Coffman Is Spared 2nd Death Sentence : Courts: Orange County jury recommends life in prison for woman’s part in slaying of Huntington Beach teen-ager. Her attorney claims victory.

Cynthia Lynn Coffman, who faces the death penalty for one murder, was spared a second death sentence Friday by an Orange County jury that recommended life in prison for the strangulation of a Huntington Beach teen-ager.

As the jury’s verdict was read, Coffman’s attorney victoriously waved his arm in the air, while members of the victim’s family sat stunned in the crowded courtroom.

Coffman, a 30-year-old former cocktail waitress from St. Louis, wiped tears from her eyes, turned to her attorney and said, “Thank you.”

The jury’s recommendation of life without parole came after three days of deliberations and saved Coffman from a second death penalty for her part in a 1986 killing spree which left two young women and a man dead.

“She’s happy, obviously, with this verdict,” said Coffman’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Leonard Gumlia. “She’s happy because she has something to keep living for. . . . There’s some hope for her.”

Coffman was convicted June 29 of strangling Lynel Murray, as well as robbing and abducting the 19-year-old college student from a dry cleaners where she had been working on Nov. 7, 1986.

After finding Coffman guilty of the crimes, the same jury then had to decide what her punishment should be. The jurors left the courtroom without comment.

Members of Murray’s family also declined comment after the verdict. But Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert C. Gannon Jr. spoke with them and later described them as “somewhat disappointed” but not angered by the verdict.

“Obviously, we felt as though the appropriate penalty was death,” Gannon said. “Three people who had their entire lives in front of them are gone.”

The prosecutor speculated that one “major consideration” in the jury’s decision to spare Coffman a second death penalty was that “there was another major player in the game” who bore responsibility.

That other “player” was James Gregory Marlow, Coffman’s former boyfriend, who is on Death Row in San Quentin for his involvement in the same murder spree.

According to prosecutors, Marlow and Coffman killed Murray five days after the sex slaying of another woman, Corinna D. Novis, in San Bernardino County. Novis, 20, was abducted from a Redlands shopping mall, raped and then strangled, much like Murray, prosecutors said. Both Marlow and Coffman received the death penalty Aug. 31, 1989, for that murder.

Unlike Coffman, however, Marlow, 36, was given a second death sentence May 8 for the Murray killing after a separate trial.

Gannon said that murder charges against Coffman and Marlow for allegedly killing a Kentucky man four months before the murders of the two Southern California women will probably be dropped. In that case, the couple were allegedly paid $5,000 to kill the man.

During the lengthy Murray murder trial, which began in May, Coffman’s attorney acknowledged that his client was involved in the killing spree, but said that she was a drug abuser who was forced to participate in the crimes by Marlow, a burly ex-convict nicknamed “Folsom Wolf.”

Coffman, who had tattooed “Property of Folsom Wolf” on herself, testified that she was obsessively in love with Marlow, even though she also feared him.

Gumlia said Friday that the jury made the right decision because Marlow “was the dominate person in the crime.”

He added that Coffman only “wanted to maintain her relationship with Marlow, both out of love and fear.”

Gumlia said the Orange County verdict strengthens Coffman’s chance of winning an appeal of the San Bernardino death sentence. “This makes it more difficult for an appellate court to say that any error in the first trial was harmless.”

Times staff writer Eric Lichtblau contributed to this report.