After days of graphic descriptions of attacks, testimony in NorCal Rapist hearing ends

After five days of often graphic testimony — some involving dog leashes, a Halloween mask, handcuffs and rape by a vacuum cleaner — Sacramento prosecutors wrapped up their presentation Wednesday of evidence against NorCal Rapist suspect Roy Charles Waller.

The next step in the preliminary hearing for Waller is a Jan. 29 session at which prosecutors and the defense will argue before Sacramento Superior Court Judge Trena Burger-Plavan over whether Waller should face trial on the 46 felony counts he faces as the accused serial rapist who eluded authorities for 27 years until his 2018 arrest.

Waller’s defense attorneys — Joseph Farina, Guy Leighton and Erica Graves — did not present witnesses or evidence during the hearing, which was conducted over a series of sessions starting in mid-December.

“The defense will not be presenting any evidence at the preliminary hearing,” Farina told the judge Wednesday morning.

But prosecutors Chris Ore and Keith Hill summoned a series of detectives, witnesses and DNA evidence designed to show the 60-year-old suspect is the man accused of a series of notorious rapes throughout Northern California that lasted at least from 1991 through 2006.

Wednesday’s session may have been one of the most damning, with Terri Castiglia, a Sacramento County District Attorney’s criminal investigator and former Sacramento Police officer, testifying that semen and blood samples taken from various crime scenes attributed to the NorCal Rapist attacks almost certainly trace back to Waller.

“Everything was consistent with Roy Waller,” Castiglia said.

DNA samples taken from assaults in Martinez, Vallejo, Rohnert Park and Davis all showed that the likelihood of the evidence coming from a Caucasian man other than Waller was one in 360 quadrillion, she testified.

Blood evidence taken from a pillowcase at a Chico assault, where the victim stabbed her attacker with scissors as she struggled to escape, had a one in 8 trillion chance of occurring at random among Caucasian men rather than coming from Waller, she said.

And evidence from the assault of two roommates in Natomas in 2006 - the last of the attacks - had a likelihood of being from Waller that Castiglia described as being “2.46 x 10 with 32 zeroes.”

DNA evidence led authorities to suspect

The DNA evidence has always been the lynchpin of the case, which prosecutors say they broke in 2018 after using the same methods employed to arrest Joseph James DeAngelo five months earlier as the suspect in the Golden State Killer/East Area Rapist case.

In both instances, authorities uploaded DNA evidence from crime scenes into online databases, then compared that to any individuals who had uploaded their own genetic backgrounds onto the sites seeking background about their ancestry.

From there, authorities looked at individuals whose DNA was close to the evidence from the crime scenes, and built out a “family tree” looking for anyone who might be the right age and race to be a suspect and who had lived near the area where such attacks occurred.

The process, which Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert’s office has dubbed “Investigative Genetic Genealogy,” ultimately led them to Waller, a married Benicia resident who had been working as a safety supervisor on the UC Berkeley campus.

Surveillance on Waller’s home led detectives to retrieve items from his trash — including a soda straw — that provided them DNA samples that led them to arrest him in September 2018.

Retired detectives summoned to testify

None of the victims were called to testify for this stage of the case. But since Waller’s arrest, detectives who worked the various cases have been dusting off old police reports, talking to victims and offering their testimony during the preliminary hearing.

One of the last to testify was retired Martinez Police Detective Jeffrey Vandermeulen, who investigated a sexual assault case that began on Halloween night in 1996 in that Contra Costa County community.

The 39-year-old victim had fallen asleep on the floor of her home watching television when she heard a knock on the door at 9 p.m., Vandermeulen testified.

Thinking it might be a late-night trick-or-treater, she opened the door.

“After she opened the door she was immediately set upon by the suspect,” he said, adding that the man had a handgun and was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, gloves and a skeleton Halloween mask.

He handcuffed her hands behind her back, placed cotton balls and duct tape over her eyes and duct tape on her mouth and eventually carried her upstairs and placed her on her bed, then got a pair of scissors and began cutting off her T-shirt, bra and shorts, Vandermeulen testified.

At one point, the victim told him later, she thought she heard the attacker taking Polaroid photos of her and moving her about on the bed in different poses.

He shaved her pubic area, and used her vacuum cleaner to suck up the hair, then inserted part of the running vacuum inside her, Vandermeulen said.

Then, the attacker undressed and raped her before asking, “How did you like it?” Vandermeulen testified.

He took more Polaroids and raped her again, Vandermeulen said.

“I guess you haven’t had enough,” the attacker then said, according to Vandermeulen. “I guess you want some more.”

The attacker raped the woman four times that night, he said, and at one point retrieved some dog leashes from her home to that he clipped to bindings on her feet and tied to the bed.

After the third rape, “the suspect laid down next to the victim and caressed her hair with his hands,” Vandermeulen said, echoing testimony from other incidents where the victims said their attacker brushed their hair with his hands.

Attacker believed to have targeted Asian women

Authorities say the NorCal Rapist targeted Asian women — the Martinez victim was of Chinese descent — and sometimes made comments about being white during the attacks.

Throughout the hearing, Waller has been seated next to Farina, the lead defense counsel, and frequently whispered suggested questions to ask of witnesses. Waller, who is being held in the Sacramento County Main Jail, faces up to life in prison if convicted.

Farina has challenged the science behind some of the DNA evidence and has noted that the laws and statute of limitations involving rape and kidnap cases have changed since the attacks first began.

He also has pointed out the varying descriptions victims have given of their attackers, noting the differences in height, weight and other details the women provided over the years.

On Tuesday afternoon he suggested that Vandermeulen must have investigated numerous sexual assault cases in his career and asked, on a scale of one to 10, how much the detective remembered about the Martinez case.

Nine, Vandermeulen replied, prompting Farina to ask why he recalled so much about that particular incident.

“As a major crimes investigator, this was the only case I had that went unsolved,” Vandermeulen said.