The Binge Crimes: Night Shift - Hunting the Bogeyman | 3. The Rollercoaster
Episode Date: November 17, 2025When the Bogeyman attacks again, police launch an unprecedented operation to hunt him down. And finally Nicole finds out how her case was linked to the others in the series. Binge all episodes of H...unting the Bogeyman ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Crimes on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. From serial killer nurses to psychic scammers – The Binge is your home for true crime stories that pull you in and never let go. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. Hunting the Bogeyman is brought to you by Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence Productions. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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In 2006, when the news broke that Nicole was the first survivor of the NorCal rapist,
she went back to the Roanard Park police station to give them a peace of her mind.
I had like lightning bolts coming out of my eyes towards them.
When she got to the police station that day,
she learned that Detective Diane had left a long time ago,
and the other officer had retired.
But for her own sake and the sake of other victims,
She had a message to deliver.
Maybe if this department had investigated a little bit better,
maybe the following nine women wouldn't have been attacked.
Maybe you should have believed me.
Maybe you should have talked to Sonoma.
Maybe you should have brought in bigger, bigger and heavier resources.
I don't know, maybe if you had done any of those things,
we wouldn't be sitting here today.
From Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence,
you're listening to Hunting the Bulls.
boogeyman. I'm Peter MacDonald. This is episode three, the roller coaster.
When the NorCal rapist attacked in Sacramento in 2006, the public alarm bell finally rang.
If you lived in Northern California, make sure to lock your doors. Turn on your outside lights,
and if you can help it, don't sleep alone. The hunt for the NorCal rapist,
had been supercharged.
Tonight, new leads in the investigation into a serial rapist.
Someone out there knows who he is.
Police say the first victim was assaulted in Rohnard Park.
He's smarter than the average crook.
He's covered his tracks for 15 years.
Detectives have linked all of these cases with DNA.
Fear hangs in the air.
I would be afraid because I don't think he'll stop.
At some point in my conversations with Nicole,
I realized that she still didn't know how her case was finally linked to the series,
neither did I.
So I decided to find out.
The answer takes us back to 1997,
the year the NorCal rapist attacked two women in Davis, California.
A detective named Kay LaPelt, who was just days away from retiring, caught the case.
I drove to Davis to meet him.
Kay is now in his mid-80s and has a white handlebar mustache.
He looks like the Quaker Oats guy.
I parked next to his vegetable garden, and he opened the screen door to invite me inside.
He was busy making Cornish hens for dinner.
There was a heat wave, and his 100-year-old farmhouse had no AC, but it was cool enough.
He poured me some water, and we sat in his dining room to talk.
It was January 25th of 1997, and I was a Saturday morning, and I was called here at home.
told about a sexual assault.
And our crime scene investigator was already there taking photographs and such.
But I met with the victims.
We walked through the apartment together,
and my instruction to them is, don't touch anything,
but tell me what's out of place.
The answer was, a lot.
The rapist had pulled two mattresses downstairs and onto the floor of the living room.
He apologized for binding them.
He also warned them not to tell anyone where their names would be publicized and they'd be ashamed.
And he threatened to come back and harm them.
They called the police anyway.
The women had done sexual assault kits, but somewhere along the line, the DNA testing got messed up.
Kay didn't want to point a finger at anyone, but I sensed he had some.
in mind. Kay decided to focus on the case and delay his retirement for a while. Then he found
a major clue. We'd learned that their cards, their ATM cards, had been used shortly after he left
the apartment. In all of the rapists' previous thefts, he used black spray paint to blind the ATM
security cameras. He did this at the first bank he went to in Davis. But when he drove across town to the next
bank. His behavior changed.
In that one, he approached the ATM, and he's wearing, later we found a copy, an exact copy
of what the mask was.
The mask was clear, but it eerily distorted his face.
He went up to the ATM camera, his head cocked to one side, and looked right into the lens.
It's kind of like taunting, you know. Catch me if you can.
The ATM images of the NorCal rapist were the closest anyone had come to seeing him.
But they made him look so freakish, even his family might not have recognized him.
A few days later, Kay caught another break.
I got a call from an FBI agent in San Francisco that, hey, this MO, that sounds familiar.
And she turned me on to, I think it was.
It was the 1992 Vallejo case.
Kay learned of many of the other cases in the series,
the ones Paul Holes had helped connect.
Based on M.O. alone, Kay was 99% sure
that the attack in Davis was part of the series.
I promised our two victims that I would work on this case
and do everything I can to catch this guy.
He kept that promise to.
When Kay finally retired from the police department and went to work part-time as an investigator at the DA's office, he took their case with him.
Then, one day in 2000, he was working outside in his front yard when a sergeant from Davis PD pulled up and rolled down the window.
Hey, Kay, we had a rape, and he wanted to tell me about it.
He actually kidnapped the victim out of the apartment, put her in the car,
took her to the bank and raped her in the car,
then returned her to her apartment.
Do you think this could be part of that series?
The rapist had never struck twice in the same town before.
Was he getting sloppy?
Or Boulder?
Did it mean he lived in Davis, or nearby in Woodland, or in Sacramento?
The sergeant gave Kay a copy of the police report.
K read it.
That's him.
The two attacks in Davis were strikingly similar.
In both, the rapist wore a mask, used bindings, threatened and apologized, and spent a long time with the victims.
Stranger rapes tend to be fast, but NorCal rapist attacks lasted hours.
Fortunately, there was DNA evidence in the case.
Kay helped definitively link it with the others in the series.
And during this entire time, from 1997 to 2000, Kay had been working with Paul Hulles.
He's developing various suspects during his efforts.
I went up to Oregon, followed leads.
I went to San Quentin prison, talked to other suspects that we were developing.
We're eliminating these suspects as he's getting samples.
These two investigators, Kay at the end of his career, Paul, in the middle.
Middle, met in Davis for a roundtable discussion about NorCal.
The DA's office, where Kay worked part-time, granted him permission to keep pursuing it if he wanted to.
Paul had no such permission. At that point in his career, he was going rogue.
Paul had tried to hide his obsession with cold cases from the higher-ups at the sheriff's office,
but word was getting out.
And my bosses were starting to clamp down on me in terms of.
of my cold case pursuits, in part because some of the staff had complained about how I was killing them
because I was just constantly putting requests in on these old, old cases.
They told Paul to stay in his lane, stick to the regular casework, stop running extra DNA tests at the lab,
and keep an eye on the budget. But Paul didn't listen.
This type of predator is going to reoffend, and that's what he did.
and Kay's digging and finds out about an attack of an 21-year-old woman named Nicole in Roner Park.
This was how they found her.
I was convinced that the Roner Park matched RMO.
He feels strongly, and I felt strongly, this sounds like the same guy.
I wanted to tie it in yes or no.
And the only way to do that was with DNA.
By now, it was 2001.
10 years after Nicole was attacked.
Then there was a case right after that in Sonoma that was like identical.
That was the second attack in the series, the one Nicole read about in the newspaper,
and then called the reporter to say, that's the same guy.
The Sonoma case hadn't been formally connected by DNA either.
So Kaye reached out to Rohnert Park to see if they had any DNA evidence in Nicole's case,
and Paul reached out to the Sonoma PD.
I end up having the evidence tech from Sonoma bring their evidence to the lab to see if we could
tie this to the same offender. In this Sonoma case, though, we unfortunately were not able
to find DNA evidence. Kay told me he couldn't remember the details of his communication with
the Rohnert Park PD, but he didn't need to. Paul had copies of Kay's written reports.
Three months after this roundtable, he writes, as of this writing, I have not received any of
from Rona Park PD concerning their DNA evidence.
In April of 2002, a year later, Kay writes,
after many requests, Roner Park located their DNA evidence
and agreed to release it all to him to Kay.
Yeah, they didn't care anymore.
I went to Rona Park.
Kay picked up the evidence in Nicole's case
and drove to the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office crime lab,
where he handed it over.
to Paul.
I assign it to a DNA analyst, and she is able to generate DNA from the semen evidence in the case
and link it to the NorCal Rapus series.
There's a nice twist to this story, too.
Is this DNA analyst, do you know this person very well?
I do, yeah.
Today she's my wife.
In the world of law enforcement,
the jurisdiction where the crime occurred
is usually in charge of communicating with the victim.
And if that changes, they formally introduce the victim
to a new point person.
But from 1992 to 2006, Nicole said
she didn't hear anything about her case.
And when she finally did, it wasn't from Rohnert Park.
Even though Paul helped link Nicole's case to the series,
for these jurisdictional reasons,
to this day, Nicole and Paul have never.
never met. But later in this story, I'll introduce them. By the summer of 2006, the hunt for
the NorCal rapist had led nowhere. Finding his trail would require some major new clues,
which is exactly what police in Sacramento got that October.
Well, this is some good new evidence that they released today, and hopefully this is finally
after 15 years going to lead them to this attacker. That's what they're hoping.
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The new evidence police found in 2006
fell into the hands of a veteran sex crimes detective
at the Sacramento Police Department named Avis Beery.
Hey, Detective Beery. I'm sure if you can hear me.
Yes, now I can hear you.
Avis was sitting on her couch after a long night of work,
the computer, on her knees.
A few years ago, she retired from the Sacramento PD
and became a sexual assault investigator for the
the A's office. At some point, which nobody seems to know, the bad guy in this story became known
as the NorCal rapist. I asked Davis when she first heard that name. And I was actually on
vacation. And when I came back, my team was like, oh, you're never going to believe this. We got
a double rape. And I was like, oh, man, why do I always miss the good stuff? Like, that's the
really terrible thing to say. But like when you're in law enforcement or, you know, homicides,
and you get like a triple, it's terrible.
But at the same time, it's like, wow, this is a good case, you know.
So we're a little weird, all of us.
But, like, that was a really exciting case for somebody who is sex assault detective.
And it was a much bigger case than Avis realized.
When they uploaded the suspect's DNA to the FBI's CODIS database,
it matched seven other cases.
I was shocked.
So then the red handle gets pulled.
by the brass because we've got rapes from across Northern California spanning from 1991 all the
way to 2006. First, Avis compared the DNA to all of her local 290s, sex offenders, and to parolees,
but there was no match. So she kicked it up a notch. We worked with a DOJ profiler. I worked with a
handwriting analyst. I worked with a geographic profiler. All of that,
led to nothing. She had two big new clues, though. The first one was that a surveillance camera
on a neighbor's garage caught a few frames of a white Toyota forerner driving by at the same time
of night that the victim said the rapist left, and no one in the neighborhood recognized the
vehicle. With help from the DMV, Avis compiled a list of everyone in California who owned
a forerunner. There were thousands. So she narrowed it down to the owners of white forerunners
in seven counties.
Where I believed, this suspect either lived or worked or both,
packets were made for every vehicle,
show with a picture of the registered owner,
accurate information that shows where they've lived,
any kind of data that we could get.
We named this, by the way, Operation Forerunner.
The Sacramento PD offered investment
Overtime pay to take one or more of the 300 packets and, on their days off, track down and interview the suspects.
Each packet had the same list of mandatory questions.
Can I look at your vehicle? Who drives this vehicle besides you? Have you had any work done on your vehicle?
The last question was, would you be willing to provide a DNA sample?
Well, we got over 100 DNA samples, and all of those were cleared.
Because, you know, they obviously all came back that they didn't match NorCal rapist profile.
You know, we knew that we were dealing with kind of a needle in a haystack.
After months of work, they couldn't find the proverbial needle.
And the tab for Operation 4-Runner for overtime, mileage, and DNA tests had swelled to the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
With no new leads, Operation Forerunner slowed down.
Avis let Nicole and the other survivors know.
She'd still do everything in her power to find him.
I tried to be really selective about what I told the victims
because it's a roller coaster for me.
It's opening up a wound for them.
You know, sex assault victims never,
I don't think ever really totally heal from their wounds.
I was curious what?
Davis thought when she read Nicole's case for the first time.
I absolutely believed her, and I felt terrible to my core that somebody would not believe her
for what reason.
When I speak with, you know, other investigators, you know, I always tell them you don't
lose anything by believing your victim from the get-go.
And if you run in, there's no reason to be an a-hole to your victim.
If you run your investigation the way you're supposed to, you're going to figure out.
that this is BS, or it's not.
It's that simple.
The second new clue Abis had
was just as good as the forerner.
One of the victims in Sacramento
saw the NorCal rapist without his mask on.
And he looked just like Nicole had thought,
except after 15 years, he put on a lot of weight.
And I said, well, you know,
he must be married because he's obviously out of shit.
The Survivor worked with a sketch artist to create a new composite.
The NorCal rapist was now in his 40s, with light brown spiked hair, clean-shaven, with full cheeks and wide cheekbones.
He looked like a bully from the 1950s, or like an angry biff from the movie Back to the Future.
Avis called Nicole.
And she told me that she was trying to get more national publicity on the case because she's like, we don't know where this guy lives.
He could live anywhere.
which was why Avis decided to pitch the NorCal rapist case
to the producers of America's Most Wanted.
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In 2008, America's Most Wanted covered the NorCal Rapist case.
A twisted serial rapist in Northern California
has been working on perfecting his bizarro fantasies
for some 15 years now.
He's called the NorCal rapist,
and tonight we're hot on his trail.
Avis, Nicole, and another survivor were interviewed.
Somebody's going to recognize this guy.
Someone's going to recognize a pattern
or have a gut feeling or spidey sense or something and call
and it's going to be the right person.
It's how big cases sometimes get solved.
In 1995, David Kaczynski recognized his brother Ted's use of language
in the Unabomers Manifesto, published in the New York Times in Washington Post.
In 2024, Luigi Mangione was caught when a worker at McDonald's recognized him from images online.
The NorCal Rapist episode of America's Most Wanted aired on Nicole's 38th birthday.
She and her husband Carlos
threw a party. Here's Carlos.
When AMW came out, I thought,
oh, we're going to get him with this.
What a birthday gift that would be.
Nicole's friend even brought a cake decorated
with his composite sketch,
behind gray bars of icing.
And then she handed me a giant butcher knife
and I cut into his face. It was great.
There were so many people
who watched America's Most Wanted
that Detective Avis Beard
was almost certain they were going to get a lead on it
that would finally crack the case.
Somebody would recognize his car.
Somebody would know his face.
But it didn't work.
None of the show's tips panned out.
The hunt for the NorCal rapist stalled again.
I think we both kind of, our hopes got shot down a little bit
after maybe a year or two after America's Wine came out.
Nicole and Carlos moved on with their lives.
But a few years later, when their son was in elementary school, a new dad at Dropoff caught Nicole's eye.
And I looked at him, and I kept staring at him, and he just had this presence about him, and he had kind of similar skin, similar characteristics.
And I went home and I said, Carlos, it wouldn't surprise me if it was him.
We don't know who this person is.
And I sort of stayed away from that person.
He made me uncomfortable.
Whenever Nicole thought about who this nameless predator was,
she also wondered what it must be like to walk around in his shoes.
How awful to be a sociopath?
How awful would it be to be that angry?
How awful would it be to be that unhinged?
It did not negate the fact that I wanted him in prison for the rest of his life.
But what I would always think about is, what happened to you?
What harm came to you?
How did you get like this?
As far as anyone knew, the NorCal rapists' attack in Sacramento in 2006 was his last.
Had the publicity scared him?
Did he relocate?
Did he die?
If he was still alive, Avis wanted him to slip up.
Drink too much and get a felony DUI.
Get caught breaking into someone's home.
Any felony would do, because by law, he'd have to give a DNA sample,
which would instantly unmask him as the NorCal rapist.
But Avis had to move on to other cases.
Whenever she saw a forerunner on the highway, though,
she'd get right up next to it and peer inside.
Is that my suspect?
You know, is that him driving?
I would, you know, catch up, look at him,
write down the license plate, double check it.
Did we see this one?
Did we check it?
You know, it was just always an unknown,
and it really drove me crazy.
to think about it.
And it's a roller coaster.
By 2017, the odds of catching the NorCal rapist had diminished.
More than a decade had passed since his last known attack,
when Avis got a phone call.
Paul contacted me and said,
hey, can we sit down and meet and talk about NorCal?
Paul had left his job at the sheriff's office,
his clashes with the higher-ups had taken a toll.
I was just like, oh, I see the writing on the wall here.
You know, they're looking out for the sheriff's operation,
and I'm going, that is not my passion.
My passion is here.
Here meant solving cold cases.
So, Paul called his friend, the elected DA of Contra Costa County, Mark Peterson.
And I said, hey, what about a job?
Can you start a new department for me where I can do what I really want to do
which is solve these cold cases?
Literally, I created my own position in the county and slid over to the DA's office.
When Paul drove to Sacramento to meet Avis, he was a full-time, cold case investigator.
Avis gave him a copy of all of her files.
The NorCal rapist case had hit the same dead end as hundreds of thousands of homicides and stranger rapes worldwide.
Detectives had the offender's DNA, but they didn't know who it belonged to.
There had to be a way around this dead end.
That's what Paul was looking for.
One possibility was a form of genealogy
using a male offender's Y chromosome
to try and find his last name.
Well, the Y is inherited from the male's dad.
The process is called Y-S-T-R genealogy.
Here's the idea behind it.
In most societies,
the male's surname gets passed down like a dominant gene.
So, if you can find one of your suspect's male ancestors,
it might tell you your suspect's last name.
But the process is hit or miss.
The Y chromosome has more than 800 of what are called short tandem repeats,
or STRs, which are unique sequences of genetic material.
Usually, though, Paul only had a small sample of a suspect's STRs,
sometimes as few as 10.
When he uploaded them to a website called y-search.org,
the site would spit out a list of potential surnames for the suspect,
based on the markers that matched.
Sometimes it was a very long list.
But sometimes it was not.
And that's where you get excited going,
okay, I got the guy's last name.
At this point in Paul's career,
he was teaching classes on DNA to investigators.
There are specific things I had to teach, but then I also added things.
And one of the things I added was, well, think about doing this YSTR-type searching in your case.
Well, one of the individuals that had seen me talking about this was this investigative assistant Monica Tchaikowski.
Monica was an investigative analyst at the Sacramento County DA's office.
When Paul told his class that YSTR genealogy might be useful in breaking the logjam of a cold case, Monica's first thought.
was to try it on the NorCal rapist.
She's probably the only one of anybody I've talked to about this
that actually took the time to do it.
We had a YSTR profile on the NorCal case.
You know, we plugged in the data into the website
and it gives you possible surnames.
There were, you know, dozens of them.
But one of them was the last name Waller.
She told Paul, but there was a problem.
That name was more common than you would think.
I was researching, you know, various men with Wallers, you know, generally in the Bay Area.
Nobody really popped.
And I just was like, you know, I know I'm just going to be spinning my wheels here.
We weren't able to narrow it down.
Monica put the NorCal rapist case to the side.
She and Paul were busy working with a small and secret team
on a shot-in-the-dark experiment to identify a serial killer.
The experiment made use of a more powerful, precise, and complex type of genealogy than Y-S-T-R.
Paul had come across the idea in 2017 when a genealogist named Barbara Ray Venter
used a woman's DNA profile and genealogy to identify her true name.
The woman had been kidnapped as a baby.
The process worked.
And Paul thought.
Huh, I wonder if anyone has ever done that to solve a homicide.
No one had.
So Paul contacted Barbara Ray Venter and pitched her on the idea.
Together, they formed a team with an FBI lawyer named Steve Kramer,
Monica Chikowski at the Sacramento County DA's office,
her boss, Kirk Campbell, and a few others.
Their quarry was the Golden State Killer,
a white man in his 60s or 70s with blue eyes.
He killed 13 people and raped 51 women and girls.
Since the beginning of his career, Paul had tried everything to solve the case.
This was his last-ditch attempt before he retired.
The first part of this novel strategy was easy.
They uploaded the DNA profile of the Golden State Killer
to a public genealogy database using a fake name.
It was like putting your last, best bet into a slot machine and pulling the handle.
The jackpot would be if the DNA profile matched one of the Golden State Killer's parents, siblings, or children.
Because then, it would be easy to triangulate and find him.
But they didn't hit the jackpot.
It wasn't even close.
They found a third cousin.
Barbara Ray Venter told them that locating GSK's identity was still possible.
but it was going to take some time.
The team worked obsessively for months,
hunting for GSK's closest ancestors
by building enormous family trees
all the way back to the 1700s in Italy.
They poured over birth certificates, obituaries, and old newspapers.
They visited graveyards to look at headstones.
It took them thousands of hours.
But then they found him.
Joseph Diamsion.
A 72-year-old former cop who lived with his daughter and granddaughter in Citrus Heights, a suburb of Sacramento.
Genealogy had given them the perfect lead.
Within hours, undercover police surveilled DeAngelo and took a secret sample of his DNA.
It was him.
To avoid an armed standoff, they staked out his house and waited.
Eventually, an oblivious DeAngelo ambled out to his side yard.
where there was nowhere to run, and they swarmed him.
Handcuffed, and in shock, he pleaded to be let free
because he had a roast in the oven.
Cooking!
The next day, Anne-Marie Schubert,
the elected DA of Sacramento County, held a press conference.
We found the needle in the haystack,
and it was right here in Sacramento.
Forensic investigative genealogy
had cracked one of the biggest, coldest cases
in U.S. history.
And everyone on the team knew
which case would be next.
Anne-Marie is going,
I want this done on NorCal rapist.
On the next episode of hunting
the boogeyman.
The team zeroes in on a suspect.
He looks a lot like the composite.
And they make an arrest.
Oh my God, they caught him. They caught him.
Don't tell anybody. We got NorCal.
Don't want to wait for that next episode?
You don't have to.
Unlock all episodes of hunting the boogeyman ad-free right now
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Hunting the Boogie Man is an original production
of Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence.
It's hosted and reported by me, Peter MacDonald.
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.
News clips are from TV50 News and CBS News, Sacramento.
The show's production manager was Sammy Allison.
Our lawyer is Allison Sherry.
Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rassick, and Jamie Myers.
If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave a review.
It's the best way to support us.
Thanks for listening.
Thank you.
