Slayer Coffman Depicted as Independent : Trial: Prosecution contends she was not dominated by her lover when they killed a Huntington Beach woman.

Prosecutors in the capital murder trial of Cynthia Lynn Coffman attempted to show Monday that, contrary to the defense, she was not under the domination of her lover when they killed a 19-year-old Huntington Beach woman.

The 30-year-old St. Louis woman has already been sentenced to death for assisting James Gregory Marlow in the sex killing of Corinna D. Novis, 20, who was abducted from a Redlands mall and killed in November, 1986. Prosecutors allege that five days later Coffman and Marlow kidnaped Lynel Murray from a dry cleaners where she worked and took her to a Huntington Beach motel, where she was raped and strangled.

Marlow, 36, received death sentences for the murders of Novis and Murray. Coffman is now on trial on robbery, kidnaping and murder charges in the killing of Murray. If convicted, she also faces a second death sentence.

Coffman’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Leonard Gumlia, has conceded that Coffman played a deadly role in Murray’s killing. But he contends that his client’s obsessive relationship with Marlow was such that even as she loved the rough-talking biker, she lived in utter fear of him because she was afraid he would kill her if she went against his wishes.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert C. Gannon has told the Superior Court jury that the defendant was a strong-willed, vindictive woman who helped kill Murray because she was jealous that Marlow had raped the victim.

Reading aloud letters Coffman wrote to Marlow while both were in separate jails awaiting trial for the Novis killing, Gannon on Monday tried to establish for jurors a relationship that he said showed that Coffman was an independent woman and not under the subjugation of Marlow. He also suggested that Coffman was drawn to Marlow because of their powerful sex drives.

The correspondence was mostly obscene and sexually explicit--a stark contrasting portrait to the whispery-voiced defendant, sitting demurely slumped on the stand and rarely raising her head.

In one angry letter, she challenged Marlow about rumors she had heard that he had a “boyfriend” in jail.

“I sure hope you’re not having (sex) . . . or next time I see you, you’re going to get a swift kick. . . . Since I’m waiting for you, then you should be waiting for me,” Coffman wrote.

Gannon asked if she feared Marlow when she wrote the letter, and Coffman replied: “I don’t know if I was afraid of him at that moment, but I’m always afraid of him.”

When asked if she ever wrote a letter to Marlow outlining in graphic details how she wanted to tie him up with “red velvet ropes” and how they would have sex, Coffman answered, “No. . . . I copied it from a friend’s” writing.

Gannon forced from Coffman an admission that in writing the letter she wanted to evoke in Marlow’s mind such sexual acts. However, she previously testified that he had once tied her, beaten and sodomized her and therefore she did not like bringing up images of being bound.