Pod Insights The Binge Crimes Hunting the Bogeyman | 5. Unmasked About this episode When the NorCal Rapist goes to trial, evidence from his storage unit paints a terrifying picture of him as a catfisher and lifelong predator. But Nicole still has questions.
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Transcript 5,472 words · 12 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 I'm Josh Manikowitz and I hope you'll join us for season five of Dateline: Missing in America. In each episode of Dateline's award-winning series, we will focus on one missing person's case and hear from the families, the friends, and the investigators all desperate to find them. Maybe you could help solve a mystery.
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0:27 Speaker 02 Hello, I'm Elizabeth Day, the creator and host of How to Fail. It's the podcast that celebrates the things in life that haven't gone right and what, if anything, we've learned from those mistakes to help us succeed better. Each week, my guests share three failures, sparking intimate, thought-provoking, and funny conversations. You'll hear from a diverse range of voices, sharing what they've learned through their failures. Join me Wednesdays for a new episode each week. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
1:00 Speaker 03 You can listen to all episodes of Hunting the Bogeyman ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit Subscribe at the top of the page, or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. The Binge: Feed your true crime obsession.
1:20 Speaker 04 Every day, I fantasized about him getting caught. Every day for 27 years, I fantasized about who would call me, what would it look like? Would it be Avis Berry showing up? How validating it would feel, how good it would feel, how good it would feel to not have to wonder who he was for the rest of my life and be scared for the rest of my life.
1:51 Speaker 03 Finally, he was caught. And now Nicole would get to face him in court.
1:57 Speaker 04 I had been waiting for so long, so I was excited to testify. I mean, I had planned this out in my head a thousand times.
2:05 Speaker 03 Waller was going to try to defend himself by saying he was just a regular guy, a husband, a dad, a safety employee, not a masked rapist who stalked and terrorized women for more than 15 years. But the evidence seemed to say otherwise.
2:27 Speaker 03 Nicole would testify against him. She was a victim, a survivor. But of course, she was so much more. And she wanted Roy Waller and the court to know it.
2:38 Speaker 04 I wanted to make sure he understood that I have built an amazing life in spite of him, but that I also never forgot what he did. And that what he did was truly life-changing and massive. And I just thought, you know what? I'm not actually the unfortunate one. You have to live as you. That's awful. What must have happened to you?
3:05 Speaker 03 In December of 1991, just six months after Nicole was sexually assaulted, another major rape trial took place in the US. Thirty-year-old William Kennedy Smith went on trial for the rape of 29-year-old Patricia Bowman at the Kennedy Family Compound in Palm Beach, Florida. It was a he-said-she-said case and one of the first trials to be televised. Nicole watched it. Smith got a lot of airtime. Bowman, however, was never shown. Broadcasters placed a blue dot over her face, and all but one news outlet kept her name private.
3:44 Speaker 04 I thought, why the hell are you hiding her? He's the one who's accused of raping her on a beach, but he is walking around looking like some celebrity.
3:54 Speaker 03 The jury quickly decided that William Kennedy Smith was not guilty. A few days later, Patricia Bowman decided she had nothing to hide, and she showed her face in an interview on ABC's Primetime Live with Diane Sawyer.
4:08 Speaker 05 I'm not a blue blob. I'm a person. I have nothing to be ashamed of.
4:14 Speaker 03 Smith's trial and Bowman's decision to talk about it publicly made an impression on Nicole.
4:20 Speaker 04 I remembered the blue dot, and it really irritated me. It just flies in the face of everything that I stand for and believe in about this type of crime, about any crime.
4:31 Speaker 04 I don't think we talk about any of these issues enough openly as a society. And then who gets blamed? Who gets the scarlet letter? Who gets the shame? The victim of the crime, not the perpetrator of the crime.
4:43 Speaker 03 Society is telling you, you cannot communicate about this. You cannot talk about these because we are not comfortable with it. From Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence, you're listening to Hunting the Bogeyman. I'm Peter McDonald. This is episode five, Unmasked.
5:04 Speaker 03 How would you describe Roy Waller?
5:07 Speaker 06 I would call him a sociopath in the sense that he's a guy who is, portrays himself as one way and then is sadistically sexually assaulting women with this mindset that they're somehow lovers. It's so bizarre to me that he's a father, he's a husband.
5:28 Speaker 03 That's prosecutor Chris Orr, an assistant chief at the Sacramento County DA's office, and one of the two prosecutors who took Roy Waller to court. Chris has dark curly hair and a disarming smile. We were sitting in a soundproofish room on the second floor of the DA's office downtown.
5:48 Speaker 06 One of the cases in Davis involved a woman who heard a creek upstairs. And I can't think of all the times I've heard the creek upstairs. She knew she was home alone and she just went up to go check it. And literally the man jumps out and takes her away and sexually assaults her. He's the type of guy that is so confident that he can get away with it. In Sacramento, you know, he, again, scares a woman as she's jumping out of the shower, telling her that I can get away with this and I never get caught. I think he was becoming more and more emboldened and is the thing of nightmares.
6:32 Speaker 06 He is kind of the boogeyman in the night that you are truly afraid of.
6:39 Speaker 07 I think he's more like a wolf in sheep's clothing.
6:45 Speaker 03 That's prosecutor Keith Hill, Chris's partner on the case.
6:49 Speaker 07 When you see him in court, he could be in my fantasy football league. But then when you read about what he has done in the police reports, it almost seems unbelievable.
7:05 Speaker 03 Keith is tall, wears glasses, and has a cheerful way about him. We were all curious about how and why Waller committed these crimes.
7:14 Speaker 07 This guy could do these horrific crimes to so many people and get away with it for so long while still portraying himself as, well, he was an environmental engineer at a major university, he owns a home, he has a family. He's not the guy that you think is going to be out in the middle of the night toting a rape kit, breaking into a house and just terrorizing his victims. It's really hard to put those two things together. And that's one of the things, as the trial attorneys, we had to overcome. We had to very clearly and solidly prove that he is, in fact, the wolf. The boogeyman that we want to believe doesn't exist.
7:57 Speaker 07 And then you're confronted with the reality that they do, and one of them's sitting right here in court. And so Chris and I knew that when it comes down to it, this case is going to be all about the DNA.
8:10 Speaker 03 This would be the biggest case in the prosecutors' careers. Forensic investigative genealogy, FIG, as it became known, was a watershed in crime solving. This breakthrough was as big as when DNA revolutionized investigations by matching suspects to crimes and allowing for cases to be linked. But the future of FIG partly depended on how the prosecutors would handle the trial. Right away, there were issues.
8:37 Speaker 06 The defense wanted to know, who is the relative that tied this case together? What database did you use? How did you build your family tree? And they wanted to know all that. And we said, no. So we want to protect the privacy of that family member.
8:58 Speaker 03 Their argument was that even though FIG cracked the case, it wasn't relevant in proving Waller's guilt. Forensic investigative genealogy just generated leads. It didn't reveal anyone's DNA or private information. Among the hundreds of thousands of white men of a certain age in Northern California who could be the NorCal rapist, it cut through the noise and possibilities of a 30-year investigation and, in 45 minutes, shined a light on Roy Charles Waller. But investigators still had to go to Waller's house in Benicia, dig through his trash, and prove he was their suspect by matching his DNA to the DNA from the crime scenes. FIG just gave them the right tip.
9:41 Speaker 06 The court said, you don't have to give it up. And that now has become the precedent in California.
9:47 Speaker 03 FIG wouldn't even be mentioned at trial.
9:54 Speaker 03 As soon as Waller was arrested, investigators descended on his neatly kept home, where they found handguns and rifles, but little else. But a large storage unit he rented was like his secret man cave. He had a lounge chair, TV, and porn library. And beneath piles of disarray, they found five ready-to-go rape kits, four zipped into black bags, and one in a plastic storage bin.
10:24 Speaker 06 One of the cases in Contra Costa involved Halloween.
10:30 Speaker 06 And inside what we described as rape kit evidence bag number two, there was a mask, a scream-type mask. In rape kit bag number three, there was three other Halloween masks.
10:46 Speaker 03 It's unbelievable he kept it all. One of the mysteries about the NorCal rapist's MO was how he selected his victims. Evidence in the storage unit showed that he found many of them by scouring postings for roommates, often Asian women. He'd then contact them using a pseudonym.
11:05 Speaker 06 So we had evidence that Rorner Park had received a phone call from a guy named Bob Smith, whose voice was the same as Mr. Waller's.
11:16 Speaker 03 Nicole had been right about Bob Smith. His call was really about figuring out when he could break in. Waller also became a catfisher. He adopted the online persona of a young Asian woman named Wendy Wang, who was looking for an apartment to rent.
11:36 Speaker 06 There was emails where he said, "Hi, my name's Wendy Wang. I'm looking for a roommate. You know, I'm interested in living with you."
11:46 Speaker 07 "I'm concerned about security. Do you have a security system? What about a dog? Do you have a boyfriend that comes over frequently?"
11:54 Speaker 06 I mean, there was thousands of these.
11:58 Speaker 03 Wendy Wang's emails were easy to trace. Waller forwarded them to his personal email address, Wall in the Mud, from his days as a landscaper. Detective Ava Speary told me that Waller also staked out women's homes and hid in his car or the bushes to record voyeuristic videos. She also thinks he frequently broke into these homes.
12:21 Speaker 08 He was choosing his victims. He was working 24/7, I feel like, you know, trying to find his next victim.
12:28 Speaker 03 He had piles of printed maps, MapQuest directions, leading to women's homes, dating back to the early 2000s. In the margins, he'd take notes and rate women on a scale of 1 to 10.
12:41 Speaker 06 Like two Vietnamese, two Taiwanese, two Chinese. And some highlighting. And there were pictures of floor plans and paths of how to get in and out of homes.
12:55 Speaker 03 Detective Avis Bury estimated that Waller had stalked hundreds, maybe over a thousand women in his lifetime.
13:05 Speaker 03 His porn library included videos of him having sex with women in a locked room in the basement of his office building at the University of California, Berkeley. As far as investigators could tell, none of the videos appeared to be rapes. But as the prosecutors prepared for trial, they worried that Waller's decades of stalking women, his obsessive catfishing, his pattern of breaking into women's homes, his five rape kits and the sixth he carried with him, suggested one terrible thing.
13:35 Speaker 06 There's a lot of cases we don't know about. So we actually asked a number of detectives and investigators to actually find the women that lived at that address or find the names and then cold call them and say, hey, I'm just trying to check, did anything ever happen?
14:00 Speaker 03 The calls didn't result in any new cases being discovered. Detective Avis Bury told me that the women couldn't remember meeting him or Wendy Wang. The whole thing was frightening news to them in fact. Investigators decided to halt their work trying to identify more cases. It wasn't helping and it might have been causing more harm than good.
14:22 Speaker 03 The evidence in Waller's storage unit was proof that Nicole had been right all along. He was a fully developed predator when he attacked her in 1991. If only the public had been warned.
14:36 Speaker 03 Roy Waller was arrested on a Friday and would be arraigned in Sacramento County Superior Court on Monday. Nicole and her husband Carlos drove to Sacramento to see it.
14:47 Speaker 04 Oof, I have to be in a room with him. I'm about to be in a room with this person for the first time in 27 years.
14:54 Speaker 03 Before the arraignment, they went to the DA's office for a meeting with some of the other survivors. Some Nicole knew from filming America's Most Wanted, others she was meeting for the first time. Then they walked up the street to the courthouse.
15:09 Speaker 04 The courtroom was very packed. It was small, wasn't that big. So I was kind of looking around, like, where's the door? Where are they gonna bring him in?
15:16 Speaker 03 On one side was a jail cell with a door at the back.
15:20 Speaker 04 And then all of a sudden we heard a click to a door, and the place went quiet.
15:26 Speaker 03 Waller, in an orange jumpsuit, walked into the cell. He'd been told not to look at any of the victims in the gallery. Waller's defense attorney, Joseph Farina, had just gotten the case. The judge read out all the charges, and Waller stood still.
15:43 Speaker 04 I'm staring at the back of his head, like, the whole time. Then, all of a sudden, he turned around. That was the first time I ever saw his face, and it was really fast. And I was so close to him that I was like, oh my god, there he is.
15:54 Speaker 03 Nicole and a survivor next to her gripped each other's hands. Nicole's husband Carlos felt a surge of anger.
16:01 Speaker 09 And I wanted to jump across and grab him by the throat and pull him down. It was just, let's go, buddy.
16:08 Speaker 04 And he sort of scanned the gallery. And then he settles in, and he notices myself and the other victim, and just stared at our eyes for a split second. And I was frozen. And I thought my blood left my body. I was so terrified. That's, I could see it on his face. I could, like, see his thinking. Bitch, I should have killed you that night.
16:33 Speaker 03 Then Waller walked out.
16:38 Speaker 03 Almost two years passed before Nicole and Carlos saw Waller again.
16:43 Speaker 03 But for a case this complex, with nine victims, 46 counts, six jurisdictions, evidence dating back almost 30 years, and a pandemic in the middle, the prosecutors told me, two years was swift. An in-house investigator at the DA's office, Terry Castiglione, wrangled all the witnesses and tracked down the evidence. The DNA was their main evidence, but Waller's MO was another.
17:10 Speaker 07 The similarities from case to case to case, it was just incredible.
17:16 Speaker 03 Prosecutor Keith Hill made an MO chart for the jury. Among other things, the rapist always wore a mask, used a weapon, bound the women, said he only wanted money, and kissed them. But the prosecutors had to decide if the MO was unique enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Waller was the rapist in the cases that did not have DNA. The 1992 rape in Sonoma, the one Nicole spotted in the newspaper, was one of them.
17:46 Speaker 03 Ultimately, the prosecutors decided that one wasn't entirely provable. But the double rape in Davis in 1997, which also had no DNA, might be. That was the case where the rapist wore a mask and taunted the ATM camera. Could they prove that was Waller?
18:07 Speaker 06 We had gotten his computer from his home. And with his computer, he, like everybody else, saves all your old photographs. We have photographs of him at Hoover Dam from around the timeframe of when this was committed. And the photograph has the same neck bend, the same look, and is identical, except for it doesn't have the mask over the top. So we showed those photographs of him just normal to his relatives, friends, his ex-wife, and asked, "Who is this? Who is this? Who is this?" And then we also asked them about the masked one. And to a T, each of them were like, "Oh, that looks like Roy."
18:49 Speaker 03 The prosecutors charged Waller with the 1997 rape in Davis.
18:56 Speaker 03 The trial began in October of 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic and lasted about three weeks.
19:03 Speaker 06 The jury's all in masks, we're all in masks. The witnesses were behind Plexiglas.
19:09 Speaker 03 The prosecutors called dozens of witnesses, including two of Waller's ex-girlfriends, his ex-wife, with whom he had a daughter, and of course, the victims. On the third day of trial, Nicole testified.
19:21 Speaker 04 I don't think I was nervous. I think I was just excited to like finally be able to talk to a jury. It was a little bit of a disappointment because the jury was sort of spread all over the courtroom.
19:34 Speaker 03 The trial was held in the largest courtroom in the building, but the pandemic-era distancing rules meant that very few people were allowed in, and the jurors had to spread out. Some were in the jury box, others in the gallery.
19:47 Speaker 04 Roy Waller's off to the side with the defense attorneys. And then because it was COVID, Roy Waller had a mask on the entire time, never took it off, which was really not satisfying. I mean, I had planned this out in my head a thousand times. And I wanted to go, "Look up, look up, motherfucker, look up, look up." And he just would not look up.
20:07 Speaker 03 Prosecutor Chris Orr asked Nicole graphic questions to establish the facts of the rape. Then Waller's defense attorney cross-examined her. She said it was hard. Her testimony lasted a few hours, and then she drove home.
20:21 Speaker 04 And I was funny with him. Like, we were making jokes about the phone. Like, it was the kind you plug in. And he's like, "I'm a bit old." I said, "Yeah, so am I." And we kind of both laughed, you know, and that kind of thing. So I threw him off a little bit. I don't think he expected me to be funny.
20:36 Speaker 03 It's such a hard thing to do, to go up there and tell your story, even though you'd been looking forward to it. It's still not, I can't imagine it's easy.
20:44 Speaker 04 No, it was hard. It was very, it's a very hard thing to do. Yeah.
20:50 Speaker 03 As a witness, Nicole wasn't supposed to attend the trial or read about it, but Carlos could. He reserved a seat for November 12th. That day, the trial schedule showed both sides moving to closing arguments. But then, a curveball. The DA's office sent out breaking news.
21:08 Speaker 04 And then Carlos read the email and all of a sudden, he's like, so they have another witness. They have a witness, so it's, you know, defense is not resting. Like, God, who are they calling? Oh, Roy Charles Waller. I'm like, what?
21:20 Speaker 03 This guy's really gonna do this.
21:23 Speaker 03 Prosecutors Chris Orr and Keith Hill thought this was a recklessly arrogant move.
21:28 Speaker 07 We were kind of high-fiving because that's the worst thing a defendant can do, you know, is to take the stand. But that's, that goes with that type of person that is, thinks that they're in control and that's out committing these crimes. He thinks he can control what's going on in the courtroom.
21:46 Speaker 03 Nicole didn't think he'd reveal much, but there was a chance he might answer some of the questions she had. Like, did something happen to him as a child that twisted him into doing this? Did he have any remorse or genuine empathy? How did he first come across her? How did he know she had a video camera?
22:06 Speaker 10 Observe. The North American Dad. 50s. Great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle. No one called him boss. He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply. Two Girls, One Ghost.
22:38 Speaker 11 Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. Where each week we dive into all things strange, spooky and supernatural and share stories of paranormal encounters from our community of listeners. Satisfy that spooky itch and entertain your inner witch with Two Girls, One Ghost. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts and check us out on YouTube at Two Girls, One Ghost. But be warned, side effects might include a haunting or two. Listen at your own risk.
23:07 Speaker 03 Carlos was there when the rapist took the stand. Waller's attorney, Joseph Farina, started by asking some softball questions to portray Waller as a loving husband and father, the kind of person who couldn't possibly be a rapist. Then he began a multi-hour Q and A about all the evidence of rape in Waller's storage unit, for which Waller had an explanation. The first one was the most innocuous. I'm paraphrasing, but the tone was, "Roy, tell us the real reason you have all these panties in a bag." Waller said they belonged to a girlfriend with an addiction to buying lingerie. He held on to them.
23:47 Speaker 03 The next question, verbatim this time, was, "Roy, did you ever engage in consensual role-playing involving the use of ropes, or restraints, or handcuffs?" "Why, yes," Waller said. One of his girlfriends had been very wild. And paraphrasing again, "Roy, what about all these Craigslist ads where Asian women are asking for roommates? Why do you have so many of those?" "Oh, those," Waller said, "well, you know, he was just trying to help a female friend find a new apartment." Which didn't explain why he had so many of them, over many years. "Roy, what about this scar on your arm and under your eye? Did you sustain those when women you were trying to rape stabbed you?" "No, no, no.
24:32 Speaker 03 Those scars are from a game of paintball." Nicole's husband, Carlos, watched it all in dismay. "I'm like, God, this guy's such a slimeball. He's such a slimeball." "Roy, why do you have so much duct tape?" "Because it's so useful," Waller said, "and there was a sale." "But why do you have single rolls inside different bags, along with zip ties, rope, masks, neoprene gloves, condoms, and tactical pens for breaking glass?" Waller said the police officers investigating him had "created the rape kits to frame him."
25:05 Speaker 09 "He just had a narcissistic attitude about himself, like that he knew he was gonna get out of this. I guarantee he thought he would get away with it. Made the hairs on my neck stand up, for sure."
25:23 Speaker 03 Then Waller's attorney asked the question everyone was wondering about. How on earth did his genetic material appear inside women's vaginas and on their covers, pillowcases, and bodies? To that, Waller didn't have an explanation. He said he'd never been to those places or seen those women. So it must not be his DNA. Then it was Prosecutor Chris Orr's turn to expose Waller as a liar. His colleague Keith showed the jury lengths of rope from one of Waller's rape kits.
25:55 Speaker 06 Keith's holding up the ropes. I'm asking Mr. Waller about the ropes and Mr. Waller says, "Those are for women because they like to be tied up." I'm like, "Sorry, women like to be tied up?" He's like, "Yes." I'm like, "So these are ropes for you to bind women?" And he's like, "My girlfriend." I'm like, "Well, your girlfriends are women, correct? So you use these ropes that we found in your storage unit next to the handcuffs, next to the panties to bind women?" And eventually he said yes. It was...
26:28 Speaker 07 That was one of my favorite parts of the trial because Chris was just crushing him on cross-examination.
26:38 Speaker 03 How did he explain the DNA?
26:40 Speaker 06 That was the very first question I think I asked.
26:42 Speaker 07 Yeah.
26:43 Speaker 06 And he says, "That's not my job. I leave that to my attorneys."
26:47 Speaker 07 Yeah.
26:48 Speaker 06 Who had no explanation.
26:50 Speaker 07 Yeah, he totally just put them on the spot when he said, "I'm leaving that up to them."
26:57 Speaker 03 Of course, his attorneys had no justification or defense for it because, well, there wasn't one. Nicole's husband, Carlos, thought Waller's decision to take the stand backfired. What did you think was going to be the outcome of this trial after that testimony?
27:13 Speaker 09 I mean, I knew, I knew 100% he was going to be guilty.
27:17 Speaker 03 At the closing arguments, Waller's defense attorney didn't have much of a defense. The DNA evidence was undeniable, even though Waller denied it. And Waller's own family members said that was him in the ATM photos. Prosecutor Chris Orr had one more piece of evidence up his sleeve, though, something the jury didn't know about yet.
27:37 Speaker 07 There's a quote, who is it by, Chris?
27:40 Speaker 06 Daniel Webster?
27:42 Speaker 07 "Confession is suicide, and suicide is confession."
27:47 Speaker 03 It goes, "There is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession." Nicole was in the courtroom for the prosecution's closing argument.
28:00 Speaker 04 They all of a sudden put the video up on the, up on the screen of Roy Waller trying to commit suicide in a cell. I'm shocked because I had no idea this happened. So here he is, you know, and they're showing us and the jury is just watching this riveted. You know, and then all of a sudden it goes dark and then one by one our pictures come up. Each victim comes up on the wall. I thought it was brilliant.
28:26 Speaker 03 The jury was sent away to deliberating. There were 46 counts. Nicole thought it would take a few days, but it took them fewer than eight hours. The following afternoon, everyone rushed back to the courthouse.
28:39 Speaker 04 They bring the jury back in.
28:40 Speaker 03 And by the way, even though Nicole was public about what happened to her, at the trial and in the court documents, she was referred to as N. Doe.
28:49 Speaker 04 I will just never forget it because he just went, you know, and he reads off this long charge. And I just broke down in the courtroom because I had been waiting so long to hear those words in that courtroom for me. So I, of course, am trying to follow the rule, you know, trying to cry very quietly.
29:11 Speaker 03 The judge had forbidden any outbursts in the courtroom. But Carlos and Nicole's friends, who were watching it on a private Zoom feed at home, didn't have to suppress their reaction.
29:25 Speaker 09 It was like we were watching the Super Bowl and your team just scored the winning touchdown. And everyone is on the same team. It was kind of like that, like everyone's jumping up and down and high-fiving and saying, "Fuck that guy." And it was just like smiles and, you know, everybody knew that this was a huge moment for Nicole.
29:47 Speaker 04 And as soon as I heard mine, the first one guilty, I'm like, oh, all 46 is going down. All 46 is guilty. Chris turned around and just looked at me and kind of nodded at me. He had his mask on. He just nodded at me and smiled. I could tell he was smiling and I was just like, "Yeah, fucking got him."
30:06 Speaker 03 All through the case, prosecutors Orr and Hill had hammered home that the DNA evidence against Waller was inarguable. When the trial was over, everyone flooded out to the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. There were news cameras everywhere.
30:22 Speaker 07 One of the jurors came out and when they, one of the questions they asked him was, "How did, how did you come to your verdict so quickly?" And he said, "The DNA don't lie."
30:35 Speaker 03 "The DNA don't lie" had been the prosecutor's catchphrase at trial.
30:43 Speaker 03 In a few weeks, Waller would be sentenced. The judge invited Nicole and the other victims to read the victim impact statements beforehand.
30:53 Speaker 03 Nicole had been thinking about what to say for almost 30 years. I asked her to read it for me.
30:59 Speaker 04 Although I have thought about this moment every day since the morning of June 23rd, 1991, when I was mercifully kept alive against what I believed in possible odds, I will not easily forgive the damage my family, the rest of that night caused.
31:13 Speaker 04 My family has suffered greatly and although my mother lived long enough to see the arrest and arraignment of Roy Waller.
31:21 Speaker 04 She was not able to fight long enough to see him convicted, which was her dying wish and indeed her constant wish every single day for 28 years before she died in 2019. I hoped to be believed fully and to stand near him in a courtroom to make sure I did my part to see him punished for what he did to me. It has been my wish for every moment in my life to be in court to hear the words guilty for what he did to me that night. Roy Charles Waller is quite simply a monster. I will not waste time, emotion, or any more of my life hating him. I will not waste one more second of my life thinking about him after this day.
32:03 Speaker 03 That day, Nicole thought she'd shut the door on Roy Waller for good. The judge sentenced him to almost 900 years in prison, one of the longest prison sentences in US history. On the one hand, it was a ridiculous number. On the other, it reflected the totality of the harm he'd wrought. Does the victim impact statement you read in court still represent what you think and feel?
32:30 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, I think for the most part, yeah. I mean, and, and I, and yes, I've said goodbye to the Roy Waller that I want to say goodbye to.
32:38 Speaker 03 But there was an aspect of Roy Waller that Nicole couldn't say goodbye to because she was curious about him and because he was the only one who had the answers to questions that still haunted her.
32:50 Speaker 04 Right after he was convicted, I immediately wanted to sit down and meet him in prison. I wanted to sit down with him.
33:00 Speaker 03 Next on Hunting the Bogeyman. Why do you want to meet with him?
33:06 Speaker 04 I'd like to understand how he pulled all this off, what made him this way, what happened to him, what made him be this monster that he is. But I also have a tremendous number of questions of him. Logistics questions. Do I expect that he would ever meet with me? Unlikely.
33:31 Speaker 03 And Nicole finally meets the man who linked her case to the NorCal series.
33:35 Speaker 04 In my case, he could have been there multiple times before this attack happened.
33:39 Speaker 03 I, I think that that's very realistic.
33:48 Speaker 03 Hunting the Bogeyman is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence. It's hosted and reported by me, Peter McDonnell. From Perfect Cadence, I'm the executive producer. From Sony Music Entertainment, the executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. The series was sound designed and mixed by Matt Gergel. We used music from Audio Network. The show's production manager was Sammy Allison. Our lawyer is Allison Sherry. Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rassik, and Jamie Myers. If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave a review. It's the best way to support us. Thanks for listening.
34:38 Speaker 00 I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and I hope you'll join us for season five of Dateline: Missing in America. In each episode of Dateline's award-winning series, we will focus on one missing person's case and hear from the families, the friends, and the investigators all desperate to find them. Maybe you could help solve a mystery. Search Dateline: Missing in America to listen completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium to unlock new episodes early.
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