NorCal Rapist Sentenced To 897 Years In Case Spanning 6 Counties

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA — A North Bay man convicted in the "NorCal Rapist" series was sentenced Friday to 897 years to life in prison for sexually assaulting nine women in Sonoma, Solano, Contra Costa, Yolo, Butte and Sacramento counties.

In a Sacramento County jury trial that concluded Nov. 18, Benicia resident Roy Charles Waller, 60, was found guilty of 46 counts involving kidnap, forcible rape, oral copulation, sodomy and foreign penetration in a case that spanned six counties and seven different investigations between 1991 and 2006.

Waller received the maximum sentence allowed by law.

By 2006, six different cases with biological evidence were linked to the same suspect. The first ones occurred in Rohnert Park and Sonoma. The last was in Sacramento in 2006, law enforcement officials said after Waller was arrested.

Late at night, Waller entered homes and either overcame or bound women to commit the assaults. He ransacked homes, took property, or took the victims to get cash from an ATM.

For decades, law enforcement was unable to determine who was responsible because Waller’s DNA was not in the state's criminal offender database.

A task force attempted to solve the case in 2006 and 2007 but was unsuccessful.

Investigators' luck would change but not for another 10 years when biological evidence left at the crime scenes of one of the victims was used to develop a specialized DNA profile intended for investigative genetic genealogy (IGG).

It was September 2018 when the serial rapist's DNA profile led investigators to a list of potential relatives of the suspect.

No DNA or other genetic material from these potential relatives was shared with law enforcement, according to the Sacramento District Attorney's Office, which constructed the family trees that led investigators to focus on Waller.

The identity of the serial rapist who went undetected for 27 years would soon become known. On Sept. 18, 2018, the Sacramento Police Department retrieved an abandoned DNA sample from Waller's residence in Benicia.

The sample confirmed Waller was responsible for raping the nine victims, and he was arrested at his place of employment in Berkeley.

All nine victims testified during the course of the month-long jury trial, which was prosecuted by Supervising Deputy District Attorney Chris Ore and Supervising Deputy District Attorney Keith Hill of the Sacramento County District's Attorney's Office.

Retired officers, detectives and sexual assault forensic nurse examiners were tracked down in multiple states so they could come to Sacramento and serve as witnesses in the trial even though some of them were long since retired and in their 80s, the Sacramento County DA's Office said.

"The victims waited for decades for justice and it was only through the use of IGG that the identification and arrest of Waller was possible," the DA's Office said.

"The Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office would like to thank the original detectives from agencies in each jurisdiction on these cases who never gave up pursuing the offender."