[2] Due to a distinctive "signature", a gloved fist or fingers rammed in the mouth and throat of his victims, police suspected the rapes to be the work of a single offender, whom the media soon dubbed the South Hill Rapist.
[3][4] In 1981, after a school custodian observed a car illegally parked in a bus drop-off zone during the time a daylight rape occurred, police traced the vehicle registration to Gordon Coe, the managing editor of the Spokane Chronicle.
Gordon was ruled out due to his age; his son, Frederick – who later legally changed his name to Kevin, a former Las Vegas radio announcer and unsuccessful real estate agent, had the use of the car.
Police placed a tracking device on the younger Coe's car and discovered that, in addition to targeting lone female joggers, he was apparently stalking city buses for victims.
Coe's alibi was that he was either having breakfast or dining with his parents during the time the attacks occurred, or else, as his socialite mother Ruth testified, teaming up with her in a mother-and-son vigilante squad to follow local buses in order to try to capture the real rapist themselves.
In June 1984, three years after Coe's trial, Washington's Supreme Court tossed out all of his convictions because many of the victims had been hypnotized before formally identifying him, in the hope of providing more details to the rapist's identity.
[11] In 1990, Washington passed the Community Protection Act, a "civil commitment" statute that allows the state to indefinitely retain dangerous sexually violent predators even after their criminal sentences ended.
The next day, after several hours of deliberation, the jury decided that the prosecution had proven beyond reasonable doubt that Coe was a violent sexual predator; he was committed to McNeil Island indefinitely.