Roy Charles Waller’s trial starts 29 years after NorCal Rapist attacks began
The attacks began the night of June 22, 1991, in Rohnert Park, where 21-year-old Nicole Earnest was awakened on her couch by a masked man grabbing her and pointing a handgun at her right cheek.
The intruder bound the Sonoma County woman’s hands and feet, placed tape over her eyes and raped her three times that night. Then he apologized, said he would never do such a thing again, and disappeared into the night.
But authorities say her attacker was lying, that over the course of the next 15 years he sexually assaulted eight more women in six Northern California counties, then suddenly stopped, frustrating investigators who had spent decades hunting for a suspect.
Monday morning, nearly 30 years after the attacks began, the suspect in what has been dubbed the NorCal Rapist case will finally go to trial in a Sacramento courtroom.
Roy Charles Waller, a married Benicia resident who had worked on the campus of UC Berkeley as a safety specialist since 1992, faces 46 felony counts alleging he committed 21 rapes as well as kidnappings, burglaries and other crimes that could send him to prison for life.
The criminal complaint filed by Sacramento County prosecutors who are handling the case for all the counties where attacks occurred runs 62 pages, and the trial is expected to last for several weeks.
“This will probably be the largest case that I’ve handled in my career,” Waller’s defense attorney, Joe Farina, said after Waller’s arrest in September 2018.
Waller, 60, has been held without bail at the Sacramento County Main Jail since DNA evidence led investigators to arrest him as he arrived for work at the Berkeley campus two years ago.
Novel DNA technique used, challenged
The technique that led detectives to Waller was essentially the same used five months earlier to arrest Joseph James DeAngelo in the Golden State Killer/East Area Rapist case.
Authorities took DNA evidence from the Norcal Rapist crime scenes — there was plenty, including blood left behind after a Chico woman stabbed her attacker with a pair of scissors — and plugged it into the online genealogy website GEDmatch.
There, they found someone whose DNA was similar to the NorCal rapist’s, and investigators began building out a family tree from that person until it led them to Waller, who was the right age and race and who had lived in areas where the attacks occurred.
Authorities say they confirmed Waller was their suspect after placing his home under surveillance and retrieving a soda straw from his trash that contained DNA tying him to the series of rapes.
Unlike DeAngelo, who pleaded guilty in June to a 12-year spree of murders, rapes and burglaries, Waller has insisted on going to trial, and officials have spent weeks selecting a jury to hear the case in Sacramento Superior Court’s largest courtroom, where officials are limiting the number of spectators and media allowed because of COVID-19.
Farina has challenged the DNA evidence and questioned some of the investigative techniques used decades ago, but prosecutors have said there is no doubt they have their man.
Deputy District Attorneys Chris Ore and Keith Hill summoned a series of detectives and witnesses over six days of a preliminary hearing that ended in January with a judge ordering Waller to face trial.
Ore said at one point that the odds of finding a Caucasian person whose DNA matches the crime scene DNA are roughly one in 360 quadrillion.
The attacks ranged from 1991 until 2006, when a pair of roommates were sexually assaulted throughout the night in their Natomas home.
Authorities have said the NorCal Rapist often targeted Asian women and wore a mask, including one case in which he knocked on a woman’s door on Halloween night in 1996 wearing a skeleton mask and forced his way into the home.
The attacks were spread over six counties: Sacramento, Yolo, Butte, Contra Costa, Solano and Sonoma.