Victims

By J.D. Reed

"SON" by Jack Olsen

Atheneum; 434 pages; $17.95

The retelling of atrocious crimes has produced a genre almost as pernicious as the criminals. Typically, the malefactor is made-into a symbol of his surroundings: his private ailments are seen as social ills, his wrongdoings merely the carrying out of humanity's dark impulses. In his psychobiography, the victims become only walk-ons, subordinated to a drama in which everyone is somehow responsible and therefore no one is truly guilty.

Jack Olsen will have none of this. In "Son " he is relentlessly out to study the evildoer and finger those who made him go wrong. His subject is a well-dressed, intelligent real estate agent who was eventually convicted of committing four brutal rapes in Spokane, Wash., in the late '70s and was suspected of having committed dozens more. The victims were housewives, career women and schoolgirls ranging in age from 14 to 51. Public officials suppressed news of the savage attacks; they wanted no hints of a crime wave in the Lilac City. But word got around, and stocks of Mace and handguns were soon depleted. The undermanned police force began to work overtime, picking up vagrants, drug addicts and recidivists, but with no success.

Fred Coe was not a suspect. His father, Gordon, was the soft-spoken managing editor of the local afternoon paper; his family, respected residents of the city's South Hill district. Extroverted, with a live-in girlfriend, flashy cars and mercantile schemes of fabulous marketing strategies, Coe fit no precinct's violent-crime profile. But his private life might have come from a chapter of Krafft-Ebing.

Drawing on extensive interviews with Coe's companion, Virginia Perham, Olsen details the rage behind the go-getter smile. The vaunted independence was in fact financed by parental handouts. Often impotent, Coe bragged of his sexual prow ess to Perham as if she had not witnessed his failures. He alternately fasted and gorged on junk food, used the name Kevin with girlfriends and clients and spoke in a variety of voice inflections. "Knowing Fred Coe," said a schoolmate, "was like having a platoon of friends."

Every man in the platoon was in thrall to Mommy dearest; at 31, Fred could not resist the pill-popping, unstable Ruth Coe, who was often his "date" at realty open houses. She also accompanied him on frequent hairstyling appointments. "If Kevin hesitated in the middle of a sentence," recalled the receptionist, "Mrs. Coe would fill in the word. They're that close!" Then, one evening, after a quarrel about his lack of accomplishment, Ruth vandalized Coe's car. "Don't let Son upset you," she once told Perham. "He's not worth it." Perham, a horrified witness to their scenes, came to see Ruth as Coe's "judge, jury and executioner, Gordon as futile peacemaker and a child called Son in the middle."

Son avenged the humiliations by choosing targets who resembled his dark-haired mother, sometimes jamming a gloved hand far down their throats. The brutal attacks were accompanied by obscene verbal abuse, threats of death and curiously polite asides. After the rape of "Sunshine" Shelly Monahan, a popular Spokane disc jockey, Coe asked the battered woman in executive tones, "How do you plan to further your radio career?"

When he came to the attention of the authorities, Coe was shadowed for several weeks before he was finally arrested. At the trial the Coe family refused an insanity plea and opted for total denial. They played the part of wronged aristocracy, writes Olsen: "Well-chiseled faces, straight noses, full lips, darkly gleaming eyes, careful coiffures. Camelots old and new had never produced a more al luringly matched set." But that was only for show. Offstage, Coe tried to persuade friends to destroy evidence, Olsen says, and the oldest victim made Ruth exclaim, "She's much too ugly to be a convincing witness."

After Coe was found guilty and sentenced to life plus 75 years, one of the longest sentences ever handed down in the state, his mother became obsessed with revenge. Ruth wanted a hired gun to murder the court officers, but she made the mistake of talking to an undercover policeman playing the part of a Mafia hit man. "I would love to see [the prosecutor] just an addlepated vegetable," she told him. "I mean diapers and all the rest of it...Dead is great. But I do think he should suffer."

As Olsen continually indicates, suffering is the operative word in the lives of almost everyone in "Son." Without prurience, he adds up the aftermath of Coe's vicious spree: years later, some of his victims cannot stand to be touched, a few are frigid, and all are afflicted by violent dreams. Monahan's marriage ended in divorce. Said her husband: "We'd had a good marriage, and after that we just started to go apart." Alone, she slept in a closet. To her, "night smells different from day. Night smells like rape."

The dictionary defines rape as an "outrageous violation" and a victim as "someone badly used." It is to Olsen's great credit that, in a strangely hypnotic, grieving book, he provides these phrases with a human dimension. "Motiveless malignity" is a fine phrase in Othello; in contemporary life, evil generally has a reason, however perverted. Olsen has tracked it to its source. --By J.D. Reed