Jack Olsen - Son: A Psychopath and his Victims

more praise for

Son

A-read-until-four-a.m. book!... I have never read a book that delineates the psychopathology of both the rapist and his disintegrating family so graphically.... Every woman in America should read Son.

Ann Rule, author of The Stranger Beside Me

Superlative reporting. Olsen turns what promises to be another run-of-the-mill crime story into a drama that invites comparison to Truman Capotes In Cold Blood.

Newsday

Might be the book that wins the Pulitzer Prize for Jack Olsen... Vividly and thoroughly describes a psychopathic rapist.

The Milwaukee Journal

Remarkably well done... Olsen brings his strange subjects to vivid life in this memorable reconstruction.

Publishers Weekly

A chilling story... Gruesomely spellbinding.

Glamour

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Other true crime books by Jack Olsen

I: The creation of a serial killer (2002)

Hastened to the Grave (1998)

Salt of the Earth (1996)

Charmer: The true story of a ladies man and his victims (1994)

The Misbegotten Son: A serial killer and his victims (1993)

Predator: Rape, madness, and injustice in Seattle (1991)

Doc: The rape of the Town of Lovell (1989)

Cold Kill (1987)

Give a Boy a Gun (1985)

The Man with the Candy: The story of the Houston mass murders (1974)

SON

a psychopath and his victims

Jack Olsen

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Crime Rant Books | Jack Olsen Literary Works, LLC, 2015

Digital text and cover used through a licensing agreement with Scribner's, New York

Copyright 1983 by Jack Olsen

Foreword copyright 2015 by Gregg Olsen

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For Scott Meredith

There walk among us men and women who are in but not of our world.... Often the sign by which they betray themselves is crime, crime of an explosive, impulsive, reckless type.

Robert Lindner, M.D.

Psychopathic personality: a disorder of behavior toward other individuals or toward society in which reality is usually clearly perceived except for an individuals social and moral obligations and which often seeks immediate personal gratification in criminal acts, drug addiction, or sexual perversion.

Websters Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary

Hiya kid. Tis I, your great buddy. It looks like we made it and I know Ive got quite a ways to go. I hope you didnt have such a hard time as I will encounter. Good luck Bill.

Fred Coe, 1965 high-school yearbook

Even though I had family ties there, I never thought much about Spokane, Washington, when I was growing up. My parents lived in Spokane when they first got married, and my oldest brother was born there. Our cousins lived across from Manito Park on the South Hill. I never really thought of Spokane as a place until I read a book that would transform my life.

My dad gave me a copy of Son some thirty years ago when we were living in Seattle.

Its a disturbing story, he said, but theres a lot about Spokane in it.

I looked at the cover. The book was written by Jack Olsen.

Are we related?

No, my dad said. He lives on Bainbridge Island. Hes a journalist. Like you.

Once I started reading, I had to agree with my father. The book was disturbing. The authors portrait of Fred Coe; Freds father, Gordon; and especially Freds mother, Ruth, had me riveted. It was a harrowing narrative, one that let the reader peer into the souls of the people involved, but also into the heart of little old Spokane. Son was like a novel in that it had a storyline, but it was crammed with truth. It wasnt a memoir in which the storyteller can recall and share whatever he or she wishes, but, rather, a book in which multiple players are given their due.

It was a mosaic of reality put together by a master.

After I finished Son, I knew what I wanted to do. I was going to be a crime writer. Yes, thats it. Other people my age insist that books like Catcher in the Rye or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance changed their lives. That book by Jack Olsen changed my life. I was going to write true crime and I was going to use Jacks work as my road map.

When I started my first book, Abandoned Prayers, it was time for some advice, and there was only one thing to do. There was no passive way to do it either. I couldnt just fill out the contact form on some website. There wasnt yet an Internet to speak of. I had to work up the courage to dial Jacks number, which I obtained from calling directory assistance. It was funny that I had no problem talking to a serial killer or cajoling an FBI agent into giving me an interview, but had to gather courage to phone Jack Olsen. I revered his work and strove to follow his example. That meant talking to everyone, sticking to the facts, and never giving up until that crucial interview was secured.

After I started calling Jack and seeing him at book events, he referred to me as Cousin Gregg, though of course we werent related.

One time I took the ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island to see him. I was looking for a new case to write about and wondered if in all his years hed found one that intrigued him but that, for one reason or another, he chose not to pursue. A Jack Olsen leftover might be really, really good. Jack picked me up at the ferry landing in his black Lexus and drove me to his home. We spent the afternoon in his office off the garage. It was crammed with books, Edgar Awards, and news clippings with Jack plunked right in the middle.

We talked about fishing, writing, what he was reading, and the latest literary scandal that had him mad. Jack didnt mince words. And he wasnt afraid to take on a fightwhatever that battle might be. At the time, he was most ardent about writers who were veering toward melodrama and out-and-out fabrication. He felt that they were ruining the genre.

You see, Jack was fierce in his belief that the people in the stories we toldand the people who read those storiesdeserved the truth. His nonfiction prose is a study in leanness and elegance. Word by word, brick by brick, he was able to build a story that was resolute in its integrity. And every word was true.

I think the Dean of True Crime, as he was famously called back then, would be very disappointed by the genres current statedismayed that TV has chewed up the best cases, that people want money for their stories, and that books are cranked out without considering whether the story is really book worthy or merely a magazine article.

Jack saw a story about a serial rapist in what many considered a northwest outpost as the narrative nonfiction gold that it was. Other writers would have passed it up for something bigger, more diabolical, more outrageous. In a location somewhere else. Certainly not Spokane.

Jacks talent lay not only in the way he crafted his books, but in his selection of stories. Others in the genre focused on women who murdered their husbands. Or husbands who murdered their wives. For the most part, Jack stayed off that well-trod path. He focused on the more challenging stories, and were all the luckier for it.

To those of us who live in the Pacific Northwest the name Fred Coe ranks with Ted Bundy as one of our most infamous. Fred and his mother Ruth Coe became synonymous with denial on an epic scale. Ruth, with her narcissistic and grandiose personality and her desire for revenge against a prosecutor and judge, was the stuff of fiction.

Years ago, I interviewed a woman named Mary who was in love with Fred Coe and was busy at work on her memoir, The Coe I Know. It never saw the light of day, but Fred Coe had transformed himself once more (as he did over and over in the pages of