Murder Victim’s Family Describes Loss at Trial : Crime: Jurors will determine whether Coffman gets death penalty for her role in the slaying of a 19-year-old.

Until this week, all that jurors in the murder trial of Cynthia Lynn Coffman knew of her 19-year-old victim were the bare facts: Lynel Murray was kidnaped from work, robbed, raped, then choked to death, her body left in a bathtub of a motel room.

Wednesday, over the vehement objection of Coffman’s attorney, the Superior Court jury heard Lynel Murray’s family reminisce about a young woman who they said was vibrant and loving and whose violent death left an irreparable void in their lives.

These same jurors who Monday convicted Coffman of murdering Murray must soon decide if the 30-year-old defendant, who is the mother of a 9-year-old boy, should be sentenced to death or life in prison without parole for her role in the crime. The jury Monday had found Coffman guilty of murdering, robbing and kidnaping the Golden West College student on Nov. 7, 1986. They acquitted her on the rape charge.

Opening statements in the penalty phase of the trial Wednesday were quietly understated as were testimonies by Murray’s family about the impact of her death.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert C. Gannon Jr. asked jurors to listen to what Murray’s father, mother and sister had to say about their personal loss. Deputy Public Defender Leonard Gumlia asked the jury to consider that Coffman, too, has a family who would suffer if she were sentenced to Death Row.

Coffman’s relatives “have not been wronged as the Murrays have been wronged,” Gumlia said. “But they are also innocent as the Murrays are innocent.”

Murray’s parents, who are divorced, testified that they have undergone counseling to cope with their daughter’s death, but nothing has worked.

With the loss of her daughter, “the joy goes out of” her life, Nancy Murray, 45, testified. And she’s preoccupied with “the constant search for something to fill that hole. It’s still there; it’s not filled.”

Donald Murray told jurors he remembered beginning a vigil the night his daughter didn’t come home. “We were waiting for words and hoping that she would be fine,” said Murray, 46. “Then, a knock on the door and two men in suits. . . . I knew things weren’t fine.”

He misses hearing his daughter call him “daddy,” Donald Murray said, adding that since her death, he’s constantly in “a panic,” afraid that the worst might also happen to his three other daughters.

While the Murrays testified, Coffman wept.

This was the second time Coffman has been convicted of murder. In 1989, she and her then-lover, James Gregory Marlow, were found guilty in San Bernardino and sentenced to death for the sex-slaying of 20-year-old Corinna D. Novis of Redlands. Prosecutors said that the couple killed Murray five days after they abducted Novis.

In a separate trial in April, Marlow was also found guilty and has been sentenced to death for Murray’s killing.

During Coffman’s murder trial, she testified that she was a virtual love slave of Marlow. She was fascinated by him and his tough-talking ways even as he was physically abusing her, Coffman said.

She told jurors that kidnaping Murray had been Marlow’s idea and that he had ordered Coffman to strangle the woman with a wet towel in a Huntington Beach motel room. Marlow finished the job when Coffman told him she didn’t have the stomach or the strength to kill Murray, Coffman testified.