Man Gets 15 Years to Life for Killing Fiancee, Taking Body to Texas

A former Redondo Beach man convicted of killing his fiancee, stuffing her body in a cardboard box and hauling it to Texas was sentenced Wednesday to 15 years to life in state prison.

During sentencing, D. C. Trainer Jr., 34, stood silently before Torrance Superior Court Judge Candace D. Cooper with his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed on a table in front of him.

He was convicted last month of second-degree murder for killing Theresa Lawson, 35, with whom he was sharing an apartment in Redondo Beach when she disappeared early last February.

Moments before the sentencing, Lawson’s mother urged Cooper to assure that Trainer would not be allowed to kill again.

“He has absolutely no compassion, no remorse. I do not believe he has a conscience,” Alice Hendrix said. “I truly believe he will kill again. He is cold-blooded. . . . I hope and pray that he’s not allowed to do to another family what he’s done to ours.”

But defense attorney William MacCabe, who unsuccessfully argued Wednesday that Cooper should reduce Trainer’s conviction to manslaughter, said Lawson’s death was an accident brought on after months of provocation on her part.

“Almost every time she drank or used drugs, she was abusive toward Mr. Trainer,” MacCabe said. “He would take it, almost too calmly . . . until this one time.”

Jurors who convicted Trainer heard more than two weeks of often-conflicting testimony, including evidence presented by four different forensic pathologists and testimony from Trainer.

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

Trainer said he could not remember how a cord ended up wrapped around Lawson’s neck and speculated that she tied it there herself. But three of the four pathologists said the cord most likely was used to choke Lawson, if not to death, then at least into unconsciousness.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Philip Millett said it may never be known exactly how, where or when Lawson died.

“I’m satisfied,” he said. “I have a kind of gut feeling that it was really a first-degree murder but the bottom line is, nobody knows exactly how she died. . . . In spite of my argument (at trial), I always believed that second-degree was the best we could get.”

Trainer testified that he panicked, lined a three-foot-square TV carton with plastic and stuffed Lawson inside. He hid the body in the garage of the Redondo Beach apartment that they had moved into two weeks before.

Ten days after Lawson vanished, Trainer rented a moving truck, loaded up his belongings and the boxed body, hooked Lawson’s sports car to the truck 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, alerted by a call from Hendrix that Lawson was missing, discovered the decomposing body when he insisted on seeing what was inside the box before his son buried it.

It wasn’t until after the murder that Lawson’s family found out Trainer had been married five times and was not yet divorced from his last wife, Joanne Trainer.

In a statement to probation officials, Joanne Trainer described her estranged husband as “one who loves women,” but who also maintained a $600-a-day methamphetamine habit.

Hendrix, who said Trainer had “totally taken in” Lawson and her relatives with his charming manners and false tales of his family wealth, said she prays daily for strength to go on with her life.

“(God) is the only one that really knows what happened,” Hendrix said. “He is the only one that can see into this man’s heart and understand why.”