‘NorCal’ rapist sentenced to 897 years

Known as the “NorCal rapist,” Waller was sentenced to 897 years in life in prison on Friday after being convicted of crimes such as kidnapping, forced rape, oral intercourse, sodomy and foreign penetration, the Attorney General’s Office reported. Sacramento County District.

Last month, a Sacramento jury convicted him of 46 crimes in a series of assaults between 1991 and 2006 against nine women, all of whom testified in his search for justice for decades.

Waller, now 60, assaulted women in six northern California counties. In many cases, he broke into homes, tied up his victims and sexually assaulted them repeatedly, according to Sacramento police detective Avis Beery.

The serial rapist used to attack at night and sometimes kidnapped women and took them to ATMs where he stole them or stole items from their homes, Beery said.

“It was a case of DNA”

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

They could not determine that the attacker was Waller, however, because his DNA was not in the state’s criminal database.

The breakthrough finally came in September 2018, when biological evidence left at the scene of the crime of one of the women who had been sexually assaulted was used to develop a specialized DNA profile, according to the district prosecutor’s office. .

Using an avant-garde investigative genetic genealogy (IGG), the researchers traced a list of possible relatives of the author who may have restricted Waller as a suspect.
According to the district attorney, no DNA or other genetic material was shared from these possible relatives, but the 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, Waller was arrested at his workplace in Berkeley, according to prosecutors.

“It didn’t matter what he did,” Joe Farina, Waller’s defense attorney, said last month following Waller’s conviction. “It was a case of DNA. We couldn’t get over the fact that his DNA was at almost every crime scene.”

Farina told reporters outside the court on Friday that Waller is not guilty and would appeal the sentence, according to CNN affiliate KPIX.

In addition to the nine women who testified, retired officers, detectives and forensic nurses examining sexual assaults traveled from several states to Sacramento to present their testimony.

Judge James Arguelles hears an impact statement from the victim during the hearing of Roy Charles Waller's sentence on December 18, 2020.

Some of those witnesses had already withdrawn in the 80s, according to the district attorney.

“The victims waited for decades for justice and only through the use of IGG was it possible to identify and arrest Waller,” the district attorney’s office said in a new statement.

“The Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office would like to thank the original detectives from the agencies in each jurisdiction for those cases that never gave up on prosecuting the offender.”

CNN’s Sarah Moon also contributed to this story.

.Source

Leave a Comment