SPOKANE – State lawyers are asking a judge for permission to take DNA from convicted rapist Kevin Coe to confirm that semen taken from a rape victim in 1980 is his.
The request to compel Coe to submit to a cheek swab was outlined in motions filed this week by Assistant Attorney General Todd Bowers, who is trying to establish that Coe is a sexually violent predator.
It was thought that semen samples from the South Hill Rapist trials in the early 1980s had mistakenly been destroyed.
But Bowers said a sperm sample taken from a rape victim at Deaconess Medical Center on Oct. 23, 1980, was placed on a glass slide by a lab technician. That sample was subjected to a DNA profile, which matched Coe’s, Bowers said in his motion.
Coe’s DNA is on file with the Washington State Patrol data bank. Court records don’t say when the Deaconess sample was discovered in a Spokane Police Department property room, and Bowers wouldn’t comment.
Coe’s attorney, Tim Trageser, said Friday that “there are a lot of unanswered questions” about the sperm sample.
He said it is unclear where the sample was stored, how it was seized, whether it was properly handled and whether it might have been contaminated.
“I’m very suspect about the alleged match of Mr. Coe to one of the slides,” he said.
Coe has maintained his innocence and contended that DNA from lost evidence samples from his trials would exonerate him.
On Monday, Bowers and co-counsel Malcom Ross, also an assistant state attorney general, plan to ask Spokane County Superior Court Judge Kathleen O’Connor to approve a battery of psychological and personality tests on Coe.
Results of the tests can be used as evidence in a civil trial scheduled for July that will determine whether Coe is indefinitely committed to a mental health lockup on McNeil Island.
If a jury isn’t unanimously convinced Coe is a sexually violent predator, he will immediately be released.
Coe, 59, served a 25-year sentence after being convicted of one count of first-degree rape in the South Hill Rapist case. His sentence ended Sept. 8, but the state moved to keep him in custody pending a civil commitment trial.
Investigators arrested Coe early in 1981, and he was charged with six rapes. A jury convicted him of four counts of first-degree rape.
Those convictions were overturned on appeal because Spokane police detectives used hypnosis during interviews with witnesses. A second jury convicted Coe of three rapes in 1985.
The state Supreme Court then overturned two of those convictions in 1988, leaving Coe with the single conviction for first-degree rape.
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