Officials believe they've found the 'Pillowcase Rapist.' The suspect was building a 'dungeon'
Officials believe they've found the 'Pillowcase Rapist.' The suspect was building a 'dungeon' beneath his home, officials say
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/23/us/robert-koehler-pillowcase-rapist/index.html
Authorities believe a Florida man arrested last weekend is the so-called Pillowcase Rapist and is responsible for a string of notorious South Florida assaults that took place in the 1980s, the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office announced Thursday.
Robert Eugene Koehler was arrested in Palm Bay, Florida, after new DNA analysis allegedly tied him to a rape in Miami in December 1983, Eleventh Judicial Circuit Court documents show.
But that DNA also matched samples from a number of cases between 1981 to 1986 left by a suspect who became known as the Pillowcase Rapist, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said in a news conference.
The assailant in those cases is believed to have attacked more than 40 women in metropolitan Miami, often concealing his face with a pillowcase, shirt or towel.
In all, authorities have linked Koehler to at least 25 cases, Fernandez Rundle said.
Investigators searched Koehler's home, underneath which they found an excavated area where they believe Koehler was building "a dungeon," Miami-Dade County Prosecutor Laura Adams said.
"We feared very much that if we had not gotten him into custody that he may have had other plans even worse than what he executed on all of these women from these cases," Adams said.
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The "key breakthrough" came when Koehler's son was recently arrested in an unrelated domestic violence case, Fernandez Rundle said. His DNA was similar enough to the Pillowcase Rapist's that investigators believed the unknown assailant was his father.
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