Prosecutor Likens Coffman to Animal With Prey : Trial: In light of the way her Huntington Beach victim died, jurors should order a death sentence, he says.

Cynthia Lynn Coffman and her ex-lover were not unlike animals who capriciously attack their prey when they robbed and then strangled a 19-year-old Huntington Beach woman to satisfy their own base needs, a prosecutor said Monday.

In his passionate summation during the penalty phase of Coffman’s trial, Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert C. Gannon Jr. asked a Superior Court jury to imagine what Lynel Murray must have gone through during her last hours as she was kidnaped, raped and killed in a Huntington Beach motel room on Nov. 7, 1986.

“In a course of a short time, that young girl is taken into a world of utter terror, absolute terror,” Gannon told jurors. “It’s almost as if she ran into a couple of wild animals . . . roaming at will to (satisfy) their own indulgence (for) sex, drugs, thrills and food.”

Coffman, 30, a mother of a 9-year-old boy, was convicted last week of kidnaping the Golden West College student from work at a Huntington Beach dry-cleaning store, robbing her, then helping her former lover, James Gregory Marlow, strangle her. In a separate trial in April, Marlow, 36, was convicted and sentenced to death for raping and murdering Murray.

Jurors must soon decide whether to sentence Coffman to the same fate or life in prison without parole.

During the guilt phase of the trial, Coffman testified that she was obsessively in love with Marlow even as she feared him. He had total control over her life and everything he told her to do, she did, Coffman said.

She told jurors that kidnaping Murray had been Marlow’s idea and that he had ordered her to strangle the woman with a wet towel in a Huntington Beach motel room. Coffman testified that Marlow helped her with the strangulation when she told him she could not do it herself.

Coffman’s attorneys are scheduled to make their closing arguments today.

On Monday, Gannon asked jurors to consider Murray’s life and the loss her family experienced. He urged them to not let Coffman’s sex deter them from returning a death sentence.

“If you think about it for a minute, who better appreciates the sensitivity and vulnerability of a woman than another woman,” the prosecutor said. “Even if (Coffman) didn’t want to save Lynel Murray’s life, she didn’t have to participate in” killing her.

What makes the sex killing more abominable, Gannon said, is that Murray was killed five days after Coffman and Marlow kidnaped and murdered a Redlands woman in the same grisly fashion. The couple was convicted and also sentenced to death in San Bernardino in 1989 for the rape and murder of 20-year-old Corinna D. Novis. Her body was found in a shallow grave in a vineyard.

“You would think that (Coffman) would come to grips with what happened to Corinna Novis, and spare Murray’s life,” Gannon told jurors. “But, obviously not, because five days after that” Coffman helped commit a similar murder.

“And what was the cost?” Gannon asked. “A couple of hundred bucks and some thrills?”

The prosecution alleged that Coffman and Marlow used Novis’ credit card to check into the motel room where they killed Murray. The couple later attempted to get cash using Murray’s automated teller card, police said.