NorCal Rapist suspect appears in Sacramento courtroom with victims in attendance
With NorCal Rapist victims glaring at him from the front of the courtroom, suspect Roy Charles Waller made a first brief appearance Monday afternoon in Sacramento Superior Court, where he faces a dozen felony counts that could lead to a life sentence.
Waller, 58, who is being held without bail in the Sacramento County Jail, barely spoke during the five-minute arraignment and did not enter a plea to the charges he faces in an October 2006 double rape in North Natomas.
But some of the women who authorities say are victims of the NorCal Rapist spree had plenty to say after the court session.
Nicole Earnest-Payte, who was 21 and believed to be the NorCal Rapist's first victim in a 1991 attack in Rohnert Park, said she briefly locked eyes with Waller as he turned inside the steel cage that holds suspects in the courtrooms on the first floor of the Main Jail in downtown Sacramento.
“When he turned around and looked squarely at us, straight in our eyes, I glared right back,” Earnest-Payte said, adding that she felt more anger toward the suspect than fear.
“That was the first time I felt angry,” she said. “It was the first time that I finally thought, ‘Yeah, there you are, and you look fairly pathetic.' I was a little afraid, but not afraid of him.”
“Right at this moment, I feel great,” Earnest-Payte added. “He's in an orange jumpsuit.”
Earnest-Payte said she woke up in her Rohnert Park home on the couch to find a masked man with a gun preparing to attack her, and that until 2006 no one had told her she was the victim of a suspected serial rapist.
Earnest-Payte also praised Sacramento Police Department Detective Avis Beery for sticking with the case for years, calling Beery “our superhero.”
She emphasized that although the assault had affected her it did not define her life.
“I want to tell him that we're all strong women and I have an amazing life and he did not steal my soul from me,” she said. “He'll never steal my life from me.”
Earnest-Payte was one of at least two NorCal Rapist victims who came to court Monday. The other was Rosalyn Anderson, who was attacked in July 1997 in her Chico home and, despite being tied up, managed to slip out of her bindings long enough to stab her assailant in the arm with scissors.
“He looked at me, he looked at me with more fear than he ever had,” Anderson said. “I'm just glad justice is being served.”
Anderson sat in court with her sister, Maria Nauman, who said the two were immensely grateful that law enforcement had not given up on the case.
“Twenty-one years, we're just really grateful to be here,” Nauman said. “We've been waiting for this a long time. This has affected her life immensely. We thought maybe he had died. We thought maybe he got scared into hiding.”
Waller is suspected of attacking at least 11 women throughout Northern California from 1991 through 2006, when the assaults apparently halted. He likely will soon face charges in other counties where similar attacks occurred.
Judge Jaime R. Roman appointed Sacramento defense attorney Joseph Farina to represent Waller and set the next hearing for Oct. 30.
Farina said outside court afterward that he did not expect the case to go to trial for another two to three years.
Farina got word he was appointed 30 minutes before court began, just enough time to throw on a suit and rush to the county jail. He is in a pool of private attorneys who take cases when the Public Defender's Office either has a conflict of interest or too many cases.
Farina noted that there is a “voluminous amount” of evidence that will need to be turned over by prosecutors Chris Ore and Keith Hill.
“This will probably be the largest case that I've handled in my career,” Farina said after the arraignment.
Farina said he didn't know whether Waller would seek private counsel, but that he asked the defendant to “give me the opportunity to outline what you're facing.”
“We don't know the extent of the DNA,” Farina said. “Do they have fingerprints? There are a number of counties spanning Northern California (where the crimes occurred), so we have to look at that, too.”
The charges Waller faces in Sacramento stem from the last known attack, an Oct. 14, 2006, incident in which a man with a handgun tied up two women inside their North Natomas home with duct tape and assaulted them for six hours.
An arrest warrant filed in court documents say the assailant “likely made entry through a bedroom window that was left ajar.”
After the assaults, the suspect “took the victims to separate bathrooms and washed their entire bodies,” court documents say, an apparent and unsuccessful attempt to erase DNA evidence.
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