SACRAMENTO — “The DNA don’t lie.”
That’s how a juror in the NorCal Rapist trial summed up the deliberation process resulting in 46 guilty verdicts read Wednesday against Roy Charles Waller.
“It was an open-and-closed case. Everything was there for us,” said the juror, who identified himself as Michael H. “He couldn’t challenge the DNA at all.”
Waller, 60, showed no apparent reaction during the nearly hour-long period it took Sacramento Superior Court Judge James Arguelles to read the verdicts, which covered the NorCal Rapist’s 15-year crime spree in six Northern California counties.
“We’re just thankful the DNA was there. The victims were able to get the justice they deserve,” said Sacramento County Deputy District Attorney Keith Hill, who tried the consolidated case with fellow prosecutor Chris Ore.
Joseph Farina, Waller’s lead attorney, declined to comment as he left the courthouse Wednesday morning. Waller now faces a life sentence in prison at his sentencing hearing, set for Friday, Dec. 18.
Several of Waller’s victims attended the verdict reading, some dabbing at their eyes as he was convicted of multiple sexual-assault, kidnapping, burglary and weapon-related crimes that for years went unsolved.
“It’s a good day,” said Nicole Earnest-Payte, one of Waller’s earliest victims from Sonoma County. “Twenty-nine years of waiting and waiting, Amazing.”
‘So afraid, so scared’
Testimony in Waller’s month-long trial began on Oct. 19, roughly two years after Sacramento County law-enforcement leaders announced his arrest based upon Waller’s DNA match to multiple NorCal Rapist crime scenes, using a technique known as Investigative Genetic Genealogy.
At the time, Waller worked as a longtime safety specialist at UC Berkeley, living in Benicia with his wife.
The NorCal Rapist committed his first known assault in 1991 and went on to target nine victims in Sonoma, Solano, Contra Costa, Yolo, Butte and Sacramento counties, carrying out his final offense in Natomas in 2006.
Waller’s dozens of charges included 11 counts in connection the suspect’s two Davis attacks.
He raped two roommates, both UC Davis students, in their Adams Street apartment on Jan. 25, 1997, then returned three and a half years later to abduct a recent UCD graduate from her Alvarado Avenue townhouse and sexually assault her in her own car.
Two of the Yolo County victims testified during Waller’s trial, who despite the passage of decades offered detailed recollections of the horrific crimes, one woman breaking down in tears at the memory of her assault.
“I was so afraid, so scared,” said T. Doe, a 1997 victim whose name was altered in court to protect her identity. She remembered trying to jump out of a second-story window to avoid the assault, and that she and her roommate initially felt ashamed of what had occurred to them.
“We didn’t want anyone to know,” she said, adding that to this day only seven of her relatives are aware of the attack. For her two sisters who accompanied her to court, and “this is the first time they heard my story. …I never told them in detail.”
The 1997 crime revealed one of the first-known images of the NorCal Rapist, whose masked face was captured by a ATM camera as he used one victim’s bank card in Woodland.
Although DNA science was still in its early stages back then, investigators were able to collect the suspect’s genetic material from the back seat of the 2000 victim’s vehicle.
DNA clinches case
Despite the physical evidence against him, Waller denied being the NorCal Rapist while testifying in his own defense last week.
“All I can say is, I was never at these locations and I never did what I’m accused of,” Waller said, as reported by The Sacramento Bee. “As far as the DNA thing, I’m not a DNA expert.”
But the jury didn’t buy it, especially after hearing Waller try to justify having items such as duct tape, zip ties, handcuffs and ski masks — all used during the NorCal Rapist’s attacks — in his home and personal storage lockers.
“Who carries around that kind of stuff?” said Michael H., the juror, who noted that the jury needed only two-and-a-half hours of deliberations to reach its decision. Waller’s lack of an sensible explanation, along with the DNA, “were the main reasons we found him guilty.”
A juror in the Roy Waller/NorCal Rapist trial speaks to reporters after Wednesday’s verdicts. “The DNA don’t lie,” he said. Lauren Keene/Enterprise photo
Davis Police Chief Darren Pytel, whose agency investigated Waller’s local crimes, praised the jury and prosecutors for “the work that was done to bring him to justice.”
“I especially appreciate the work done by the Sacramento County District Attorney (Anne Marie Schubert), who is a true leader when it comes to using DNA to resolve cold cases,” Pytel said. “Roy Waller evaded justice for far too long and I hope now that all of his victims can feel some relief that his reign of terror has stopped.”
The Waller case is one of three cold cases with Davis ties solved through DNA evidence in recent years.
Joseph James DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer/East Area Rapist who assaulted two women and a married couple in Davis during the summer of 1978, was sentenced in August to life in prison without the possibility of parole after pleading guilty to multiple murder, rape and other charges.
Mark Jeffrey Manteuffel, linked to three area rapes, pleaded guilty in July to two Sacramento crimes and is expected to admit to the 1994 Davis offense — the sexual assault of a UCD student as she jogged along a South Davis greenbelt — on Dec. 11.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene