Gas Chamber Looms in Woman’s Future

SANTA ANA —  Here we are in “the Cindy Room,” surrounded by remnants of her violent past and, possibly, her deadly future.

From this cubbyhole, two Orange County public defenders are marshaling their arguments to save Cynthia Lynn Coffman, the first woman sentenced to California’s gas chamber since the Manson followers.

There’s the bulletin board of color snapshots: the Fontana vineyard where the first victim was buried; Cindy smiling broadly with her attorneys; a close-up of her behind tattooed with Property of Folsom Wolf, her co-defendant’s prison nickname; and the smiling face of the last victim who was raped and strangled in the tub of a seaside motel.

The coatrack holds her plainly modest courtroom attire--a prim pink sweater, a colorful blue dress--the wardrobe for her second murder trial starting in the next few weeks in downtown Santa Ana, a trial that could earn her a second death penalty.

Across the street, the former factory worker and mother of a fifth-grader spends an afternoon answering questions at the Orange County Jail, where she fills her days in isolation from other inmates--studying history, reading the novels of American Indians and Danielle Steele.

“I’m afraid of the death penalty . . . but I’d hope to go to a better place than here,” said Coffman, 30, in the first interview since her arrest--conducted just days before Robert Alton Harris was executed. “But I’d still rather have life.”

Three years ago, Coffman was sentenced to die for the 1986 San Bernardino County kidnaping, robbery, sodomy and murder of 20-year-old Corinna Novis. Now, she faces the same fate in the abduction and slaying of a 19-year-old Huntington Beach woman, Lynel Murray.

Of the women she is accused of killing, Coffman has insisted her attorneys bring her details about “what their lives were like beforehand,” she said. “I should know . . . who they are, what was taken away. It makes me feel worse for what they were or what they might have been. One of them I talked to.”

Once a wispy brunette drugged and adrift, a Missouri Catholic girl divorced and looking for a new life out West, Coffman rode shotgun for months with James Gregory Marlow, a powerfully built Kentucky outlaw and speed addict who sported tattoos all over his body.

But why she stuck with Marlow during a kinky 1986 cross-country crime spree in which they married atop a Harley Davidson motorcycle will be disputed. And it may, in the end, figure critically in the jury’s decision on whether she should live or die.

“At the first trial, (her) attorneys wanted so much to convince the jury that she was afraid of Marlow they didn’t want to show that she loved him,” said Leonard Gumlia, a deputy public defender and Coffman’s lead attorney. “There will be no question for the (current) jury that this was a classic battered-woman situation.”

“We’re not saying she’s innocent,” added Hector Chaparro, Coffman’s other deputy public defender. “But in most civilized (countries), life in prison is punishment.”

“I’m trying to understand myself, why I did things,” Coffman said, scratching the bandage covering the word Wolf tattooed around her wedding ring finger, “but I’m still not all the way yet.”

Whether she was an unwilling accomplice or avid participant will factor into a key question facing the jury: Did Coffman intend for Murray to be killed?

What’s not in dispute is that everything in this case circles back to the electric attraction between the former lovers. He called her Cynful, she called him Squeeze, and even after their arrest they exchanged passionate love letters from their cells, using sideways hearts to create the letter B and swastikas to dot the I’s. Now they despise each other.

“They were two flaky sociopaths separately,” said Raymond Haight, the San Bernardino deputy district attorney whose prosecution resulted in death sentences for the couple. “But you put them together and it was like Bonnie and Clyde all the way. . . . “

Slim and pretty with brown hair spilling down her back, Coffman wore lipstick and mascara and appeared in good spirits, smiling often, laughing with ease during the two-hour interview.

With her right hand freed from a manacle at the waist, she gave greeting cards to her attorneys and the paralegal who are her almost daily moral support.

Her lawyer, Gumlia, would not allow her to discuss most details of the Marlow romance, the facts of the last murder trial or those of her impending one. Although she looked at her attorneys for approval before answering most questions, she freely discussed her looming death verdict, her 6-year captivity, her son and her feelings now about the ex-lover with whom she is accused of helping kill two women and a man.

Born Cynthia Haskins and raised in lower middle-class apartments of St. Louis, her father was out of her life by the time she was 6. It was the first of several formative events that her defense claims left her needy for the attentions of the wrong kind of man.

She was in psychotherapy by first grade at the urging of school teachers because she felt abandoned by both parents.

“To get attention I’d get in trouble, and for that,” Coffman said with an amused sigh, “I’ll always remember the taste of Dove.”

Prosecutors, of course, consider the shaky childhood story just that. They point to the remarriage of her mother, Carol, to a successful executive, William Maender, who adopted Cindy and her brother and moved them to an upper middle-class suburb, where the children went to private Catholic school until high school.

The spring of her sophomore year, she smoked her first marijuana joint. She graduated high school pregnant and was a married mother at 18. After little more than a year, the marriage unraveled.

For the next few years she struggled to support her son, Josh, on the swing-shift at a carburetor factory. Sizing up her dead-end job, Gumlia said, Coffman decided to travel with a girlfriend and “start over” in Page, Ariz., where she planned to bring her son once she settled.

Her in-laws eventually won legal guardianship, although she was granted visitation. She has seen her boy, now 11, just one time since.

“Almost as soon as she got there she wanted to find a man, any man,” Gumlia said. “The truth is Cindy always had to have a guy around.”

Within a month she had found one; his name was Doug Huntley. Some time later he was arrested on a warrant and delivered to a Barstow jail, but Coffman followed him.

One day, Coffman recalled, a man showed up at the apartment she had shared with Huntley to tell her that her boyfriend had been moved to a different jail. It was Marlow, he had just been released, and “I thought it was strange for him to show up at my door,” Coffman said. But her first impression was that he was “nice looking.” And the sparks flew.

Soon the couple were kicking around scruffy high desert haunts. Eventually they headed east for Kentucky and what became a violent cross-country rampage. Both Coffman and Marlow were charged with the execution-style shooting death of a Kentucky drug dealer who Marlow told police he shot with Coffman’s help for $5,000. Because of the death penalty cases here, that case has not been pursued.

Along the way, Coffman and Marlow camped outside, slept in a car and were unofficially married atop a motorcycle in what Gumlia called a “biker wedding.”

During numerous angry fits, Gumlia said, Marlow beat and bit Coffman and hacked off her hair, which was crew-cut length at the time of her arrest. Always he apologized and showered his girlfriend with affection, Gumlia said.

By November, Coffman and Marlow were back in Southern California. On Nov. 7, 1986, Coffman and Marlow approached Corinna Novis at a Redlands shopping mall and asked for a ride. At gunpoint, Novis was taken to the home of a Marlow friend, handcuffed and gagged, then sexually assaulted. Coffman and Marlow were convicted of strangling Novis, who was buried face down in a Fontana field.

Three days later, authorities allege, the pair rode in Novis’ Honda to the Orange County coast, where they lived off her bank and credit cards and prowled beach towns for their next victim.

On Nov. 12, they found her, and the resemblance to Novis was striking.

Lynel Murray, a Golden West College student with pretty brown hair and long red fingernails, was working part time at a Huntington Beach cleaners, about to close up when Coffman approached her alone.

The cleaners was robbed of cash and clothes that the couple were wearing when later captured.

Murray was forced into the Honda and driven to the the Huntington Beach Inn, where Marlow raped her in the shower and she was beaten, blindfolded and strangled with a towel twisted around her neck. A maid arriving to clean the room found her face down in a full bathtub.

On Nov. 14, after wiping the car clean of fingerprints and abandoning it in the San Bernardino Mountains community of Running Springs, Coffman and Marlow were captured in Big Bear during a police dragnet. At their woodsy motel room, police found several of Murray’s earrings. In a police bulletin, they were described as possible trophies.

Some court insiders call it the Patty Hearst defense, referring to the newspaper heiress kidnaped by the Symbionese Liberation Army and later convicted of participating in a robbery during her captivity.

Her attorneys argued that she was so battered, starved and brainwashed by her captives that she was afraid to bolt when given the opportunity. The jury did not buy it.

During Coffman’s San Bernardino trial, the attempt by Coffman’s former lawyers to cast her as controlled by Marlow misfired, said prosecutor Haight, who interviewed jurors after the verdict. Witnesses testified Coffman yelled at him on a public bus for not following her directions to get exact change, giggled over a wine and steak dinner in the hours after Novis was killed and was entangled in a highly sexual embrace in the moments before Murray was kidnaped.

Coffman testified for nine days at her own trial, and Haight said she hurt her own case.

“She was snitty with me, and she never shed a tear in that whole time,” Haight said. “She is very difficult to paint as a sympathetic character.”

The San Bernardino County jury and Judge Don A. Turner handed Marlow and Coffman death sentences.

“It’s still very difficult for judges and juries to vote death for an attractive young woman,” Turner said at Coffman’s Aug. 30, 1989, sentencing, “but this jury got to know her too well.”

Coffman’s new attorneys disagree. For months she said she refused to believe Marlow did not love her, and only after psychotherapists on a weekly basis cited all the alleged beatings and abuse by Marlow over half a year did reality seep in. Gumlia said jurors could have mistaken as unemotional Coffman’s stoic court presence, because she did not want to break down in front of Marlow.

Earlier this month an Orange County jury gave Marlow his second death sentence for Murray’s murder.

“I don’t want him to die, no,” Coffman said slowly. “I understand he has problems. . . . I’m very hurt by what he’s done to me--it hurt me because of that, but I still don’t wish him to die.”

In order to win the death penalty he is seeking against Coffman, Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert C. Gannon Jr. must prove she is guilty of murder with a special circumstance--in this case, murder in the course of a burglary, rape, kidnaping and robbery.

But Gannon must also show that Coffman intended for Murray to die, a legal requirement the time of the murders that has since been changed. It was designed to prevent executions of those who “aid and abet” a killing but do not themselves kill.

Gannon declined requests to be interviewed for this story, saying he will not be quoted on cases until they have been tried.

In statements to police, Coffman and Marlow have admitted involvement in both murders. Marlow claims it was “50-50,” and that he was robbing the victims to bankroll a Missouri trip to win back Coffman’s son. Coffman has said she helped kidnap the victims and used their credit cards, but Marlow alone sexually assaulted them.

Prosecutors have alleged Coffman was equally responsible for murdering the women to eliminate them as witnesses. Coffman testified at her last trial that she only participated in Murray’s slaying by briefly pulling the towel that would strangle her, and only because Marlow threatened to kill her if she did not.

But Haight said jurors believed Coffman wanted Novis murdered.

“She’s a very bright woman,” he said recently. “She is very manipulative and very clever, and she reeked of sexuality. Oh! you wouldn’t believe! The jury could see that manipulation, and the women jurors were more against her than the men. She came off so much smarter than (Marlow), and the jury told me they didn’t believe this guy sitting there was outsmarting her, out-manipulating her.”

Elizabeth Ann Duncan of Santa Barbara was the last woman gassed at San Quentin State Prison, the last woman legally executed in California. That was Aug. 8, 1962.

After Coffman’s Orange County trial and while she awaits automatic appeals that follow a death sentence for at least five years, she will be on Death Row. For females, that is now in a newly built wing of the Central California Women’s Facility near Chowchilla.

Had she not been sent to Orange County to face a second murder charge, Coffman would have been the first woman on Death Row since Californians reinstated capital punishment 15 years ago. Maureen McDermott, a Los Angeles nurse convicted of ordering the stabbing murder of her roommate, now awaits appeals there alone.

As with Marlow, a second death sentence has been pursued in Orange County--at considerable expense. Orange County Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi has defended that decision by saying families of the victims deserve restitution for those crimes, and, if the first death penalties were overturned, it would be even more expensive--if possible at all--to attempt trying both defendants five or more years from now.

So even if she was acquitted by an Orange County jury that will soon be picked, Cynthia Coffman is still going to Death Row.

The odds make it unlikely, however, that she will be executed.

According to Cleveland State University law professor Victor L. Streib, who completed a national study of female capital punishment, actual executions of women are “quite rare.”

Since new death penalty statutes were passed in 1973, 84 women have been sentenced to death in the United States, Streib said. Only one woman has been executed--in North Carolina--since then. Of the 50 female death sentences finally resolved, 98% were reversed, compared to a reversal rate of about 75% for men, Streib said.

Still, Coffman’s attorneys say they see no advantage to a murder defendant being female.

“Women are almost more harshly judged, because men are sometimes excused to a degree for having a beastly side,” Gumlia said. “So I think it can actually work against you to be representing a woman in a death penalty case.”

For now, Coffman passes her time at the Orange County Jail, where she is housed alone because she technically is in the custody of the state Corrections Department. She is studying history with ambitions of a college degree and teaching fellow prison inmates.

“Now I know what I’d like to have been when I grow up,” Coffman said.

Other than deputies and other inmates she sees only on bus rides to court appearances, she spends her time alone. She has become a voracious reader and checks the newspaper daily. She followed much of the Harris coverage, and remembers a story chronicling how an execution occurs--”this is where you go, this is what happens, and I thought, ‘Oh my God!’ ”

Each Sunday night she calls her mother, and exchanges letters monthly with her son. He assumes she is in jail on drug charges, but one day she knows he will have to be told the truth.

“I know I want to be the one to tell him,” Coffman said heavily, “but . . . what could you say to him to make him understand? I don’t think you ever could.”