DNA know-how connects man to Florida serial rapes

Superior DNA know-how helped detectives hyperlink the circumstances of six ladies to a person accused of being the “pillowcase rapist” for a string of rapes in Florida again within the Eighties.

Robert Koehler is at the moment jailed in neighboring Miami-Dade County, the place he faces costs for assaulting a girl within the early ’80s as effectively, Broward County Sheriff Gregory Tony stated in a Tuesday morning information convention.

Authorities imagine Koehler, 62, might have dedicated 40 to 45 rapes, terrifying victims by breaking into their properties at night time, the sheriff stated. The assailant used a pillowcase or different cloth to cowl his face — or the faces of his victims — earlier than assaulting them, tying them up and stealing gadgets from their properties.

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The assaults by the pillowcase rapist attracted intensive media consideration in South Florida and the creation of a job drive to analyze the intercourse crimes, sheriff’s officers stated.

However the path ultimately turned chilly, and the circumstances ended up within the chilly case unit. Nonetheless, sheriff’s officers stated the meticulous record-keeping on the unique circumstances offered detectives the flexibility to check the proof many years later.

They dug via 500 packing containers of proof and 1000’s of sexual assault circumstances to hyperlink the circumstances to Koehler, stated Sgt. Kami Floyd.

Floyd started trying via the information in 2019 and located the case of a girl who was assaulted in her Pompano Seashore condo in June 1984. That led her to a number of different comparable crimes in Broward County.

“It was a hunch,” Floyd stated linking the primary case she discovered to Koehler. “It was a hunch based mostly particularly on this case, that he used a pillowcase to cowl his face, and at no level was she capable of establish who he was as a result of she didn’t know what he regarded like.”

Across the similar time, in 2020, prosecutors in Miami-Dade County introduced Koehler’s arrest and stated he was considered the “pillowcase rapist” whose knifepoint assaults put ladies throughout South Florida on edge starting in 1981.

Floyd acquired a search warrant for Koehler’s DNA and testing completed by the sheriff’s workplace crime lab discovered it matched the proof within the circumstances she was investigating, she stated.

Detectives labored with prosecutors to carry six sexual assault costs in opposition to Koehler.

Their tales had been all comparable. They lived alone. They had been assaulted at night time, and the attacker apparently knew their habits, together with in some circumstances the structure of their residences.

Now, these victims are very relieved to know the person who attacked them could also be delivered to justice, she stated.