‘Blind as a Bat’ | 5

Summary

Felonious Florida: Episode 5 - “Blind as a Bat”

Release Date: July 5, 2024

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Introduction and Background

In the gripping fifth episode of Felonious Florida, titled “Blind as a Bat,” host David Shoots delves deep into one of South Florida’s most haunting unsolved cases: the hunt for the elusive Pillowcase Rapist. Spanning nearly three decades, this case has baffled investigators and instilled fear across Miami and Broward counties.

The February 1986 Breakthrough

The narrative takes a pivotal turn on the night of February 11, 1986. A 36-year-old business executive awakens to a terrifying encounter in her North Miami apartment. Unlike previous victims, who were left blindfolded by the rapist, she catches a fleeting glimpse of her attacker, providing the first substantial lead in the case.

“She screamed at the sight of him, and he spun around and lunged toward her bed.” ([04:56])

Despite the imminent danger, the victim employs quick thinking to deceive her attacker:

“I can’t see. I can’t see my glasses over here on the nightstand. I’m blind as a bat.” ([05:44])

Her ruse forces the rapist to reveal his face, a risk he hadn’t taken before.

Investigation Intensifies

This encounter allows police to create one of the most detailed sketches of the suspect to date. The widespread dissemination of this sketch—over a million flyers distributed within the first week—marked the largest manhunt in South Florida’s history.

“Police say they doubt all this publicity will stop the Pillowcase Rapist from making assaults or force him to leave town.” ([02:02])

To enhance recognition, a local sculptor was commissioned to produce a three-dimensional bust of the suspect, aiming to improve identification rates.

“It’s going to be easier for people to identify something that looks like a person rather than looks like a drawing of a person.” – Detective Dave Simmons ([08:26])

Challenges in Solving the Case

Despite the massive efforts, the investigation hit numerous roadblocks. Detective Dave Simmons and his team meticulously analyzed over 25 cases linked by blood subtype evidence, focusing their search within a small geographical area in South Miami. However, the lack of unique characteristics in the suspect’s description made it exceedingly difficult to pinpoint the perpetrator.

“Nobody could be completely sure that all the rapes were linked, but all agreed that the pillowcase rapist had to be taken off the streets.” ([12:18])

As months passed without further attacks, frustration grew within the investigative team. The absence of new incidents led to the dismantling of the specialized task force in April 1987.

“We thought there’s a good chance we chased him away from the jurisdiction and he’s gone to another state.” – Detective Dave Simmons ([17:11])

The Case Goes Cold

With the task force disbanded, Simmons was left to grapple with the unresolved case, the only significant investigation he couldn’t close.

“It really haunted me. After I retired, it was the only big case that I left open.” – Detective Dave Simmons ([18:25])

Re-opening the Investigation Years Later

Fast forward to 2017, nearly three decades after the last known attack, Detective Sergeant Cammy Floyd from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office revisits the cold case. Advances in DNA technology reignite hope for solving the decades-old mystery.

“Because of technology, we’re solving more crimes than we thought we would have been able to in the past.” – Detective Sergeant Cammy Floyd ([24:32])

Despite numerous challenges, including damaged evidence and faded memories, Floyd and her team persist in their quest for answers.

DNA Breakthrough

The breakthrough arrives unexpectedly in 2019 when a routine felony charge leads to a crucial DNA match. Robert J. Koehler’s DNA, submitted during a domestic violence case, links back to one of the original Pillowcase Rapist attacks from 1983. However, this presents a perplexing twist: Koehler wasn’t born at the time of the earliest crimes, indicating that the perpetrator was his father, Robert Eugene Koehler.

“If I was going to spend the time to risk my life to do something stupid, heinous like that, you think I would spend only five minutes with a woman?” – Robert J. Koehler ([30:34])

Conclusion and Cliffhanger

As authorities close in on Robert Eugene Koehler, the episode leaves listeners on a suspenseful note, promising revelations in the next installment.

“You never know what becomes of them. Because rapists don’t generally just stop abruptly.” – Detective Dave Simmons ([14:23])

Stay tuned for the next episode, where the final chapter of the Pillowcase Rapist case unfolds, revealing the true identity of the man who evaded capture for so long.

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Notable Quotes:

• “She screamed at the sight of him, and he spun around and lunged toward her bed.” – Dave Simmons ([04:56])

• “I can’t see. I can’t see my glasses over here on the nightstand. I’m blind as a bat.” – Victim ([05:44])

• “Nobody could be completely sure that all the rapes were linked, but all agreed that the pillowcase rapist had to be taken off the streets.” – David Shoots ([12:18])

• “It really haunted me. After I retired, it was the only big case that I left open.” – Detective Dave Simmons ([18:25])

• “Because of technology, we’re solving more crimes than we thought we would have been able to in the past.” – Detective Sergeant Cammy Floyd ([24:32])

• “You never know what becomes of them. Because rapists don’t generally just stop abruptly.” – Detective Dave Simmons ([14:23])

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Felonious Florida continues to unravel the dark and complex layers of unsolved crimes in the Sunshine State, offering listeners an in-depth exploration of justice, persistence, and the relentless pursuit of truth.

Transcript

[David Shoots]

Wondery subscribers can binge all episodes of Felonious Florida season four early and ad free right now. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. This episode contains graphic language and descriptions of sexual violence that some listeners may find disturbing.

[Dave Simmons]

Our next story, which is about crime, will be familiar.

[Cammy Floyd]

Since 1981, police believe the same man has raped 44 women in Dade and.

[Dave Simmons]

Broward counties in Miami. They call him the Pillowcase Rapist.

[Cammy Floyd]

There are enough files on the case to nearly cover an entire couch. The Pillowcase rapist has frustrated police. Unfortunately, they say they don't know where to expect him to strike next, but they're hoping they'll catch him before he has any further opportunities.

[David Shoots]

It's early 1986. The search for Florida's pillowcase rapist reaches a pivotal moment. Over the past five years, police believe he's attacked at least 43 women, but it's the 44th that would change the course of this investigation. What happened in a North Miami apartment at just after midnight on February 11, 1986, hadn't happened before.

[Cammy Floyd]

That incident gave police their first major break in the case in five years, and they owe it all to the victim's ingenuity and quick thinking.

[David Shoots]

It was a break that offered the public their first look at the man who'd been terrifying women across the region. TV newscasts were spreading a new sketch of the suspect on broadcasts in English and Spanish. La Policia del Metro Sea.

[Dave Simmons]

And wanted posters are being printed by the hundreds of thousands as the search for the Pillowcase Rapist becomes the largest in South Florida history.

[David Shoots]

But with the face of the suspect now all over the media, the investigation was entering unknown territory.

[Cammy Floyd]

Police say they doubt all this publicity will stop the Pillowcase Rapist from making assaults or force him to leave town. They say he has an uncontrollable problem.

[David Shoots]

What would the Pillowcase Rapist do now? That that was the nagging question whose answer would haunt investigators for more than three decades.

[Lindsey Graham]

Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondry's American Scandal. In our latest series, a family of religious fanatics moved to Ruby Ridge, Idaho, to wait out the apocalypse. But their paranoia and suspicion of authority lead to a confrontation with federal agents and their own personal Armageddon. Follow American Scandal on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[David Shoots]

From. The South Florida Sun Sentinel. This is Felonious Florida, the podcast that leads you into the dark side of the Sunshine State. I'm David Shoots. This is episode five of in the Darkness, the hunt for Florida's. Pillowcase rapist. At this point in the investigation, detectives were still several steps behind the suspect they'd been hunting with little progress in all of his attacks. He was careful and cunning. Other than leaving a shoe print outside a window, he'd never made a mistake. This is the story of what happened when he finally did. In early February 1986, Detective Dave Simmons and the team investigating the pillowcase rapes were in the midst of pursuing Ronald Beasley. He'd been identified by fingerprints after raping an elderly woman in South Miami. He was a strong suspect, but the pieces weren't fitting together. Beasley was the latest in a string of disappointments. Then a much more significant lead emerged. It was in the early morning hours of February 11, a Tuesday. In an apartment in the city of Aventura in far northeast dade county, a 36 year old woman was asleep in her bedroom. She was a business executive, but other than that, she had never been identified by the police. At about 12:45am Something woke her up. It wasn't a sound or a movement. Maybe she just had a feeling that something wasn't right.

[Dave Simmons]

She woke up with a shadow of a man standing near her bed.

[David Shoots]

The man's back was to her. He was quietly staring out the window. She screamed at the sight of him, and he spun around and lunged toward her bed.

[Dave Simmons]

He rushed her and grabbed her by the neck. He hadn't yet put anything over his face, and she didn't have anything over hers yet either.

[David Shoots]

There was enough light coming through the window that she was able to catch a glimpse of her attacker, and he.

[Dave Simmons]

Started to panic, saying, don't look at me. All the other victims, he had covered their face right away with a pillow or bed linens and or he had his face covered with a T shirt or some kind of mask to keep them from seeing what he looked like. And he would tell them throughout, do not try to look at my face or I'll kill you. Don't look at my face.

[David Shoots]

But this woman who was just torn from her sleep and ambushed in the safety of her own bedroom was quick thinking. And she was clever.

[Dave Simmons]

She said, I can't see. I can't see my glasses over here on the nightstand. I'm blind as a bat.

[David Shoots]

And her glasses were on the nightstand, but they were reading glasses. In reality, she was nearsighted. Ed could see him just fine. She continued the ruse by blinking her eyes repeatedly and peering around the room as if she couldn't see clearly. It worked. He never bothered to cover her face.

[Dave Simmons]

Or his he didn't realize that she.

[David Shoots]

Had seen him for as long as 15 minutes. She stared at the man raping her and burned his face into her memory. When he was done, he tied her up and fled with her purse. She stayed still until she heard his car drive off, then got herself free. Within hours, she was sitting with a police sketch artist recreating an image of the pillowcase rapist. In the days after the February 11th attack, printing companies across Dade and Broward counties were pumping out wanted posters by the thousands. They displayed the black and white charcoal sketch of the suspect along with a description. He is a white male of American origin with no accent, in his mid-20s to early 30s. He is 5 foot 8 to 6ft tall and 180 to 185 pounds, which is with a medium to athletic build. He has medium length wavy brown hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. His skin is fair and possibly suntanned and he has acne on his upper back. He wears a size 10 or 10.5 shoe. To be honest, there were very few unique characteristics. Many men matched the description, but still, it was the most detailed image they had yet. And in the first week, more than 1 million flyers were printed and distributed at grocery store checkout counters throughout South Florida.

[Cammy Floyd]

From the sketch alone, police have received more than 400 calls. Officers assigned to a special task force like these, auto theft detectives are actively pursuing about 200 leads, but they weren't done yet.

[David Shoots]

Determined to turn up the pressure, investigators commissioned a local sculptor to turn the two dimensional sketch into a three dimensional bust of the rapist's head.

[Cammy Floyd]

Miami artist Tony Lopez has been working on the sculpture for weeks. Today it was unveiled a life sized three dimensional replica of South Florida's most wanted criminal. Police say they don't want to immortalize him, they just want to catch him.

[David Shoots]

It's going to be easier for people.

[Dave Simmons]

To identify something that looks like a person rather than looks like a drawing of a person. So I would hope that the leads that we have from this might be better leads than we had from the sketch.

[David Shoots]

Police at the time called it the most ambitious crime stopping effort in South Florida history. If you lived in the area and had never before heard of the pillowcase rapist, you almost certainly had. Now.

[Anna Richardson]

The town of AGDA in France is famous for sun, sand, sea and sex. But lately, life on the coast has taken a strange turn. The town's mayor, a respected pillar of the community, has been arrested for corruption. His wife claims he's been bewitched by a beautiful clairvoyant Then there's the mysterious phone calls that local people have been getting.

[Dave Simmons]

I am the Archangel Michael.

[Anna Richardson]

The whole town has been thrown into.

[Leo Chic]

Chaos as the mayor is unable to carry out his duties.

[David Shoots]

I would like to address you.

[Leo Chic]

All legal proceedings have been initiated.

[Anna Richardson]

Join me, Anna Richardson and journalist Leo Chic for the mystic and the Mayor as we investigate a story of power, corruption and magic. Binge all episodes of the mystic and the Mayor exclusively and ad free right now on Wondery. Start your free trial in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the Wondery app.

[Mike Corey]

Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast Against the Odds. And in each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who live to tell the tale. And sometimes we get to hear from survivors themselves in their own words on our next season. It's May 2023. Competitive swimmer Allie Truitt has just graduated from Yale and completed her first marathon. But a few days after graduation, Allie is snorkeling in the Caribbean when suddenly she's attacked by a shark and and finds herself in a fight for her life. Ally's epic journey to reclaim her love of the water pushes her further than she could have ever imagined, all the way to the Paris Paralympics. Follow against the odds on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge the entire season ad free right now only on Wondery.

[Dave Simmons]

Plus.

[Mike Corey]

Start your free trial in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

[David Shoots]

Today, the hunt for the Pillowcase rapist was at a make or break moment. With so much publicity, women were being more careful and millions had seen the suspect sketch. There was a good chance somebody would recognize him. It would be more difficult than ever for him to continue getting away with his attacks.

[Cammy Floyd]

Police say they expect the recent publicity will make him more cautious, but they don't believe it'll stop him. Unfortunately, they say they don't know where to expect him to strike next, but they're hoping they'll catch him before he has any further opportunities.

[David Shoots]

Detective Simmons and his team were closing the circle.

[Dave Simmons]

We sent victim questionnaires out to all of our victims that were 20 something pages in length, asking where they got their hair done, where they got their everything, to see if there was a common denominator among the victims that would take us to the suspect.

[David Shoots]

No connections surfaced.

[Dave Simmons]

We investigated all the viable leads that we had gotten. We had a hotline set up. Hundreds were phoned in and we categorized them by priority and weight that we gave them and started with the highest Priority first, the ones that really looked promising to the ones that were just, oh, he looked a little bit like that composite.

[David Shoots]

Those efforts did lead to the capture of other criminals across South Florida. Burglars, robbers, even other rapists. But each time one was brought in, blood tests quickly eliminated him as a pillowcase rapist. So investigators focused on the locations of the rapes, canvassing a specific area south of the city of Miami. Although suspected attacks had happened across a huge swath of South Florida, the vast majority took place in this very small radius of about a dozen square miles.

[Dave Simmons]

My theory back then that this SOB lives close by because he's telling these victims, give me five minutes to get, get away and don't. Don't call the police for five minutes or I'll be outside and come back and kill you. And he was in bed by the time the victims got themselves untied and got to a telephone. If he didn't cut the lines and call the police, police response times, maybe 10 minutes or so, five minutes if you're lucky, then he's long gone by then. We thought if you plotted the cases that we had through blood work that we knew was him, and there are a good 15, 20, 25 of them that we knew were him, and they were all close to Sunset in that area of South Miami, and Carl Gables. So we figured he lived somewhere off but didn't know who he was or what he did for a living.

[David Shoots]

But what they did know was that serial rapists are driven by their compulsions. Maybe it's the need to assert power over women or an uncontrollable rage over something that happened in his past, or the thrill of evading capture. Time after time, investigators believed it was just a matter of time before he struck again.

[Dave Simmons]

Somebody like him just doesn't stop cold turkey.

[David Shoots]

Why do you say that?

[Dave Simmons]

They just don't. Not somebody that's done this many. He's driven by his actions. And unless something stops him cold, like a jail sentence or an accident where he's incapacitated, where he can't get around, he's going to keep going until he's finally caught.

[David Shoots]

And in the media, that's exactly what officials were telling the public. It seemed to just about everybody that it was only a matter of time before the pillowcase rapist struck again.

[Dave Simmons]

I think that he's totally enjoying the publicity. I think he's totally enjoying his sense of power that this gives him.

[David Shoots]

And I don't think he'll stop. But weeks passed, then months. By the spring of 1987. It had been more than a year since the rape that led to the sketch, the last suspected attack of the pillowcase rapist. All the leads had dried up, and the frustration among investigators was building. Some even began questioning just how many of the 44 rapes could be definitively linked to one man.

[Alina Urquhart]

I've been told the case of the pillowcase rapist has been causing shouting matches here at the metro Dade police department. Police have compared footprint, fingerprint and semen evidence and have not yet determined they.

[Cammy Floyd]

All came from one man.

[David Shoots]

The investigative tools at the time were limited. There certainly was no DNA testing. The one significant piece of forensic evidence was the suspect's unique blood subtype, which was gleaned from analyzing semen found at the crime scenes or from rape kits. But the suspect only left that evidence in about half of the reported cases. And blood subtyping could only be used with certainty to eliminate potential suspects. The truth is, nobody could be completely sure that all the rapes were linked. But all agreed that no matter how many rapes he had committed, the pillowcase rapist had had to be taken off the streets. So investigators kept hunting. Even as they braced for another long south Florida summer of attacks. They couldn't seem to stop. But summer came and went. Then fall, then winter. By the spring of 1987, more than a year had passed without a single attack by the pillowcase rapist. And there was nowhere else for the investigation to go. So in April, police officials made the decision to shut down the special pillowcase rapist task force.

[Dave Simmons]

We didn't get any more cases, so we thought there's a good chance we chased him away from the jurisdiction and he's gone to another state, gone to another county, and we might never, ever know what happened to him.

[David Shoots]

The investigation was reduced to four full time detectives led by Dave Simmons. And by the end of 1987, even Simmons had to move on.

[Dave Simmons]

I got back to work with my detectives and trying to solve current cases as they would come in with the idea they all knew this case backward and forward as I did. If anything came in that sounded like him, let me know right away and I'd respond right now. It never came. I thought, either this guy is in jail for something unrelated that he got a lot of time for, and he never opened his mouth and told a fellow inmate what he had done, which is how we get a lot of tips from jails, or he was killed in a car accident. We would never know what happened to the guy.

[David Shoots]

For Dave Simmons, a detective used to putting violent criminals behind bars. Leaving this one unsolved was devastating.

[Dave Simmons]

Oh goodness, it was. It's hard to describe, but I can only, only say that it was a big disappointment that we weren't able to solve the case, given the resources that we had and the amount of manpower that we threw at it. And we had task forces and we kept. I kept kicking myself. What did we miss? What did I do wrong? What have we overlooked? It really haunted me. After I retired. It was the only big case that I left open. And we always wondered, I wondered what became of them. Because rapists don't generally just stop abruptly.

[David Shoots]

It seemed the pillowcase rapist had. But as it turned out, he had not gone very far.

[Alina Urquhart]

It's all a lighthearted nightmare on our podcast Morbid we're your hosts. I'm Alina Urquhart. And I'm Ash Kelly. And our show is part true crime, part spooky and part comedy. The stories we cover are well researched. Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group with a touch of humor. Shout out to her. Shout out to all my therapists. Throughout the years, there's been like eight of them. A dash of sarcasm and just garnished a bit with a little bit of cursing. That motherf er is not real. And if you're a weirdo like us and love to cozy up to a creepy tale of the paranormal, or you love to hop in the Way Back machine and dissect the details of some of history's most notorious crimes, you should tune in to our podcast Morbid. Follow Morbid on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to episodes early and ad free by joining Wondery and the Wondery App or on Apple Podcasts.

[Ash Kelly]

Before the Internet ruled our lives, AOL brought America Online with email and Instant messenger. By 2000, AOL was so powerful it bought media giant Time Warner. This was a deal that was supposed to bring us into the future, revolutionize media. But instead it became one of the messiest corporate disasters in history. So what went wrong? The dot com crash? Culture clashes? Or something deeper? Business wars gives you a front row seat to the biggest moments in business and how they shape our world. Because when your flight perks disappear, your favorite restaurant chain goes bankrupt, or new tech threatens to reshape everything overnight, you can bet there's a deeper story behind the headlines. Make sure to follow Business wars on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcast and you can binge all episodes of Business. The AOL Time Warner disaster, early and ad free right now on Wondery.

[David Shoots]

Over the years, then decades, the case of the Pillowcase Rapist faded from the headlines. Detective Dave Simmons retired in 2005 after more than 30 years with the Miami Dade Police Department. And the case that was once the biggest of his career grew stale on cold case shelves until 2017, when the dusty old files caught the attention of an ambitious cold case detective in Broward county named Cammy Floyd.

[Leo Chic]

So originally, I was working on a cold case initiative that we were doing for sex crimes in the criminal investigations division.

[David Shoots]

Floyd is a detective sergeant with the Broward County Sheriff's Office. Broward is Miami Dade County's neighbor to the north, and several rapes tied to the pillowcase Rapist had happened there in the 1980s. Today, Sgt. Floyd works in the crime scene unit, but in 2017, she was in a special victims unit and digging into unsolved cases. DNA technology was advancing fast and snagging violent criminals for things they did years ago. That's what Sergeant Floyd wanted to do.

[Leo Chic]

I was really intrigued about the new processes that are used to collect this DNA and how our lab is able to identify to the trillions that this is a match in DNA. And it sparked my interest, and it's why I'm here, because I know that there's both families of homicide victims and female victims, male victims out there that were raped. And they want closure, and they want to know, well, why isn't my case being solved? And I want to solve them.

[David Shoots]

There's no shortage of cold cases in South Florida, but one in particular stuck with Sergeant Floyd.

[Leo Chic]

I ran across an article on the Pillowcase Rapist that talked about multiple cases that happened not only in Miami Dade, but also Broward County. It sparked my interest, number one, that there were so many unsolved cases, and this wasn't a sex crime where someone was victimized outside of their home. It was occurring while they were sleeping, where they felt secure, alone in their homes. And I just felt it was so egregious that. That it needed to be solved.

[David Shoots]

So she began to dig deeper into the case files.

[Leo Chic]

In order to prosecute, I had to have a victim name, what evidence was collected back in the 80s. And then I was seeing if we still had some of that evidence in our custody so it could be retested. We had to have DNA. All these cold cases, DNA is what's solving them these days. And back in the 80s, we didn't have DNA technology and we, we didn't have crime scene units who were able to process things the way our crime scene unit does. So we have hundreds of cold case homicides that are being solved just due to DNA. Our crime scene unit will look at it, we'll reprocess it, we'll get a nice DNA sample that goes to our DNA lab and they're able to make identifications off of it. And because of technology, we're solving more crimes than we thought we would have been able to in the past.

[David Shoots]

Still, Sergeant Floyd had a mountain of a task. These were old cases, and a lot can happen over the years. People age, memories fade, files disappear.

[Leo Chic]

We were having a very difficult time locating the original police reports and statements that were taken. It took months. And I had a detective who was assigned to the case with me, Detective Tim Metz. He spent relentless hours digging through boxes and piecing these cases back together. And in some circumstances, we had to retake statements from these victims and make them relive the horrific event all over again so that we had a fresh statement. Because these cases were so old, you couldn't read the original police report. Some of the statements, they were on cassette tapes, and we had a difficult time making them digital so we could actually hear what they were saying.

[David Shoots]

And storing DNA evidence, that can be a challenge even in new cases.

[Leo Chic]

Unfortunately, a lot of evidence can be damaged and lost over the years. Either it's not sufficient enough to get DNA out of it. We had some flooding issues in one of our buildings. It damaged hundreds of cases back in the 80s. But we were able to locate some specimens that were in a freezer here in our DNA lab. And when I learned that we had frozen specimens, I knew I had to locate the rest of these cases.

[David Shoots]

She found four of them in Broward County. The victims were still alive. The cases were available, and the frozen samples contained DNA. Could Sergeant Floyd's team get the same success that investigators got on the other side of the country? In that same same year, that case made national news and became the talk of the true crime town. Advances in DNA science had led to the identity of the infamous Golden State Killer, also known as the East Area Rapist. But in that case, matches were found in genetic genealogy databases that led investigators to charge Joseph James DeAngelo. But no such DNA matches were found in the samples Sergeant Floyd got from the pillowcase rapes files. She needed what Detective Dave Simmons and everyone who had investigated this case needed from the start. A little luck. It arrived on Labor Day weekend 2019, in a most unexpected way about 180 miles north of Miami, a young man kicked in the door to his girlfriend's house during an argument that got out of control. And that one act, one so seemingly inconsequential, would make Sergeant Floyd's efforts worth every minute. Was this, at long last, the big break? It's just afternoon on Sunday, September 1, 2019. A young couple is arguing in the front yard of a small home in Melbourne on Florida's central east coast. It's a scorcher of a day, over 90 degrees under blistering sunshine. The two were arguing as they pulled into the driveway of the woman's home. She was frightened and hurried toward the back of her house, and her boyfriend chased her down. Their argument led became physical. That's what she told police. The woman rushed into her house and locked the door. He threatened her through the door and threw text messages to her phone. When she didn't let him in, he tried breaking in. So she called 911, and police arrested her boyfriend as he tried to drive away. Robert J. Koehler was charged with criminal mischief and domestic violence misdemeanors. But he was also charged with attempted burglary since he tried to kick in the door. That's a felony. And although the charges were later dropped, in the state of Florida, just being charged with a felony means a sample of your DNA is taken and entered into a statewide database. Those samples are compared with DNA from thousands of unsolved cases. And a stunning hit. It came back on Kohler's DNA. It matched a sample taken from a rape that happened in 1983. It was one of the pillowcase rapes, an attack we told you about in episode three. It happened that December in the South Miami neighborhood of Fontainebleau. But how is that possible? Kohler was 28 years old. He hadn't been born at the time of the pillowcase rapes. For forensic investigators, the results could only mean one the DNA of the suspected pillowcase rapist belonged to his father, Robert Eugene Kohler. It turns out he was living just a few miles up the road in the city of Palmer Bay. And that's where the final chapter of this story begins.

[Robert J. Koehler]

I remember coming from the bedroom to the front window and looking out and just littered the entire street, just littered with every cop car you can think of.

[Dave Simmons]

He was off the wall, making accusations that were pretty crazy. The gun was put to my head, and then he. I heard. I felt the cocking of the mechanism with the gun right here to my temple.

[Robert J. Koehler]

I think he was aware that my daughter was on the phone with a plate, you know, so he might have ended up hurting me. He always wanted everyone to think that he was smarter than them. Why the would I want to rape somebody? And let me tell you something to your ear, since I'm not in your face. If I was going to spend the time to risk my life to do something stupid, heinous like that, you think I would spend only five minutes with a woman? I would have her for the night, baby, and do everything I want to do to somebody. Those days that he would be gone, you know, where was he? Was he committing another crime? Has he done worse crimes than rape?

[Alina Urquhart]

The police found what appeared to be.

[Cammy Floyd]

For lack of a better term, a dungeon in progress that was very disturbing for the investigators to see.

[Robert J. Koehler]

Who knew that we lived next to the devil?

[David Shoots]

That's on the next episode of Felonious Florida Foreign thank you for listening to this episode of Felonious Florida. Please support the show by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and following us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can listen to more episodes on the Wondery app [e-mail] or wherever you listen to podcasts. This season was reported, written and produced by me, David Shoots editing by Robin Webb and Gretchen Day Bryant sound design and production by Sean Pitts Web design by Carbell Multimedia with illustrations by John DeLuca soundtrack by DeWolfe Music sound clips courtesy of the Miami Dade Police Department and the Wolfson Archives at Miami Dade College. Special thanks to retired Detective sergeant Dave Simmons for his assistance with our reporting. This show is a production of the South Florida Sun Sentinel, a division of Tribune Publishing. Felonious Florida was created by Lisa Arthur and Juan Ortega. Follow Felonious Florida Season 4 in the Wondery app. Follow. You can binge the entire series early and ad free right now by joining Wondery and the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

[Lindsey Graham]

In 1992, federal agents surrounded a remote cabin in the mountains of Idaho. It belonged to Randy Weaver, a Christian survivalist with links to the far right. Weaver was wanted on a minor weapons charge, but a series of blunders and misunderstandings turned the situation into an armed and deadly standoff. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondry show American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US History. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, and corporate fraud. In our latest series, a family of religious fanatics moves to Ruby Ridge in northern Idaho to wait out the apocalypse. But their paranoia and suspicion of authority lead to a confrontation with federal law enforcement and their own personal Armageddon. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad free and be the first to binge newest seasons only on Wondery Plus. You can join Wondery plus in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today.