Man held in serial L.A. sex assaults

Police believe Vegas resident used aliases to meet numerous future victims online.

A Las Vegas man is in custody in connection with more than half a dozen sexual assaults across Los Angeles County since 2015, with LAPD detectives now saying they believe he may have assaulted more victims he met while using aliases on social media and dating apps.

Matthew Werner, 46, is accused of being a serial predator who would meet women using aliases and then become violent, raping and otherwise sexually assaulting them, Los Angeles

Police Det. Brent Hopkins said Tuesday.

“He’d meet the women under a false name. In one case, he pretended to be a soccer player.” Hopkins said, and once he was alone with the women, sometimes at hotels, he would “take cocaine and become aggressive and forcibly attack them.”

“He was a real Jekyll and Hyde,” Hopkins said of Werner’s switch from a smooth operator to a violent assailant.

Werner was taken into custody in Las Vegas on Feb. 28 in connection with five sexual assaults across Los Angeles in 2015. He was bought back to L.A. at the time, and was held in the Los Angeles County Jail in lieu of $3 million in bail. He has yet to be formally charged in those attacks.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office charged Werner last year in a reported March 4, 2015, rape and a Sept. 7, 2019, rape and oral copulation assault. Those charges grew from an L.A. County sheriff ’s Special Victims Bureau investigation into the 2019 case.

He has pleaded not guilty and remains in custody at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility pending a hearing slated for later this month.

Werner, originally of Massachusetts, had previously been investigated by the Los Angeles Police Department in connection with an alleged rape in the Mid-Wilshire area in 2015. Prosecutors, however, declined to file charges in that case, deeming the evidence insufficient.

After connecting Werner to several other rapes in part through forensic evidence,

Hopkins said, the LAPD now believe the Mid-Wilshire attack that Feb. 25 was one of a series he was responsible for in 2015.

The detective said that the first reported assault Werner is suspected of occurred in North Hollywood on Feb. 21, 2015, followed by the Mid-Wilshire attack.

Werner is accused of attacking another woman in Hollywood that March 4, and of sexually assaulting another in the Wilshire area that July 23 before striking again in the West Valley, according to Hopkins.

In each case, what began as a romantic meeting would, once Werner was alone with a woman, escalate to an violent sexual assault, Hopkins said.

Authorities are also examining a 2015 allegation from Illinois involving Werner.