SACRAMENTO — Nearly 23 years have gone by, but David Conley still vividly remembers his work assignment from January 1997.
The now-retired investigator for Bank of the West had a specific task that day: retrieving still photos from video of multiple ATM transactions at a Woodland bank branch.
It stood out because “it’s the only person I ever saw in front of an ATM with a mask on,” Conley testified Friday in Sacramento Superior Court.
Sacramento County prosecutors say that masked man was Roy Charles Waller, who stands accused of committing a series of sexual assaults in six counties — including two in Davis — attributed to the long-elusive “NorCal Rapist.”
Waller, a longtime safety specialist at UC Berkeley who lived in Benicia before his arrest in September 2018, was identified as a suspect through DNA evidence that authorities say linked him to some of the crimes, while others were matched through similar conduct.
Sacramento prosecutors have consolidated the NorCal Rapist cases from the six jurisdictions — Butte, Contra Costa, Sacramento, Solano, Sonoma and Yolo — into a single case that covers the 15-year crime spree spanning from 1991 to 2006. Of the 45 counts he faces, 11 stem from the Davis assaults.
Waller, 60, quietly watched the proceedings from the defense table in his orange jail-issued jumpsuit. He alternated between rocking back and forth in his seat and consulting with his attorney, Joseph Farina.
The ATM photo was the only known image of the perpetrator, who on the morning of Jan. 25, 1997, attempted multiple transactions but completed only one, taking $300 from a Davis woman’s account around 7:30 a.m., Conley recalled.
Roommates assaulted
At about the same time, the Davis Police Department received a 911 call from a woman reporting that she and her roommate had been sexually assaulted in their Adams Street apartment.
The lead investigator in that case, now-retired Davis police Det. Kay Lipelt, recalled Friday arriving at the apartment to find the living room in disarray, with tables overturned and two twin bed mattresses on the floor.
One victim said she awoke that early morning “after hearing some sort of loud noise,” Lipelt testified. Thinking it came from a neighbor’s apartment, she went back to sleep, but later “realized that somebody was in her room. …He had his hand over her mouth and was telling her, ‘Be quiet — I have a gun.’ ”
“I”m not going to hurt you,” the man went on to say, according to Lipelt. “I want your money.”
Both women reported being bound and blindfolded, left in their bedrooms for moments at a time while the suspect rummaged around in other rooms. One told Lipelt she loosened her bindings and tried to escape through her second-story window, but the man caught her before she could flee.
“She said throughout the whole thing he was very calm, speaking very softly, never got upset with her,” Lipelt said. His only expression of frustration came when he switched on the television and “remarked something about them not having cable.”
After demanding the PIN numbers for the women’s bank cards — instructing his gagged victims to use their fingers to relay the digits — he carried the women downstairs and strapped them to the mattresses, where he assaulted one woman but backed off the other when she resisted him, Lipelt said.
Neither saw the man’s face but described him as a white male in his mid- to late 20s, 6 feet tall with an average build, wearing a ski mask, fingerless gloves, vest and brown hiking boots. For years, he remained unidentified.
Three years later
The NorCal Rapist returned to Davis on July 16, 2000, this time targeting a woman at her Alvarado Avenue apartment.
The recent UC Davis graduate had two roommates but was home alone for the weekend. It was a typically hot July day in Davis, and she’d left a kitchen window open throughout the day, retired Davis police Sgt. Scott Smith recalled on the witness stand Tuesday.
That night, the woman left her apartment several times as she washed a few loads of laundry in the apartment complex, leaving her door unlocked on several occasions, Smith testified.
Nothing seemed amiss until the woman prepared for bed, leaving the apartment one last time around 10:30 p.m. to retrieve her laundry. She was pouring a glass of water “when she heard a squeaking sound coming from upstairs,” Smith said.
She armed herself with a pair of scissors and went upstairs, checking her roommates’ bedrooms for the source of the noise. As she checked the second room, “she came face to face with a subject in a mask,” Smith said.
The man grabbed the victim, covered her eyes and pinned her to the ground, where he bound her wrists and ankles with what she believed to be wire and covered her eyes and mouth with duct tape, according to Smith. Asked about her roommates, she lied and said one was due home in a couple of hours.
“Which car is yours?” the man asked in response as he looked outside to the complex’s parking lot. After she identified her vehicle, the man carried her over his shoulder down the stairs — apologizing at one point when the woman’s head struck the wall in the stairwell.
In the darkened parking lot, the suspect placed the woman in the back seat of her car and began to drive, stopping a couple of times and leaving the vehicle for reasons unknown.
“You shouldn’t leave your windows open at night,” he admonished the victim at one point.
Eventually the man parked the car and climbed into the back seat, where the sexual assault ensued. Afterward, he re-dressed the woman and said he’d drop her off near her apartment.
“He told her he was going to leave her in the car with the car running and told her not to call the cops,” Smith said. Earlier, he’d replaced the wire on her wrists and ankles with duct tape so she could work herself free.
“Just give me some time,” the man said as he left. The woman freed herself and laid on the horn, ultimately driving herself to the police station when no one responded.
Waller’s preliminary hearing resumes on Jan. 29 for attorney arguments, after which Judge Trena Burger-Plavan will rule whether there is sufficient evidence for the case to proceed to trial. Waller, who has pleaded not guilty to the allegations, faces life in prison if convicted.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene