James Gregory Marlow and Cynthia Lynn Coffman met in the California desert in April 1986. Seven months later two women were dead. Corinna Novis was abducted in Redlands on November 7, 1986, and strangled in Fontana that night. Lynell Murray, a college student, was taken from Huntington Beach on November 12 and strangled there that night; she was found dead the next day. Use of Murray's credit card led officers to the pair near Big Bear on November 14.
Marlow was convicted of both murders. A San Bernardino County jury found him and Coffman guilty of murdering Novis, with other charges, and sentenced both to death in 1989. In Orange County he pleaded guilty in 1992 to murdering Murray, with other charges, and a second jury returned a death verdict. In his own testimony he also admitted a killing in Kentucky in July 1986, for which he said he and Coffman had been paid. The Supreme Court of California affirmed both of his death judgments on August 19, 2004. In June 2026 he remained under sentence of death in California, where no one has been executed since 2006.
Marlow's early life was laid out by the witnesses his lawyers called to argue for his life at the two penalty trials. His mother used drugs and alcohol and stole to support her habit, at times using her children as lookouts. From 1965 on she was arrested and jailed again and again, and she began a prison term in 1968. While she was away the children were left with friends or relatives, and Marlow was placed in foster homes more than once. His father was described by family witnesses as an alcoholic who beat his children and took no interest in this son. A woman who knew the family said child welfare authorities had placed the boy in foster care, and that he seemed neglected and withdrawn.
The testimony about his mother's house was consistent. One man who lived there said drugs were used openly and that she paid so little attention to her children that he did not at first realize they lived there. According to witnesses, she gave her son marijuana at about eight and heroin at about 11. At about 13 he was allowed to drink and smoke marijuana at home. His younger sister testified that she saw their mother inject him with heroin when he was about 15, and another witness gave a similar account. In 1971 he spent about six months with a family who hoped to become his foster parents; they told the jury the county would not help pay for the psychological treatment they believed he needed. His mother died in a trailer fire in 1975.
A psychologist, George Askenasy, examined Marlow for the California Youth Authority in 1975 and described him as "a pathetic young man with a chaotic life history." Dr. Michael Kania, a clinical psychologist who later spent about 70 hours with him, testified in Orange County that the mistreatment Marlow had suffered was among the most severe he had seen, and that Marlow tended to play it down. Marlow, Kania said, idealized his mother.
The record of Marlow's adult crimes begins in Kentucky, where he was convicted of escape in 1978. In November 1979, in San Bernardino County, he and an accomplice committed three robberies in less than three weeks: two in Upland, on November 5 and 6, and one at a methadone clinic in Ontario on November 20, where the two forced staff to open a safe and left with about $10,000 worth of methadone. Marlow was armed with a sawed-off shotgun in the clinic robbery, and he was arrested on November 26 with methadone and a loaded shotgun. He pleaded guilty. Marlow was 23 when he met the accomplice, who later testified that he had recruited him.
Marlow was in prison from 1980 to 1983 for the robberies. He took the name "Folsom Wolf" from the prison where he had served time, Coffman later testified. After his release, the Orange County court heard, he had no further arrests until he met Coffman. He completed his parole and held jobs, and he was married for a time. Those two prior robbery convictions were later found true as prior serious felonies in the San Bernardino case.
Cynthia Lynn Coffman was born in St. Louis in 1962. She had a son in August 1980, and in 1984 she left Missouri and left the boy with his father's family. By April 1986 she was living in Barstow with a boyfriend, a construction worker who had known Marlow in jail.
That month, after Coffman and her boyfriend were arrested, Marlow came to her apartment, though the two had never met. He soon took her to Newberry Springs, in the Mojave Desert, where they stayed with friends. Coffman testified that he beat her there and told her he was the Folsom Wolf, and that he threatened to harm her son and her family if she left him. Her account of the months that followed, of near-constant violence and fear, was the core of her defense at trial. Marlow denied most of it, and the jury heard witnesses on both sides.
In June 1986 the couple took a friend's truck, had it repainted black and drove east by way of Colorado and St. Louis to Kentucky. Coffman testified that she was not allowed to see her son on the way through Missouri. Marlow told her, she said, that the real purpose of the trip was a contract killing of a "snitch."
In July 1986 Gregory Hill was shot and killed in Kentucky. The California courts described the killing as one done "for financial gain." At his 1989 trial in San Bernardino, Marlow admitted under oath that he and Coffman had been paid a little more than $5,000 for it. He said the gun went off in a struggle and that he had at first changed his mind about the killing; Coffman testified that she heard the shot but did not see it, and that she later counted the money. Marlow told the jury that Coffman had said she would do it herself, and in the end he admitted that the two of them had planned it together. The Hill killing was presented in both California penalty trials as evidence in aggravation. The court records do not show a prosecution in Kentucky.
From Kentucky the couple went to Atlanta, where in mid-August 1986 Marlow found work for a time; Coffman later testified that he abused her there, which he denied. They went back to Kentucky and then west in a stolen station wagon. In Arizona they burglarized the home of her former boyfriend's parents, took a safe and buried it after finding ten silver dollars inside.
By early October 1986 they were in Fontana, staying with Marlow's cousins. Late in October they moved in with Marlow's sister and her husband in San Bernardino.
Corinna Novis lived in Redlands. She was abducted in Redlands on November 7, 1986, and strangled in Fontana that night.
In the days that followed, the couple used her identity and her accounts. The day after she disappeared, Marlow asked his brother-in-law whether he could get "cold" license plates, and on November 12 the couple told him they had been "casing out the rich people, looking for somebody to rip off." Novis was reported missing on Monday, November 10. Coffman's fingerprints were later found on Novis's car.
Lynell Murray was a college student in Huntington Beach. She was taken from Huntington Beach on November 12, 1986, and strangled there that night; she was found dead the next day, November 13. That evening and the next, her credit card and bank account were used, with her name forged.
Continued use of Murray's credit card led officers to the couple in the San Bernardino Mountains, and on November 14, 1986, they were arrested in Big Bear. Coffman had a loaded .22 caliber revolver in her purse. The Supreme Court of California later noted that after the Murray killing Marlow "essentially gave up," discarding evidence in a way likely to lead police to him and to Coffman.
Both were taken to Redlands. Both asked for lawyers at the outset, and officers kept questioning them anyway, the Supreme Court of California found. Detectives expected Marlow to say less than Coffman, so they began with her. Officers falsely told her that Marlow was "ratting on her." Marlow was questioned that night for more than three hours, from about 9 p.m. until after midnight; he was given food and allowed to smoke. Sergeant Thomas Fitzmaurice repeatedly told him that because he had invoked his rights, nothing he said could be used against him in court.
Novis was found dead in Fontana on November 15. That morning officers told Marlow that Coffman had described both killings, and he then gave a detailed statement about Novis, Murray and the Kentucky killing. He was questioned again on November 17, the day Fitzmaurice also interviewed Coffman.
The statements were not part of the prosecution's main case. The trial court found them voluntary and allowed them to be used to impeach the two defendants if they testified differently. In the San Bernardino trial Fitzmaurice was called in surrebuttal to describe what Marlow had told him: that the killing was "a 50-50" thing and that Coffman "got the ball rolling." The judge admitted the evidence that followed from Coffman's statements under the inevitable discovery rule.
Marlow and Coffman were charged together in San Bernardino County with the Novis crimes, and both faced the death penalty. Coffman's lawyers asked for separate trials and for a change of venue, and both requests were denied.
The venue motion rested on the coverage. The defense put in more than 150 newspaper articles and television segments, many of which described the defendants as armed and dangerous transients linked to serial killings. A telephone survey taken about nine months before trial found that 70.9 percent of the 282 respondents in the judicial district where the jury would be drawn recognized the case, and that more than 80 percent of those who recognized it thought the two were definitely or probably guilty. The trial court kept the case at home, noting that San Bernardino was the fourth largest county in the state and that other cases tried there had drawn more publicity. Every seated juror who remembered the case said that he or she could be fair.
There was also a fight over the judge. The trial was assigned to Judge Don Turner. Coffman's lawyer was running for a seat on the county superior court against another judge, and he alleged that Judge Turner served on his opponent's campaign committee, had allowed his name to appear on the campaign letterhead, and had not disclosed it. Judge Turner denied any bias, and a different judge denied the motion to disqualify him.
The trial began in February 1989. Each defendant testified, and each blamed the other.
Coffman's defense was that she had acted out of fear. She testified that Marlow had abused her and threatened to kill her son and her family if she left him, and that she had not intended anyone to die. Dr. Lenore Walker, a psychologist known for her work on battered woman syndrome, testified for Coffman and diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
Marlow's version put the pressure on her. He testified that Coffman had kept insisting that he "do something." Marlow called Dr. Michael Kania in rebuttal. Kania testified that Coffman was exaggerating and possibly malingering, and that she met most of the criteria for antisocial personality disorder.
Other witnesses cut against Coffman's account. Marlow's sister testified that Coffman never expressed fear of Marlow, for herself or for her son, and that what Coffman wanted was for Marlow to get her son back and "get rid" of her former husband and in-laws. She said she had seen Marlow slap Coffman once. A man who saw the couple with Novis on November 7 testified that Coffman seemed to go along willingly. A jail informant testified that Coffman had told her in January 1987 that she had taken part, and that Coffman never claimed to have been beaten or to have acted out of fear for her son. Coffman's statements to an officer after her arrest also differed from her testimony at trial.
The jury convicted Marlow and Coffman each of one count of murder, kidnapping, kidnapping for robbery, robbery, residential burglary and forcible sodomy. It found true special circumstance allegations that the murder was committed during a robbery, a kidnapping, a sodomy and a burglary, and found that each defendant was personally armed with a firearm. Marlow waived a jury on two prior serious felony allegations, and the court found them true.
At the penalty phase the prosecution presented the three 1979 robberies and an incident on February 17, 1988, in jail, when Marlow struck a jail trustee with a paper blow dart; he later boasted to a deputy, "It was a lucky shot through the bars." The defense answered with his childhood, through his sister, his half-siblings, his father's former wife, family friends, the accomplice from 1979 and Askenasy's 1975 report. Coffman's mother, stepfather and former husband described her own troubled upbringing, and a psychologist, Dr. Craig Rath, testified about impaired bonding in her early life.
The jury returned death verdicts for both. Judgment of death was entered against Marlow on August 31, 1989.
Marlow still faced the Murray case in Orange County. In February 1990, a few months after the San Bernardino sentencing, the Orange County court granted his motion to replace his appointed lawyers. A new lawyer withdrew in a fee dispute with the county, and Marlow objected to the next one in a letter in April 1990; that lawyer said he could not represent him and was relieved on April 25. Marlow wanted counsel he could trust who was not on the court's list, and he asked whether he could represent himself with a co-counsel appointed. The judge called that "an absolute disaster" and declined. Marlow agreed to waive time so that new counsel could be appointed.
The Murray case was tried before Judge Donald A. McCartin. At the close of the prosecution's case, after the jury had heard the evidence, Marlow pleaded guilty to burglary and to the murder, kidnapping, robbery and rape of Lynell Murray. He admitted the special circumstance allegations that the murder was committed during a robbery, a burglary and a rape, and that he was armed with a firearm. The prosecutor took him through the rights he was giving up, the jury trial on guilt and on the special circumstances, the right to confront the remaining witnesses and the right to remain silent, and Marlow answered "Yes, sir" to each. The court found the two prior serious felony convictions true in a separate proceeding.
The same jury then decided the penalty. The prosecution used Marlow's own 1989 testimony from San Bernardino, in which he had admitted kidnapping, robbing and strangling Novis, along with the Hill killing, the 1979 robberies and the 1978 escape conviction from Kentucky.
The defense case again centered on his childhood. His sister, a half-sister, his father's former wife, two people who knew his mother's household, a woman who had known the family as a teenager, and a member of the family that had tried to foster him all testified. A forensic psychologist, Dr. Peter Chambers, who had not interviewed Marlow, said that abuse of that kind could produce a borderline personality disorder. Kania, who had spent about 70 hours with Marlow, testified that he had fallen in love with Coffman because she reminded him of his mother, that he would do anything to please her, and that the crimes grew out of her wish for money and his fear of being abandoned. In Kania's opinion they would not have happened without the relationship. Marlow told Kania that after the Kentucky killing Coffman threatened to go to the police unless he did as she said. The judge excluded testimony about his grandmother and barred Kania from one line of testimony on strangulation.
In closing, the prosecutor told the jury that a capital case was the only kind in which the judge did not make the sentencing decision "initially." The defense objected to the word, and the prosecutor rephrased. The jury returned a verdict of death, Judge McCartin denied the motion to modify it, and judgment was entered on May 8, 1992.
Coffman was tried separately in Orange County. She was convicted of Murray's murder with special circumstances and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
Both death judgments went directly to the Supreme Court of California, and both were decided on August 19, 2004, in unanimous opinions by Justice Werdegar.
In the joint San Bernardino appeal, People v. Coffman and Marlow, the court rejected claims about the denial of separate trials, the refusal to move the trial, jury selection, the judge's refusal to step aside, and alleged interference with defense witnesses. On the postarrest statements it acknowledged a hard question. "Although the issue is close," the court wrote, the statements had been made voluntarily, so they could be used to impeach the defendants even though officers had kept questioning them after they asked for lawyers. It held that statements made before Novis was found fell within the rescue doctrine, which can excuse questioning without the usual Miranda safeguards when officers are trying to save a life. The judgment was affirmed in its entirety. On October 27, 2004, the court made a one-line change to the opinion at Coffman's request and denied rehearing.
In People v. Marlow, the Orange County appeal, Marlow argued that the two counties should not have prosecuted him separately, because the killings were part of a single plan to raise money for a trip to Arizona. The court held that he had given up the claim by not raising it at trial and that it would fail anyway: murders of different victims, on different days, in different counties were not one course of conduct requiring one prosecution. The court also held that his question about representing himself was a request for information rather than a clear demand, that his guilty plea was valid, that his earlier testimony had properly been used, and that the prosecutor's "initially" remark had not misled the jury about its responsibility. That judgment was also affirmed in full.
The United States Supreme Court denied Marlow's petition for review of the Orange County judgment on March 28, 2005, and denied review in the joint San Bernardino case on May 31, 2005. A state habeas corpus petition had been filed on his behalf in October 2001.
In June 2026 Marlow remained under two judgments of death, San Bernardino County's of August 31, 1989, and Orange County's of May 8, 1992. State habeas counsel had been appointed, and no petition was then pending in the Supreme Court of California. Coffman remained under her San Bernardino County death judgment.
No execution has taken place in California since January 2006. On March 13, 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order granting reprieves to the 737 people then on death row, withdrawing the state's lethal injection protocol and closing the execution chamber at San Quentin, KQED reported. In 2024 the state began moving condemned prisoners out of San Quentin to other prisons, ABC7 News reported in April of that year; where Marlow is now held has not been made public.
Who did what on the night Novis died was contested from the start. Coffman said she acted in terror of Marlow; Marlow said she pushed him and called the killing "a 50-50" thing. The San Bernardino jury convicted both of murder with the same special circumstances and sentenced both to death, and the Supreme Court of California found the evidence against each strong enough that a joint trial was fair.
The Hill killing in Kentucky rests on the couple's own testimony. Marlow's admission that they were paid a little more than $5,000 came in his 1989 testimony, and Coffman testified that he had called the trip a contract killing of a "snitch." Whether Hill was in fact a police informant, and who paid, are not established in the court records. Neither defendant was tried for his death in the cases on record.
Before the 1989 trial, news coverage linked the couple to serial killings beyond Novis and Murray. The court records list no other killing charged against Marlow, and no other killing was put to either jury.
Novis's and Murray's ages, and Marlow's birth date, are not part of the public court record.
1965 onward: Marlow's mother is repeatedly arrested and jailed; he is placed in foster homes.
1971: lives for about six months with a family hoping to foster him.
1975: examined for the California Youth Authority; his mother dies in a trailer fire.
1978: convicted of escape in Kentucky.
November 5, 6 and 20, 1979: three robberies in Upland and Ontario, California; arrested November 26.
1980 to 1983: in prison for the robberies.
April 1986: meets Cynthia Coffman in Barstow.
June 1986: the couple drive to Kentucky.
July 1986: Gregory Hill is shot dead in Kentucky; Marlow later admits the couple were paid a little more than $5,000.
Mid-August 1986: Atlanta.
Early October 1986: Fontana; late October, San Bernardino.
November 7, 1986: Corinna Novis is abducted in Redlands and strangled in Fontana that night.
November 10, 1986: Novis is reported missing.
November 12, 1986: Lynell Murray is taken from Huntington Beach and strangled there that night.
November 13, 1986: Murray is found dead in Huntington Beach.
November 14, 1986: Marlow and Coffman are arrested in Big Bear.
November 15, 1986: Novis is found dead in Fontana; Marlow gives a statement.
February 17, 1988: jail incident with a blow dart.
February 1989: joint trial begins in San Bernardino County.
August 31, 1989: judgment of death against Marlow for the Novis murder.
February to April 1990: Marlow's Orange County lawyers are replaced.
1992: Marlow pleads guilty to the Murray murder at the close of the prosecution's case in Orange County.
May 8, 1992: second judgment of death.
October 5, 2001: state habeas corpus petition filed.
May 24, 2004: both appeals argued.
August 19, 2004: Supreme Court of California affirms both judgments.
March 28, 2005: United States Supreme Court denies review of the Orange County case.
May 31, 2005: review denied in the joint San Bernardino case.
March 13, 2019: California governor orders a moratorium on executions.
2024: condemned prisoners begin moving out of San Quentin.
June 1, 2026: listed under sentence of death on both judgments.