alcala was already a registered sex offender and did little by way of vetting contestants.

Matt Murphy, a former homicide prosecutor who worked on the Alcala case and consulted on Woman of the Hour, says by phone from Manhattan Beach, California: “The Dating Game was a risque G-rated show that ran for over 10 years in southern California. It was filled with silly double entendre and reflected a far more innocent time before television became overrun with cringey reality TV. And it reflected a more innocent time in America, especially when it comes to our collective understanding of sexual predators.”

Handsome, intelligent and urbane, Alcala seemed like an ideal contestant. Yet as he sat on stage in a brown bell-bottom suit, he already had blood on his hands. Murphy continues: “It speaks to the narcissism, the arrogance of psychopaths. He’s in the middle of a murder spree and he went on The Dating Game and he was selected.”

At the moment of choosing, Bradshaw announced, “Well, I like bananas, so I’ll take [bachelor number] one!” Alcala beamed as the audience applauded. The fledgling couple were awarded tennis lessons and a trip to the Magic Mountain theme park. But almost immediately Bradshaw had a gut feeling that something was wrong.

Murphy adds: “If you watch the YouTube clips, where he comes around the partition and Cheryl Bradshaw looks at him, there’s a moment in her eyes where you can see she’s being polite but she refused to go on a date with him and that probably saved her life.”

After filming, Bradshaw phoned the The Dating Game’s production office and told the contestant coordinator Ellen Metzger that she wanted to cancel. Metzger told an ABC News documentary: “She said, ‘Ellen, I can’t go out with this guy. There’s weird vibes that are coming off him. He’s very strange. I am not comfortable. Is that going to be a problem?’ And of course, I said, ‘No.’”

Bradshaw later recounted the experience to Alan Warren, author of The Killing Game: The True Story of Rodney Alcala. He recalls: “She liked him when she was asking questions and he was giving answers. His answers were very sexual with very strong innuendos – that was also part of the 70s and the style show so it wasn’t far off.

“She liked that playfulness but when she actually met him, when they were both standing there on the break behind the scenes, she got chills and shivers and she thought there’s something off about him. She thought this guy’s weird.”

Warren, based in Seattle, Washington, adds: “The word was creepy: he creeped me out; there was something about him that made me feel nervous. It wasn’t something he said that turned her off. It was just his presence, something about the way he looked and acted and the way he looked at her and she got freaked out.”

Bradshaw never saw Alcala again. Nor did she fulfill her acting ambitions. She left California – and the public eye – to raise a family. Warren, who interviewed her before her death from cancer, says she never forgot her brush with a mass murderer.

Warren says: “When I talked to her a few years ago she was still disturbed by the whole thing. Even years later, she acted like well, yeah, good thing I didn’t do that and I felt it. She was very upfront that way. But I still felt there was a little bit of a discomfort with it because she came that close to it. It was still there.”

After his fleeting fame, Alcala returned to his killing spree. He murdered 12-year-old Robin Samsoe in 1979 and was subsequently arrested at a house he shared with his mother and put on trial. Despite a retrial and the verdict being overturned twice, he remained in prison for decades. By 2010 DNA technology had advanced to the point that it could link him to numerous murder cases.

Eventually he was sentenced to death for five murders in California between 1977 and 1979, although authorities estimated that he may have killed up to 130 people across the country. He received an additional 25 years to life in 2013 after pleading guilty to two homicides in New York.

He was still awaiting execution when he died from Alzheimer’s disease at a hospital in San Joaquin Valley, California, in 2021 at the age of 77.

Alcala is the focus of a chapter in Murphy’s new volume The Book of Murder. The prosecutor, who spent more than two decades assigned to the sexual assault and homicide units of the Orange county district attorney’s office, says Alcala’s childhood offers few clues to his psychological motivations.

“He was raised in a house with people who loved him. He had successful siblings. His brother graduated from West Point and became a war hero in Vietnam. He had an aunt very much in the picture who also loved him dearly.

“We had some of the best criminal defence lawyers and investigators working on the defence in three separate trials and nobody found a hint of childhood abuse. He was not sexually abused. He was not physically abused. He was not bullied in school.”

He adds: “Perhaps the most disturbing take away from guys like Rodney Alcala is that, if there’s a common thread in their childhood, it is far closer to entitlement and being spoiled as kids than it is to childhood abuse and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. I can give you example after example of that.

“Rodney Alcala had a Mensa-level certified genius IQ. He was handsome, he was articulate, he had friends, he had girlfriends, he was not a social outcast, he had family who loved him. And he loved sadistically raping and murdering people.”

Two of Alcala’s victims were posed nude after their deaths while one was raped with a claw hammer. All were repeatedly strangled and resuscitated to prolong their agony. After he was caught, investigators tracked down his storage locker and found about 1,700 photos of mainly women and girls – it was not known if they were alive, missing or murdered – as well as dozens of pieces of jewelry that had belonged to his victims.

Alcala represented himself at his final trial. Murphy, the prosecutor, saw the “Dating Game Killer” up close in court every day. What were his impressions? “He was very charming, he was very charismatic but, of course, I knew that he was a monster,” he says. “He is a true blue American bogeyman and it was it was fascinating just dealing with him, trying to figure out what made him tick.

“He was born with half a soul. He would get off on the absolutely horrifically sadistic rape-murders of these poor women. Part of the job is we would deal with the families and the multigenerational trauma that happens as a result of that is hard to describe. I’d go from dealing with the family members into directly dealing with Rodney and we did that on a daily basis for six months.”

Murphy, a legal analyst for ABC News, adds: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with these guys’ moral compasses. They do it because they love doing it and they choose to do it. They sexually get off on it.”

• Woman of the Hour is now available on Netflix