[music playing]
NARRATOR: A solitary man walks his dog along the footpath.
Up ahead, a shadow slips across the path
and disappears under a footbridge.
Man and dog pick up the pace and come up on the bridge.
Close by lies the body of a young Hispanic girl.
Detective Garry Dugan is one of the first to arrive on scene.
Her hands were at her side.
And we couldn't quite tell exactly what
had killed her at that time.
NARRATOR: An ambulance tech at the scene
leans in to inspect the girl's body and lifts her sweater.
GARRY DUGAN: There was a stab wound
in the center of her chest.
And further examination revealed that she
had a ligature around her neck.
And there was hardly any blood coming from the stab wound.
NARRATOR: The lack of blood tells Dugan
he is most likely looking at a body dump
and that his Jane Doe was actually
killed in another location.
GARRY DUGAN: I guess we were there probably
about 45 minutes, when we heard that there was
a female at the 23rd precinct reporting
that her daughter was missing.
NARRATOR: The girl in question is Paola Illera, a 13-year-old
who left school earlier that day and had
not been heard from for hours.
Dugan and his partner, Maria Bertini,
grab a photo of the victim and head to East River landing.
Inside an apartment, they find a family
of nine, who confirmed what detectives already suspect.
The body under the bridge is Paola Illera.
Illera's body is transported to the medical examiner's office
for an official autopsy.
The victim suffered three stab wounds to the chest
and was also strangled.
Bruising on the pelvic area indicates
a possible sexual assault, most likely with a blunt instrument.
No semen is recovered from the victim's body.
A single pubic hair, however, is collected.
[sirens]
5:00 PM on September 10.
A fire truck rumbles down Third Avenue.
The air is hot and thick as smoke, then
fire, peeks out from the rooftop landing of a Harlem high rise.
The engine turns into the George Washington Housing Complex.
Firefighters douse the blaze in a matter of minutes.
As the smoke clears, they realize what they thought
was a rubbish fire is actually a corpse doused in gasoline
and set on fire.
In other words, murdered.
In a matter of moments, a team of New York detectives
arrives on scene.
A response from a Bronx precinct
who had a missing person report of a young woman
by the name of Johalis Castro.
NARRATOR: Castro's family IDs the victim's jewelry.
And dental records taken from the body
are matched to that of Johalis Castro.
Detectives then begin tracking Johalis's movements
on the day of her murder.
They pull phone records and find a series of calls
from Johalis's home in the Bronx to a Cynthia Kee in Manhattan's
East Harlem neighborhood.
SCOTT WAGNER: I spoke to Miss Kee on the phone.
I called up, identified myself.
I asked her if she knew this person.
She said, no, she says, but I have
a son who is about that age.
Maybe he might know her.
So I asked her what her son's name was.
And she told me his name was Arohn Malik Kee.
And she said he wasn't home at the time.
So I left her my name and number.
And I said, do me a favor.
When he comes in, have him call me.
NARRATOR: While Wagner awaits a phone call from Arohn Kee,
he runs his name for any criminal history
and discovers Kee had spent time in a correctional facility
upstate for robbery.
The next day, he calls Detective Wagner
and agrees to come in for a sit-down interview.
SCOTT WAGNER: When we came in, one
of the first remarks that he made
was something to the effect of, wow.
That's Johalis?
What a damn shame.
Look how pretty she was.
And basically, that's where we started.
NARRATOR: With no physical evidence
linking Kee to the crime, Wagner's hands are tied.
Johalis Castro, like Paola Illera before her,
is dropped into the cold files.
They both stay that way for one more year
until another girl meets Arohn Kee
and quickly finds herself dead.
It's 8:30 on a Tuesday morning, and business as usual
in the Taft Housing Projects.
The elevators are not working, and
a resident on the 16th floor begins
the long trek down stairs.
In the stairwell of the 15th floor,
she stumbles across a woman lying
in the middle of the landing.
At first, the resident thinks the woman is asleep.
Then she discovers the woman is dead.
Detectives Mike Ulacco and Scott Wagner respond to the scene.
At the time we found her, we weren't sure exactly
what had happened to her.
We got the job as investigated DOA.
SCOTT WAGNER: She was nude underneath the shirt
that was covering her, covering her almost like a shroud.
It was like it was placed over her face and upper body.
But she was nude underneath, no bra, no shirt.
NARRATOR: The body is transferred
to the medical examiner's office for autopsy, where she is
identified as 18-year-old Rashida Washington,
a local resident who disappeared the previous night
while walking home.
The ME determines the cause of death
to be asphyxiation due to compression
of the chest and neck.
She also notes that Washington was sexually assaulted.
A semen sample is detected and lifted from Washington's body.
Detectives begin looking for likely sources of the semen,
starting with the victim's boyfriend.
ROBERT MOONEY: We interviewed her boyfriend.
We interviewed a lot of people.
But there was nobody that was really sticking
out as a viable suspect.
NARRATOR: Six months into the investigation, the case
has no solid leads and seems destined for the cold files,
when the science of DNA brings the case into focus
and the pieces of murder begin to fall into place.
Inside the New York City Medical Examiner's office,
forensic scientist Karen Dooling works on evidence kits
from unsolved homicides.
In January of 1999, she runs semen collected from Rashida
Washington's murder into the city's local database
and registers a hit--
not to a known offender, but to another unsolved case, a rape
victim, one out of East Harlem, ID'd in the system
only as Rape Victim One.
KAREN DOOLING: Case from rape victim one
was originally believed to be part of a different pattern.
And as it turned out, that case was not part of that rape
pattern, but had created a new pattern
with homicide victim Rashida Washington and this rape case.
NARRATOR: Soon, three other unsolved East Harlem rapes
are linked to the new pattern.
Investigators working the Washington homicide
now begin reviewing the rape cases
for any possible connection that may lead them to their killer.
ROBERT MOONEY: The sequence of violence
was almost always the same.
He would make the girls take off their clothing.
He would use an article of their clothing
as a gag and a blindfold.
There would be oral sodomy, anal sodomy, and vaginal rape.
And it would almost always progress in that order.
NARRATOR: Composite sketches of the suspect
are posted throughout East Harlem,
and leads begin to filter in.
The best of the lot come from the East River Landing Complex,
a clutch of buildings located less
than a mile from where Rashida Washington's body was found.
Residents there tell police they should talk to a man named Ace.
ROBERT MOONEY: As a result of that information,
we search the computers and find out
that a man by the name of Arohn Kee,
who also used the name Aaron Warford,
has the nickname of Ace and lives at 240 East 111th Street.
And when we get a picture of him, he very eerily
resembles the person in the sketch.
NARRATOR: Arohn Kee is arrested on a charge of petty larceny.
The detective grabs five Styrofoam
cups from Kee's holding cells.
Meanwhile, Kee is arraigned on the larceny charge
and let out on bail.
The DNA belongs to Arohn Kee or his cell
mate, who had access to the cups inside the jail cells.
The tentative link does not prove the case,
but comes awfully close.
A warrant is sworn out for Kee's arrest,
and detectives head out to get their suspect.
Samples of Kee's hair, blood, and saliva
are taken for further analysis.
The DNA matched to Washington, and
the rape cases is confirmed.
Kee's hair is then matched through mitochondrial DNA
testing to pubic hair left behind
at the scene of Paola Illera.
Kee is extradited back to New York, where a guilty verdict
seems all but certain.
Kee is sentenced to life in prison
for the murder of Rashida Washington,
25 years to life for the murders of Johalis
Castro and Paola Illera, and 475 years
in prison for the four rapes.