On Friday, November 7, 1986, at about half past five in the evening, Corinna Novis left her job at a State Farm insurance office in Redlands, California, and cashed a check at a First Interstate Bank drive-through window near the Redlands Mall. She was twenty, she was alone, and she was driving a new white Honda CRX. She had a manicure booked at a salon run by her friend Terry Davis, and after that she was meeting friends at a pizza parlor by seven. She never reached either.
That same afternoon a couple sat in the mall outside the deli where Veronica Koppers worked. Koppers pointed them out to her supervisor: her brother, James Gregory Marlow, in a suit and tie, and his wife, Cynthia Coffman, in a dress. They had arranged to drive Koppers home, but when the time came they walked in, handed her the car keys and said they had a ride.
Around half past seven Coffman and Marlow brought Novis to the house of an acquaintance, Richard Drinkhouse. Drinkhouse heard Novis ask Marlow whether they were going to take her home, and Marlow tell her, "As soon as they get back." In the living room Marlow told Drinkhouse they needed to get the girl's bank card number so they could empty her account. When Drinkhouse protested, Marlow said there would be no witnesses. "How is she going to talk to anybody if she's under a pile of rocks?" Drinkhouse, who had a physical disability and had once watched Marlow beat a man, was too frightened to leave. When he looked as though he might go, he saw Coffman in the hallway signal to Marlow, who came out of the bedroom to ask where he was going. Novis was strangled with a ligature and buried in a shallow grave in a vineyard in Fontana.
Coffman was twenty-four. She was born in St. Louis on January 19, 1962. Her father left the family; her mother at one point tried to give her and her brothers away. She had married and had a child by eighteen, and the marriage did not last. She moved to Arizona with a friend, and in May 1986 she met Marlow, who had just come out of prison for stealing the car of his sixth wife. An earlier term in Folsom had given him the nickname the Folsom Wolf. Within weeks they were traveling the country together, using methamphetamine, and in late July they married in Tennessee. Her wedding present was a tattoo reading "Property of the Folsom Wolf." They drifted west, living off relatives, and reached California in October.
Four women died in the next five weeks. Sandra Neary, thirty-two, was taken in Costa Mesa on October 11. Pamela Simmons, thirty-five, was taken in Bullhead City, Arizona, on October 28. Then came Corinna Novis. On November 12 Lynel Murray, nineteen, a psychology student working at Prime Cleaners in a Huntington Beach mall, was due to meet her boyfriend, Robert Whitecotton, when she finished at half past six. At six a customer saw Marlow and Coffman embracing in the alley behind the shop. When Murray did not arrive, Whitecotton found the store closed and her car still in the lot. At half past eight the owner, Mooshang Movafaghi, found the store ransacked and the day's takings gone. Murray was found strangled in a Huntington Beach motel room.
The case came apart quickly. Corinna Novis's checkbook turned up in a trash bin in Laguna Niguel, inside a fast-food bag with papers that led back to the couple. On November 14, 1986, they were arrested walking along a road near Big Bear in San Bernardino County, after a man and a woman tried to use Lynel Murray's credit card in two sporting goods stores. In Coffman's purse officers found Murray's identification cards, receipts carrying Murray's forged signature, an earring matching the single earring left in Murray's ear, a loaded revolver and ammunition, and a bag of money from Prime Cleaners. Novis's car was found nearby with Coffman's fingerprints on it. Coffman confessed, and she led investigators to the grave in the Fontana vineyard, where Novis's body was recovered on November 15.
The San Bernardino County case concerned Novis alone. The jury convicted Coffman and Marlow of one count each of murder, kidnapping, kidnapping for robbery, robbery, residential burglary and forcible sodomy. It found four special circumstances true, that the murder was committed in the course of robbery, kidnapping, sodomy and burglary, and found that both had been personally armed with a firearm. In the penalty phase the prosecution put the Murray killing before the jury, along with Marlow's three robbery convictions from 1979 and an attack on a jail trustee while he awaited trial. Against Coffman it offered an incident of brandishing a deadly weapon, carrying a concealed weapon, and an act of violence against a former boyfriend, Doug Huntley.
Her defense, then and since, was battered woman syndrome. She admitted being present at the killings and said Marlow was violent to her throughout and that she acted under his control. The prosecution presented her as a willing partner who used the dead women's bank cards and carried his name on her body. The jury rejected the defense. Both accounts remain in the record.
Both were sentenced to death, and history accounts date the sentencing to August 30, 1989; the Los Angeles Times report appeared the next day. Coffman was the first woman sentenced to death in California after capital punishment returned there in the late 1970s.
Lynel Murray's killing was tried separately in Orange County, and her record carries a second first-degree murder conviction for it. Marlow pleaded guilty in the Orange County case to all charges, admitting every special circumstance, at the close of the prosecution's case. Neither was ever tried for Sandra Neary or Pamela Simmons.
The California Supreme Court affirmed Coffman's conviction and sentence in full on August 19, 2004, fifteen years after the sentence. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case on June 27, 2005. She was represented by the state's Habeas Corpus Resource Center. One online encyclopedia reports that in 2025 a federal district court found her trial lawyers ineffective at the penalty phase and ordered a new penalty trial or a sentence of life without parole, and that the state appealed to the Ninth Circuit in October 2025. No court record or news report confirming that ruling has been found.
Marlow died in prison in 2020. California's condemned women were never held at San Quentin; they have been housed at the Central California Women's Facility at Chowchilla, where Coffman was reported in 2025, by then the woman held longest under sentence of death in the United States.
A claim that she was present at a contract killing in Kentucky in June 1986, months before the California killings, appears in an automatically generated online encyclopedia and in no court record or news report.