A Delco judge will decide the fate of an accused serial rapist who police say targeted women in Chester

DeJohn Lee terrorized women in Chester, sexually assaulting four of them in a nearly identical manner, Assistant District Attorney Danielle Gallaher said Thursday in Delaware County Court.

“This case is about a man who raped and robbed women at gunpoint every chance he could get,” Gallaher said in her closing arguments at the end of Lee’s three-day bench trial. “He had it down to a science, and he had a clear modus operandi.”

It was, she said, his “signature crime.”

Lee, 27, has been charged with rape, aggravated assault, robbery, and related crimes for allegedly targeting four women as they walked alone in Chester between September 2016 and January 2017. His fate is now in the hands of Delaware County Court Judge James Bradley, who said Thursday that he will render his verdict on Oct. 24 after considering the evidence presented to him this week.

Lee’s attorneys, Sherri Eyer and Scott Galloway, said he had no involvement in the crimes and disputed prosecutors’ theory of the case, which they said was rife with reasonable doubt.

Eyer challenged the accuracy of the accounts given by women who said Lee attacked them, pointing out inconsistencies between what they initially told police and what they later said in court.

She questioned whether some of the women had been able to positively identify Lee. They testified that they were attacked from behind, and that, Eyer said, meant they could not have seen his face during an assault.

Gallaher countered that the charges against Lee were supported by a significant amount of evidence, including that his DNA was found on a rape kit taken from his first victim. And, she said, he confessed to three of the four assaults.

Lee’s attorneys cast doubt on the confession, which they said was coerced by investigators intent on pinning the crimes on him.

Gallaher pointed out that Lee’s statement to police matched the victims’ accounts and included details that officers did not know and could not have supplied.

In each incident, Lee pulled the women into a secluded area under threats of shooting them, robbed them of their phones and money, and then sexually assaulted them, according to evidence presented during the trial.

Prosecutors said he raped three of the women, and sexually assaulted the fourth after she fought back and told him she had HIV.

After the attacks, Lee told the women to count to a specific number to give him time to flee the scene, Gallaher said. He also took steps to distance himself from the crimes, she said, including discarding one of the women’s belts that he said had his fingerprints on it.

Lee was arrested in January 2017, when a woman who said he attacked her the previous month recognized him at a ShopRite store in Eddystone. The two had worked together briefly, she said, and he had once given her his phone number and offered to sell her marijuana.

When police took Lee into custody at the ShopRite, he was in possession of a .22-caliber Ruger handgun that had been reported stolen in 2014, and a cell phone that one of the victims told police had been taken by her rapist.

On that phone, Gallaher said, were pictures of Lee wearing an outfit similar to the clothing that some of the victims said their attacker had worn.

In court, another woman who said Lee assaulted her testified that she knew him from school and the neighborhood, and recognized his voice during the assault. A third victim, whom prosecutors say he attacked in December 2016, later picked him out of a photo array provided by police.

Aside from the four cases before Judge Bradley, Lee is also charged in connection with five other rapes that investigators say occurred around the same time period in Chester. Those cases are pending.