Word: coe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...