A ‘horrific’ death: Arrest warrant documents brutal slaying of Rancho Cordova woman

Two days after Emma Roark went missing from her Rancho Cordova home on Jan. 27, her father got a call from a man who was using her cellphone.

Gabriel Roark then called sheriff’s deputies and told them he was going to meet him. He found a man named Cedric Sandiford, who handed over the phone.

Sandiford told Roark he had purchased it from Mikilo Morgan Rawls, the man now accused of killing Emma Roark, newly filed court documents say.

Rawls cautioned Sandiford and his companion “not to say where he got the phone from,” court records filed Monday say, but Sandiford gave deputies Rawls’ name and escorted them to a homeless camp near the El Manto access point along the American River where he had purchased the phone.

Two days after that, on Feb. 1, deputies searching for the missing 20-year-old came upon a tent and hanging tarp near the river obscured by trees and shrubs.

“Inside the tent/hanging tarp, deputies found a deceased female adult,” according to a 13-page arrest warrant for Rawls, which was part of the charging documents. “The female was naked from the waist down.

“Her legs and arms were tied up with the rope and pulled upward to the tree branches above her. The rope was tied to the tree branches.”

The woman was Roark, the arrest warrant says, and she had been dragged, repeatedly sexually assaulted and strangled with a foot-long leash around her neck.

Rawls, 37, who was arrested Friday after DNA tied him to the crime, now faces charges of murder with three special circumstances that could lead to prosecutors seeking the death penalty, as well as counts of rape and sodomy, court documents say. He is due in court Tuesday for his first appearance.

“The circumstances of this murder are horrific, and our sympathies go out to Emma Roark’s family,” Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said in a statement released Monday.

The court documents outline Rawls’ criminal history, including a 2017 burglary conviction and arrests for weapons possession, assault, receiving stolen property, drug possession and possession of a stun gun.

The arrest warrant details the two-week period between Roark’s disappearance and the discovery of her body. It describes her father reporting her missing after she had been gone from their house for six hours, and Gabriel Roark telling deputies she was autistic but “high functioning” with the mental capacity of a 16-year-old.

Emma Roark typically would go down to the river three times a week for about two hours, her father told detectives, and “did not have any friends and would not pick up on social clues when speaking or communicating with people.”

Cellphone records showed she left her home at 11:30 a.m. Jan. 27, and made her way to Ambassador Park. By 1:30 p.m., her phone showed it was located at the area where the body was later found, the warrant says.

But searches failed to find her body until Feb. 1, and by then detectives had already begun to focus on Rawls, who had lived in a tent in the area for at least two years, the warrant said. When he was questioned, Rawls claimed he had seen a man named “Jake” who carried a lot of electronics drop a cellphone near Carmichael Park, and that when he picked it up “Jake” told him he could keep it, the warrant says.

Rawls later met Sandiford at a homeless camp and sold him the phone for $10, the warrant says, adding that when detectives showed Rawls a photo of the missing woman “he stated he did not know who she was and had never seen her.”

On Monday, the campsite where Roark’s body was found still contained two yellow evidence flags, a pink face mask and a an assortment of empty soup and chili cans, as well as a sleeping bag, a handsaw, part of a black patent-leather belt and a length of black cord still tied to a tree branch. A small bouquet of flowers with a red paper heart sat just adjacent to the campground, along with four candles.

This story was originally published February 14, 2022 at 12:25 PM.