Pillowcase POS

 So it was December of 1983, and Mike was over my apartment studying for our 1L Finals. I had begun dating Wifey, but she had broken up with me since I told her I planned to spend the post Finals week off snowmobiling in Wisconsin with Mike and our friend Dave instead of hanging with her. She had a point!

She had moved into an apartment on Edgewater Drive with her friend Carole -- they met when Carole was Wifey's boss at an early post college job. Carole was thin and blonde and Midwestern nice and stoic. Wifey had gone out with friends, and returned to find cop cars and detectives in her apartment. Carole had been raped by a notorious criminal known as the "Pillowcase Rapist."

The creep was big news then -- his victims spanned South Dade to Pompano Beach. They tended to be blonde professional women. He would enter their apartments through an open sliding glass door, cover his face with a shirt or pillowcase, and rape them at knifepoint. Thankfully none of the victims were killed or beaten up -- the violation was more than enough for this sicko.

Wifey called me, in tears. Mike and I drove over to the apartment. The lead detective was there -- we met. He was Dave Simmons. Carole was composed as usual -- they took her to the hospital for the awful "rape kit." She was going to spend the night at her parents' up in Broward. Mike and I drove Wifey to her parents' in Kendall. Wifey moved back to her parents' house afterwards -- Carole never left. As I said, she was stoic.

She moved on with her life. There was a civil suit against the apartment -- the night of the crime, the security guard was off duty. She took her settlement and applied to law school -- she moved to East Lansing to attend Cooley Law. I visited her there in the 90s when I was on a deposition in that gray city.

I don't think Carole ever practiced law. She moved back to Miami, and we were neighbors on Brickell after Hurricane Andrew. But she and Wifey grew apart, and lost touch. I reconnected a few years ago on FaceBook -- she was now managing Broken Sound CC up in Boca. I guess she's probably 70 now.

The investigation into the creep went cold. I met Dave Simmons years later through a mutual friend, Pat. Pat had left Metro Dade Police and was a lawyer. He sent us cases. We were out to drinks, and he introduced us to "Spiffy," his detective friend, so nicknamed because he was a sharp dresser. It was Dave -- and we talked about the case. He assumed, along with most of his colleagues, that the rapist had either died or moved away. The attacks stopped in the early 90s, and the task force to find him had disbanded.

But technology changed -- that little thing called DNA. A few years ago, there was a match with a convicted sex offender from Palm Bay, Florida. They surveilled him, and got a sample from a wipe he had thrown away. He was the piece of shit! The DNA linked him to 25 rapes in Miami Dade and Broward!

Well, yesterday his trial of the first victim started in Miami Dade Circuit Court. They wheeled him in -- he suffers from some kind of disability now. He has a young public defender, whose defense is that the whole thing was a conspiracy -- in the 80s, corrupt cops tortured him and extracted semen, to be able to set him up wrongfully for these crimes. I don't think she explained why they waited 4 decades!

I get it. When your client is SO scientifically guilty, you might as well make stuff up that's wild -- maybe the argument will stick like fresh manure thrown against a wall.

The creep will get convicted. My hope is that he goes to prison in a wheelchair, and each and every day gets knocked out of it -- to the point it becomes comical, like a Wayan Brothers routine. Let him lie helpless on a feces and urine covered prison floor each day until the guards get around to lifting him up. That seems like an appropriate punishment for someone who victimized so many women.

I assume Carole knows about the arrest. We're no longer close enough for me to ask her about it -- just the occasional FaceBook (tm) comment.

But man -- that DNA!!! It's remarkable how it can bring closure to crime victims decades and decades later.

Here's to the Pillowcase rapist sleeping without pillowcases -- in a hellish existence he more than deserves.