‘NorCal’ rapist sentenced to 897 years

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Known as the “NorCal Rapist,” Waller was sentenced to 897 years to life in state prison on Friday after being convicted of crimes such as kidnapping, violent rape, oral copulation, sodomy and foreign penetration, the Sacramento County prosecutor said.

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

Waller, now 60, attacked women in six Northern California counties. In many cases, according to Detective Avis Beery in Sacramento, he would break into homes, bond his victims, and repeatedly sexually assault.

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

‘It was a DNA case’

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

However, they could not determine that the attacker was Waller because his DNA was not in the state’s criminal offenders 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, the prosecutor’s office said.

Using advanced genetic genealogy (IGG), researchers tracked down a list of the potential relatives of the culprit who could narrow down Waller as a suspect.
According to the prosecutor, no DNA or other genetic material from these potential relatives was shared with law enforcement officials, but researchers built family trees, which led them to focus on Waller. The same DNA technology was used to identify the Golden State Killer.

Within days, according to prosecutors, Waller was arrested at his Berkeley station.

“It didn’t matter what I did,” Joe Farina, Waller’s attorney, said last month after Waller’s conviction. ‘It was a DNA case. We couldn’t get over the fact that his DNA was present at almost all crime scenes. ‘

Farina told reporters outside the courthouse on Friday that Waller claims he is not guilty and would appeal the sentence, according to CNN partner KPIX.

In addition to the nine women who testified, retired officers, detectives, and forensic nurse examiners from multiple states traveled to Sacramento to share their testimonies.

Judge James Arguelles listens to a victim impact statement during the criminal trial before Roy Charles Waller on December 18, 2020.

According to the prosecutor, some of these witnesses were retired and in their eighties.

“The victims waited decades for justice and it was only through the use of IGG that the identification and arrest of Waller was possible,” the prosecutor’s office said in a new release.

“The Sacramento County District Attorney would like to thank the original detectives from agencies in every jurisdiction for these cases who never gave up on the perpetrator’s prosecution.”

CNN’s Sarah Moon also contributed to this story.

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