Spokane Still Coping With Coes
Some Spokane residents barely know who Ruth and Kevin Coe were, if they have heard of them at all. Once, they were the center of a sensation - a series of vicious crimes and bizarre trials that gripped and tore at this community in the same way the O.J. Simpson trial recently gripped the nation.
No longer. The recent death of Ruth Coe, at age 75, in a remote Nevada town, puts the tragic saga in perspective. Her son Kevin is negotiating middle age in prison, where he belongs. The judge and prosecutor who helped put him there, whose murder a vengeful Ruth Coe attempted to arrange, have retired. And what of the 40 or so women Kevin Coe stalked and raped? The frightened 14-year-old would be turning 30 about now. And the young woman who pointed at Coe in court, defiantly declaring that even as he battered her body she had resolved to “memorize his face,” has perhaps experienced the healing forgetfulness of time. And the satisfaction of knowing that her bravery protected others and put a predator behind bars.
Spokane itself has grown, and it has changed.
The provincial little city of the ‘70s, the city horrified by a home-grown psychopath, exists only in files of yellowed newspaper clippings, in a once-popular book that now collects dust on library shelves, and in faded memories. We have grown too familiar with crime.
Coe’s rapes forced Spokane to look crimes against women squarely in the eye. News media that once referred to rape only in euphemisms now portray it more accurately, as an act of hatred, not as a sexual matter from which good Puritans must shrink. Local police, which once made crude jokes about rape and ignored the evidence a serial rapist prowled the streets, have shown in subsequent cases an aggressive, professional response. Rape victims now find skilled and compassionate support groups, and sensitivity by those who perform necessary examinations.
But unfortunate stigmas remain for mental illness, one of Ruth Coe’s afflictions, a now-forgotten but obvious factor among the forces that led her prominent family to produce a sexual psychopath. Psychiatric treatment has improved since the years of her struggle. Yet access to successful care remains limited by superstition and short-sighted economics.
We still have things to learn. Sensations fade. But the obligation to imprison criminals and heal families that can produce them is a challenge as fresh as tomorrow’s headlines.
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board