In ‘Dateline’ interview, Coe cops to strangeness, but not crimes

Calling his civil commitment trail a “Hitlerian effort” to further punish an innocent man, convicted rapist Kevin Coe says during an interview set to air Sunday night on “Dateline NBC” that he’s not a threat to women.

“I’ve never committed a crime of any kind in my life. I was a model citizen. I’ve been a model prisoner,” Coe said in a prison interview taped in summer 2006. “… I’ve never been around that element of life until I got here. And I’m not a threat to anybody, and I never have been.”

The 61-year-old Spokane native, who is known as the South Hill rapist, speaks forcibly and with passion in segments of the interview viewed Friday by The Spokesman-Review.

Dressed in a plain gray sweat shirt with tan pants and with wavy brown hair and a mustache, Coe spoke to “Dateline NBC” correspondent Sara James without handcuffs, using hand gestures, enunciation and sarcasm to emphasize his position that he did not commit the crimes of which he’s been accused.

Coe was scheduled to be released in September 2006, but the Washington attorney general’s office moved to have him declared a sexually violent predator, which could keep him locked up for life.

His trial is scheduled to start Sept. 15.

“It’s preposterous,” Coe tells James. “You have a situation where the evidence proves innocence, and you’re going to put him away in a nuthouse? For what?”

The “Dateline” interview appears to have been conducted at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, where Coe served his quarter-century sentence. If Coe is civilly committed, he would stay at McNeil Island Correctional Facility, where he is currently housed.

“In terms of just creature comforts, they’d be doing me a favor,” he said. “The fact of the matter is if I’m released I face extreme poverty, thanks to these people … They’ve taken somebody who led a middle-class existence all of his life …

“So, being locked up in some facility is better than that, I suppose. But yeah, I would fight it. Because it’s unjust.”

Coe said he doesn’t know where he’d live if released, saying it wouldn’t matter much because he’d “be a homeless person and in extreme poverty” wherever he went.

“What does it matter if you’re living in Phoenix or Tuscaloosa?” he said. “It really doesn’t matter at that point. I have absolutely nothing. Nothing. No family, even, anymore.”

James then asked if he’d work if he were released.

“What? I mean, as opposed to not working and starving to death?” Coe snapped.

Coe initially declined comment on the civil commitment case. But then he told James, “You can’t even allow this criminal conviction to stand on the evidence I’ve put before the court, let alone pursue something beyond that. It’s quite absurd.”

Segments of the show viewed by the newspaper were incomplete and out of order, offering just a short look at what will be an hourlong spotlight at the Coe case, including interviews with attorneys and rape victims.

One segment features Coe lambasting the book by the late Jack Olsen, “Son: A Psychopath and his Victims.”

Coe calls the book “a hodgepodge of nonsense” and “the biggest piece of junk ever published in the history of mankind.”

“I would agree with you that if 90 percent of that was correct you’d probably be dealing with a fairly strange person,” he said. “But, ooh. Let’s go to the scientific evidence. You might be dealing with a very strange person, but, by the way, he happens to be innocent.”

Coe talks about evidence and witnesses in the case and addresses questions about “Sex in the White House,” a book he wrote under the name Superfry in the 1970s, calling it a Watergate parody.

James asks if the book, which she describes as “pretty strange,” proves he has a sexual obsession.

Absolutely not, Coe said.

“I have no sexual obsession,” he said.