A life of secrets ends in the shadows

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By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 16, 2000

The spot where Harry Lee Coe killed himself is shaded by an expressway overhead and a thick stand of white oleander.

The oleander is so tall the branches bend above where where Coe sat against a highway support cushioned with vines.

I have heard people wonder why nobody saw him there, Wednesday night or Thursday morning. I have heard people wonder why he killed himself so publicly. They're the wrong questions.

Coe was a hundred feet from MacDill Avenue, hidden by the highway support from anybody coming from the intersecting street, Bay to Bay Boulevard.

Coe's killing ground was not a pleasant place, but a stretch of sand, mulch, concrete and litter between the fence that bordered his apartment complex and some railroad tracks. It was not, in the way we usually mean the word, a public place. True, a city parking lot was close by, but who, getting out of his car or doing anything else, looks directly at the homeless?

And homeless is what Coe would have appeared to be, sitting in the despair of his last hours, or even after he was slumped over in death.

It used to be a standing joke among the reporters who covered the Hillsborough County Courthouse. Nobody knew where the state attorney lived. How we laughed at the idea that he lived out of his car. It wasn't until 1996, three years into his first term, that I found out he lived in the modest apartment complex next to where he died. The address was on the police report on that celebrated episode in which he had his gun and his boxer shorts stolen from his car.

The jokes ring callous now. That callousness will be one more thing used by those who think reporters drove Coe to suicide.

We did not. Even as we chased the stories about his secret life that were impossible to nail down because those who knew were so often afraid to speak publicly, we prolonged his deception. We humored him, calling him judge as he insisted, although he no longer was one.

He was a house of cards attached to a pair of legs, possessed of more oddities than a carnival fun house, and maybe more demons than a Stephen King novel.

That made him great copy.

He became the political equivalent of Henny Youngman's wife. If you wanted to get a laugh out of somebody, all you had to do was bring up Harry's name.

Other Democrats laughed, too, when they weren't wincing. They did this only privately. Now in public, they're taking aim at reporters.

They ought to look in the mirror.

They ought to ask why, after each gaffe erupted, each rumor circulated, they never went to the man the Miami Herald once so eloquently called "Witless for the Prosecution" and conducted what pols call a prayer meeting. This is where the bosses not so gently tell a man like Coe that he's hurting the party and it's time to hang it up.

This is considered out of line in Tampa's sorry excuse for a Democratic party. So Coe was allowed to go on, until even he could no longer carry the burden of his own contradictions and embarrassment, if not shame.

Shame is a hard word, yes, but only Coe knew what the FDLE was going to find at the end of his trail.

Coe was universally, perpetually, described as a loner. A man's secrets will isolate him like nothing else. It will fill him with the belief that nobody could possibly understand him and forgive. It will make him, if not physically homeless, psychologically so.

Whoever left the holy card must have grasped that.

At the site where Coe put that .38 to his forehead, somebody who cared a lot left some yellow flowers wrapped in foil and a Catholic holy card bearing the face of St. Raphael the Archangel. St. Raphael is the patron of the blind, and of travelers, anyone trying to find his way home.

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