SACRAMENTO — Roy Charles Waller will stand trial for the NorCal Rapist crimes that included two attacks in Davis, a Sacramento Superior Court judge ruled Wednesday.
Waller, 60, stands accused of 46 charges that accuse him of sexually assaulting and kidnapping young women in six counties over a span of 15 years. He’s alleged to have assaulted three of his victims in Davis — two in 1997 and one in 2000.
Judge Trena Burger-Plavan issued her ruling following a multi-day preliminary hearing held over December and January in Sacramento, where crimes that occurred in Butte, Contra Costa, Sacramento, Solano, Sonoma and Yolo counties have been consolidated into one case. The NorCal Rapist’s last known attack occurred in the Natomas area in 2006.
Waller, a longtime safety specialist at UC Berkeley, was arrested in September 2018 after allegedly being linked by DNA evidence to multiple crime scenes.
They included the July 16, 2000, attack of a recently graduated UC Davis student who was taken from her Alvarado Avenue apartment and raped inside her vehicle before being released.
Authorities say the perpetrator used similar conduct during his assault on two roommates in their Adams Street apartment on Jan. 25, 1997, which were linked to the other crimes despite the lack of DNA collected in that case.
However, that incident did yield what for years was the NorCal Rapist’s only known image, his masked face photographed at a Bank of the West ATM in Woodland after the suspect stole bank cards from the Adams Street victims and forced them to reveal their access codes.
Waller’s defense team has disputed his alleged culpability in that case, noting that, in addition to the absence of DNA, the victims’ descriptions of their attacker differed from those of other NorCal Rapist targets.
But Burger-Plavan disagreed, upholding all charges against Waller, who is due back in court Friday for further proceedings. Waller has previously pleaded not guilty to the allegations.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene
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