Coe faces day of reckoning

The latest legal fight for South Hill rapist Kevin Coe starts today.

State prosecutors will try to convince Spokane County Superior Court Judge Kathleen O’Connor that they have enough evidence to justify a civil trial that could keep Coe locked away for life.

Coe, 59, spent the past 25 years in prison and was only nine days away from release on Aug. 30 when state Attorney General Rob McKenna announced the state’s effort to civilly commit Coe as a sexually violent predator.

Today, the only witness is expected to be forensic psychologist Dr. Amy Phenix, who determined through reading his conviction and police reports that Coe suffers from four mental abnormalities that cause him to have anti-social personality disorders.

Those abnormalities, according to Phenix’s report, tend to make Coe aroused by forced sexual contact, urine and feces and exposing himself to strangers.

“She concludes that these conditions cause Coe serious difficulty controlling his behavior and predispose him to commit predatory acts of sexual violence,” Assistant Attorney General Malcolm Ross wrote in court documents.

Tim Trageser, who along with John Rodgers is defending Coe, said he is calling Phenix as his only witness to question her report.

“The state is relying entirely on her report,” Trageser said. Prosecutors “are not going to call anybody, including Mr. Coe.”

Ross confirmed Trageser’s prediction. However, he and Assistant Attorney General Todd Bowers did succeed last week in convincing O’Connor to allow them to call Coe as a rebuttal witness if needed.

Trageser “expects to ask questions of Dr. Phenix for two to three hours,” Ross said of the probable cause hearing. “The judge said she would probably deliberate overnight and give her decision on Tuesday morning.”

Spokane police attributed 43 sexual attacks to Coe between 1978 and 1981.

Coe was charged with six rapes in 1981 and convicted of four. However, only one rape conviction was upheld after appeals because investigators had used hypnosis to interview witnesses and victims.

“This is a mental health proceeding,” Trageser said. “It’s not a rehash of the alleged criminal activity, although certainly any of that alleged activity would be relevant to some degree. The goal, obviously, is to convince Judge O’Connor that probable cause does not exist” to proceed to a civil commitment trial.

If the state succeeds, law mandates that Coe can have a civil commitment trial within 45 days. However, Ross said he and Bowers are expected to ask O’Connor to set the trial for sometime next summer or fall, depending on O’Connor’s schedule.

Civil commitment trials typically take one to two weeks, Ross said.

“It will be longer in this case, of course,” he said. “I think there is going to be a lot more witnesses in this case.”

If the state is successful, Coe would be sent to a secure mental health facility operated by the state Department of Social and Health Services on McNeil Island in Pierce County.

Coe would be ordered to remain there until “his underlying mental condition has so changed that he is safe to be unconditionally released into the community,” McKenna said in an earlier interview.

In an interview in May with The Spokesman-Review, Coe claimed he was trying to help police nab the real South Hill rapist by following bus routes as part of a civic promotion business he had created with his father called Spokane Metro Growth.

“If I hadn’t been a pro-growth activist, I would have never shown an interest in the South Hill rapist case; I would not have followed any buses,” Coe said. That’s when Spokane police officials “decided to frame, smear and railroad an innocent man.”

After Coe’s arrest, his father, Gordon Coe, retired from his job in 1981 as managing editor of Spokane’s afternoon paper at the time, the Spokane Daily Chronicle.

His mother, Ruth Coe, later was convicted of trying to hire an undercover police officer to kill then-Spokane County Prosecutor Donald Brockett and Superior Court Judge George Shields, who had presided over the first rape trial. Both Coe parents and Shields have since died.