‘I would have been a hero.’ Police missed first chance to arrest NorCal Rapist suspect

Sacramento police detectives looked for months, hunting for a single white Toyota 4Runner among thousands of vehicles in Northern California that may have been tied to a serial attacker known as the NorCal Rapist.

Detective Jimmy Vigon spent his weekends and off-hours in 2007 driving mile after mile, knocking on more than 120 doors and interviewing potential suspects trying to find the rapist who had been attacking women since 1991.

“It seems like that’s all I ever did,” Vigon said. “It was a huge project in which we enlisted lots of detectives from a lot of other units.”

They called it “Operation 4Runner,” an ambitious effort to find the vehicle that had been seen leaving the scene of an October 2006 attack in Sacramento’s Natomas neighborhood, where two roommates were raped repeatedly in their home.

Using vehicle registration records for every white 4Runner in the north state, Vigon and other detectives methodically knocked on doors, questioned potential suspects and took DNA swabs from individuals who held the promise of being the man they were hunting.

But the effort failed, and a suspect in the case was not found for another 11 years, when police arrested Roy Charles Waller in September 2018 after DNA evidence led them to his Benicia home.

And that’s when Vigon, a now-retired 20-year veteran of the Sacramento Police Department, learned how close he had come years before.

In February 2007, Vigon came face to face with Waller, questioning him about the case and the white 4Runner, and then leaving without asking for a DNA sample to feed into the Sacramento County crime lab computers.

Last week, in the first public comments on the brush with the NorCal Rapist suspect 13 years ago, Vigon described his 2007 encounter with Waller at a house in Fairfield.

“I recall he was cooperative and friendly, not evasive,” Vigon said.

Waller, 60, faces 46 felony counts accusing him of breaking into homes and raping nine women in six cities between 1991 and 2006.

In testimony at Waller’s trial in Sacramento Superior Court and in a subsequent interview with The Bee, Vigon said police made an all-out effort to find the 4Runner in hopes it would lead them to the elusive serial rapist.

A home security camera in Natomas had captured video of a Toyota SUV leaving the area of the October 2006 attack, and police began visiting Toyota dealerships with photos from the video, questioning salesmen to discover the SUV likely was a higher-end 4Runner model made between 1999 and 2002.

Detectives then set up a “war room” with packets of information about the owners of thousands of 4Runners throughout Northern California, doling them out to officers to fan out and begin questioning them.

“We’d go to addresses and see if a male was living there, and if so we’d get a consensual DNA swab ...” Vigon said. “We would be assigned several packets in a certain geographical region, could be anywhere from Sacramento to Chico to the Bay Area, Pleasanton to Dublin.”

He estimates he went to as many as 140 homes during the effort.

“We’d follow up with the detectives in the war room,” he said. “What do you got for Saturday? They’d say, ‘We’ve got five, what city do you want? You want Dublin? You want Pleasanton?’

“So they would give them to you. You’d get a packet and they would all be in a geographical area not too far from each other. It required extensive travel. We’d be the road for an hour and a half, two hours to get to a location. And now you’re going to start going to houses.

“It was a big commitment on our personal time, but it was an important case. We needed needed to put an end to this.”

On Feb. 11, 2007, a Sunday, Vigon and a partner found themselves knocking on Olga Coy’s door on Bickford Circle in Fairfield at about 10:40 a.m.

Coy, a nurse, owned a white 2000 Toyota 4Runner, and when the detectives arrived they found her at home with her boyfriend at the time, a man named Roy Waller.

Vigon had a one-page questionnaire on a clipboard with questions about where potential suspects were on the day of the Natomas attacks, who might have had access to the 4Runner and other questions.

He also had a series of composite sketches of the NorCal Rapist.

But the sketches portrayed a suspect with a flat-top haircut and a facial features that did not appear to match Waller’s face. Waller also appeared older and heavier and stockier than the description of the suspect they were seeking, Vigon said.

“Not to me, not even now,” Vigon said of whether the sketches matched Waller’s appearance. “So, in my professional judgment, as an experienced detective, highly experienced, I’ve done everything.”

Vigon and his partner talked it over, and then decided Waller was not the man they were looking for.

“The subject is too old, does not match the description/composite of suspect,” he wrote on the questionnaire.

Vigon left without taking any photos of the 4Runner or asking Waller for a cheek swab to collect his DNA.

“Obviously, our objective was not to obtain DNA swabs if it wasn’t necessary to bog down the lab time with matches that obviously weren’t going to fit,” Vigon said.

Eleven years later, investigators using DNA left at the scene of the rapes linked it to Waller using data from a genealogy website — the same tactic used to find Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo. Investigators collected items from Waller’s garbage cans and say DNA from a soda straw matches DNA left behind by the NorCal Rapist.

Now, Vigon concedes he wishes he had asked Waller back in 2007 for a swab from his cheek.

“That would have been great,” he said. “I would have been a hero.”

But he takes solace from the fact that the Natomas attack was the last committed by the NorCal Rapist.

“Funny, huh?” he said after testifying Thursday. “That as a result of my contact that the crimes stopped after how many years? Since 1991? This guy’s been out there that long. Maybe it scared him straight. ‘Oh, the police are on my trail, maybe I better stop.’ If that’s the case, good.”

Waller obviously contends he is not the serial rapist, and opted to go to trial in a case that could lead to him spending the rest of his life in prison.

Since trial began in October, he has taken an active role in his defense, appearing to whisper suggested questions to defense attorney Joe Farina and taking notes as witnesses — including his alleged victims — testify.

Prosecutors Chris Ore and Keith Hill have elicited graphic, sometimes emotional testimony from rape victims, and have introduced evidence that includes photos from ATMs that investigators believe show the NorCal Rapist using victims’ bank cards to try and withdraw money.

On Thursday, as Ore questioned Coy — Waller’s ex-girlfriend and the owner of the 4Runner — he produced photos of a man wearing a clear plastic mask trying to use an ATM card at a bank machine on Jan. 25, 1997, the same day that a NorCal Rapist attack occurred in Davis.

“Does that photo look like him to you?” Ore asked her.

“To me it does,” Coy said.

Testimony is expected to continue this week.

This story was originally published November 9, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘I would have been a hero.’ Police missed first chance to arrest NorCal Rapist suspect."