‘NorCal’ rapist sentenced to 897 years

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Known as the ‘NorCal Rapist’, Waller was sentenced to 897 years in life on Friday after being convicted of crimes such as kidnapping, forced rape, oral copulation, sodomy and foreign penetration. , said the Sacramento district attorney’s office.

Last month, a Sacramento jury convicted him on 46 counts in a series of assaults between 1991 and 2006 on nine women, all of whom testified in their decades-long quest for justice.

Waller, now 60, has assaulted women in six counties in northern California. In many cases, he would break into homes, bind his victims and sexually assault them on multiple occasions, according to Sacramento Police Detective Avis Beery.

The serial rapist would usually strike at night and sometimes kidnap women and take them to ATMs where he stole them, or he stole things from their homes, Beery said.

‘It was a DNA case’

As of 2006, police have DNA evidence linking six of the cases to the same suspect.

However, they could not determine that the attacker was Waller, as his DNA was not in the state’s criminal offender database.

The breakthrough finally came in September 2018, when biological evidence left at the crime scene of one of the women who had been sexually assaulted was used to develop a specialized DNA profile, according to the district attorney’s office.

Using advanced investigative genetic genealogy (IGG), investigators tracked down a list of potential relatives of the attacker who were able to focus on Waller as a suspect.
No DNA or other genetic material from these potential relatives has been shared with law enforcement, according to the district attorney, but investigators have constructed family trees, which has led them to focus on Waller. The same DNA technology was used to identify the Golden State Killer.

Days later, Waller was arrested at his place of work in Berkeley, prosecutors said.

“It doesn’t matter what I did,” Joe Farina, Waller’s attorney, said last month following Waller’s conviction. “It was a DNA case. We couldn’t get over the fact that his DNA was at almost every crime scene.”

Farina told reporters outside the courthouse on Friday that Waller said he was not guilty and would appeal the conviction, according to CNN affiliate KPIX.

In addition to the nine women who testified, retired officers, detectives and nurse forensic sexual assault examiners traveled from several states to Sacramento to give their testimony.

Judge James Arguelles listens to a victim impact statement during Roy Charles Waller's sentencing hearing on December 18, 2020.

Some of these witnesses were retired and in their 80s, according to the public prosecutor.

“The victims have waited decades for justice to be done and it was only thanks to the IGG that the identification and arrest of Waller was possible,” the district attorney’s office said in a new report. communicated.

“The Sacramento County Attorney’s Office would like to thank the original detectives from the agencies in each jurisdiction on these cases who have never given up on prosecuting the offender.

CNN’s Sarah Moon also contributed to this story.

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