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Penalty Phase Starts for Pair Convicted in Murder Rampage

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Times Staff Writer

Cynthia Lynn Coffman’s court appearance in a plain skirt and blouse and her quiet demeanor contrasted sharply with the image presented by the prosecutor Monday of her participation in the killings of two young women 2 years ago.

Her hands clasped and head down, the thin, diminutive 26-year-old listened calmly as Deputy Dist. Atty. Raymond L. Haight told jurors about the crime rampage with boyfriend James Gregory Marlow that shocked the Southland. The two women were left dead, both robbed and raped--one in San Bernardino County and the other in Huntington Beach.

Haight is asking jurors to return a verdict that could make Coffman the first woman sent to the gas chamber in California since the 1950s.

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Marlow, 32, his short hair graying at the temples, wore a sharp-fitting gray suit and took notes in lawyerly fashion while the prosecutor talked to the jury. The two defendants, separated at the counsel table by three lawyers, appeared very different than at the time of the killings. Then, he wore old clothes and was unshaven and long-haired. She dressed in tight jeans with hair cut so short that one witness said she was almost bald.

The two were lovers then. Coffman called Marlow “Folsom Wolf,” his prison nickname, and had it tattooed on her buttocks. He called her “Cynful.”

Now, they blame each other for their misfortune. Marlow’s lawyers argued that she manipulated him. Coffman testified that she was under his control when the killings occurred.

Coffman and Marlow were convicted last month in the Nov. 7, 1986, death of 20-year-old insurance clerk Corinna Novis, kidnaped outside the Redlands Mall and later strangled and dumped in a field near Fontana. The penalty phase of their joint trial began Monday.

Coffman’s lawyer, Alan Spears, said after court that her calm demeanor was a cover-up for “a very frightened young woman.”

“She’s terrified,” Spears said. “She’s confused. She sees herself as only an accomplice in these crimes. She doesn’t understand why she is facing a penalty like this.”

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But the San Bernardino case represents only half the pair’s legal problems. Once their San Bernardino penalty trial ends, they are scheduled to go on trial in Orange County for the Nov. 12, 1986, death of 19-year-old Lynell Murray, who was kidnaped at the Prime Time Cleaners in Huntington Beach where she worked. She was found strangled to death in a room at the Huntington Beach Inn, which Coffman has admitted renting with Murray’s credit card.

Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard F. Toohey said he plans to seek the death penalty against Coffman no matter what happens in San Bernardino.

“She was just as much a participant as Marlow,” Toohey said recently. “She isn’t the innocent little victim under his influence she’d have you believe.”

Sitting directly behind Coffman in Judge Don A. Turner’s courtroom in San Bernardino were William and Donna Novis, Corinna’s parents, who had driven their recreational vehicle from Gooding, Ida. They had been present every day during the 5-month-long guilt phase, staying in a local campground, and they returned this week for the second phase of the trial.

“We set a goal for ourselves that we would stay for the duration,” William Novis said.

Novis, a truck driver, took a leave of absence during the first phase of the trial. He tried to make up for it by putting 10,000 miles on his truck during the 4-week break after the guilty verdicts.

How did they feel about Cynthia Coffman, they were asked? Should she die in the gas chamber for their daughter’s death?

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William Novis nodded toward where Coffman sat. “She is just as guilty as the other one,” he said.

But last December, Coffman spent 4 days on the witness stand, protesting that she went along with the killings out of fear because Marlow had threatened to kill her and her 8-year-old son.

Marlow beat her, sodomized her and cut her hair, she said. She testified that in one angry outburst, he grabbed a pair of scissors and asked her, “What will it be--your hair or an eye?” It was Marlow who forced the tattoo on her, she said.

The two reportedly met a few months before the killings, when he was in jail in Barstow and she was visiting a friend in the jail. By her own admission, the two then traveled back to Whitley, Ky., an area where Marlow once lived, and killed a man in a robbery.

Then the pair returned to San Bernardino County to stay with friends. Coffman claimed during the trial that she thought Marlow only meant to rob Novis, not kill her. After dumping Novis’ body, they arrived in Huntington Beach seeking their next victim.

Coffman testified that Marlow told her: “We’re going to the beach, ‘cause that’s where the rich people live.”

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But the prosecutor attacked Coffman’s defense that she was a submissive participant with his first witness Monday, Linda Schafer of Huntington Beach. Schafer said she had seen Coffman and Marlow when she dropped off a load of dry cleaning with Lynell Murray at closing time that day.

They were locked in an embrace when she saw them, Schafer said.

“They were in an incredible embrace, more than just kissing. She had her leg wrapped around his lower leg,” she said.

Coffman’s lawyer, Spears, postponed his opening statement until he begins to present evidence in the penalty hearing. Marlow’s attorney, Ray Craig, however, told jurors that the “why” of these murders lies in Marlow’s impoverished background.

Marlow’s mother was a heroin addict and prostitute who had him steal money from the pants of the men she slept with, Craig said. He described Marlow as sexually abused by a stepfather and abandoned by everyone in his family, often left alone and hungry.

“James Marlow, in his entire life, never really had a chance,” Craig said. “All of this (the killings) may have been preordained by the time he was 10 or 12 years old.”

Marlow sucked on a throat lozenge and leaned back lazily as he listened to his lawyer. The most expression Marlow has shown so far was in a letter sent to Coffman after their arrest, revealed during the trial: “I cannot adequately express the sense of shame I feel, having my queen in such a place (jail).”

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