Sounak Sengupta
Investigation Discovery’s ‘Very Scary People: NorCal Rapist: Phantom Predator’ chronicles the crimes of American serial rapist, Roy Charles Waller, convicted of raping at least nine victims in six Northern California counties between 1991 and 2006. He was caught over a decade later, in September 2018, using the same genetic technology used to identify the Golden State Killer. If you’re interested in knowing more about the case, including how Waller was caught, here’s what we know.
Who is Roy Charles Waller?
Roy Charles Waller, aka the NorCal Rapist, was born on January 8, 1960, in Contra Costa County, California. He lived with his wife (name withheld) in a quiet Benicia neighborhood and had worked as a UC Berkeley safety specialist for 25 years until his arrest in September 2018. According to a press conference by Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert and Police Chief Daniel Hahn, Waller was employed in the UC Berkeley Office of Environment, Health, and Safety.
News reports painted Waller as a regular guy in a nice neighborhood, living in a house with a well-manicured lawn and white picket fence. Neighbors recounted him as the type of middle-aged guy seldom seen tending his lawn or trimming the trees on his property. They said Waller was a pleasant but slightly introverted guy, with one of them even recalling how she taught him to use a new weed wacker. One neighbor said, “I walk up and down this road every single day. I’ve seen him, I’ve seen his wife, but I’ve never really spoken to him that I can remember.”
Hence, it came as a shock when Waller was arrested on suspicions of being the NorCal Rapist, a suspected serial rapist who committed a series of more than ten rapes and kidnappings in six Northern California counties between 1991 and 2006. The rapist’s modus operandi involved breaking into the victims’ residences, usually in the late hours, to avoid confrontation with families or friends. He would catch the women by surprise and overcome and bind them before committing repeated, non-consensual, and perverse sexual crimes.
According to police reports and victim accounts, the serial rapist had also been known to ransack homes, steal ATM cards, and force women to divulge their passwords for him to steal money. Moreover, he had sometimes abducted his victims, robbed their items, and even taunted them before leaving the crime scene. Retired Senior FBI Profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole insisted the NorCal Rapist took the personal stuff as memorabilia for each rape he committed. According to news reports, a significant majority of his victims were of Asian origin.
Roy Charles Waller Remains Imprisoned
Dozens of rape cases between 1991 and 2006 in multiple counties, including Sonoma, Solano, Contra Costa, Yolo, and Butte, remained unsolved for over two decades before police arrested Waller at the UC Berkeley campus on September 20, 2018. According to Anne Marie Schubert, the authorities retrieved DNA evidence from various NorCal Rapist crime scenes into GEDmatch, a genetic genealogy website. The results came close to the DNA voluntarily uploaded by an individual on the site, helping the police to build a family tree.
Using the family tree, the investigators narrowed down the potential suspects to Waller, who was the right age and weight, had lived close to the areas where the attacks happened, and owned the same guns as the serial rapist used. According to authorities, this was the same technology used to arrest East Area Rapist suspect Joseph James DeAngelo. News reports indicated the Sacramento police had interviewed Waller and his girlfriend, Olga Coy, on February 11, 2007, after investigators learned the serial rapist used a white Toyota 4Runner in a Natomas rape case in October 2006.
The couple had been a part of the questioning drive mounted by the police looking for possible owners of identical vehicles since Olga owned one. However, police sources indicated Waller was never a suspect in the rape cases till his arrest in September 2018. He was initially charged with 12 counts of forcible sexual assault, with the Sacramento prosecutors filing additional 28 charges on January 7, 2019. The new charges included a horrific attack against a Martinez woman on 1996 Halloween Day.
Per the court ruling on February 3, 2020, the 60-year-old was to stand trial for 46 felony charges, including 21 counts of rape and seven counts of kidnapping. His trial commenced on October 19, and he was convicted of all 46 counts of rape, sodomy, and kidnapping involving nine victims a month later, on November 18. He was sentenced to 897 years in prison in December 2019 with no chance of parole. According to official records, Waller, 62, continues to serve his sentence in the Salinas Valley State Prison in Soledad, California.
Read More: Was Roy Charles Waller Married? Where Are His Wife and Kids Now?
