Pod Insights The Binge Crimes Hunting the Bogeyman | 4. The Arrest About this episode After a breakthrough idea for solving cases cracks the mystery of the Golden State Killer, the NorCal Rapist’s identity is finally revealed. A stakeout ensues, and the hunt for his DNA.
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Transcript 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.
0:20 Speaker 01 Search Dateline: Missing in America to listen completely free or subscribe to Dateline Premium to unlock new episodes early.
0:35 Speaker 02 Welcome to The Haunted Library. Join me, Colin Morgan, as I read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. A story of science and ambition, loneliness and longing, and what it truly means to be human. Listen to The Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts, or find us on YouTube.
1:01 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.
1:29 Speaker 03 Detective Avis Berry was driving down the freeway in her undercover car with one eye searching for forerunners when she heard on the radio that the Golden State Killer had been caught.
1:40 Speaker 04 And that they have used some sort of genetic genealogy to catch him. So I just like immediately get on my phone and I call my sergeant and I go, "We have to do this with NorCal." I just got chills talking about that just now. I just said to myself, "This is gonna work." I just, I just knew it. Like, I just felt it in my bones.
2:04 Speaker 03 Analyst Monica Chikowsky and her boss Kirk Campbell, fresh off helping solve the Golden State Killer case, immediately pivoted.
2:13 Speaker 05 Like, NorCal's next. Right away, we started working to get the genealogy off the ground for NorCal.
2:24 Speaker 03 But could they go two for two?
2:28 Speaker 05 I was not honestly sure if the GSK was a one-off and we were not going to be able to have that kind of result again.
2:38 Speaker 06 I really didn't know exactly what to expect.
2:42 Speaker 03 Monica had to fly to Palm Springs for a work conference. But as she got to the hotel, she called Kirk on speakerphone.
2:51 Speaker 03 They uploaded the NorCal rapist's DNA profile to the same public genealogy database that they'd uploaded the Golden State killers to and hoped it would match with at least a first cousin. Instead, they hit the jackpot.
3:05 Speaker 05 The last name Waller stood out to us right away.
3:09 Speaker 03 The person they found was just one degree removed from their suspect. Monica recognized the name Waller because it was one of the surnames she got from her YSTR test. This time, there was also a first name.
3:23 Speaker 05 Roy Waller.
3:26 Speaker 03 She pulled up his driver's license.
3:28 Speaker 05 And we're kind of stunned about how closely it resembled the ATM surveillance photo.
3:36 Speaker 03 Roy Charles Waller was a 58-year-old white man from Northern California. He fit the age range, the location, and most of all, the appearance of the NorCal rapist. It had been 12 years since his last known attack and 20 since he stared into the lens of the ATM camera in Davis, hiding behind a mask. But those essential, unique features that define someone's appearance were still there. The shape of his ear, the tilt of his head, his eyes, the way everything fit together. It was him.
4:12 Speaker 05 That was the clincher, for me.
4:14 Speaker 03 Ann Marie Schumer, the Sacramento County DA, called Paul Holes.
4:19 Speaker 01 Don't tell anybody. We got NorCal.
4:24 Speaker 03 From Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence, you're listening to Hunting the Bogeyman. I'm Peter McDonnell, episode four, The Arrest.
4:40 Speaker 03 Monica Ciekowski and Keith Campbell didn't have to build a single family tree to find the primary suspect in the NorCal rapist case. It took them just 45 minutes to identify Roy Waller.
4:55 Speaker 03 But as Paul Holes knew, you never make an arrest on genealogy.
4:59 Speaker 01 That is just providing you a lead. Now you need to get a direct DNA sample.
5:05 Speaker 03 The next step was to surveil him. Ava sent out the CCATs, the career criminal apprehension team.
5:13 Speaker 04 Couple of people in an unmarked vehicle to set up on his house and figure out who's coming and going from that home, so they can get an idea who lives there.
5:24 Speaker 03 This house where he was living, was that the one in Benicia?
5:28 Speaker 04 Yes.
5:32 Speaker 03 Benicia is a coastal town in the East Bay. A few months ago, Paul Holes and I drove there the long way. Passed roller coasters at Six Flags. Passed the Dead End Street in Dusty Vallejo, where the rapist entered through the woman's garage. Passed middle-class mansions in Martinez, where he perpetrated a nightmare on Halloween. And passed the crime lab, where Paul hunted him with a microscope.
6:00 Speaker 01 I was like, geez, he was right across the bridge from where I was working trying to find him, right?
6:08 Speaker 03 Paul told me that in 1997, when he and his first wife separated, he rented an apartment in Benicia.
6:15 Speaker 01 It was convenient, the grocery store is right around the corner.
6:19 Speaker 03 Is it possible you passed by Waller, the grocery store?
6:22 Speaker 01 Oh, absolutely. You know, if he's in Benicia while I'm living in Benicia, for sure. But we're on the street in which Waller lived.
6:31 Speaker 03 And I guess I didn't realize he was this close to the water. Just right up here to the right, you might as well just go ahead and. Home over.
6:39 Speaker 03 They look like they're single family homes with small yards in the front, nice
6:47 Speaker 03 nice landscaping. They're all, each one's in slightly different color. Some are green, some are yellow. The one he was in is brown.
6:59 Speaker 03 Who would have thought that this is the home of serial rapists?
7:05 Speaker 03 The CCAT team watching Waller learned that he lived in the house with his wife and no one else.
7:13 Speaker 04 And he always rode his motorcycle to work while they were surveilling him. He always had this backpack that he carried with him so he could have weapons in there for all we know.
7:23 Speaker 03 The first order of business was to do a trash run, meaning get a sample of his DNA from something he threw away, like a tissue or the straw from a drink.
7:33 Speaker 04 They did a trash run on his home garbage in Benicia.
7:38 Speaker 03 So does an officer from the CCAT team have to get out of the car? Sort of walk normally over to the garbage, reach in, pull it out, put it into an evidence bag and walk away and hope no one looked?
7:53 Speaker 04 But that's how they do it.
7:55 Speaker 03 Waller's trash was a DNA goldmine. They pulled out an apple core, an old pair of men's tennis shoes, and his soda straw from a hamburger joint. They rushed the soda straw to the lab. As Avis waited for the results, she learned something surprising. The person on the genealogy website who was one degree removed from Roy Waller had only uploaded their profile a few weeks earlier.
8:21 Speaker 04 It was just serendipitous.
8:27 Speaker 03 The next morning, Avis learned the results of the DNA test on the straw from Waller's garbage.
8:35 Speaker 04 Holy shit. We got him. We got him.
8:41 Speaker 03 Roy Charles Waller was the NorCal rapist.
8:46 Speaker 04 Now, that's a true CSI moment. News just spread like wildfire.
8:53 Speaker 03 At dawn, the CCAT team deployed in multiple vehicles. After 27 years of investigation, it was time to make an arrest.
9:04 Speaker 03 In Venetia, Roy Waller put on a dark hoodie, grabbed his black backpack, got on his motorcycle, and zipped out of his driveway for the last time.
9:17 Speaker 03 A hundred feet back, unmarked cars with CCAT agents in street clothes and bulletproof vests followed him, all the way to the University of California, Berkeley, where for 26 years Roy Waller had worked as a safety specialist.
9:37 Speaker 03 Waller pulled into the parking lot and parked his bike. As soon as he got off and removed his helmet, they were on him.
9:46 Speaker 04 One of the detectives pulled out a shotgun and pointed it at him and said, "Put your hands up in the air and get down on the ground." Roy Waller looked very surprised, and he also peed his pants. You know, he literally had the piss scared right out of him, and he had to be thinking to himself,
10:08 Speaker 04 "I think I know what this is about. How much do they know?"
10:14 Speaker 03 They put him in the back of a police car and headed to Sacramento. During the entire 90-minute drive, Waller didn't ask a single question about why he'd been arrested.
10:25 Speaker 04 He's probably thinking, "Maybe they only know about Sacramento."
10:30 Speaker 04 I knew that he was more savvy than some suspects. But I didn't know what to expect. I didn't, I didn't know if he was going to want to just give it all up and want to brag about himself. I didn't know if he was going to deny, deny, deny. I didn't know if he was going to play the card of these were all consensual contacts, because that's often a card that, that a rapist will play.
10:54 Speaker 03 At the station, they took Waller's fingerprints, put his black backpack on a table to be searched later, walked him into an interrogation room, took off his leg irons and handcuffs, and showed him a chair. They gave him a bottle of water and closed the door. And there he sat for an hour, probably thinking about what to do. And then Avis went in.
11:17 Speaker 07 Hey, Mr. Waller? How you doing? I'm Detective Berry. I work with the Sacramento Police Department. My first name is Avis, just like the car rental.
11:29 Speaker 04 He was very calm, very calm. When I talked to him, he looked right through me. His eyes were just kind of dead.
11:40 Speaker 07 So do you have any idea why, why we're talking today?
11:47 Speaker 04 I wanted to get kind of a timeline from him to see if he would admit to putting himself in a lot of those locations where the victims were attacked.
11:57 Speaker 03 Avis did most of the talking, but Waller gave short answers about where he'd lived and worked. His wife owned the house he lived in. She owned a factory in China, he said. Thirty minutes into the interview, Avis took a chance and asked him about a case. The 2006 double rape in Sacramento.
12:16 Speaker 03 She put photos of the two victims on the table in front of Waller.
12:25 Speaker 07 Unfortunately, what I'm struggling with is that we do have DNA evidence, okay, from, from this scene. And it does come back to you. I don't know how it can be. But you don't have an explanation for that. No. That you can think of, a thing that makes sense. No.
12:52 Speaker 07 You're accusing me of something that I didn't know.
12:56 Speaker 04 So we pull out the next victim, then we do the same routine, you know, with, with that victim. Same questions. Nope, don't, don't recognize her, never met her.
13:06 Speaker 07 You don't see anything before. You don't recognize anything. The way your timing is that out of all of these photos, all these pictures, and all of the houses and apartments, that they don't look like any place you remember being, that you've never been there before.
13:22 Speaker 03 Waller leaned back in his chair, frowned, and shook his head.
13:26 Speaker 04 Why would we have your DNA in this house? I don't know. Well, why would your DNA be inside of her vagina? I don't know. Maybe you planted it there. So you think that I put your DNA inside of her vagina? How would, how would I do that?
13:44 Speaker 03 Waller shrugged his shoulders, as if he was stumped.
13:47 Speaker 04 That's when it became the deny, deny, at all costs, deny.
13:52 Speaker 03 Avis showed Waller a photo of every house the NorCal rapist broke into and every victim he attacked.
13:59 Speaker 04 Ronant Park, Martinez, Vallejo, Chico, Davis.
14:05 Speaker 07 You say you got evidence on me, but I don't know how you would.
14:10 Speaker 04 He denied each one.
14:13 Speaker 04 And, and it was at that point that he lawyered up.
14:17 Speaker 03 Avis left the room. Waller's military-style black backpack, the one the SeaCat team saw him carry everywhere he went, lay on the table in the hallway.
14:29 Speaker 04 We find sex toys, zip ties, gloves, a flashlight, a black beanie. We found tape. He basically had a rape kit inside of his backpack.
14:44 Speaker 03 It appeared that Roy Waller had been ready to commit another sexual assault.
14:49 Speaker 04 You know, maybe it's something that he always had in the back of his mind, you know?
14:58 Speaker 03 As Waller sat alone in the interrogation room, waiting for a guard to take him to jail, he pulled the string out of his hoodie and moved a chair into the corner of the room beyond the view of one of the video cameras.
15:12 Speaker 03 He stood on it, looped the string around the top hinge of the door, slipped it around his neck, and muttered to himself, "Oh, my God, it's done", and stepped off the chair. But the string came off the hinge. Waller scrambled back onto the chair and tried it two more times. The last time, it held, but the string broke. He gave up.
15:39 Speaker 03 For all the things Waller wouldn't say, his actions said it all.
15:48 Speaker 00 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.
16:18 Speaker 07 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.
16:51 Speaker 03 It was only weeks later when investigators looked at the footage from a second camera in the room, an angle they call "the God's Eye View," that they realized he'd tried to kill himself. When the jailers came into the interrogation room, they found Waller just sitting on the chair in the corner. His emotions were inscrutable. He gave away nothing. They took him to a cell. He was finally behind bars. Over at the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office, the elected DA Anne Marie Schubert scheduled a press conference for the next morning to announce Waller's arrest as the NorCal rapist. Now, it was time to break the news to the survivors.
17:33 Speaker 03 Representatives from the counties where the attacks had occurred would call them. Avis, though, didn't like that. She wanted to call them.
17:40 Speaker 04 Doggone it. Like, I felt like these were my victims, you know? They knew me. And as it turns out, my lieutenant looked at me and he said, "You are not going to win this fight."
17:55 Speaker 03 Nicole was now 48 years old, a mom and wife with a flourishing career. In the quarter-century since the rape, she'd built a whole life for herself.
18:05 Speaker 07 I was ready for work, ready to go, and I was home alone. This call came in on my cellphone. It was undisclosed number. I never answer those, except I thought, "I wonder if that's my son's school." So I answered the phone, and this person on the other end, don't remember her name, said, "Hi, I'm calling from the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office." And I went, "Oh, okay. Why would the Sonoma County District Attorney be calling me?" And I started to, like, started, almost feel like hot and a little bit sick. And she said, "I am the victim's advocate for the NorCal rapist case, and I'm calling to let you know that we have a suspect in custody."
18:45 Speaker 07 And I actually fell. I fell to the floor. I was on the floor sobbing. I just remember saying, "Thank you, thank you, thank you. It's been 27 years. It's been 27 years." And she said, "I know, I know, I know."
18:57 Speaker 03 When Nicole hung up, her two dogs came over and looked down at her. Her hands shook as she called her husband, Carlos, who was at work, but he didn't answer. She called her mom, no answer. Her dad, no answer. Then she texted Carlos, 911.
19:15 Speaker 07 So then he calls me and I was shaking.
19:18 Speaker 04 I could just hear his, like, trembling in her voice. "Tell me who they got."
19:22 Speaker 07 And I said, "They got the Darkout Ravens. They caught him. They caught him."
19:27 Speaker 03 Carlos rushed home. Within an hour, Nicole's friends showed up too. She'd been so open about the rape that when this day finally came, they were there for her. Together, they watched the press conference live, online. The district attorney of Sacramento County, Anne Marie Schubert, was speaking.
19:48 Speaker 07 It began in 1991, and it went on for over 15 years. As I have said many times before, cold cases often become a journey for justice. For 27 years, there has been one common thread: his DNA.
20:09 Speaker 03 Sacramento Police Chief Daniel Han came to the podium next. I'd like to give you a brief overview of the series. What we know is this started in 1991 in Roanoke Park.
20:20 Speaker 07 And then I heard something about Roanoke Park's Sonoma.
20:24 Speaker 03 Had several sexual assaults in Sonoma, Vallejo, Martinez, Woodland, Chico.
20:32 Speaker 07 And I went, "I was fucking right about Sonoma." I was right the entire time. And I was like, "Oh, my God."
20:40 Speaker 03 Yesterday, Sacramento Police detectives arrested Roy Charles Waller. The next person to speak was Avis Berry. Thank you, Chief, and thank you, everybody, for being here today. I can tell you that I've been waiting a really long time for this day to come. No one else has.
20:59 Speaker 07 To worry about him anymore. The victims in this case can stop looking over their shoulders. They are truly the strongest people I know and the bravest people I know. I'm still completely in shock. My whole world has changed. And at some point, I looked at Carlos and I uttered my son's name in like, oh, God, he doesn't know. Carlos called the school and said, we've had a family emergency. I need to come get him right now. So he goes down there, picks him up.
21:31 Speaker 03 One of Nicole's friends at the house that day, Erin, pulled her aside. Erin was a mental health therapist.
21:38 Speaker 07 She said, however, he reacts is the right way. He will likely feel embarrassed. He will likely want to run out of the room. He's a 14 year old boy finding out about this horrendous thing that's happened to his mother, and it's a very difficult subject to handle. So whatever he does is the right thing. He comes in and he's like, where are all these people here? And I said, why don't we go sit outside? And sat down and I just, I said, you know, I want to tell you this because there's, this is about to break publicly in the news and it has to do with me.
22:10 Speaker 03 Nicole told him what had happened.
22:12 Speaker 07 All the color left his face and he just kind of stared at me, said, are you okay? I said, how do you feel? And he said, embarrassed. And he said, and I want to go back to school. And we said, okay. So Carlos drove him back to school.
22:26 Speaker 03 Their son was in ninth grade and on the football team. By the time practice started that afternoon, Nicole had been on the news.
22:35 Speaker 07 He goes to football and the coach pulls him aside and they start talking. He said, how are you feeling? I know, I know about the news about your mom. But some people on the team know, the team is going to know. Do you want to come with me when we talk about it? Or do you want to stay here? And he said, no, I want to go. So they went down to the field. All the players were there. And then the head coach said, this is going to be a very public story. And, you know, our, your teammate, your friend needs our support right now. And one by one, they, in their own very
23:08 Speaker 03 Very many of them helped him understand you're not alone in this. And they put their arms around him, they hugged, they protected him. And then the head coach said, and you know, your mom's a real badass.
23:23 Speaker 03 As Nicole and the other survivors processed the surprising news that a suspect had finally been arrested in their decades old case. Over in Sacramento, Avis Berry learned that they had actually been very close to catching him many years ago. When investigators served search warrants on Waller's house in Benicia, they discovered the answer to the mystery of the Toyota 4Runner. In 2006, Waller was living with a girlfriend in a house near Sacramento, and she owned a white Toyota 4Runner. The weekend of the attack, she left the country for a funeral, and he borrowed it.
24:06 Speaker 04 They came to me and they said, Avis, guess what? That car is in one of our packets. And I said, holy cow. Tell me that we didn't go there. And they said, no, we went there.
24:23 Speaker 03 The detective with the packet had sat down across the table from Roy Waller. He asked him all the questions on the list, except one. He never asked for Waller's DNA. When the detective, Jimmy Vagon, turned in the packet, he simply wrote that Waller didn't fit the NorCal rapist's profile.
24:43 Speaker 04 I don't think ever I've been so close to vomiting in my life. And then I just wanted to cry. I just wanted to sit down and cry. Because we had this guy, Peter, we had this guy. And it was good old fashioned police work that did it. How am I going to explain this to Nicole and to all, all of my, my other victims? How are we gonna explain this to them? Because I just felt like I hugely let them down.
25:24 Speaker 03 Joseph D'Angelo, aka The Golden State Killer, and Roy Waller, aka The NorCal Rapist, were held in the same jail. But only one of them was headed to trial. D'Angelo pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, so he got sentenced to multiple consecutive life terms. But Waller refused to admit guilt. And that's how The NorCal Rapist became the first case in the world to go to trial after being solved by forensic investigative genealogy. Everyone on the prosecution team knew their case was going to set a precedent. They thought this novel and groundbreaking genealogy method was legal,
26:07 Speaker 03 but the trial would be the real test. Next, on Hunting the Bogeyman. He was becoming more and more emboldened. There were pictures of floor plans and paths of how to get in and out of homes. As the boogeyman heads to trial, his secret life and his MO are exposed. He's holding up the ropes. Mr. Waller says, "Those are for women because they like to be tied up." Like, "Sorry, women like to be tied up?" He's like, "Yes." After waiting 29 years, Nicole faces him in court.
26:48 Speaker 03 And I remember staring at him, glaring at him. He was the thing of nightmares. The boogeyman that we want to believe doesn't exist, and then you're confronted with the reality that they do, and one of them's sitting right here in court.
27:13 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.
27:50 Speaker 03 If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave a review. It's the best way to support us. Thanks for listening.
28:10 Speaker 02 Welcome to The Haunted Library. Join me, Colin Morgan, as I read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. A story of science and ambition, loneliness and longing, and what it truly means to be human. Listen to The Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts, or find us on YouTube.
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