Defense Fights for Coffman’s Life

There were many facets--some sympathetic, others inexplicable--to Cynthia Lynn Coffman in 1986, when she participated in a cross-country killing spree that culminated in the sex murder of a 19-year-old Huntington Beach woman, her attorney said Tuesday.

In an emotional closing argument during the penalty phase of Coffman’s trial, Deputy Public Defender Leonard Gumlia asked a Superior Court jury to spare the 30-year-old defendant and mother of a 9-year-old boy from the gas chamber because, he said, her lover had forced her to help murder Lynel Murray in a Huntington Beach motel on Nov. 7, 1986.

Gumlia asked the jurors to consider a young woman who was degraded and beaten by her lover, Gregory James Marlow; a woman who feared she would be killed if she ever left him; a woman who felt he would punish her if she didn’t follow his order to kill Murray.

Coffman and these women “are one and the same,” Gumlia said. She participated in the murder out of love, fear and survival instinct, he said. To sentence her to death for the crime is, in effect, to condemn a “battered and abused” woman.

Coffman was convicted last week of kidnaping the Golden West College student from work at a Huntington Beach dry cleaners, robbing her, then helping Marlow strangle her with a towel. She had testified that they placed a wet towel around Murray’s neck and, at Marlow’s order, she grabbed one end of the towel, he the other, and together the two pulled on it to kill Murray.

In a separate trial, Marlow, 36, was convicted and sentenced to death in April for raping and murdering Murray.

Jurors in Coffman’s trial began their penalty deliberation Tuesday afternoon. They must decide whether to sentence her to death or life in prison without parole.

In his arguments against the death penalty, Gumlia dramatized for jurors the circumstances he said existed in the Huntington Beach motel room where Murray was murdered. But, he asked the jury to hypothesize that the killing took place with a gun instead of a towel.

His feet apart, his body tense, Gumlia held a pen and pointed it over the jurors’ heads, simulating a shooting. Pretend that Marlow gripped Coffman’s hands and forced her to shoot at Murray, Gumlia told the jury. Make believe that Coffman missed her mark, he said, but sooner or later--with Marlow guiding her--she hit the target.

In that example, “she shot wide and she kept shooting wide on purpose,” said Gumlia, just as she had “no intent to kill” Murray and therefore, should not be sentenced to death.

The prosecution, however, told jurors the evidence proved an entirely different scenario.

Coffman was a willing participant in Murray’s murder and not a coerced victim, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert C. Gannon Jr. in his closing argument. True, she acted in concert with Marlow, the prosecutor conceded, but she didn’t have to.

The defendant had no respect for Murray’s life, but instead treated her as “almost less than trash,” Gannon said. He claimed Coffman and Marlow made an attempt to clean up the motel room after the murder, yet they left Murray’s body draped over the side of a bathtub, her face submerged in water.

Murray was the couple’s third victim in a killing rampage that took place within four months. Five days before Murray was murdered, a 20-year-old Redlands woman was also kidnaped, robbed, raped and strangled in a motel room. Coffman and Marlow were convicted and sentenced to death in 1989 in San Bernardino County for the sex slaying of Corinna D. Novis.

Coffman also confessed that she helped Marlow in a third killing, a $5,000 contract murder in Kentucky before the couple came to California.