On January 24, 1991, thirteen-year-old Paola Illera rang the doorbell of her family's apartment in East Harlem so that her mother would let her in. She never reached the door. Three hours later her body was found on the East River promenade ten blocks away. She had been raped and strangled and stabbed three times in the chest. Near her body police found a single pubic hair, and witnesses described a young man getting into the building's elevator with her just before she disappeared. The young man was identified. He lived in the same complex, was seventeen, and then went by his mother's surname, Warford. He told detectives he had stepped out of the elevator while Paola was still in it, and they let him go. He was Arohn Kee, and it would be eight years before the police had him again.
Kee was born in New York City on September 18, 1973, and spent his whole life in East Harlem. He had been arrested for robbery in 1990 without being convicted, and in the neighborhood he was known as a peeping tom who hid in stairwells to take photographs and video up the skirts of passing women. Some residents knew him as Ace.
In 1994 he took a fifteen-year-old girl from behind at knifepoint, forced her into an alley, blindfolded her and made her undress before he raped her. She described a muscular, clean-shaven Black man who told her she was lucky to be raped by such a handsome man. On September 13, 1997, he attacked nineteen-year-old Johalis Castro, whose family had come from the Dominican Republic, and smothered her, then set her body on fire while she may still have been breathing. It happened in the basement of her apartment building in the George Washington Houses, and a responding fire crew found her body. Phone calls from Castro led detectives to Kee's number. He said his girlfriend was Castro's friend and that the three of them had planned to go shopping that day; his girlfriend confirmed it, and although he gave no alibi he was let go again.
In April 1998 he raped a thirteen-year-old girl who, like the girl in 1994, remembered him repeating the same compliments to himself and telling her to be quiet and take it like a woman. On June 2, 1998, he raped and murdered eighteen-year-old Rasheeda Washington, who lived in the same complex as Paola Illera. After two more rapes, of a fifteen-year-old on September 25 and a fourteen-year-old on November 16, 1998, residents of East Harlem complained to the police about what looked like a connected series, and a semen match confirmed that it was.
Once the police put out wanted posters, an anonymous caller named a man called Ace who lived in Rasheeda Washington's building, and the description and the apartment floor fitted Kee. A baseball cap and hooded sweatshirt left at the September rape carried laundry tags from a dry cleaner his mother used. It was not enough to compel a DNA sample, so detectives watched him, and when he was caught stealing a hard drive from a computer store they had him in custody. He refused to give DNA or fingerprints, saying it was against his religion as a Jehovah's Witness. Detectives recovered a sample instead from trash he left behind in the jail. In January 1999 the DNA from Rasheeda Washington's body was linked to rapes in Manhattan in 1995 and 1996 and to Kee, and the police offered a reward of $11,000 for information leading to his arrest.
By then he had left New York for Florida, taking with him a sixteen-year-old girl he had groomed while tutoring her with homework, and the search for them spread along the East Coast. For weeks the two moved from hotel to hotel around Miami. On the evening of February 19, 1999, Miami police stormed his room. The girl was rescued and flown home. Kee was flown back to New York and charged with Rasheeda Washington's murder, with kidnapping and false imprisonment, and with the 1995 and 1996 rapes. Further DNA testing tied him to the killings of Paola Illera and Johalis Castro and to a rape in 1992.
His trial began in 2000 on all three murders and three other rapes, and he pleaded not guilty. He took the stand to insist he was being framed and that the DNA evidence was fake, although surviving victims identified him as their rapist. On December 16, 2000, the jury found him guilty on every count; other accounts give the date as December 20 and the rapes as four. When the verdict was read he shouted an obscenity at the room. At his sentencing in January 2001 he made a statement apologizing for how he had behaved at trial, and he was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life imprisonment.