Is NorCal Rapist suspect innocent ‘oddball’ or cunning criminal?

With NorCal Rapist suspect Roy Charles Waller watching silently Monday, a Sacramento prosecutor summed up the wealth of evidence — DNA, handcuffs, zip ties, a databank about various women — that he says proves Waller is the man who raped nine women between 1991 and 2006.

As some of the rape victims sat in the audience in Sacramento Superior Court, Deputy District Attorney Chris Ore spent nearly three hours describing the years-long search for a suspect that led to Waller’s arrest in September 2018 and the effect it had on his alleged victims.

“These women have waited, some close to 30 years, for justice,” Ore told the jury in his closing argument. “Justice was found when that swab was taken from Mr. Waller’s cheek.

“The answer was solved that had plagued so many women, so many investigators, so many criminalists for so long.”

Waller defense attorney Joseph Farina opened his closing argument after Ore on Monday afternoon marveling at the national media attention the case has drawn, and attacking the use of DNA evidence.

He described how law enforcement officers who collected DNA evidence from Waller’s trash in front of his house had to “sneak up like a thief in the night,” and told jurors that they should be alarmed that an individual’s DNA is subject to “government prying.”

Farina said there are questions about how some of the DNA was stored over the years and how it was collected originally.

“With no DNA, there’s no case,” Farina said. “And as I pointed out, there’s been issues with the DNA, whether it’s degradation or the way it was collected.”

He also noted that there has been no evidence that investigators recovered items in Waller’s storage lockers that had been taken from the victims.

“I’m curious, where are the trophies that you would expect a serial rapist to keep from his victims, some thing he would keep so he could relive his memories?” Farina asked.

He conceded that his client dated many women he met on the internet, including some who used sex toys.

“So what, there’s nothing illegal about that,” Farina said, adding that “Mr. Waller’s an oddball.”

In testimony last week, Waller conceded that one of his girlfriends was into bondage, as were some of her friends, and Ore noted that one of the items found among his belongings was a webbed device that could be placed under a mattress to allow for a women on top of it to be bound with Velcro straps.

Farina said Monday there is nothing incriminating about Waller’s interest in the “wild” girlfriend Waller once dated. “Mr. Waller was single, he had rendezvous with other single women. So what?”

“What if the district attorney has the wrong person?” Farina asked. “What if Mr. Waller is completely innocent of these unsolved rapes from 1991 to 2006?”

He also noted that only one of the nine victims - a woman in Chico who was 21 when she was attacked in her apartment - identified Waller in the courtroom, but said she was lying when she made the claim.

“Just because you’ve been sexually assaulted doesn’t mean you get to get up there and lie about what happened,” Farina said.

Court ended for the night after Farina’s argument, and will resume Tuesday with final argument from Ore before Judge James Arguelles sends it to the jury to decide whether the 60-year-old defendant spends the rest of his life in prison.

Jurors will have a daunting task.

Waller faces 46 felony counts in a series of break-ins that began in 1991 and victimized nine women in six attacks that spread across Northern California cities until they suddenly stopped in October 2006.

The verdict forms the jurors will use total 124 pages, and they must sift through an array of evidence that includes samples of the pornography, databases of women and maps found in Waller’s storage unit, along with bags Ore referred to as “rape kits” that contained handcuffs, panties, duct tape and other items.

Sacramento police have testified that they interviewed Waller months after that last attack — the rape of two Natomas roommates — but decided he was too old and did not match the composite sketches of the attacker.

The jury has been listening to evidence for nearly four weeks, sitting wearing masks or face shields and spaced out in Sacramento Superior Court’s largest courtroom in an unusual seating arrangement made necessary by the coronavirus pandemic.

Prosecutors have presented evidence from victims of the attacks — including one who says she was able to stab her attacker in the arm with a pair of scissors and saw his face from underneath duct tape that had been placed over her eyes.

But the most critical evidence may be the DNA left behind at crime scenes that prosecutors say matches Waller’s.

Waller, who testified for two days last week, has insisted he was not at their homes and did not rape any of the women, but offered no theories on how his DNA ended up on the victim’s bed sheets, pillowcases and bodies.

“There is no dispute from the evidence that Mr. Waller raped these victims...,” Ore said. “Mr. Waller said he has no explanation for the DNA. Mr. Waller said he has no explanation for the sperm at each of those individual crime scenes.”

Waller, who is married and has been held without bail in the Sacramento County Main Jail since his September 2018 arrest, became the focus of the long-running case after investigators used an online genealogy site to link DNA from crime scenes to someone’s on the site and began tracking down potential relatives of that person.

The same process was used months before to find Golden State Killer/East Area Rapist Joseph James DeAngelo.