Kevin Coe’s attacker accused of new assault at McNeil Island

OLYMPIA – A resident at the state’s Special Commitment Center for sex offenders who once tried to kill Kevin Coe now faces the prospect of life imprisonment for attacking another resident at the McNeil Island facility.

Prosecutors charged Timothy Leon Cannon with assault this week for throwing scalding water into Robert Duncan’s face and then punching the partially deaf Duncan after he fell down.

Duncan suffered second-degree burns from the Sept. 29, 2014, attack, according to court documents. Cannon allegedly told the center staff it felt good to beat up a sex offender and said he wanted go back to prison “so I can be around some real convicts.”

Cannon was at McNeil Island awaiting trial in King County on a possible civil commitment as a sexually violent predator. Such a finding could keep him at the McNeil Island facility for sex offenders indefinitely. Pierce County prosecutors charged Cannon with the assault, which would be his third strike under a state law that could put him in prison for life without a chance for parole.

Cannon pleaded guilty in 1995 to slashing Coe’s throat with a razor blade embedded in a toothbrush when both were inmates at the state penitentiary in Walla Walla. The wound required 100 stitches to close. Coe is known as the South Hill Rapist who terrorized women in Spokane during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Cannon, who was serving time for rape and assault in King County and had a history of prison assaults, received an additional 15 years on his sentence for the attack on Coe.

Coe is also a resident at McNeil Island, having been found to be a sexually violent predator by a Spokane Superior Court jury in 2008. That commitment was upheld by the state Supreme Court in 2012 and reaffirmed by a federal judge last September.