Coffman Tells of Murder Before Southland Killings : Trial: Convicted slayer says she and lover carried out contract hit before deadly sexual assaults here. She is being tried in Huntington Beach death.

A St. Louis woman, already sentenced to death for her part in the sex-slaying of a San Bernardino woman and facing a second death sentence in a similar Orange County killing, testified Wednesday that she and her lover began a cross-country crime spree with an earlier murder in Kentucky.

Cynthia Lynn Coffman, 30, is being tried for murder, kidnaping, rape, robbery, burglary and using a firearm in the Nov. 12, 1986, attack on 19-year-old Lynel Murray, a college student who was working at a Huntington Beach dry cleaners.

Coffman’s lover, James Gregory Marlow, 36, was tried separately, convicted and sentenced to death in early May for his part in Murray’s killing.

After being tried together in San Bernardino, both Coffman and Marlow received death sentences on Aug. 31, 1989, for the kidnaping, sexual assault and strangulation of Corinna D. Novis, 20, who was abducted from a Redlands shopping mall. The Novis abduction took place Nov. 7, 1986, five days before the attack on Murray.

In opening statements last month, attorneys for both sides agreed that Coffman participated in the killings of Novis and Murray, that she was a drug abuser and that she was upset by Marlow’s sexual assaults on the two victims, both of which took place in showers.

In a soft, at times almost inaudible voice, Coffman told of helping Marlow with a contract killing in Kentucky four months before the murders in California. She said she lured the victim out of his home at night and drove the getaway vehicle after Marlow shot him to death, for which the couple received $5,000, most of which went to buy a motorcycle.

In the truck after the shooting, Coffman testified, Marlow “told me I was a good girl.”

Coffman said she was told the same thing after she performed oral sex on one of Marlow’s friends, at his command.

She did these things, Coffman said, and did not leave him on other occasions when he beat her, fired a gun next to her head and kicked her with steel-toed boots, “because I wanted him to love me. . . . I didn’t have anybody else.”

In another incident, Coffman said, Marlow went into a jealous rage and cut off all her hair, threatened to gouge out her eye with scissors, threw her naked out of their motel room and finally brutally sodomized her.

Still, she didn’t leave him.

“I was naked, I was bald,” she said. “What was I going to do?”

Dressed in a green blouse, black slacks and high heels and speaking with a Midwestern accent, Coffman wept frequently during direct examination by her attorney, Deputy Public Defender Leonard Gumlia.

At one point, Gumlia reminded her that “there are two dead girls out there.”

“I know I shouldn’t cry for myself,” Coffman replied, “but I can’t help it.”

Coffman’s testimony mirrored an extraordinary, 145-page opening statement read by Gumlia. The attorney’s account of Coffman’s and Marlow’s early lives and deadly, cross-country odyssey read more like a pulp novel than a legal brief.

Although the prosecution maintains that Coffman was a conscious and willing participant in all of the killings, Deputy Dist. Atty. James C. Gannon Jr. agreed in part with the defense scenario.

In his opening statement, Gannon said the Murray killing in Huntington Beach was “in many ways the culmination of a series of events which started long before that.”

Coffman’s testimony continues today.