LUCKY TO SURVIVE

YEARS AFTER TRAUMATIC ATTACKS, TWO WOMEN WHO GOT AWAY FORM A HEALING

- WENDY GROSSMAN KANTOR

Terrified and utterly alone in a locked bedroom with a man who had lured her and two friends to his house in Los Angeles, 16-year-old Morgan Rowan felt certain she would die. "I watched his transformation," Rowan, now 72, recalls of that life-changing night in August 1968. "I watched his face turn purple. He punched me between my eyes with a belt buckle. I saw stars shooting, and I dropped to my knees." The man bound Rowan's wrists with a necktie, punched her and broke ribs and removed his pants and sexually assaulted her.

"I wasn't praying to live-I was praying to die.

" Rowan didn't know it then, but when one of her concerned friends broke a bedroom window and persuaded her assailant to unlock the door, the man she managed to escape from was a lethal predator. Known as the Dating Game Killer because he once appeared on the iconic 1970s TV show of the same name, Rodney Alcala, a smooth-talking professional photographer who is believed to have killed dozens of women in the 1960s and 1970s, was eventually convicted of seven murders.