Harger: ‘South Hill Rapist’ Kevin Coe was free for 8 weeks before he died; his victims didn’t need to relive their trauma

The state forced five survivors to beg a judge not to release their attacker. Then released him anyway.

Kevin Coe died yesterday of natural causes at 78. He had been free for exactly two months. Two months after spending 44 years locked up for crimes that terrorized Spokane in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The “South Hill Rapist,” as he became known, served 25 years in prison and 19 more on McNeil Island under civil commitment as a sexually violent predator. He was convicted of one rape in 1982 but linked by investigators to more than 40 sexual assaults. He destroyed lives and caused unimaginable pain that his victims carry to this day.

Kevin Coe’s hearing re-traumatized survivors

On Oct. 2, Spokane County Judge Julie McKay held a hearing on Coe’s unconditional release. Five surviving victims were allowed to speak. They stood in that courtroom and relived assaults from 45 years ago.

One victim described her assault in detail. Unspeakable, what he did. She remembered staring at a single star, praying God would let her live. Coe called and threatened her after his conviction.

Another survivor, raped at 20, talked about the vulgar, haunting questions Coe asked during the assault. Questions about her family.

“Now that he’s free, he can do that,” she told the court. “And I am scared.”

A third called the hearing itself “a re-rape. You go through everything again.”

The judge released him anyway.

McNeil Island exists for exactly this reason

People like Kevin Coe are the exact reason McNeil Island exists: a facility specifically designed to hold sexually violent predators deemed too dangerous to walk free, even after their prison sentences end.

That’s the entire point of the place. And then the judge let him go.

The legal standard asks whether someone is more likely than not to reoffend if released. The state’s answer was no. Not because Coe changed. Not because he showed remorse. Not because he earned it through any measure of rehabilitation or humanity.

He never admitted a single rape. He never completed actual sex offender treatment. Every expert who evaluated him over 40 years placed him in the top five percent of the darkest personalities they’d ever assessed.

But he was in a wheelchair. He was incontinent. He had congestive heart failure. He was frail, often bedridden.

The argument was simple: he physically couldn’t reoffend.

So the checklist said “safe.” The Attorney General’s Office stopped contesting his release, and the judge signed the order.

Never mind what five traumatized women said in open court.

Treatment v. punishment: a convenient excuse

The law says civil commitment is about treatment, not punishment. Fine, then treat him on the island until he dies. The statute explicitly allows lifelong commitment if the mental abnormality and risk still exist.

Coe’s mental abnormality never left. He just got old.

Those five women stood in court and told the judge what this man did to them, what he took from them, and the fear they still carry. One said she’d finally found the strength to speak after decades of silence. Another had forgiven him as part of her healing, but still came to say his freedom terrified her.

The system heard them. Then it ignored them.

8 weeks of freedom

Two months later, he’s dead. All that pain, all that process, all that trauma dredged up and put on display, for eight weeks of freedom he spent as a registered sex offender shuffling between Auburn and Federal Way.

Eight weeks.

Would his release have happened in Idaho? Montana? What is it about Washington’s legal system that prioritizes bureaucratic process over common sense, that weighs a checklist more heavily than the voices of women saying “we are still afraid”?

What kind of justice system makes rape survivors beg a judge not to release their attacker, then releases him anyway because he’s too old to chase anyone down?

Kevin Coe is dead. The women he assaulted are still living with what he did. And the system that released him has the nerve to call that justice.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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