In `Sins Of The Mother,' Familial Breeds Contempt

Lock the doors, grit your teeth and hold on to your stomach. Kevin Coe, the convicted rapist from Spokane, is back. Or at least his television doppelganger is, as featured in ``Sins of the Mother,'' a made-for-television movie on the whole sordid Coe family affair.

The movie, to be aired at 9 tonight (KIRO, Channel 7), stars Elizabeth Montgomery as Coe's mother, Ruth; Dale Midkiff as Coe; Heather Fairfield as Coe's girlfriend, Ginny Perham; and Thalia Balsam as a composite character representing the police detectives who finally arrested Coe in connection with Spokane's notorious South Hill rapes in late 1981.

Based on Bainbridge Island author Jack Olsen's 1984 book, ``Son,'' the TV movie ``Sins of the Mother'' is a deeply disturbing view of a psychopath and his family of origin.

Coe was the 34-year-old son of Gordon Coe, a Spokane newspaper executive, when he was arrested and charged with being the South Hill serial rapist, believed to be responsible for as many as 20 rapes.

Coe denied that he was the rapist, but was convicted of four counts of rape in 1982. Shortly thereafter, Ruth Coe was arrested for trying to hire a hitman to kill the judge and prosecutor in her son's case. (All but one of Kevin Coe's convictions were later overturned; he is serving time in the state penitentiary in Walla Walla and could be eligible to be considered for parole later this year.)

The movie is less a crime story than an attempt to portray some of the psychological roots of Coe's behavior, as is telegraphed in the title. The movie focuses on the relationships Coe had with his mother and with his girlfriend.

Because the movie follows Olsen's book fairly closely, it is fair to call it a representation of Olsen's own representation, which was drawn primarily from interviews with people who knew the Coes; thus it is three times removed from the events and the relationships.

That's not to say, however, that it's inaccurate in what it shows. But the story of the Coes remains one that is far more complex than any visual or written medium can record.

The Coe family has long rejected Olsen's book as ``pornography,'' and once claimed the book had ``a thousand mistakes,'' but never identified any errors even after Olsen challenged them to name one.

Mostly, however, the Coes objected to Olsen's overall image of them as tortured, self-deluding, manipulative, and ultimately corrupt; Olsen's image took them completely out of context, the Coes maintained.

In the movie, Montgomery's role is used to set the tone. Her Ruth is alternately shrill, seductive, deceitful, demanding, or almost unbelievably cruel. She controls Midkiff's Kevin with her bag of psychological tricks, making him alternately boastful, enraged, weeping or impotent, rendering him an adult-size infant. ``He's my baby,'' she says.

Just as the movie Ruth engages in her behavior as a mechanism to cope psychologically with what to her is a threatening and uncertain environment, the movie Kevin fends her off with his own lies, secretiveness, and ultimately, with the power-rage of rape, directed against largely anonymous victims as stand-ins for Ruth.

Some of those who knew the real Ruth Coe, however, will probably see the movie version of her as overdrawn, made larger and more horrifying to illustrate the psychological forces at work in the Coe family.

``Poor Ruth,'' says David Allen, the Seattle lawyer who defended Coe in court. ``They should leave her alone. You can't blame her for this. It sells books and it sells movies, but it's not the truth.''

Likewise, the movie version of Coe's girlfriend, Ginny Perham, is given an altogether stronger personality than the real Ginny, in part to further emphasize the bizarreness of Ruth's behavior.

Like Olsen's book, the movie is at its most effective when it shows the true horror of rape - violent, terrorizing assaults that leave the victims bloody and bruised, emotionally crushed, and psychologically shattered. If anyone still believes that rape is about sex, this movie will destroy that illusion once and for all.

Olsen says he is pleased with the way the movie came out.

``I thought it was very good,'' he said. ``It depicted rape as the horrifying crime that it is, and it depicted Kevin Coe as the horrifying rapist that he was.''

At the same time, Olsen said, the movie also shows psychopathology in action - where it comes from, how it manifests itself. ``It is a disturbing movie. It's a horror story, but it's a true horror story.''

Carlton Smith covered Kevin Coe's second rape trial in 1985 for The Times.