New charges have been brought against a serial sexual predator dubbed the ‘pillowcase rapist’, who has been accused of half a dozen cases dating back to the 1980s.
He is suspected of having raped and terrorized dozens of women in the 1980s. Robert Eugene Koehler has just been charged with six new attacks. He was confused thanks to advances in DNA analysis, which confirmed some evidence, reports the “New York Post”. In total, according to agents from the Broward Sheriff’s Office, the 62-year-old man may have committed up to 45 rapes. He is currently imprisoned in neighboring Miami-Dade County, for the assault of a woman in the early 1980s. He had been arrested in January 2020, when he was already registered on the sex offender database of Palm Bay because of a conviction dating back to 1991.
At the time of the rapes, he was in his twenties. The predator would use a pillow case, towel or T-shirt to hide his face as he entered his victims’ homes. This sordid detail earned him the nickname “the pillowcase rapist”. The rapes took place between 1981 and 1986 around Miami. At the time, investigators had managed to gather only minute details about the suspect who was simply described as rather young, athletic and white. The authorities had also managed to establish the blood type of the rapist.
It is the progress of science that in 2020 has made it possible to advance this “cold case”. Investigators searched through 500 boxes of evidence and thousands of sexual assault cases to link those cases to Koehler, Sgt. Kami Floyd, at a press conference. The latter began going through records in 2019 and found the case of a woman who was brutally stabbed in her Pompano Beach apartment in June 1984. This led to several other similar crimes in Broward County. . “It was a hunch,” he commented.