Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - Hunting the Bogeyman | 4. The Arrest

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

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. Binge all episodes of Hunting 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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You can listen to all episodes of Hunting the Boogie Man 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. The Binge. Detective Avis Beery 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. 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 going to work. I just knew it.

Like, I just felt it in my bones. Analyst Monica Tchaikowski and her boss, Kirk Campbell, fresh off helping solve the Golden State Killer case, immediately pivoted. Like NorCal's next. Right away, we started working to get the genealogy off the ground for NorCal. But could they go two for two? 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.

I really didn't know exactly what to expect. Monica had to fly to Palm Springs for a work conference, but as she got to the hotel, she called Kirk on speakerphone. They uploaded the NorCal rapist's DNA profile to the same public genealogy database that they were. they'd uploaded the Golden State Killers to, and hoped it would match with at least a first cousin. Instead, they hit the jack button.

The last name Waller stood out to us right away. 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. Roy Waller. she pulled up his driver's license and we're kind of stunned about how closely it resembled

the ATM surveillance photo 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. That was the clincher for me. Anne-Marie Schumer, the Sacramento County DA, called Paul Holes.

Don't tell anybody. We got NorCal. From Sony music entertainment and perfect cadence, you're listening to Hunting the Boogie Man. I'm Peter MacDonald, episode four, The Arrest. Monica Chikowski 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. But as Paul Holes knew, you never make an arrest on genealogy.

That is just providing you a lead. Now you need to get a direct DNA sample. The next step was to surveil him. Avis sent out the CCATS, the career criminal apprehension team. A 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. This house where he was living, was that the one in Benicia?

Yes. Benicia is a coastal town in the East Bay. A few months ago, Paul Holes and I drove there the long way. Past roller coasters at Six Flags. Past the Dead End Street in Dusty Vallejo, where the rapist entered through the woman's garage. Past middle-class mansions in Martinez, where he perpetrated a nightmare on Halloween.

and passed to the crime lab, where Paul hunted him with a microscope. I was like, geez, he was right across the bridge from where I was working, trying to find him, right? Paul told me that in 1997, when he and his first wife separated, he rented an apartment in Venetia. It was convenient, the grocery store was right around the corner. Is it possible you passed by Waller at the grocery store? Oh, absolutely. You know, if he's in Benicia, while I'm living in Benicia, for sure. And we're on the street at which Waller lived on.

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 pull over. They look like their single-family homes with small yards in the front, nice landscaping. They're all, each one's a slightly different color. summer green, summer yellow, the one he was in his brown. Who would have thought that this is the home of serial rapists? The CCAT team watching Waller

learned that he lived in the house with his wife and no one else. 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. 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. They did a trash run on his home garbage in Benicia. 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 looks? But that's how they do it.

Waller's trash was a DNA gold mine. 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. It was just serendipitous.

The next morning, Avis learned the results of the DNA test on the straw from Waller's garbage. Holy shit. We got him. We got him. Roy Charles Waller was the NorCal rapist. Now, that's a true CSI moment. news just spread like wildfire. At dawn, the CCAT team deployed in multiple vehicles. After 27 years of investigation, it was time to make an arrest. 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. A hundred feet back, unmarked cars with C-CAT 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. Does anyone really know what hormones do? There is so much talk about women's hormonal health,

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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, I think I know what this is about. How much do they know? 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.

He's probably thinking, maybe they only know about Sacramento. I knew that he was more savvy than some suspects. But I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know if he was going to want to just give it all up, I 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 a rapist will play. 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.

Hey, Mr. Waller? Hi, you know. I'm Detective Berry. I'll work with the second room for the police department. You first name is Avis. I suspect the car rental. He was very calm, very calm. When I talked to him, he looked right through me.

His eyes were just kind of dead. So do you have any idea of why we're talking today? No. 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. Havis 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. 30 minutes into the interview, Avis took a chance and asked him about a case. The 2006 double rape in Sacramento. She put photos of the two victims on the table in front of Waller. I think you had interviews. I was familiar to you in the film.

Unfortunately, when I'm struggling, is that we do have DNA evidence, okay, from the C, and it does come back to you. I don't know how it can be. But you don't have an explanation for that, which you can think of, nothing that makes sense. No. You're accusing me of something that I didn't do. So we pulled out the next victim, and we do the same. routine, you know, with that victim. Same questions. Nope, don't, don't recognize her, never met

her. You know, you don't recognize anything for them. So what you're telling me is that out all of these photos, all these pictures and all the houses and departments that they don't look like any place you remember being and you've been there before. Waller leaned back in his chair, frowned, and shook his head. 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 I do that? Waller shrugged his shoulders, as if he was stumped. That's when it became the deny-deny, at all cost, deny. Avis showed Waller a photo of every house the NorCal rapist broke into and every victim

he attacked. Ronit Park, Martinez, Balejo, Chico, Davis. You say you've got evidence on me, but I don't know how you would. He denied each one, and it was at that point that he voyered up. Avis left the room. Waller's military-style black backpack, the one the C-Cat team, saw him carry everywhere he went, lay on the table in the hallway. 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. It appeared that Roy Waller had been ready to commit another sexual assault. You know, maybe it's something that he always had in the back of his mind, you know? 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. 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

for all the things Waller wouldn't say his actions said it all at all at Desjardin we speak business we speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans we've mastered made to measure growth and expansion advice

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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 Norcao rapist. Now, it was time to break the news to the survivors. Representatives from the counties where the attacks had occurred would call them. Avis, though, didn't like that. She wanted to call them. Dog on 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. 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. I was ready for work, ready to go, and I was home alone. This call came in on my cell phone. It was undisclosed number. I never answered 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, and 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 like, started, almost feel like hot and a little bit sick. And she said, I'm the victim's advocate for the NorCal rapist case. And I'm calling to let you know that we have a suspect in custody. And I actually fell. I fell to the floor.

I was on the floor, sobbing. And 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. 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. So then he calls me, and I was shaking. I could just hear his like trembling in her voice. Tell me who they got. And I said, they got the North Carolina Ramos.

They caught him, they caught him. 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. 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. Sacramento Police Chief Daniel Hahn 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 Rohnert Park. And then I heard something about Roner Park, Sonoma. had several sexual assaults in Sonoma, Alejo, Martinez, Woodland, Chico, two sexual assaults in Davis. And I went, I was fucking right about Sonoma! I was right the entire time, and I was like, oh, my God. Yesterday, Sacramento police detectives arrested Roy Charles Waller.

The next person to speak was Avis Beery. Thank you, Chief. Thank you for 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 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 one of Nicole's friends at the house that day

Aaron pulled her aside Erin was a mental health therapist 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 said, you know, I want to tell you this because this is about to break publicly in the news and it has to do with me. Nicole told him what had happened. All the color left his face and he just kind of stared at me. He 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. school. And we said, okay, so Carlos drove him back to school. Their son was in ninth grade and on the football team. By the time practice started that afternoon, Nicole had been on the news. 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. 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, are your teammate, your friend needs our support right now. And one by one, they, in their own very individual way, 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. 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 Beery 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 forerunner. In 2006, Waller was living with a girlfriend in a house near Sacramento, and she owned a white Toyota forer. The weekend of the attack, she left the country for a funeral, and he borrowed it. 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.

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 Vigone, turned in the packet, he simply wrote that Waller didn't fit the NorCal rapist profile. 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 a good old-fashioned police work that did it. How am I going to explain this to Nicole and to all of my other victims? How are we going to explain this to them? I just felt like I hugely let them down. Joseph DiAngelo, 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. DeAngelo 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, but the trial would be the real test. Next, on hunting the boogeyman. 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 M.O. are exposed. He's holding up the ropes. 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. After waiting 29 years, Nicole faces him in court. 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 is sitting right here in court. 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 by subscribing to the binge podcast channel. It's easy, really. Search for The Binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page.

Not on Apple? Head to getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. As a subscriber, you'll get binge access to new stories on the first of every month. Check out the Binge Channel page on Apple Podcasts, or getthebinge.com to learn more. 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 design 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 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.