Former officer Noah Winchester allegedly targeted ‘vulnerable women’ as young as 17 while with the San Mateo police in northern California

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

A former California police officer was charged Thursday with sexually assaulting five women while on duty, including a 17-year-old girl, and prosecutors say he picked “vulnerable” targets in isolated areas.

Noah Winchester, a 31-year-old former officer with the San Mateo police department in northern California, is facing 22 felony counts of rape, sexual assault, kidnapping and other offenses stemming from five alleged attacks since 2013.

“They were all vulnerable young women,” said Stephen Wagstaffe, San Mateo district attorney. “He did make his selections of victims who he thought would not come forward.”

The disturbing allegations draw parallels to the case of convicted serial rapist Daniel Holtzclaw, a former Oklahoma City police officer, who was sentenced to 263 years in prison for raping and sexually assaulting eight women while on duty.

The Holtzclaw trial became a symbol of police abuse of marginalized women of color after 13 accusers, all black, testified that the policeman had assaulted them.

Winchester’s arrest Thursday morning comes at a time of increasingly tense debates about policing in America, following multiple high-profile shootings by officers and the killing of five officers in Dallas, Texas, and three officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Winchester assaulted his first two victims in Sacramento, the state capital north of San Francisco, where he previously worked as an officer for a community college district, prosecutors said.

One of two alleged attacks that occurred in the summer of 2013 involved a 17-year-old victim near campus, Wagstaffe said.

“He told her to get into his car, and that’s when the sexual assault occurred,” the prosecutor said in a phone interview.

The three other cases happened in September and October 2015 in San Mateo, just south of San Francisco.

The five victims ranged from ages 17 to 35 and represented multiple races, Wagstaffe said. The most common thread was that the women appeared to be vulnerable or disadvantaged in some way. Some may have been homeless or “living in tough times”, he added.

Winchester, who is in jail on $3m bail and facing a possible life sentence, did not arrest any of the women he assaulted and did not write up any incident reports on the interactions, according to Wagstaffe. The suspect was allegedly in uniform and alone in all five cases and made a range of statements to the women before he assaulted them.

The attacks happened in different locations, including a motel room and a parking lot, prosecutors alleged.

“He would take the women and move them to another area,” Wagstaffe said.



Winchester, who resigned from the San Mateo department in February while the investigation was ongoing, is accused of raping three of the women, attempting to rape a fourth and sexually assaulting the fifth victim.

In multiple cases, the officer touched the women while they were “unlawfully restrained”, according to a 19-page complaint.

In an incident in San Mateo, he entered an “inhabited dwelling” where he committed the assault, the charges said.

The complaint further said Winchester committed the assaults by “threatening to use the authority of a public official to incarcerate” his victims. In one assault, he directly threatened to arrest a woman, Wagstaffe said.

In one of the Sacramento assaults, the officer threatened “to commit a crime which would result in death and great bodily injury” to the victim, according to the charges. In that case, which involved “forcible oral copulation”, Winchester allegedly used “force, violence, duress, menace, and fear of immediate and unlawful bodily injury to said victim and to another”.

In one of the cases not classified as a rape, Winchester stopped the assault after the victim started crying, Wagstaffe said.

The first victim came forward at the end of last year, and a subsequent investigation uncovered other cases. One woman had written about the assault on Facebook, Wagstaffe said.

The prosecutor said it’s possible there could be other cases, noting: “We had two in 2013 and nothing until 2015 … That seems unusual.”

The district attorney said that he hoped that if there were other victims, the charges would encourage them to come forward.

An Associated Press investigation last year also uncovered cases of roughly 1,000 officers who lost their badges in a six-year period for rape, sodomy and other sexual assaults in the US – a number that it said was “unquestionably an undercount”. California did not offer records to the AP, because it has no statewide system to decertify officers for misconduct, the news agency reported.

San Mateo police said Winchester joined the department in early 2015 and that he was placed on indefinite leave after the department learned of the allegations.

“While we respect the now former officer’s right to due process under the law and the presumption that he is innocent until proven guilty, we as a department cannot help but be appalled by the nature of these allegations,” the agency said in a statement. “These allegations, if proven true, are a disgrace and wholly disavowed by this department and this city.”

After a local station ABC7 News published an initial report on Winchester in May, San Mateo police chief Susan Manheimer wrote an open letter, saying: “We as an organization recognize that the thought of someone committing criminal acts while wearing an SMPD uniform is deeply troubling and repulsive to this department and its members.”

A student newspaper in Sacramento wrote a profile of Winchester in 2014. The officer told the reporter: “I will do whatever to keep my students safe.”

It was not immediately clear if Winchester had retained a lawyer.