A man who South Florida authorities believe is a serial rapist who avoided capture for decades took the stand Monday in his own defense at his sexual assault trial.
Robert Koehler, now 63, told a bizarre story as he testified at his trial for the 1983 case.
Koehler said he was kidnapped, drugged and tortured by people who he claims were crooked police officers.
He said the kidnappers planted a tracking device in his arm, killed a man and woman in front of him, and threatened him with being framed for the murder of his family.
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Koehler said he woke up naked and strapped to a chair with a hood over his head. He said the hood was lifted and a 4 to 6-year-old girl was in front of him, duct-taped to a chair and holding a doll.
"When they lifted that hood I immediately started to scream. Because I saw what they did to me and I saw what was in front of me. This steel cage that kept my arm from moving in any position whatsoever, was strapped back down, had a gun on it with my finger on the trigger. This part was sealed shut where I could not take my hand off that handle," he testified. "There was no way to move anything, there was no way to pull out of it, I kept pushing my index finger as far as I could forward into the trigger part of the gun. It was a big gun, it was aimed right at this poor little girl's body, chest."
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He claimed one of the kidnappers was shocking him as they ordered him to shoot the girl.
"I screamed and I kept getting shocked, I couldn't say anything," Koehler said. "He said 'pull the trigger' and I didn't say a word and I wouldn't do anything. One more time, 'pull the trigger and I wouldn't pull the trigger and I felt my finger twitching, moving and I felt this and next thing you know it jerked, I shot the girl and killed the girl, that little girl and the doll fell right out of her hand."
Koehler claimed police told him they needed someone to be a serial rapist so they could justify obtaining more funds for police budgets. He said they used some type of device to extract bodily fluid out of him — evidence that could be planted crime scenes.
Koehler is suspected of being the "pillowcase rapist," a man authorities said is responsible for numerous sexual assaults of women in South Florida during the 1980s.
The "pillowcase rapist" was so named because he used a pillowcase or other fabric to cover the faces of his victims, usually after he broke into an apartment or town home. The assaults were often committed at knifepoint, authorities said.
The trial that began last week involves only one case, the December 1983 rape of a then-25-year-old woman who was living on the ground floor of an apartment building near Miami International Airport.
Authorities said the case had gone cold until advancements in DNA testing led them to Koehler.
According to an arrest warrant, investigators obtained a DNA sample from Koehler's son following an unrelated arrest. That sample was linked to one of the assaults, leading detectives to Brevard County where they followed Koehler to obtain DNA samples from objects he touched.
Koehler was eventually arrested in January 2020 after detectives found a match.
Prosecutors rested their case Friday, after telling jurors that the odds of someone other than Koehler being the source of that DNA was nearly 90-billion-to-one — later set at 16.55 octillion to one through further testing.
It turned out Koehler was convicted in a 1990 rape in Palm Beach County and sentenced to probation, which he later violated and served 120 days in jail.
But that case was never linked to the series of assaults in Miami and elsewhere in South Florida. Authorities said that was mainly because DNA samples were not yet mandatory.
More than two years after his arrest in the Miami-Dade case, the Broward Sheriff's Office announced Koehler would be charged in at least six sexual assault cases in the county.
In convicted, Koehler faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.
