In a stunning verdict that ends one of South Florida’s most haunting criminal sagas, a Miami-Dade jury has found Robert Koehler, the infamous “Pillowcase Rapist,” guilty on all counts.
Koehler, now 66, stood silent as the verdict was read. The same man who, in 1984, slipped into a young woman’s townhouse in southwest Miami-Dade, pressed a knife to her throat, and vowed to kill her if she screamed, before brutally raping her, is now finally facing justice. The survivor was just 22 at the time.
For years, Koehler’s crimes cast a shadow over Florida. Dozens of women terrorized in their own homes. A faceless attacker who covered his victims’ heads with pillowcases, a sadistic signature that kept Miami and Palm Beach gripped by fear through the 1980s.
It wasn’t until 2020 that DNA evidence, preserved for decades, cracked the case open. The genetic match linked Koehler, already a registered sex offender with a 1991 conviction, to a string of unsolved rapes stretching across two counties.
Koehler was arrested on January 22, 2020, booked into the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, and has since been held without bond at Metrowest Detention Center.
For the 1984 assault alone, prosecutors charged him with two counts of armed sexual battery, armed kidnapping, and armed burglary. Miami-Dade Circuit Judge David Young presided over the explosive trial.
After forty-one years, the mask is off. The monster who hid behind a pillowcase will finally face the reckoning his victims and South Florida have waited a lifetime to see.
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