Arohn Kee was born in 1973 and lived in East Harlem, New York. He was described as a computer expert, a self-styled rap artist and a convicted thief.
On January 24, 1991 he killed Paola Illera, who was thirteen. She was strangled and stabbed three times. On September 13, 1997 he killed Johalis Castro, nineteen, and burned her body beyond recognition; the prosecution said she may have been burned alive on a rooftop. On June 2, 1998 he raped, sodomised and killed Rasheeda Washington, who was eighteen. During the same years he raped and sodomised several teenage girls, four of whom, aged between thirteen and fifteen, were named in the charges. The New York press called him the East Harlem Rapist.
He was a suspect almost from the time of the first killing, and the reason he was not caught for eight years is the substance of the case. He repeatedly evaded attempts to obtain his DNA. On one occasion, held on a petty larceny charge, he was offered a cheek swab which officers told him was a tuberculosis test; at the point of signing the consent form he declined, saying he was a Jehovah's Witness and opposed to invasive medical procedures. One investigator said he had suddenly got religious.
He left New York and was traced to Miami. Surveillance officers moved on the Sun Hotel in the downtown area on February 19, 1999, and two SWAT teams cleared the rest of the building before finding him in a room on the top floor.
They also found a sixteen-year-old girl alive on the sixth floor. She had been missing since going out with him on a Valentine's Day date five days earlier.
His DNA was taken from a coffee cup he used while in custody after that arrest, and it matched material recovered from six of his seven victims.
He testified in his own defence, against his lawyers' advice, and gave two days of rambling evidence. He said he was innocent and that the police had framed him, and that they had arrested him because of the shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man killed by officers who fired forty-one shots at him on February 4, 1999, a fortnight before Kee's arrest. His explanation for his DNA being found on six of the seven was that the police had planted it and that it had something to do with genetic shuffling.
A New York jury convicted him on December 20, 2000 of the three murders and the four rapes, and he was sentenced on January 26, 2001 to three life sentences without the possibility of parole and a further four hundred years.
Two points on the record. The old figure of three or more is now given as what he was convicted of and what was attributed to him, separately. And the first victim's name appears as both Paola and Palo Illera.