SACRAMENTO — Typically, T. Doe and her four roommates weren’t home on the weekends, the UC Davis students instead traveling to the Bay Area to visit their families.
But Doe and another roommate stayed behind during the weekend of Jan. 24-25, 1997, both wanting to study for crucial exams they had the following Monday.
“I was very nervous and scared,” T. Doe said about sleeping alone in the bedroom she normally shared with two of her roommates. So she kept all the lights on and, as she usually did, checked the window and door locks before going to bed.
But for some reason, T. Doe overlooked the living-room window at the front of the Adams Street apartment before heading to her upstairs bedroom around 11 p.m. At one point, she heard a loud “jumping noise,” but figured it had come from a neighboring apartment.
“A few minutes later, I saw a person standing next to my bed,” T. Doe said. He was “very tall,” she recalled, wearing a black beanie that covered his face, jeans, hiking boots and a sleeveless vest. He asked T. Doe about her ATM card in a voice she described as “very soft and gentle.”
That night, however, T. Doe and her roommate, K. Doe, experienced several hours of terror that authorities would later link to the NorCal Rapist, the serial sexual offender whose crime spree ultimately spanned 15 years and six counties, including 1997 and 2000 attacks in Davis.
Most of the crimes followed common themes, during which the suspect entered dwellings at night while the victims were asleep or going about their nighttime routines. He would overcome and bind the women, sexually assault them repeatedly, then ransack their homes, stealing bank cards or personal property.
DNA evidence would later link the attacks to Roy Charles Waller, 60, whose trial is in its second week in Sacramento Superior Court. A longtime safety specialist at UC Berkeley, Waller was arrested at his Benicia home in September 2018, 12 years after the NorCal Rapist’s last-known assault in Sacramento’s Natomas neighborhood.
That 2006 incident also involved two victims, as did the 1997 Davis rapes.
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On the witness stand Wednesday, T. Doe said the intruder covered her eyes and mouth with duct tape and ordered her onto her stomach, tying her hands and feet with zip ties and covering the back of her head with a pillow. He then pressed what she believed to be a gun to her head while telling her not to do anything “stupid.”
“I was so afraid, so scared,” said T. Doe — as she’s referred to in court to protect her anonymity. Despite her fear, she struggled out of her restraints while the man bound Doe’s roommate in the other bedroom and made several trips up and down the stairs.
“I got free. I opened the window and I’m about to jump down” when the man heard her movements and “he came and grabbed me back. …He said something like I ‘ruined his plan’.”
After that, the intruder re-tied T. Doe — tighter this time — and carried her over his shoulder down the stairs, where he fastened her to a mattress he’d moved from one of the bedrooms. He again asked T. Doe about her ATM card and access number, which she gave him by gesturing with her finger, she said. At one point, he covered her with a blanket when she said she was cold.
Fearing his next move, T. Doe warned the man that a third roommate would soon be home. She hoped the ruse would make him leave, “but it didn’t happen,” she said.
Pausing several times to control her emotions and wipe away tears, T. Doe described having her pajamas removed with scissors, followed by several sexual assaults.
“It was very painful, because I’d never had sex before,” she said. Although she didn’t know it at the time, the man also victimized her roommate in the same room. Afterward, “he told me he had to go to the car and he’d be back in 10 minutes, and then he was gone.”
Before he left, however, the man asked T. Doe whether she wanted him to call someone on her behalf. She refused, and, once the coast was clear, the two women freed one another and fled to a neighbor’s apartment after failing to find their phone, which their assailant had stashed in the freezer.
Ashamed of what had just occurred, the women told their neighbors only that they’d been robbed, T. Doe recalled.
“We didn’t want anyone to know,” Doe said, adding that to this day only seven of her relatives are aware of the attack. Two of her sisters accompanied her to court Wednesday, and “this is the first time they heard my story. …I never told them in detail.”
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The NorCal Rapist returned to Davis more than three years later, setting his sights on a recent UC Davis graduate in her Alvarado Avenue townhouse.
Her four housemates had recently moved out, leaving C. Doe home alone on the night of July 16, 2000, as she did some household chores.
“I remember the windows were left open,” C. Doe testified in court Thursday, recalling she left the townhouse several times to go to the complex’s laundry room. “It’s possible that I forgot to lock the door.”
But nothing seemed amiss until about 10 p.m., when C. Doe went downstairs for a cup of water before going to bed.
“I heard a squeaking sound coming from upstairs,” in one of the vacated bedrooms, she said. “I was a little bit suspicious, so I though I should go upstairs and check it out.”
She retrieved a pair of manicure scissors from her own bedroom before crossing the hall and gently pushing on the other bedroom door.
“That’s when the guy came out from behind the door. I pretty much freaked out,” C. Doe said, describing a man dressed all in black, a ski mask covering his face. She tried jabbing at him with the scissors, “but that was not useful at all, and he pushed me down on the floor.”
Pressing a knee into C. Doe’s back, the intruder covered her eyes and mouth with duct tape and zip-tied her wrists and ankles.
“Be quiet,” he said, telling C. Doe he just wanted “a little bit of money” and would leave. He also asked whether her whether her roommate was coming back, “so I said yes.”
So the man turned his attention to C. Doe’s car, asking which in the parking lot was hers and where the keys were, she recalled. He tossed her over his shoulder and carried her downstairs — apologizing when her head bumped against the ceiling — then placed her in the back seat of her sedan before getting behind the wheel.
“He said he needed money, and a friend is going to pick him up and go to the airport,” C. Doe said. “I was hoping he would just cash out from my account and that was it.”
But instead they drove, the man’s behavior ranging from accommodating — “he asked if the temperature was OK” — to admonishing, saying “I shouldn’t leave my windows open.”
After about 20 minutes, he parked in a “dark and quiet” place, swapping C. Doe’s zip ties for duct tape before sexually assaulting her several times — and leaving behind physical evidence that would later yield the assailant’s DNA profile.
“Don’t tell your boyfriend about this, or he may not want you afterwards,” the man said during the ordeal, which ended back in the townhouse parking lot. He asked for some time to “get away,” but also warned: “Don’t go to the police. I know where to find you.”
But C. Doe ignored the warning and, after struggling free from the duct tape, drove directly to the Davis police station and filed a report.
Waller’s trial resumes next week before Judge James Arguelles.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene
Long-unsolved NorCal Rapist crimes see their day in court