In 2006, police in Sacramento, Calif. used DNA to link a local rape case to seven other assaults across Northern California. Detectives had no idea who was sexually assaulting all the women, but they gave him a name: the "NorCal Rapist." The search for the serial sexual predator is heating up, and cops need your help to track this monster down.
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For the last 15 years, citizens in Northern California have been plagued by a man cops are calling the NorCal Rapist. Law enforcement officials say they've linked him to assaults on 10 women in six counties since 1991.
Victims of the NorCal Rapist's string of sexual assaults say similar things...he talked to them as if they were friends and sometimes called them after an attack to apologize. He reportedly tells his victims personal details about himself. Some authorities believe that these are the actions of a man who fantasizes about a future life with the women he rapes.
Investigators note that the NorCal Rapist stalks his victims and learns their routines. In his most recent attacks in October 2006, two female victims told detectives that it seemed like he knew his way around their home suggesting that he had surveilled them beforehand.
Police tell AMW that when he strikes, the NorCal Rapist likes to tie his victims up with duct tape, blindfolds them, and repeatedly rapes them over a period of several hours. He sometimes wears a mask and often begins each assault by telling victims he is armed before brandishing a gun.
To date, police say he's attacked 10 women on nine separate occasions. The series of assaults began in 1991 when a woman was raped in her Rohnert Park townhouse after an unknown assailant broke in through a sliding glass door. Cops say the same man struck again in Vallejo, California in 1992.
Four years later on Halloween, police say the NorCal Rapist donned a skeleton mask attacked a woman in Martinez, California. Stranger still, he called the woman at work three weeks later to apologize. That same year, he tied up a woman but didn't rape her. In 1997, he raped two women in Davis and a woman in Chico. He wouldn't appear again for three years when he struck again in Davis. Police say that while the NorCal Rapist's first two victms were white, every victim since has been Asian.
Police say that the NorCal Rapist may be driving an SUV similar to the one pictured here.
After lying dormant for six years, the NorCal Rapist would strike again, this time in Sacramento. On October 13, 2006, a woman was attacked after she got home from work. Police say the NorCal Rapist broke into the woman's home, put a gun to her head, tied her up...and waited for her roommate to return home.
Authorities say that the NorCal Rapist tied both women up and repeatedly raped them for hours. During the incident one of the women was able to get a look at him when one of their blindfolds slipped down. She told police that her attacker is white, 35 to 40-years-old, around 6 feet tall, 200 to 250 lbs, with a protruding stomach.
Luckily, neighbors spotted the vehicle used by the rapist and it was also picked up by a nearby garage mounted camera. The vehicle is described as a 1997, white Toyota 4-Runner with tinted rear windows and a silver stripe around the bottom.
Cops now have DNA evidence on the NorCal Rapist from his most recent attack in Sacramento and have positively linked him to previous assaults. Sacramento Police Chief Albert Najera tells AMW that "unfortunately we have everything on this guy except who he is." Authorities are asking for the public's assistance in helping identify the NorCal Rapist or the Toyota 4-Runner.