Woman Sentenced to Death for Helping Boyfriend in Killing

Cynthia Lynn Coffman, who said she helped her boyfriend kill two young women in a five-day crime rampage, Wednesday became the first woman sentenced to death in California since the state reinstated capital punishment 12 years ago.

Coffman, 27, sitting eight feet away from co-defendant James Gregory Marlow, 33, tearfully told a San Bernardino County Superior Court judge, “I’m sorry for what happened and I’m ashamed that I let it happen.”

But Judge Don A. Turner, who upheld jury death verdicts for both of them, said Coffman “was in this thing up to the hilt, and enjoyed it right up to the last minute.”

Coffman, the mother of a 9-year-old son, will be sent to the Correctional Institution for Women at Frontera. If her appeals, expected to take at least seven years, are unsuccessful, she would be executed at San Quentin State Prison, site of the state’s only gas chamber.

The last woman executed in California was Elizabeth Ann Duncan, on Aug. 8, 1962, for the murder of her daughter-in-law in Ventura County.

Coffman and Marlow were convicted of first-degree murder five months ago for the Nov. 7, 1986, slaying of Corinna Novis, 20, of Redlands.

Second Slaying

The two are now scheduled to stand trial in Orange County for the murder of 19-year-old Lynell Murray of Huntington Beach, strangled at an oceanfront Orange County motel five days after the Novis killing. Details of the Murray slaying were presented to jurors at the penalty phase of the couple’s trial in San Bernardino.

The two are also under indictment in Whitley City, Ky., for the July 7, 1986, killing of Gregory Hill, 28. Police believe that was a murder-for-hire.

“It’s still very difficult for judges and juries to vote death for an attractive young woman,” Turner said. “But this jury got to know (Coffman) too well.”

Coffman moved to California from Missouri, the judge said, because she found middle-class married life dull. But when she met Marlow, he said, “the two of them just clicked.”

“For Ms. Coffman, here was a man who was thrilling, who was exciting, who was dangerous,” Turner said.

Marlow and Coffman had once been lovers--she has “Property of Folsom Wolf,” his nickname, tattooed on her bottom. But by the time of the trial, they were enemies. They asked for separate trials, which the judge refused.

Coffman testified that she was under Marlow’s domination during the two-county murder binge. She told jurors that Marlow had raped her, beat her, and cut off all her hair. He once told her, she said, ‘I am the devil, and I own you.’ ”

She said she believed Marlow intended only to kidnap and rob Novis, not kill her. After the two kidnaped Murray at a Huntington Beach cleaning store where she worked, Coffman said, she helped twist a towel around the victim’s neck in the motel room. She said, however, that Marlow forced her to do it.

But prosecutors in both San Bernardino and Orange counties said that while Marlow may have been the actual killer, Coffman was equally responsible.