SFGate reports that Winchester assaulted women he came into contact with on the job, including a 17-year-old while he was working as an officer for the Los Rios Community College District in 2013.
In the three most recent cases, which occurred between September and October, Winchester kidnapped and raped one woman, attempted to rape another woman after breaking into her hotel room and sexually battered a third, according to San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe.
Winchester was charged with four counts of sexual battery, one count of kidnapping and two counts of digital penetration on the 17-year-old girl stemming from one of the 2013 attacks. He was also charged Thursday with kidnapping, making criminal threats, two counts of rape and four counts of forcible oral copulation on another woman in 2013.
One of the Sacramento victims had reported the assault to law enforcement but no charges resulted, Wagstaffe said. He said that with “the multiplicity of victims” and further evidence prosecutors now have a case.
Wagstaffe said all of the women were strangers to Winchester and that he used his authority as a police officer to commit the assaults.
“These were not just random people on the street,” Wagstaffe said. “They were people he had reason to contact as a law enforcement officer.”
The investigation was opened in October and Winchester resigned in February. But news of the investigations into his conduct didn't surface publicly until May, when Wagstaffe and San Mateo Police Chief Susan Manheimer revealed he was under investigation.
"[W]e 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," Manheimer wrote in an open letter published online May 12. "If these allegations are proven true, these acts will tarnish the community partnerships that our officers have worked so hard and long to build and preserve."
The San Mateo County investigation into Winchester was opened on Oct. 20, when police in Burlingame responded to a distressed driver in the area of El Camino Real and Chapin Avenue at about 5:15 a.m. After contacting the driver, Burlingame police referred the report to San Mateo police for further investigation, according to Burlingame police records.
The allegations concerned events that had happened the previous night about 10 p.m., San Mateo police said.
While Manheimer said that as soon as the allegations against Winchester came to light she immediately suspended his police powers and contacted the district attorney's office, even at the time Winchester was hired he was under investigation in Sacramento.
Sacramento police opened a criminal investigation into Winchester in 2013, when he was a member of the Los Rios Community College District police force, according to Sacramento police Sgt. Bryce Heinlein.
Winchester was briefly employed by the Sacramento Police Department in 2006 and 2007, but was released before his probationary period was up.
Responding to a California Public Records Act, Heinlein refused to provide more information about the Sacramento investigation into Winchester, citing the ongoing investigation.
In 2015, another victim came forward to the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department regarding a 2013 incident, according to sheriff's spokesman Sgt. Tony Turnbull.
Winchester served with the Los Rios Police Department from January 2009 to January 2015, according to district spokesman Mitchel Benson. He joined the San Mateo department early in 2015.
Los Rios Police Chief Cheryl Sears said in May that her department was cooperating with Wagstaffe's investigation, though his office had contacted the Los Rios department only after news reports of Winchester's conduct had already surfaced.
This post contains reporting by Bay City News.
