Torrance Jury Convicts Man of Slaying Fiancee : Court: D. C. Trainer Jr. is cleared of first-degree charge but is found guilty of second-degree murder. He faces 15 years to life in prison at a Jan. 22 hearing.

A former Redondo Beach resident accused of killing his fiancee, stuffing her body in a television box and hauling it to Texas has been convicted of second-degree murder in the case.

D. C. Trainer Jr., 34, showed no emotion as a Torrance Superior Court clerk read the jury verdicts acquitting him of first-degree murder but convicting him of the lesser charge.

He faces 15 years to life in state prison for killing Theresa Lawson, a 35-year-old woman with whom he shared an apartment in Redondo Beach when she disappeared in early February. Trainer will be sentenced on Jan. 22.

Trainer’s attorney, William MacCabe, expressed disappointment in the verdict.

“It should have been involuntary manslaughter,” he said. “There was no malice involved in this case.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Philip Millett, who had argued for first-degree murder, said he was satisfied with the results.

“I thought there was so much confusion surrounding the way she died that I had a feeling that that would be a sticking point,” Millett said.

The jury’s foreman said jurors shared “a gut feeling” that Trainer planned Lawson’s murder--which would have made the killing first-degree murder--but did not feel there was sufficient evidence to prove it.

“I think we reached a good verdict with the information we had,” said foreman Debbie Kirks, 34, of Gardena. “With the laws and the instructions we had to consider, it was second-degree.”

Ten days after Lawson vanished, prosecutors said, Trainer rented a moving truck, loaded up his belongings and the body, hooked Lawson’s sports car in tow and moved back to his hometown of Pasadena, Tex.

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

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

Jurors heard more than two weeks of often conflicting testimony during Trainer’s trial, including evidence presented by four forensic pathologists and testimony from Trainer.

Although none of the pathologists found any evidence of head trauma, Trainer testified that he struck Lawson on the head with a vase after she had hit him with a wine bottle and whipped him with an electrical cord.

Trainer said he could not remember how the cord got around Lawson’s neck and speculated that she had tied it there.

Jurors said they believed little of Trainer’s story.

“The loop (of the cord) was tied in the back, so that just didn’t make any sense,” said juror Sheryl Rodriguez, 21, of San Pedro. “We just couldn’t be sure exactly what happened.”

Trainer testified that after he stuffed Lawson into the three-foot-square box, he stored it in the garage of the apartment he and Lawson had shared.

When worried friends of Lawson’s called the apartment looking for her, Trainer told them she had taken an impulsive trip to Palm Springs and would be back soon.

Lawson’s mother, Alice Hendrix, said she is primarily concerned that Trainer be prevented from harming anyone else.

“I want him to pay for what he did to my daughter, yes, but anything they would do to him will not bring her back to me,” Hendrix said. “I just don’t want him to be able to hurt another family like he’s hurt ours . . . and I believe that, given the opportunity, he will.”

While courting Lawson, Trainer painted himself as being from a wealthy Texas family, Hendrix said. He spoke of a huge ranch, his father’s 10-seat corporate jet and his mother’s large pottery manufacturing plant.

It was all a lie. And he did not mention his previous five marriages, his two children, or the fact that he was not yet divorced from his last wife, the victim’s mother said.

“He came over to my house after he’d killed her, and he sat there and asked me if I knew where she was,” said Ree Chavira, Lawson’s best friend, as she trembled uncontrollably outside the court after the verdict.

“It was no big deal for him,” she said. “He deserves worse, totally worse. He’s an unfeeling person. . . . It seemed to me, looking at him, like his spirit was gone.”