Suspect in Killings Has Kentucky Robbery Record, No Murder Link

Kentucky law officers said Sunday that a suspect in the strangulation slayings of two young Southern California women is from a small town in that state and has a past police record for theft.

The officers, however, said they had nothing to link James Gregory Marlow, 30, and his alleged accomplice, Cynthia Lynn Coffman, 24, to any unsolved murder in Kentucky.

Redlands police have said Marlow and Coffman told them about killing a man in Kentucky before coming to California.

The couple was arrested Friday in Big Bear City in the San Bernardino Mountains, in the kidnap and slaying last week of Lynel Murray, 19, of Huntington Beach and the Nov. 7 abduction of Corinna D. Novis, 20, of Redlands. On Saturday, Coffman took Redlands police to Fontana, where Novis’ body was found in a shallow grave.

“All we have is a nickname of a possible murder victim, and we can’t make any connection right now,” Kentucky State Police Sgt. Glen Dalton said of the murder confession in a telephone interview. “There are lots of people with that nickname, but we don’t have any unsolved murder that we know of with a person of this nickname.”

Constable Buck Bradley of the McCreary County Sheriff’s Office in Whitley City in eastern Kentucky said by phone that he has known Marlow for about 12 years.

“He had a good family, but he ended up bad,” Bradley said. “One time he robbed a jug store--a place where they sell milk here--and he holed up in the hills after that.”

Bradley said Marlow and a young woman returned to the state this past summer. The woman may have been Coffman, but Bradley said he was not sure, adding that Marlow “has had a lot of girls.”

Coffman’s background could not be clarified Sunday.