Criminology - The Pillowcase Rapist

Episode Date: June 26, 2022

The Pillowcase Rapist was a moniker given to a man who committed over 40 violent assaults on the East coast of Florida from 1981 to 1986. This individual was extremely cunning and cautious and staked out apartments that were well hidden from view. He crept inside the residences of unsuspecting women, usually by climbing through open windows or simply opening sliding glass doors that had been left unlocked and would scale balconies to get to higher units. He usually attacked professional women in upper-middle-class apartment complexes.  Join Mike and Morf as they discuss the case of the pillowcase rapist. In many ways, his crimes show many parallels to the crimes of The East Area Rapist / Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo. Both men were good at avoiding the law. The police had trouble finding out who The Pillowcase Rapist was. Thankfully, a crime scene technician did an excellent job preserving some evidence in the days before DNA was used. In 2020, a DNA link was made to a man named Robert Eugene Koehler and he was arrested as The Pillowcase Rapist. He has not yet faced a jury of his peers but, the authorities seem pretty confident in the evidence they have against him. You can help support the show at patreon.com/criminology An Emash Digital production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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data was found and removed. The longer your data stays out there, the more it spreads. Try Aura for free at Aura.com slash hidden. That's Aura.com slash hidden to try ORA for free. is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 213 of the criminology podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson. And this is Mike Morford. Morph, what's going on with you?

Just got done doing a little bit of alligator watching while swimming and, you know, almost forgot that we had to record. So I got out and here we are recording. What's new with you? Man, you're just living the dream, aren't you? Alligator watching. Yeah, it's something you don't expect to do, but you get down to Florida and all of a sudden it's something that can fill some time for you. I think I would watch alligators if I could see them from my backyard.

Yeah, as long as they're from a distance. I don't want to be too close to them. No, I'm not scared of a lot of things, but, yeah, alligators, crocodiles, those are scary. All right, Morph, let's go ahead and jump into our Patreon shoutouts. And we only had one name this week, and that was Dana Smith. but we appreciate any support we get for the podcast. Yeah, thank you so much, Dana, and thank you to everyone else that supports the show. It means a lot.

And to anyone that would like to help support criminology, you can do so by going to Patreon.com slash criminology. All right. Let's jump right into this episode. You know, more if we've talked about some very dangerous predators and some frightening serial rapists on this show over the years, perhaps none more notorious than Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer. But sometimes these high profile predators get a lot of attention.

They overshadow other dangerous ones who kind of fly under the radar. In this episode, we're talking about one of those dangerous predators, Florida's pillowcase rapist. In some ways, his attacks parallel, Joseph DeAngelo's movements. DeAngelo attacked from the 1970s to 1981. But then he went on a hiatus of about five years before he committed his last known attack in 1986. It was from 1981 to 1986 that the pillowcase rapist was active. It was on May 1st, 1981 in Coral Gables, Florida, just west of Miami, where the rapist first struck.

A woman alone in her apartment was his first victim. His trial of terror would continue throughout multiple towns on the east coast of Florida spanning five years. His last known victim was attacked in February 1986. The pillowcase rapist crept inside the homes of unsuspecting women, usually by climbing through open windows or simply opening sliding glass doors that had been left unlocked, though he was also known to pick a lock or shatter the sliding glass door by throwing rocks. He usually attacked professional or business-connected women

in upper-middle-class apartment complexes, but he attacked girls as young as 17. He preferred apartments to the side or back of the complex, rather than the middle units. And the complexes themselves were usually surrounded by hedges or walls, which obscure the view. And Morfew and I have done a lot of cases. We've done cases very similar to this one.

I think what I find extremely scary, you know, on top of what we're going to be talking about, which are very violent attacks, is the thought, the planning that some of these press, predators put into their actions. To me, that's a very scary thought. I think, you know, sometimes we think of some of these predators as being just careless and reckless. But oftentimes we see they're very calculated. I mean, this guy, you know, when we talk about picking out apartment complexes,

picking out specific units in apartment complexes because of the view or the fact that the view is obscured. I hate to say it because you don't like to say that people are smart who are committing these types of crimes, but there was a lot of thought that went into what he did. Yeah, this isn't the kind of guy that just sees a person on the street and decides spur of the moment that he's going to spring into action and attack them, there's a lot of thought and planning and very methodical to this kind of predator. I think that's what makes these guys so dangerous. They don't, they're controlled and they act in a planned manner as opposed to, you know,

being disorganized or spur of the moment. And so by extension, they're much harder to catch, right, because they are being careful. They're not being reckless. The pillowcase rapists attack. as we'll get into, they were terrified. I mean, all violent assaults are extremely disturbing. But this man was bold. He was very dangerous. Like we just talked about, he was organized. And he was practically invisible. In some instances, he was seen, but couldn't be stopped. Before one of the attacks, he was seen by the security guard of a high-rise building in Coral Gables, walking just about 50 feet behind the woman who would become his victim. He followed her inside the building after she parked her car.

And the irony here is that the security guard had only been hired because of an attack that happened one month earlier. The victim in the second attack lived directly next door to the first victim. Police quickly connected the first two attacks. And they said early on, according to the Miami Herald, He's either parking in the complex and sitting in his car for long periods of time, watching women as they arrive home, or he's possibly hiding in a location nearby. Unfortunately, authorities had very little to go on after the first two attacks.

All they knew was that they were looking for a white man, probably young, and none of his victims could pick out any remarkable accent. Detective Sergeant Christine Eckroll told the, AP News during the initial investigation. He's not invisible, but he might as well be. Although we don't have all the details or dates, from 1981 to 1984, the rapist remained active. In June 1984, a woman was attacked in a apartment in Pompano Beach, Florida, by a man with a knife. He had a pillowcase over his head, so she couldn't give any details about what he looked like. Although Pompano Beach was 40 miles north of Coral Gables, police.

police theorized that the same rapist was responsible. As far as M.O., the suspect generally robbed his victims after sexually assaulting them, stealing cash and jewelry, and telling his victims that he was broke. He would pretend he was going to steal their cars, audibly jingling their keys and demanding to know what kind of car they drove. Before leaving their apartments, he would tie them to the bed, usually with a pillowcase, or sometimes with their own clothing. These attempts at misdirection and some of the interactions with his victims,

is also reminiscent of Joseph DeAngelo's attacks. Well, and more of, let's be honest, scarcely reminiscent. You know, DeAngelo told some of his victims that he was broke, he just needed money, he needed a car. The parallels here are kind of staggering. And I wonder if this rapist in this series was sort of doing what Joseph DeAngelo tried to do and misdirecting them because he knew that they would tell the police certain things. maybe he wanted them to have a different picture or a different road to go down.

Well, there was definitely a reason. And I think the misdirection is probably the most likely reason. In February of 1985, a woman was attacked at an apartment complex in South Miami. East of the first two attack sites in Coral Gables, she left her door unlocked while she quickly went to a neighbor's apartment returning just 10 minutes later. in time to catch the nine o'clock show Hollywood was. When she got inside, she saw what she later described to the Miami Herald as a dark shadow rushed toward her from behind and something pink over her head.

This MO was an escalation from his attacks in the year prior. He started out by sneaking in just before dawn when the women were sleeping, gradually starting to sneak into the homes earlier and earlier until he was surprising victims who were completely awake. Investigators began to worry about this escalation. One police investigator told the AP News in 1985 that he may kill his next victim. He shone an escalation of violence in recent cases. Before long, it would be no big deal to him to attack a woman in broad daylight or may even a woman who wasn't alone. And again, more if a lot of this mirrors, Joseph DeAngelo,

there's an escalation in attacks, attacking at different times. And, you know, sometimes not being worried at all about attacking while someone else was with the victim. Even women who lived on upper floors were attacked too. The height offered no extra security as the pillowcase rapist actually entered apartments as high as the fourth floor. He did this by scowling balconies. Police knew the rapist was obviously very physically fit to be able to perform this kind of feat. Another victim who lived on the second floor saw a man standing on her balcony with a t-shirt covering his face. She warned him that she was going to call the police and ran into her kitchen to grab the phone.

While she tried to call for help, the man used a knife to cut the sliding door screen. He entered the apartment and assaulted her before she could finish calling for help. So a couple of things more jump out at me here. You know, a lot of times people do believe that living higher up in an apartment offers extra security. I mean, it does. But when you have a guy like this who is able to scale balconies, well, obviously that height doesn't offer the same security. And I think about that, you know, we said obviously he was very physically fit.

He had to have been. I know for a fact, I'm not scaling any balconies, leaping from one balcony to another or climbing balconies. It's just not in my repertoire. And I think that's just one more parallel to Joseph DiAngelo that we've talked about a couple times so far is that he did have that agility and that physical capability. I remember Joseph DeAngelo jumping fences and things like that. So this guy seems to be of a similar.

build or similar physical characteristics. One thing that was different that I noticed in this is that the pillowcase rapist wasn't afraid to attack women that were high up in buildings, whereas Joseph DiAngelo typically targeted single story homes. So there's a little bit of a difference there. Well, the one thing I think it does show is that you cannot rely on living on the third or fourth floor as your sole source of security. It doesn't mean that you can leave your back sliding door open because something like this

can obviously happen. People can get up there. The AP News reported that police were said to have encouraged victims of the pillowcase rapist to move because they said there was a real possibility. The rapist was stalking them after he had attacked them. Police told some of the victims to essentially lie low or move because there was a possibility that he would be back. One survivor came home to find some of her undergarments out of the drawer. There were signs that someone had masturbated with her lingerie. And this was just over a month

after this woman had been attacked. Three weeks after she found her soiled lingerie, she took a hot shower. And according to the AP news, when the mirror fogged, up. She looked over at it and saw an obscene message from her rapist written with his fingertip on the bathroom mirror. I mean, you want to talk about scary. And obviously, this woman had already gone through a vicious sexual attack. She had to have been, you know, extremely scared. But then this, right, to come home and find that someone had to have been, you know, extremely scared. but then this, right, to come home and find that someone had been in your house, most likely the person who had already attacked you.

I mean, this is a scene out of, you know, some type of horror movie. Yeah, just one more set of things that match DeAngelo. When he was the Viceroyer ransacker, he would do a lot of the same thing with women's undergarments. And this message on the mirror is just really, really scary. It seems like a way for him to torture his victims later on to put that message on the mirror knowing that once it fogged up, she'd be able to read it later on. That's just got to be further proof of how to brave this guy was. Police had their work cut out for them.

They didn't know whether the victims of this rapist would be repeat targets, where if women living in close proximity might be the focus of this attention. Some of the survivors received phone calls after their attacks where no one would speak, but they could tell someone was there listening. This is known to have happened to women who survived the attacks by Joseph DeAngelo, weeks, months, or even years after they were attacked. And again, not to really hammer too much on the similarities, but they're there.

You can't deny it. And it would be different, more if I would think, if this happened today, after everything about Joseph DeAngelo, you know, the Golden State killers, has come out. I can't imagine that this guy was copycatting the East Area rapist, Golden State Killer in any way back then. So to me, it just highlights the fact that, you know, these guys were, we're thinking similar thoughts. They were employing similar tactics.

Yeah, I think you're right. It's almost like they use the same playbook because it would be difficult for someone in Florida to be mimicking someone in California. But when you compare the crimes, there's just so many similarities that you start to wonder, you know, how do they come up with the same ideas and the same procedures when they do these attacks? It's pretty frightening. Investigators trying to track the pillowcase rapists knew their suspect had a lot of time on his hands.

Miami-Dade Metro Sergeant David Simmons told the Miami Herald. he's putting in a lot of hours. He's making this a full-time job. He may be out there 10 or 12 hours a night until he finds the right opportunity. I wouldn't think it would be easy to find an open window or sliding glass door. And we know DeAngelo did this as well, studied and surveyed his victims before attacking them. Obviously, the pillowcase rapists must have been watching in advance as well. go back to this comment made by David Simmons.

He's making this a full-time job. He's out there 10 or 12 hours a night. I mean, if that doesn't scare the you know what out of you, I don't know what does. And you have a predator who is spending the amount of time that most people, you know, spend at their jobs, searching for targets, searching for opportunities. That's nightmare's type stuff.

Now, what this guy seemed to be doing was watching apartments, watching the balconies to see which units had women living alone, watching the parking lots, to see what type of car they drove, following them to their apartments, and at some point more figuring out their phone numbers. With each attack, investigators would gather a clue here and there, and they came to learn that the pillowcase rapist wore a size 10 and a half shoe. His height was determined to be between 5'8 and 5'11, and he weighed around 170 pounds. The best lead they had with the technology at the time was his blood type. Though it was type O, which is pretty common, he had a very rare subgroup belonging to just 1% of people, and that's the extent of what they knew about the man they were looking for. Though the FBI tried to assist, they came up short. According to the Miami Herald, journalist Edna B. Cannon, scientists at the FBI Academy

Quantico, Virginia, produced a five-page psychological profile of the Pillowcase rapist, yet they were no closer to figuring out who he was. Buchanan added, you don't have to be an FBI scientist to determine, as they did, that the man is a loner who fantasizes about sex. So what are we dealing with here? Morph, an athletic white male of average height, average build, he could have been anyone. And investigators did question. almost everyone they could in an effort to catch this perp from pilots and mail carriers to

utility workers and handymen. They turned over a lot of stones, but did not catch the rapist. Once again, this type of fruitless search for an average guy closely mirrors the search for the East Area rapist, Golden State Killer. He was a young white man, not too tall, athletic enough to jump fences, nine, nine and a half shoe size. That was about it. And it's part of the reason why he evaded being identified until 2018, 45 years after his first known crime. In September 1985, pillowcase rapist investigators thought they had their man.

30-year-old Michael Richard Gersley, who had typo blood and more size 10 and half shoes, was charged with five counts of sexual battery, five counts of armed burglary, and two counts of armed robbery. He confessed to a series of sexual assaults in which he had been dubbed the repairman rapist. He admitted that he would wait in the laundry room of apartment complexes, wearing a tool belt, and wait to see a woman that he could convince

to let him into her apartment with the story that he needed to work on their air conditioning, and then he would attack them. Garsley's shoe size and typo blood matching the pillowcase rapist had been a coincidence, an eerie one though. Though the same blood type, He did not belong to the rear blood type subgroup that the pillowcase rapist did, confirming that he was not their suspect. Another unsettling coincidence, he lived in the apartment complex where the pillowcase rapist attacked his first six known victims.

And his brother lived in an apartment complex in South Miami, where another pillowcase rapist victim was attacked. As interesting as that was, police were able to rule Gersley out as being the pillowcase rapist. So they rule this guy out, Morve, but it just goes. to show you and we've talked about it in a number of episodes you're talking about a case that that happens you know in a relatively small radius small area and how many bad individuals are operating in that given area at any one time i can't underscore enough how scary that thought is to me yeah i don't know what's scary or one predator doing all kinds of different attacks and really racking up victim count or multiple dangers, people like that,

moving around the same area, sort of overlapping and collecting victims. It's pretty frightening that you can have multiple people like that in one area at the same time. And the coincidences here, right? The apartment complexes, the fact that this guy lived in one of the apartment complexes where the pillowcase rapist attack. Yeah, police must have been pretty excited when they first stumbled across this guy. Yeah, as him being the pillowcase rapist as well, obviously they ruled him out.

In the suburbs of D.C., a woman fails to show up for work and is found brutally murdered. I wonder what's emergency? We just walked in the door and there's blood in the foyer. For the next two decades, the case remained unsolved until new technology allowed investigators to do what had once. been impossible. A new series from ABC Audio in 2020. Blood and water. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. If you love chilling mysteries, unsolved cases, and a touch of mom-style humor, Moms and Mysteries is the podcast you've been searching for. Hey guys, I'm Mandy. And I'm Melissa. Join us every Tuesday for Moms and Mysteries, your gateway to gripping, well-researched true crime stories. Each

week, we deep dive into a variety of mind-boggling cases as we're shed light on everything from heist to whodontas, where you're your go-to podcast for Mysteries with a motherly touch. Subscribe now to Moms and Mysteries wherever you get your podcast. The same month that authorities cleared Gersley, the repairman rapist in the pillowcase spree, a former police officer from Miami, Pedro Gabriel Gonzalez, confessed to being the pillowcase rapist. He was already in jail, facing first-degree murder charges in the death of his girlfriend when he made his claim. Gonzalez did fit the description, but authorities had to be sure it was him. They took his blood to analyze it. He did have typo blood. But as we said, that's very common,

but he did not belong to that rare subgroup. So police knew. He was not the suspect and they knew his confession was false. So they were back to square one hunting for an elusive serial rapist, who by this point was suspected in a large number of rapes. 43. The final attack thought to have been the pillowcase rapist, number 44, occurred on February 11, 1986 in northeast Miami. This time, things went differently. The woman he attacked that night woke up just after midnight.

She saw the rapist at her window, looking outside. His face was uncovered. The woman screamed as a reflex, and he immediately told her, look away. and he tried to cover her face with a pillow. The 36-year-old woman was a quick thinker, though, and was able to convince the man that he didn't need to bother. She claimed that she needed her glasses to be able to see, and she wasn't wearing them.

According to the Miami Herald, she said she was blind as a bat. The man spent 15 minutes with this victim without covering her face or his own. As it turned out, the woman's eyesight was just fine. She was a little near-sighted, but she had taken in a lot of details of this man's appearance. Before he fled, he tied her to her bed and stole her purse. Authorities were able to create a sketch from her description. The victim relayed to police that the attacker had fair,

sun tan skin, medium-length, thick, wavy brown hair, a trimmed mustache, and the woman was even able to see acne on his back. Her purse was found later the same day in Hollywood, Florida, which is in Broward County. This was the best witness to date in the series. Police were hopeful that this witness description and the resulting sketch would help ID the pillowcase rapist once and for all. I mean, really, if you think about it, up to this point, they had put a lot of effort into trying to find this guy, figure out who he was. but everything they had done had essentially come up empty. It's a shame that they didn't catch a break with a good description like this until he had such a high victim count.

But I think once you get that description, as law enforcement, you have to be very hopeful, right? Thinking this is the one thing we needed. This is the one thing that's going to break this case wide open. According to the Miami Herald, at one time during the investigation, there was a list of nearly 300 names, almost all of whom had been eliminated as suspects. The Pillow Case Rapist Task Force, even with over 20 dedicated investigators assigned to the cases, was overworked, with police spokesman, Commander William Johnson, revealing that at one point they had up to 1,800 leads. More than 1 million flyers were distributed by investigators. In addition to the sketch,

a life-sized clay bus was sculpted from the description from attack number 44, where the woman saw the rapist face for over 10 minutes. But still, no clear suspect emerged. Investigator David Simmons told the Miami Herald, he is the cleverest rapist I have ever investigated and definitely the most prolific in Dade County history. And more of I think you have to take that comment into perspective, right? Dade County is a big county. So when this guy is saying that this is the most prolific rapist in the history of that

county, it's really saying something. And we've already, you know, said that, you know, 44 attacks. Now, obviously, we haven't talked about every attack. And there were years where attacks occurred, which we skipped, but that's solely due to the fact that there just wasn't information about every single attack. And to me, this is where the pillow case rapist case, differs greatly from the East Area Rapist, Golden State Killer case. It's in the level of details about each and every attack. And I think one key difference is in the Pillow Case, Rapist case, we didn't have access to any kind of files or reports where we were fortunate enough to have access to those to an extent to cover the Golden State Killer case, East Area Rapist case.

So that made a big difference in being able to detail each date and more specific details. But even so, I mean, the reporting, I think, on the two different cases is different. The Sacramento Papers definitely detailed more of the specifics of what happened in each case and what dates and times the attacks happened. Soon after the 44th attack, authorities arrested a 24-year-old man. at an apartment complex in Kindle after a woman found him watching her undress from her second floor balcony. The man had moved to Miami in May 1981, the very same month that the pillowcase rapist attacks started. He wore a size 10 and a half shoe. So again, when we talk about law enforcement excitement and maybe excitement is not the right word, maybe it is,

they had to be very hopeful that they were on the right track, that this could be their guy. The problem is he didn't have typo blood. So he was ruled out pretty quickly. By April 1987, authorities were discouraged. They began to wonder if maybe there was not a single pillowcase rapist. Maybe there were multiple offenders using the same MO, and they had been wasting their time. and resources focusing on a single suspect who fit all of the similar crimes in the area. And we talked about the repairman rapist. He had threatened women with knives. He had stalked apartment

complexes and tied up his victims like the pillowcase rapist had in his attacks. So law enforcement thought maybe the similarities were due to the nature of the crimes and not because they were committed by the same perpetrator. We've talked about the parallels between Joseph DeAngelo as the East Area rapist and the pillowcase rapist. There are a lot of them. So I get it why law enforcement at a certain point could maybe ask the question. You know, perhaps some of these offenders simply just shared a lot of the same traits, a lot of the same habits.

Three more cases were loosely attributed. to the pillowcase rapist, bringing the total to 47. Police came to a hard conclusion, and a memo was released to the media stating, it is the consensus of opinion of investigators that the 47 open cases are not attributable to a single offender. On April 3, 1987, the Pillow Case Rapist Task Force, which had dwindled down to four full-time investigators, was disbanded, with officers freed up to work on other cases. People in the area didn't easily forget about the Pillow case. rape as though, and many wondered if he would return. In March of 1991, an article in the Miami

Herald discussed the status of the case. By the time the article was published, there were no active leads and the case had no detective assigned to it. According to the Miami Herald, the files on the case stacked up thicker than 25 telephone books. Okay, I'm trying to picture 25 telephone books stacked on top of each other. That is a lot of files. But it's a lot of lot of attacks. It's a lot of cases, 47 over a number of years. It doesn't surprise me that the authorities would amass a large amount of files, a large amount of paperwork. And I think you could say this more if about a lot of cases, unsolved cases, you have so many files. You have so much information. Is the answer to the mystery somewhere in, you know, one of those reports,

are on one of those pieces of paper. Yeah, I think we've heard of a lot of cases where someone's caught and identified and then, lo and behold, they go back through all the reports and there's the suspect's name, you know, as a witness or they were questioned and let go, things like that. So you almost have to wonder if that was the case for investigators that they were thinking, hey, did we miss something? Is this guy's name in these reports? So that had to be frustrating for them.

Yeah, to me, it kind of brings to mind the movie, The Zodiac, you know, that scene where Graysmith goes back to the police station. He wants to get a look at the files. Yeah, you have to wonder for these investigators, is there somewhere where you draw the line and say, okay, I've poured over these reports, I've gone through them, there's no need to look at them anymore. Or is it the reverse? Is it, if I keep it?

if I keep on looking through these, is something going to jump out at me that's going to solve this case? Or is it that we need fresh eyes? We need someone new who hasn't poured through it to look through it. And then maybe they'll see something that others didn't see. I think a lot of people listening,

a lot of us who think of ourselves as kind of armchair detectives would like a crack at that. But the one thing more if they really jumped out of me is that, for this to be such a big case, such a high profile case, not a single detective left assigned to it. That kind of struck me as odd, but it also kind of clues you in as to where police were. They just had nothing. And they weren't really at that point putting any resources towards it. Now, I'm sure they had speculated as to how exactly this serial rapist had gone uncought.

He could have died, which would have. accounted for the end of the attacks. Maybe he was undergoing some type of psychiatric care, which ended his need to attack, or perhaps he had gone to prison. They also thought, of course, he could have moved to another location and kept doing what he was doing. There was no shortage of serial sexual assaults and serial predators across the country. Throughout the 80s and early 90s, most investigators came to the

conclusion that the pillowcase rapist saw the sketch of him and the bust that was created, and he thought they looked too much like it for him to feel comfortable committing his crimes. There were no more attacks after that bust was created. The pillowcase rapist faded in the memories of residence in the towns he struck in, but police worked quietly over the years behind the scenes. On January 13, 2020, there was a partial match in Codas, stemming from an attack in South Miami on December 28, 1983. An investigator had the presence of mind in 1983 to perform the necessary sexual assault evidence collection kit collecting

and was able to properly preserve the swabs so that a DNA profile could be developed from the sample to later date. In that 1983 case, a young man wielding a weapon like an ice pick broke into the home of a 25-year-old woman, startling her. When she screamed, he tackled her to the ground and covered her mouth with his hand. He stabbed her in the stomach and told her to stop screaming where he'd kill her. When she was quiet, he took her into her bedroom and covered her with a blanket and pillow while he assaulted her. She pleaded with him because she couldn't breathe. She had been stabbed and was terrified, and her face was covered by a blanket and pillow. According to the Washington Post, the man simply told her to shut up before leaving. The stab wound wasn't deep and the victim's

survived and got help. But there was a problem. The 2020 hit in CODIS connected to that 1983 crime was from someone who couldn't have committed the crime because they were too young. It was connected to a 29 year old named Robert J. Cole. He had been arrested in September 2019 following a domestic incident where he threatened his girlfriend, tried to break into her home and smashed flower pots in the yard. Eventually, the charges of domestic violence, attempted burglary, and criminal mischief were dropped. But his DNA had been taken and entered into COD's.

His DNA profile closely matched the offender in the 1983 case. It appeared that the DNA connection was a paternal one and that his biological father had likely been the 1983 offender. Just three days after that CODIS match came to the attention of investigators. They were telling Robert's father, Robert Eugene Kohler, a 60-year-old electrician and handyman. On January 16th, they were able to get DNA evidence from things he touched at a grocery store while they trialed him. These included the shopping cart he used, as well as a door handle they saw in touch. The Miami-Dade Police Department analyst compared his DNA to the sample from the 1983 attack, and it matched.

When shown a 1998 photo of the suspect that matched the DNA sample, the victim in the 1983 attack, known only as EV, confirmed for Miami-Day detectives that she had not had consensual sex with that man at any point in the past, and she didn't know who he was. So more things are getting interesting, right? And it's because of technology, advancements in technology. But it's also because somebody back in 1980s, did a really good job of taking the swabs, preserving the swabs. You know, technology is great.

And you and I have touched on this before, but technology only works if you can derive a viable sample. And so, you know, you really have to give it up to some of these individuals back in the early 80s before DNA was really, you know, a thing. was known about, they were doing their job and preserving evidence for something that they didn't even know was going to come along. It's kind of amazing when you think about it. Yeah, I think it just goes to show that when you do good police work, even though technology hasn't come along yet, that's going to help you. It just helps that when it happens. I think they knew that things were evolving. And although they didn't know about DNA at the time, they knew that one day that evidence they collected might be important. So they did a good job collecting it.

On January 17, 2020, 60-year-old Robert Eugene Kohler was arrested in Brevard County, Florida. His DNA was taken and analyzed again. And once more, it matched the sample taken from the evidence collected in 1983. At his first hearing, Kohler said to the judge, I'm not guilty. He was extradited to Miami-Dade County in order to be held without bond. While in custody for the 1983 attack, DNA taken in some of the pillowcase rapist cases was matched to Kohler. Police knew that after decades, they finally had their man. And looking back at his past, they found that he had been in trouble with the law, but

nothing that led to him being identified sooner. In 1991, just five years after his last known attack as the Pillow case rapist, Culler was arrested for an attack the year before in Palm Beach County, Florida, on charges of sexual battery. For some reason, perhaps lack of DNA. The case wasn't connected to the pillowcase rapist attacks by authorities. Kohler was convicted and required to register as a sex offender, but he wasn't required to provide DNA due to a Florida law at the time. Had that happened, he would have been identified as the Pillow case.

rapist much earlier. For the attack in 1990, Robert Kohler was only sentenced to probation and later 120 days in jail after he violated the terms of that probation. So we don't have all the details of exactly what this sexual battery charge entailed, but probation morph? I mean, you know, I don't want to sound like a broken record because I know I talk about this a lot, but it really galls me in some of these cases where, you know, people do really bad things. Sexual battery to me is a serious crime. And so, you know, to give a person probation. Now, he got 120 days later, but that was only because he violated the terms of his probation. It just doesn't seem right. Yeah, this isn't a case of vandalism or shoplifting or something like that where no one's injured.

This is a sexual attack on someone. So to only get probation, I'm like, you, I'm scratching my head over that. Yeah, you're treating this guy as though, you know, he's a 20 year old who blew up somebody's mailbox with, with an M80. I'm not saying that's a good thing to do, but to me, that's, it's a far cry from some type of sexual battery, some type of sexual assault. I think it just shows you how small the consequences were for some of these sexual crimes, you know, 30, 40 years ago.

Kohler's criminal record stretched back to 1980 the year before the pillowcase rape started. He was arrested that year in Miami for aggravated assault, not sexual assault or battery, but it's further proof of people with criminal records who are somehow out and free to commit more crimes. Upon news of Kohler's arrest on just one charge of sexual battery for the 1983 case, many people expected more charges to come. Dave Simmons, who had led the Pillow Case Rapist Task Force before it was disbanded and before he eventually retired, was one of many who still believed that one single

attacker had committed most of the pillowcase rapes, telling the Miami Herald, at least 44 attacks had been committed by the same suspect, in his opinion. As reported by CNN, by the end of January 2020, investigators were able to link Kohler to at least 25 cases. Miami-Dade State Attorney Catherine Fernandez-Rundle confirmed that Robert Kohler's DNA matched the DNA of samples found at a few of the pill case rapist crime scenes. Still, prosecutors only initially charged him with a sexual battery case from 1983. A Miami Herald article mentioned that, according to legal experts,

it was a smart strategy to focus on swiftly convicting an imprisoning cholera on one rock-solid case, with other cases waiting in the wings just in case. Former Miami-Dade prosecutor, John Prevolis, confirmed that the prosecutor would be wise to focus all efforts on one case at a time. It may seem a bit counterintuitive to us as non-legal experts, but some of his victims were okay with that course of action. 64-year-old Mimi Calvo, one of the pillowcase rapist victims, told the Miami Herald, he just needs to be put behind bars. I don't care if it's me that puts him there or not.

She was just 26 years old when the pillowcase rapist sexually assaulted her after breaking in her apartment and putting a pillowcase over her head. When Kohler's neighbors learned of his arrest and his ties to the pillowcase rapes, interestingly, they didn't give the usual shocked answer to reporters when asked about living next door to someone so dangerous. You know, we hear it all the time. Or if usually people say, I'm shocked or I never would have guessed. He seemed so normal. He was a great neighbor. But one neighbor, Alex Winsel, told Wesh.com, I just always read him as incredibly predatory.

So to me, that's a fascinating statement because we do hear it so often. Most of these individuals, they're able to put on the facade. They're able to make their neighbors believe that they're just part of the group. But here you have this one neighbor who thought from the get go, this guy's a predator. Now, that neighbor could have said that already knowing what this individual was being accused of. I don't know. But if the neighbor really thought that, to me, that's extremely fascinating. But the other thing, morph is what is that neighbor going to do with that information?

You're not going to go to the police and say, you know, I think my neighbor is a predator, just based on your thoughts alone. nobody's going to do that, right? Yeah. And I think it's sort of talking about the parallels between him and Joseph DiAngelo. I remember some of the neighbors in when he was en masse as being the Golden State killer, some of his neighbors came forward to say they had disputes over property issues, things like that, minor things, but he seemed aggressive and would start arguments over things.

So some people in that case as well had run in. with him and had a bad feeling about him. Well, you know, it's interesting that you point that out because I'm going to make an admission. I as a neighbor have been at times in the past somewhat aggressive. I can be aggressive when, you know, a neighbor comes at me or says something nonsensical. I've been known to push back. I mean, it's just the type of person I am, I guess. So if I was unmasked,

as this killer or serial rapist, I'm sure there's more than one neighbor that would come forward and say, yep, I knew it. I knew that that Ferguson guy was, was trouble. Now, I'm not a bad guy. I'm not saying that by any means. I just don't suffer fools. I'll put it that way. I just have one question. Do your neighbors listen to your podcast? I don't know if they do or not, but I'm totally fine. And because I'm speaking the truth and I'm not saying anything bad about them, they're all good people. But I think when you live next to someone for 20 years, I've been in my house for 20 years, neighbors come and go, but some of them have been around a long time. Well, at a certain point in time, you're going to have a dispute with somebody, whether, you know,

it's over a fence that they want to put in or the fact that they don't paint their side of the fence or they don't mow their grass. I mean, I can throw out a million different things. When neighbors asked police why they were there and there were multiple cars, neighbors were told it's very bad and you'll find out on the national news. That's the next time you're going to see him. Neighbors like Winsle who had kept their guard up told Wesh.com they were relieved to have trusted their gut. Wensel added that he was not physically scary, but there was something in him that just never sat right. So, you know, this Winsel person is not really able to define it, not really able to put it into words exactly what caused them to think that Kohler was dangerous, predatory, but it's that

there's just something. There was something in him. I sensed it. I saw it. But turned out to be correct. Culler had cameras around his home, watching the property in the street, and it's no surprise why. According to CNN, when authorities searched Culler's home after his arrest, they found an excavated area underneath the home, which Miami-Dade County prosecutor Laura Adams described as a dungeon. Authorities were horrified to imagine what they had stopped.

One prosecutor told CNN, 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 all these cases. More than one safe full of jewelry and other small items, possibly trophies from his many victims, were found inside the safes inside the home. Multiple cross pendants, glass bead rosaries, gold bracelets, golden silver necklaces, pearl necklaces, and multiple small charms and pendants were found in its safes.

21 miscellaneous items of jewelry are listed in the items seized in the two thousand, So, and 20-surge. Also inside a safe, investigators found a black box containing one nail file, which they believed could have been the sharp object. He pushed against his victim's necks.

Two VHS tapes, the contents of which have not yet been disclosed, were found in a safe, in the room where the safes were. But not inside the safes, investigators found over a dozen pairs of women's underwear and a leopard print bra. The search warrant from 2020 lists over 100 floppy disks, five laptops, 60 USB drives,

three SD cards, two cell phones, and an extra hard drive among the items seized. It's still unknown. What was on everything found inside that home. But here's one thing I will say more. Okay, five laptops, that seems excessive. but I probably have five laptops in my house. I have a hard time getting rid of them when I buy a new one. So over the years, I have amassed a number of laptops.

60 USB drives. That seems like a big number. You are storing a lot of information because you already have an extra hard drive on top of that. 60 USB drives, depending on how big they are, that's a ton of info. And you just wonder what exactly. exactly that information is.

Yeah, and I'm curious about the VHS tapes because, you know, this is 2020 that he has these things. And unless he somehow found a working VCR, I don't even know how you could watch them. So I wonder if it had some kind of, God forbid a, he had filmed some kind of attack and he kept it as a souvenir. We just don't know what was on those tapes. Photos of color at his court proceedings look quite similar to Joseph DiAngelo at his, though he's a bit younger. Further paralleling Joseph DiAngelo, during his court hearings in 2021, Kohler was in a wheelchair. But rather than own up to his crimes like Joseph DeAngel eventually did,

Culler claimed that he was being framed. As reported by the Miami Herald, he said to the judge, I was set up. He was also angry at his treatment, saying, I didn't ask to be here. I didn't ask for any of this to happen to me. Culler also claimed that he had been poisoned in jail. He had fallen, but his public defender would not get

him the footage to prove it. And he claimed that he was being forced to crawl around. And more if you mentioned the irony, you know, of this guy saying, I'm, I'm angry at what's happening to me. I didn't ask to be here. I didn't ask for any of this to happen to me. I can only imagine the victims and what they must have thought when they either heard that or they, they saw that printed in a newspaper. Now, obviously, they didn't ask for what happened to them to happen, allegedly at his hand. So I'm always amazed by what, you know, some of these suspects say in court. Now, obviously, we'll have to wait to find out exactly how this thing winds up. In 2019, before investigators ever got that match in Codas, Sergeant Cammy Floyd

from the Broward Sheriff's Office cold case unit found that six cases had a suspect with a similar M.O. This included the 1984 attack in Pompano Beach, where the victim clearly saw a pillowcase over the attacker's head. On June 7, 2002, the Broward Sheriff's Office officially filed charges against Kohler for the six cases identified by the cold case unit. Though the number of possible attacks usually hover somewhere between 40 and 45, it definitely could be more. For now, authorities are focusing in on a handful of cases. They also hope that perhaps victims who were never identified or chose not to come forward early on will come forward now.

Anyone out there who believes they have a tip about the case or may be a pillowcase victim is encouraged to call Broward Crime Stoppers at 954-493-8477. Collar's trial for the 1983 attack, where a woman was stabbed, was set to begin June 21st, just days before this episode airs. And the first hearing for the six-pill case rapist assault has been set for this August. For all of the survivors out there of these attacks, alleged to be at the hands of Kohler, reported or not, hopefully this brings some peace. Prosecutor Catherine Fernandez-Rundled told Local 10 News,

this offender will never, ever be free again. This is a case in which we'll have to see what develops. Yeah, obviously this is an ongoing case as far as the upcoming trials. But I think for the prosecutor to come out and say that to the news, it tells me that she's pretty confident that they're going to nail this guy. I think we talked a little bit about it earlier that they want to sort of break these cases up and focus on certain ones, which is. It seems like it is a smart strategy. So that way if something goes wrong with some of the cases, they have the other ones to fall back rather than putting all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. So hopefully at the end of the day, if he's found guilty on any number of these charges, that he will face the consequences and be held accountable in prison.

Well, I think it is a smart tactic. And we have a lot of legal experts that listen to the show. and sometimes chime in and help us. My thought is, and what I've always heard, is that you don't want to muddy the waters with too much all at one time. If you have something that is, I won't call it a slam dunk, but you know,

you have very concrete evidence to put before a jury on one charge or a few charges. Go for that. And then if you get that conviction, you've got him. He's not going anywhere. He's going to sit in jail. You have plenty of time to either get a confession or further cement evidence, you know, related to some of the other cases. But if you try to throw everything at the wall all at one time,

could it be possible that a jury decides you do? don't have enough evidence for some of it, and it hurts your case. It backfires on you. And I think that's the thinking. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if he takes any kind of plea deal where he agrees to own up to everything he did in exchange for some kind of sentence that he thinks is to his benefit. Well, I'm sure that if a plea deal is offered, and I don't know if one has already been offered, it would result in.

time for him than if he went through the full trial, multiple trials, and was convicted. Now, this guy's in his 60s. So maybe he's making the decision that I've got nothing to lose. I'm going to get a bunch of time either way. I might as well take my chances. And that's the one thing that we haven't talked about is I'm glad that they think they're on the right track, that they're going to try this guy. It seems like they've got some really good evidence in at least some of the cases. But I can think about this in a couple of different ways. One is that, you know, much like DeAngelo, this guy was able to live his life, do what he wanted, maintain his freedom for a very long time. Now, hopefully he's going to be held accountable now. And that's the second piece of the puzzle.

is this is a case that could have gone unsolved without police ever identifying a perpetrator. So you have to find some solace in that, I think, even though it took a very long time. And that's the thing that I think has to cause these type of individuals who have been able to allude police for many years to be scared. That it's just a matter of time. in some instances where they're going to get a knock on the door and the police are going to say, we got you. And we're seeing that more and more and hoping that that trend continues. Yeah, it's a great thing to see all these bad guys getting nailed.

And for the victims out there of someone like the pillowcase rapist, it's good to see them getting justice, even though sometimes it takes a long time. They deserve that. No doubt, this colder guy, if he is in fact the pillowcase rapist, as it seems things suggest he is. He's a very bad guy. He's vicious. He's brutal.

He was also a cold calculating individual. And it's probably, you know, a main reason why it took police so long to get him. Because he did do a lot of things to try to elude the police in his selection of victim. his selection of apartments. But like you said, Morf, you know, this is a case that we can kind of keep an eye on, see what develops.

I think it's going to be very interesting to see what comes out about the information that is on all of that technology that they recovered from his home. And maybe that's why the prosecutor has been so confident. You know, there's probably, a lot of stuff on there that is going to sink him.

I think we'll have to be patient and wait to see what develops. Thanks goes out the Sunny Landon for help with writing and research in this episode. As always, if you love the show, but you haven't done so yet, take a minute, go out and give us a five-star rating. Keep telling your friends. That word of mouth about the criminology podcast really goes a long way. If you want to find us on social media, we're on Twitter with a handle at Criminology pod.

You can also find us on Facebook by searching for Criminology Podcast, or by joining our Facebook discussion group, Criminology Podcasts Discussion and Fans. So that's it for our episode on The Pillow Case Rapist, but we'll be back with everyone next Saturday night with an all-new episode of Criminology. So until then, for Mike. And Morf.

We'll talk to you next week. Take care, everyone.