MIAMI – DNA tech advances helped detectives to identify an infamous serial rapist who was sentenced on Thursday in Miami-Dade County court — but not for rape.
Robert Koehler became known as the “Pillowcase Rapist” after detectives identified a modus operandi of “diabolical precision” that included using pillowcases to cover the faces of dozens of his rape victims in the 1980s.
Even though Koehler was convicted of a 1983 sexual battery in January, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Daryl Trawick said he decided to drop the charge because the statute of limitations had expired.
Trawick said he used the sentencing guidelines that were in effect at the time of the crimes to sentence Koehler to 17 years for armed kidnapping and 17 years for armed burglary with assault or battery.
Trawick ordered that Koehler serve the sentences concurrently, at the same time, and get credit for time served. According to the prosecution, had the jury found him guilty of armed sexual battery and not just the sexual battery then the statute of limitations wouldn’t have applied.
In 2020, with a warrant in hand, detectives searched Koehler’s home in Brevard County’s city of Palm Bay, in central Florida. They arrested him and reported finding a “dungeon in progress” and safes with “keepsakes” from his victims.
According to Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, Koehler’s DNA trail linked him to at least 25 sexual batteries in Miami-Dade alone. There are cases in Broward and Palm Beach counties.
Koehler appeared in court as a 63-year-old grandfather who used a wheelchair when a jury found him guilty of the 1983 rape in Miami-Dade.
“The work of two generations of police officers and forensic scientists seems to have come to a just and final end,” Fernandez Rundle said in a statement earlier this year after the conviction.
The victim, a 65-year-old woman, was 25 when he committed the sexual battery, armed kidnapping, and burglary with assault or battery, according to prosecutors.
“He terrorized an innocent woman in her home,” Assistant State Attorney Laura Adams said during her closing statement.
Before DNA tech, the first detectives in the Miami-Dade County cases knew the serial rapist had a rare O-blood type subgroup.
“We had to depend on a blood-typing system that our serology department in the crime lab used,” retired Miami-Dade Sgt. David Simmons, who was a lead detective on some of the cases, said during his testimony in court. “That was sophisticated but not nearly as exact or precise as DNA.”
Edna Buchanan, the Miami Herald’s legendary crime reporter who turns 84 on Thursday, covered the search for the serial rapist in 1985.
“Scientists at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, produced a five-page psychological profile,” Buchanan wrote in her book “The Corpse Had A Familiar Face” after winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1986.
The profile was useless and the case went cold until the expansion of criminal databases provided other detectives with solid clues decades later.
According to a warrant, the rape kit of the 25-year-old Miami-Dade victim was eventually included in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System.
Koehler had been convicted of sexual battery in Palm Beach in 1991, so he was a registered sex offender, but he was not included in the CODIS database, which began in 1990. But when Koehler’s son was arrested for a domestic violence felony in 2019, there was new evidence.
Koehler’s son submitted a DNA sample, and with the help of a criminal database, The Florida Department of Law Enforcement found a familial match and notified the police departments, according to prosecutors.
The detectives who picked up the cold case pieced it all together and followed Koehler to collect the DNA that is now at the center of this and other criminal cases in South Florida.
During a rant in Miami-Dade court before sentencing Thursday, Koehler claimed that the judge, the prosecutor, and the police were all involved in an intricate conspiracy against him that began decades ago with his kidnapping and torture.
“I can take the CIA down right now if I wanted to,” Koehler said in court.
Koehler’s public defender plans to appeal the sentence. He is set to be arraigned on Monday in Miami-Dade County court on new charges of armed burglary, armed kidnapping, and sexual battery.