Coe: Inside the courtroom
Detective: Commitment too good for Coe
It's good that Kevin Coe is being put away again, but he's getting better than he deserves, says the detective who tracked him 27 years ago.
"They're putting him in a nice little rest home for the rest of his life," Roy Allen said of Coe's commitment to a state mental health facility on McNeil Island. "People his age pay good money for living in luxury like that.
"It's a lot better than what he deserves, I think. His victims have got to live with their scars for the rest of their lives."
Allen, who was the lead detective in the "South Hill rapist" case, continued: "He brutally beat these women. He rammed his hand so far down their throats that they couldn't talk for a couple of days.
"That came to a halt, thank God, before he killed somebody."
Allen says he'd rather see Coe in prison - where he likely would be, had his original sentence of life plus 75 years on four rape convictions been upheld.
Instead, three of those convictions were reversed on appeal because victims had been hypnotized by police. Coe served his full 25-year sentence on the remaining conviction.
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Kevin Coe, labeled the "South Hill rapist" in a community frightened by dozens of attacks on women in the Spokane area in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has been in prison since 1981. He was slated for release in September 2006 when the Washington state attorney general's office moved to have Coe spend the rest of his life in prison through the civil commitment program. In this trial, the state seeks to convince jurors that Coe represents too much of a threat to ever be released.
Karen Dorn Steele has been a Spokesman-Review reporter since 1982,
covering the courts, environment, enterprise and investigative beat. She
lived in Spokane in 1980 when a series of unsolved rapes terrorized the
city. 
Rick Bonino has worked at The Spokesman-Review in various positions
since 1977. He covered both of Kevin Coe's previous trials, in 1981 and
1985, and also Ruth Coe's trial in 1982. 
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