Jury Weighing Man’s Motive in Death of Fiancee : Torrance: The defendant says he acted in self-defense before putting the body in a box and taking it to Texas.

Theresa Lawson did not have an easy life.

Three of her four siblings died before the age of 30, one in a car accident, one the victim of a drunk driver and the third by suicide. After dropping out of North High School in Torrance during her junior year, Lawson worked alternately as a bank teller and a waitress, eking out a living but hanging on to her sense of humor and exuberance.

She was looking for a good, honest man with whom to build a family and a future, her mother said. She thought she had found that man in her fiance, D. C. Trainer Jr.

But their relationship ended in tragedy, with Lawson dead and Trainer on trial for murder.

Now, after more than two weeks of testimony, a Torrance Superior Court jury this week began deliberating whether Trainer killed Lawson, 35, in self-defense when she attacked him in a rage or whether he sneaked up on her from behind and strangled her.

Trainer, 34, testified that he did not mean to kill Lawson last February. He said she hit him on the head with a wine bottle and struck him with an electrical cord, and that he reflexively struck her on the head with a vase.

Fearing he had killed her, Trainer said, he stuffed her body in a three-foot-square television box and stashed it in the garage of the Redondo Beach apartment they had moved into just two weeks before.

The pathologist who conducted the autopsy said he thinks Lawson may have been alive when she was placed in the box, where she later suffocated. However, three other pathologists who reviewed his report disagreed about how she died.

Several days after Lawson’s death, Trainer rented a moving truck, loaded up his and Lawson’s belongings, as well as the box containing her body, and drove to his hometown of Pasadena, Texas.

There, he borrowed a backhoe from his father’s heavy equipment business and dug a pit in the ground, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Philip Millett. He told relatives who complained of a foul odor in the truck that he planned to bury two dead dogs he had brought along.

Trainer’s father discovered Lawson’s decomposing body, an electrical cord wound around the neck, when he insisted on seeing what was inside the box before his son buried it.

“There’s no malignant heart here, no premeditated plan to kill,” defense attorney William MacCabe argued Tuesday. “If he did anything criminal, it may be the wrongful thing of putting a person you thought was dead, but was not, in the box.”

Millett disputed Trainer’s tale of an accidental killing.

Noting that none of the four pathologists found any head trauma, but that two of them said the cord found around Lawson’s neck was probably used to strangle her, Millett argued that Trainer coldly planned to kill his fiancee.

The 90 seconds required to strangle someone, Millett said, allows plenty of time to reconsider.

“With every moment that they hold that ligature tight, they’re thinking, ‘I’m killing you,’ ” he said. “He knew what he was doing.”

Lawson’s mother, Alice Hendrix, and best friend, Ree Chavira, said Lawson was an intelligent, artistic, vivacious woman who was constantly being forced to rebound from the grief and trouble that plagued her life.

During the trial, the defense described Lawson as an alcoholic who used cocaine frequently and was verbally and physically abusive toward Trainer.

“She had dealt with an awful lot,” Hendrix said during an interview Tuesday. “Drinking and drugging was not her way of life like they made it sound. . . . She wanted just to live a good life.”

Chavira added, “She really cherished the idea of having a good relationship and kids. Her dreams weren’t big. She wanted inner peace. She didn’t want a hectic life. She wanted something simple. She wanted something good.”

The jury’s deliberations in Trainer’s murder trial are set to resume this morning.